SPAN: May 1974

SPAN

May

2 Reflections on Pessimism and Pluralism

by Andrew M. Greeley

The Ice Age Cometh

by James D. Hays

A LEITER FROM THE PUBLISHER Twelve years ago, SPAN published a portfolio of paintings by a young Indian artist then holding his first one-man show abroad, at New York's Gallery Mayer. Since that time Ghulam Rasool Santosh has come a long way. His recent work, characterized by the successful adaptation of Tantric forms and symbols, has placed him among the handful of top Indian painters today. It is with particular pride, therefore, that we present a Santosh painting on our cover this month-his interpretation of the theme of our lead article, "The Ice Age Cometh" [page 5], which discusses the latest climatological and meteorological research [see also facing page].

It is difficult to avoid describing Santosh as a man of many parts-of few people, in fact, is the cliche so apt. Born in Srinagar, Kashmir, he started painting in his teens; as a young man he also did weaving and worked in papier-mache.

He is well known as a poet in the Kashmiri language; has published a novel in Urdu, and has participated in national mushairas. Since his first solo exhibition in Srinagar in 1953, Santosh's work has been shown in more countries than can be mentioned here, and his paintings hang in museums and private collections throughout the world.

Another distinguished Indian contributor to this issue is Nayantara Sahgal, whose "Letter From America" [pages 28-31]details her experience as writer-in-residence at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Her sensitive account considers the tenuous relationship between teacher and taught, the delicate balance that must be struck before rapport is achieved.

Filmmaker Satyajit Ray is the third eminent Indian to be featured in SPAN this month. His eloquent obituary on John Ford [pages 40-41] compares the American director's work to middle-period Beethoven-"the same boldness of contour, the simplicity and memorability of line, the sense of architecture, even the same outbreaks of boisterousness and the heroic, action-packed finales."

I would like to draw our readers' attention to just one more article in this issue-John Kenneth Galbraith's brilliant introduction to Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class [pages 12-19]. The former ambassador to India wears his scholarship lightly, and this piece is Galbraith at his best -witty, ironic, and just a trifle malicious as he debunks the myth that Veblen's famous theory was the outgrowth of an impoverished childhood. On the contrary, Galbraith points out, Veblen came from comfortable farm stock; and his whole attack on the rich, far from being venomous, is in a tone of amused derision. In my opinion, the overriding merit of this article is that it makes one want to read Veblen's classic.

-A.E.H.

10 Cars That Will Gulp Less Gas 12 A New Theory of Thorstein Veblen

by John Kenneth Galbraith

20 We Need an International Effort to Combat Hijacking 22 Miracles and Mysteries of the Brain 28 A Letter From America 32 Americ~ns Are Talking About 3 4 Strategies for an Environmental Decade 38 A Congressman .Discusses Foreign Policy 40 A Tribute to John Ford 42 The New Directors 4 5 Indo-American Commercial Relations 48 As the Press Sees It 49 Probing Jupiter's Secrets An Interview With John J. O'Donnell

.

by Nayantara Sahgal

by Robert Leider

An Interview With Paul Findley

by Satyajit Ray

by Stephen Duncan-Peters

Front cover: Artist Santosh's vision of the apocalyptic ice age has the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal, the Sphinx, and sundry skyscrapers all frozen into one solid mass. The chances of something like this happening are discussed on pages 5-9.

Back cover: Photographer Bruce Roberts's poetic study of trees underlines the need for preserving nature's gifts, particularly the wealth of her forests. An article on international measures to safeguard the environment appears on pages 34-37.

Managing Editor: Carmen Kagal. Editorial Staff: Mohammed Reyazuddin, Avinash Pasricha, S.R. Madhu, Nirmal Sharma, Krishan Gabrani, M.M. Saha. Art Director: Nand Katyal. Art Staff: B. Roy Choudhury. Kanti Roy, Gopi Gaiwani. Chief of Production: Awtar S. Marwaha. Photographic Services: USIS Photo Lab. Published by the United States Information Service, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg. New Delhi-I 10001, on behalf of the American Embassy. New Delhi. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the United States Government. Printed by Arun Mehta at Vakil & Sons Private Ltd .• Vakils House. Sprott Road, 18 Ballard Estate, Bombay-40000J.

Photographs: Inside front cover, bottom-courtesy Richard E. Orville, State University of New York at Albany. 9-Edwin Wolfl', courtesy National Center for Atmospheric Research. 21-courtesy Westinghouse Electric Corporation. 28-Pramod Kumar. 37-Hiro.

40 top right-The Museum of Modern Art/Film Stills Archive. Inside back cover-NASA. Back cover-Bruce Roberts, courtesy Friends ~agazjne.

Use of SPAN articles in other publications is encouraged, except when copyrighted. For permission, write to the Editor. Subscription: One year, 18 rupees; single copy, two rupees. For change of address, send old address from a recent SPAN envelope along with new address 10 A.K. Mitra, Circulation Manager, SPAN magazine, 24 Kasturba Gand!!i Marg, New Delhi-Il000I. Allow six weeks for change of address to become effective.

Throwing out a provocative personal challenge to American prophets oJ doom, the author urges them to descend from their Olympian heights and go out across the country to see people as they really are. Dr. Greeley was in India last month at the invitation of Ambassador Daniel P. Moynihan to give lectures in New Delhi and Calcutta on 'The Crisis in American Pluralism.'

"

"What is Andrew Greeley, anyway?" an American writer recently asked facetiously. Time magazine ran an. article on him titled: "Andrew Greeley, Incorporated." And publisher Dan Herr quipped, "I used to think there were four Greeleys.

I was wrong. There are more than that."

So it would seem.

There is, first of all, the Reverend Andrew M. Greeley (right), 46-year-old Roman Catholic priest, with 10 years' experience in a Chicago parish. There . is the sociologist who took his doctorate in 1962 from the University of Chicago, where he taught for the next 10 years.

Then there is Andrew Greeley the writer, who turns out a weekly column for 50 Catholic newspapers. He has produced scores of other magazine articles and more than 40 books, both scholarly and popular. These include The Student in

Higher Education, Building Coalition: American Politics in the '70s, and Sexual Intimacy. At the moment, he is working on a novel.

And there are other Greeleys: the lecturer in demand on college and community platforms,. the editor of Ethnicity; the author of new biweekly series of religious meditations. Now Director of the Center for the Study of American Pluralism at the University of Chicago, he is a past president of the Catholic Sociological Association, and has belonged at various times to innumerable committees and boards. He also takes time out for swimming, water-skiing and sailing. His other hobby, he says, is "writing." It is hardly surprising, then, that a U.S. newsweekly should have described him as "an information machine-gun who can fire ofTan article on Jesus to the New York Times Magazine, on ethnic groups to the Antioch Review, and on war to Dissent."

a

Out on the praIrIe soil of Illinois where I live I devote Saturday mornings to absorbing the flow of wisdom coming in my direction from the Olympian heights of editorial offices. I diligently pursue the magazine pages of Commentary, The Public Interest, Social Policy, New York Review of Books, Harper's, Atlantic, Commonweal, Christian Century, Intellectual Digest, The New Republic, Psychology Today and the previous Sunday's New York Times, which has

just been delivered five days late by our postal service. Having conscientiously discharged my duty, I turn for light escapist reading to St. John of the Cross's Dark Night of the Soul.

By noon every Saturday I am convinced that not only are things disastrously bad, indeed apocalyptically so, but that they are rapidly getting even worse. I am further discouraged by the

thought that the authors and editors of these worthy journals are probably h.aving a splendid time at cocktail parties in their week-end homes in suburbia, while their work has put a pall on my week-end that can be lifted only by an improbable victory of the Chicago Bears football team on Sunday afternoon.

Depending on which journal has made the strongest impact, I am faced with the thought that we are involved in an environmental Gotterdammerung, or that we live in a society of horrendous inequality and injustice, or that legions of hard-hat ethnic middle-American racists are closing in on all sides. All education has failed, all social policy has failed, everything has failed. We are in the grip of a generation gap, future shock, backlash, alienation, permissiveness, revolution, a heroin epidemic and the collapse of the family. The American citizenry is turning away from its conscience; the American people are evil, corrupt, immoral. One-dimensional man dominates what is left of the environment; the country is failing to reorder its priorities; American society is coming apart.

There are a number of replies one could make to the prophets of doom.

One could cite, for example, excellent research data that indicate that the family is not collapsing, that there is no such thing as either future shock or a generation gap, that there is relatively little alienation west of New York State's Hudson River, that young people are not revolutionaries, that the amount of sexual promiscuity does not seem to have changed much in several decades, that the ethnic backlash seems to be invisible.

Alternatively, one could raise questions, both logical and philosophical, about

the native American stock. Finally, while religious because the society was already collective guilt. Is the whole society pluralistic: Congregain theory it was not required of immifundamentally immoral or just part of denominationally tionalist in New England, Quak~ in grants that they give up either their it? If so, what part? Eighty per cent? language or culture, in practice the Pennsylvania, Anglican in New York Forty per cent? Is the society so corrupt and Virginia, Methodist and Baptist in social pressures were so strong that as to be irredeemable? If it is redeemable, the South. Nor could the cultural basis languages were lost and cultures were what are the dimensions within it that for the society be ethnic. Even at the repressed. make it so? Might not Hannah Arendt War at least But the American creed kept us uneasy be correct after all when she said that time of the Revolutionary half of the population was not Angloabout these transgressions.

The Immiif everyone is guilty then no one is? gratiQn Act of 1965 eliminated quotas Saxon. (Most of the non-Anglo-Saxon Or one could try to engage in systemagainst Orientals and Eastern and Southatic discussion of the complexities and half were Scotch-Irish, German or black.) ern Europeans.

While injustice against Nor could the common basis be a unique nuances of all our social problems and blacks and American Indians remains, cultural heritage, for while the Battle trot out vast quantities of technical data practically no one in the society defends which would indicate that neither are of Hastings, the Magna Carta, the War it any longer, and major efforts are being of the Roses and the Glorious Revolution . the problems so bad nor the solutions made to eliminate it. More recently, in so obvious as the wise men would have meant something to the Anglo-Saxons, great part as the result of black emphasis it meant much less, if anything at all, us believe. on cultural diversity, the country has at to the non-Anglo-Saxons.

But to engage in such dialectic efforts last begun to come to terms with the reliTherefore the founding fathers decided, would be a waste of time, for we are as the early naturalization laws make gious, racial, ethnic and geographic diverdealing here neither with issues about sity within its boundaries. which men of good will can debate nor clear, that the central core of beliefs that was to create the American nation Despite all its flaws, then, the American with questions of fact for which empirical experiment in pluralism has been in evidence can offer answers. We are must consist of certain political principles many ways an incredible success. When dealing with symbol systems, with im- as contained in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Citizenone looks at the ethnic, religious and plicit pictures that enable the sophistiracial conflicts in the rest of the world, cated intellectual elites of a society to ship would be granted to the man who was willing to be a "citizen" in the Enone is astonished that there has been order and interpret the phenomena that lightenment sense of the word. No man so little -conflict and violence in American impinge on their consciousnesses when 'who committed himself to the political society. Despite its large. population, they consider their society. principles of the 18th century and who its immense geography and the variegated I would suggest that one of the items was willing to pledge allegiance to them origins of its citizenry, the United States that should be on the agenda of anyone as they were enshrined in the Declaration has had only one civil war, and that was who wants to understand what's going of Independence and the Constitution a conflict between two basically Britishon in the United States is an exploration American groups. could be excluded from citizenship whatof America-not the America we perceive We should endeavor to understand ever his religion, ethnicity or heritage. through the smog banks lying low over American society as it really is, and not I suppose Presidents Jefferson and the Jersey flats, nor the America of as it looks from an airplane flying from Madison would have been horrified at wandering journalists for whom "telling New York to San Francisco. What 'are the thought that within something less it like it is" means telling it like they the forces that bind the society together knew it was before they got out of New than a .century, while the population despite the¡ immense centrifugal forces expanded across the continent, 45 million York City. at work? What are the cultural riches would come to the As my own modest contribution to- new immigrants that may be latent in the various subward mapping the roads for such an shores of the United States from all over populations?

What are the aspects of the world. However grudgingly, the native exploration, let me cite one phenomenon, the symbol system of the American civil Americans did indeed admit the immithe process by which the United States religion that can be activated to facilitate grants, requiring (in theory at least) only was peopled: immigration. Like so many positive and constructive social change? that they pledge allegiance to the political other things in American society that To put the matter differently: Amerisystem in order to achieve equal rights are taken for granted, no one has thought cans tried to accomplish social change as citizens. The system may have been it particularly worthwhile to understand of a major sort in the last decade by flawed in practice, but not in theoretical why citizenship is so readily accessible massive government expenditures, by statement. The incredible thing is not in the United States to immigrants, extraordinarily activist court decisions, that there has been injustice and violence when in most other North Atlantic by protests and mass demonstrations, countries it is but rarely conceded to in the United States, it is that the country by threats of revolution and by the has held together at all. foreigners and then only under the most micropolitics through which political But let us be clear about the flaws. rigorous circumstances.

Whether they power is established. The attempt was come from Africa, Yugoslavia, Spain or Neither the blacks nor the American not altogether successful, and we might Indians were given an opportunity to Italy, "guest workers" in some Western now try understanding.

America is an European countries are permitted to stay become citizens. Orientals were admitted only for brief periods of time, are gen- for a time but then excluded. Eastern . incredibly diverse society, made up of all kinds of economic, racial, religious, and Southern Europeans were admitted erally not allowed to bring their families, ethnic and geographic groups. That society by the millions, but then the American and are excluded from citizenship. is held together by coalitions and comRepublic lost its nerve and, departing The founding fathers of the United promises from which no major group from its principles of equal access to States, political philoso.phers that they excluded-and in were, were very conscious of the need for citizenship, established quota systems to is ever completely which no group is ever presumed to an intellectual and cultural base for their keep the "inferior" peoples of Eastern have a pre-eminent hold on virtue.

0 new nation. Such a base could not be and Southern Europe from contaminating

Readers Respond to Women's Lib Issue The special section of four articles entitled "A Look at Women's Lib," in the January 1974 SPAN, evoked many comments from readers. We regret that we do not have the space to print all of them in toto, but the sampling represents a crosssection of their opinions.-Ed. Dear Sir: Do I need the support of "women's lib" on a personal plane? The answer is an emphatic "no." I am one of the fortunate few who grew up in a family where there was no distinction based on sex. But does my country need a women's lib movement? Most certainly, yes.

It is true, as Nayantara Sahgal says, that our Constitution has given us equal citizenship rights along with men. But what good is that to the majority of women if this equality is not generally accepted in practice? Why is there such a fuss about women holding high office?

The time has come for us to be judged by our merit, not by our sex.

When the elite women of even an affluent country. like the U.S. feel the need for a "lib" movement, what about a developing country like ours where the great mass of women live in villages?

How can the disparity between the sexes be reduced without a movement? It is bound to come sooner rather than later.

The late '60s and the early '70s witnessed this phenomenon in America and Europe.

Let it come to India.

LATIKA NAG Headmistress Shri Shikshayatan Calcutta

No mark of fossilization, no stamp of decay over seven full decades! Old age has its grace, indeed, only while mind remains youn~ and alert, spirits stay alive, thoughts continue to be fresh as the morning breeze, and the total personality displays all the wealth of its native hues.

Mead has all these.

S. SARAF Reader in Anthropology University 0/ Saugar Madhya Pradesh

Dear Sir: I read with interest your coverage of the women's liberation movement.

While the psychological and physical make-up of the female are different from those of the male, this does not entitle the male to dominate the female.

The intellectual superiority of man over woman is an untenable myth: Witness the better performance of girl students in colleges and universities as compared to boys.

The present controversy over women;s lib focuses attention on the need to evolve a more enduring partnership between the male and the female in modern society. The dish-washing and childbearing concept of woman has undergone drastic change. Thinking men and women everywhere should evolve a dynamic approach to the problem of the rights of women-only then can the concept of social justice and equality be meaningful.

MARY THOMAS Department 0/ History and Politics Bhavan's College Andheri. Bombay

Dear Sir: Nayantara Sahgal's article "The Woman in India" is not very enlightening. She has ignored the service rendered by Christian missionaries, particularly nuns, whose contribution to the progress of Indian women has been noteworthy. One cannot forget the work of Sister Nivedita of beloved memory.

Why did the article omit her name?

Dear Sir: Gail Sheehy's portrait of Dr. Margaret Mead refreshes and revives all the memories of my participation in the IXth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences in Chicago (August-September 1973) where I had the occasion to see the woman who a century hence might well be symbolically .

T.M. GNANAPRAKASAM represented by her odd and bizarre fetish Madurai -the forked thumbstick-and who might well get near "mythologized" on more Dear Sir: From the January 1974 SPAN scores than one. What spirits (in no one learns a lot about the women of manner the Samoan Ariel and his kith America and their problems. I also enand kin, though!) she has at this age! joyed reading Nayantara Sahgal's article

on the progress of Indian women.

Women like Margaret Mead are the pride of the entire feminine world. Her daily work-routine is awe-inspiring. There are not many men who can do such stupendous work or undertake such long journeys in the quest for knowledge.

"Women's lib" has found its true meaning in Dr. Mead.

I would like to quote from Swami Yivekananda to show what a great leader of thought in the 19th century had to say about American women.

"The average American woman is far more cultivated than the average American man. The men slave all their lives for money and the women snatch every opportunity to improve themselves."

"In this country women are the life of every movement, they represent all the culture of the- nation."

"Whichever side you turn your eyes in America, you see the power and influence of women."

"American women! A hundred lives would not be sufficient to pay my deep debt of gratitude to you. I have not words enough to express my gratitude to you. The oriental hyperbole alone can express the oriental gratitude .... If the Indian Ocean were an inkstand, the highest peak of the Himalayas the pen, the earth the scroll and time itself the writer, still it will not express my gratitude to you."

Talking of our country, the women of ancient India were essentially feminine, proud of their sex. One can see them; beautifully dressed and coiffured, in the carvings of temple walls. They covered their bodies with muslin; their faces were never covered .. Women those days did not boast that they were the equal of men; they perhaps thought they were . superior to men. In the epics, we find w,omen accompanying husbands everywhere, in palace and forest.

To me, liberation means freedom from ignorance, laziness and prejudice. From this standpoint, women's lib has been successful both in America and India though they have found expression in different ways.

CHITRIT A D EYI Novelist Calcutta

North India recently endured its coldest winter in years. Worse is yet to come, say the experts, who believe that the world is at the dawn of a new ice age. Already, the signs are at hand-glaciers are growing and warmth-loving animals are moving southward.

In January 1973the temperature in America's heartland seemed colder than anyone could recall, aggravating an already chronic fuel shortage. Schools closed in Denver, factories shut down in the Midwest, and thousands of workers were laid off as fuel supplies ran out. The suspicion that winters are getting colder is no longer merely a suspi. cion among climatologists. Over the last 30 years perma, nent snow on Baffin Island has expanded. Pack ice around Iceland in the winter is increasing and becoming a serious hazard to navigation. Warmth-loving armadillos that migrated northward in the first half of this century are now retreating southward toward Texas and Oklahoma.

These are just some effects of a global cooling that has been recorded by the world network of weather stations.

If all indications are correct, worse is yet to come. Judging by what has happened in the past, it may very well get cold enough to allow great glaciers thousands of feet thick to cover North America as far south as Long Island, burying the highest peaks of the White Mountains and Adirondacks.

The last great lee Age ended only 17,000 years ago, when the ice sheets in the mid-latitudes retreated, leaving only some smaller mountain glaciers as they crept back to the poles (where now all that remains are the ice packs on Antarctica and Greenland). As the ~ce melted, the earth then rapidly warmed until sometime between 3,000 to 5,000 B.C., when it was probably warmer than today-in fact, warmer than it had been for 100,000years.

But these balmy conditions were not long lasting, and

'Current studies of the world's oceans will for the first time accurately record past climatic change over thousands of years and also help predict future trends.'

the climate gradually cooled until about 900 B.C., during the archeological Iron Age. It then rebounded again, as evidenced by records of flourishing vineyards in England from 1000 to 1200 A.D. Thus, the great Viking conquests were favored by slightly warmer conditions than today's.

This time of mild climate and flourishing agriculture saw the spread of Christianity over northern and eastern Europe and the most active period of cathedral and abbey construction.

The climate again cooled from the late 15th through early 19th centuries. This interval, the so-called Little Ice Age, was a refrigeration of considerable intensity, although still a far cry from a full ice age. It saw the greatest advance of mountain glaciers, and probably of ice on the polar seas, since the last great Ice Age. In some degree it touched every aspect of human life.

The effects of the Little Ice Age have commonly been overlooked, presumably because they were overshadowed by the devastation caused by the Black Plaglle. The late 1500s and the 1600s were probably the coldest time of the four-century period. The 1690s saw the last serious famine anywhere in Great Britain, the result of.an eight-year run of harvest failures in the upland parishes of Scotland, where the proportion of the population that perished from hunger rivaled the toll caused by the Black Plague. The consequent weakening of the Scottish nation may have made union with England inevitable. In England the 15th through 19th centuries also were significantly colder than now. The Thames River at London had frozen only occasionally prior to the 16th century; however, in that century, and during the two that followed, the river froze on numerous occasions. In the late l600s the river froze repeatedly, and for weeks on end in the winter of 1683-84, Charles II, his court, and just about everybody else in London were able to tread clear across the ice-encrusted Thames. The river froze on only one occasion in the 19th century, but what prevented it from freezing more often probably were man-made changes of the river banks and subsequent industrial thermal pollution, rather than climatic warming. The Little Ice Age also affected the Scandinavian colony on Iceland, where grains introduced by the Vikings refused to grow.

On the Western side of the Atlantic, good historical records don't go back as far, but there is some striking evidence from the 18th and early 19th centuries that conditions were significantly colder in eastern North America than they are today. In the winters of this period New YOl'k Harbor repeatedly froze, allowing Staten Islanders to walk across the narrows to Brooklyn. In 1816 there was frost every month in northern New York and New England, and for this reason it was dubbed "the year without a summer." From the sixth to the 19th of June subfreezing temperatures were recorded in upstate New York and New England, and a foot of snow fell on Quebec City. The crop losses that occurred because of this late-spring cold and the following late-September black frost posed serious problems for Americans recovering from the ravages of the War of

1812. Admittedly, 1816 was unusual, even for the Little Ice Age, but the possibility of the recurrence of such anomalous years increases as the world's mean climate cools.

Our knowledge of climatic conditions before the late 1600s, when the thermometer was invented by Gabriel Fahrenheit, is based mainly on observations included in diaries and historical accounts. For the next 150 years we have a temperature record for western Europe and, during the latter part of this period, for North America. By the end of the last century a sufficient number of weather stations had been set up around the world to provide a good indication of global climatic trends.

This climatic record clearly shows the end of the Little Tce Age, with temperatures rising fr0111the late 1800s until about 1940. Since then the trend has reversed, and a steep decline is now clearly under way. Already the climate has reverted to the levels of the 1920s, and the cooling continues.

The effects of the present cooling trend will be most strongly felt in temperate climatic zones, while the tropics will be least affected. Not only will the temperate regions become cooler, but we may also expect an increase in with late-spring frosts or "anomalously" cold years-years early-autumn frosts-and a general increase in storminess.

Thus, the grain fields of the Canadian prairies and the Russian steppes are vulnerable to a shortening of the growing season; however, the sugar cane harvest of Cuba or the banana crops of Guatemala would probably survive even a fully glacial climate in the north.

It is the vast industrial and grain-producing areas that wilJ undergo the greatest change. The main grain (primarily wheat) exporting nations-the United States, Canada, Argentina, and Australia-all lie in temperate latitudes. A large number of nations, most notably the Soviet Union and China, rely upon these exports. Any reduction of grain

production could cause an immediate problem, for the dred years. A compatable length of time was required for large grain surpluses of some years ago have now been . the temperate forests of England, the Netherlands, and vastly reduced, and most of the world's production is con- Denmark to be replaced by subarctic tundra. However, sumed within a year of the harvest. The continuing popu- the magnitude of the change from an interglacial to a lation growth may put a strain on food resources even glacial is such that noticeable changes, even greater than without a marked modification of climate, but a shortening those observed in the Little Ice Age, would probably occur of the growing season in temperate latitudes could easily in fewer than 100 years.

Other scientists, such as the British climatologist Hubert aggravate thls situation.

As climate cools, the demand for more heat will put Lamb, propose that the present climatic trends may lead an ever-increasing strain on energy resources, causing us only into another Little Ice Age. They argue that climate natural gas, oil, and electricity prices to rise. The present seems to oscillate between periods of 200 and 400 years. energy crisis points out how narrow our tolerances are and The coldest part of the Little Ice Age was in the late 16th how closely we regulate our energy supplies to the level of and 17th centuries. Another cold spell, though less severe, so-called normal winters. However, what was considered an came in the early 19th century. If the system continues to abnormally cold winter is becoming normal, and it is ex- cycle as it has in the past, we can expect substantial cooling pected¡ that winters will be getting even colder. Some in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, perhaps to a degree scientists, such as the Czechoslovakian climatologist Jiri comparable with the Little Ice Age. On the conservative Kukla, think we may be on the verge of another Great Ice side, the Danish physicist W. Dansgaard, from his research Age. They point to the fact that previous interglacial mild into the climatic record of long columns of ice removed intervals, which are comparable in warmth to the present from the Greenland ice cap, predicted that the present coolone, lasted only about 10,000 years. The present interglacial ing trend will continue for only another 10 to 20 years. period already has lasted 10,000 years, so if it is truly similar The most reasonable explanation for the current global to earlier ones-and if man's activities do not alter the cooling is that the amount of solar energy reaching the natural trends-it should be nearly over. earth's surface is decreasing. Since the sun is the source of If we indeed have reached the critical point in the all the energy in natural climatic processes, anything that climatic cycle where an interglacial changes to a glacial, interferes with the amount of solar energy received and there is some difference of opinion as to how long this retained at the earth's surface or the distribution of that interim period will linger. Recent evidence suggests a shorter energy could cause a change of climate. An obvious way time for the transition than was previously thought. Pollen this could happen is through a fluctuation of the strength grains preserved in the peat bogs of Macedonia, Greece, of solar radiation at the sun's surface. However, evidence reveal that the change from the last interglacial forest to to document this fluctuation is difficult to come by. Since glacial grassland probably took no more than a few hun- atmospheric variations cause changes in the strength solar radiation at the earth's surface, we must either monitor the sun's strength above the atmosphere (which has yet to American climatologists are studying scores of phenomena that be done) or rely on observations of solar disturbances that give clues to changes in climate. Below: Sediments like these. may reflect changes in solar intensity. from the ocean floor, enable scientists to determine temperature Sunspots, one of several kinds of solar disturbances, of the ocean surface thousands of years ago. Leji: Surtur, a have the longest record of reliable observations, dating volcano in Iceland, injects tons of fine rock and gases high back to the 1600s.

Some correlation has been found between into upper atmosphere. For a year after such an eruption, air temperatures are lower than the average of the previous decade. large numbers of sunspots and warmer conditions on earth, and a dearth of sunspots and cooler conditions. It has not been established, however, that their numbers during any year are an accurate measure of solar energy output. Solar disturbances other than sunspots have not been measured over a long enough period for scientists to say how im, p.ortant these changes in solar intensity may be to the overall process of climatic change.

Gravitational interaction between the earth and other bodies in the solar system also causes periodic changes in the geographic and seasonal distribution of incoming solar radiation. This mechanism does not significantly alter the annual total radiation received at any given portion of the earth's surface. Nevertheless, the relative increase of radiation received in one season at the expense of others may be extremely important in the building and decay of glaciers.

This theory is a popular explanation of the major advances of ice sheets. Over the last quarter-million years, glaciers have expanded during times when summers were cool and have retreated when summers were hot. At present, the northern hemisphere has passed from a time of sharp contrast among the seasons and is experiencing what is

or

Some scientists attribute the current global cooling to a decrease in solar energy reaching the earth. Weather balloons (right) study this and other hypotheses.

called a low seasonal contrast regime-¡possible signaling, if this theory is correct, another major advance of ice.

Alterations in the transparency of the earth's atmosphere also affect the amount of solar energy reaching the earth's surface. Large volcanic eruptions, such as the eruption of Krakatau in 1883, can inject tons of fine rock material and gases high into the upper atmosphere, 24 kilometers and more. Fine particles that reach such levels above the weather may take years to settle out. In general, temperatures for a year or so after such great eruptions are somewhat colder than the average for the decade in which the eruption occurred. Thus the extraordinarily cold summer of 1816 may be at least partially explained by the mighty volcanic eruption of Tamboro, Sumatra, in 1815. However, the long-term development of climate seems to be only slightly modified by volcanic eruptions.

The problem of understanding the future course of climate is compounded by the possible disruption of climate's natural progression by man. Although the direct effect of man's activities on global climate is the subject of controversy, his effect on local climate is established, and his ability to affect global climate is at least probable.

Man has altered local climate through construction of cities, deforestation of millions of hectares, and the development and expansion of agriculture. His potential for wider alteration of climate lies primarily in modification of the atmosphere through the combustion of fossil fuels.

Such combustion produces carbon dioxide and thus increases the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere. This results in a blanket effect, reducing the heat loss from the earth to outer space and thus causing the earth to warm.

Industrial exhausts also add dust to the atmosphere.

This industrial dust has a cooling effect; it screens out solar radiation just as volcanic dust does. The warming trend from the late 19th century to 1940 could have been caused by an industrial increase in atmospheric CO2 and the cooling since 1940 by an increase in man-made atmospheric particles. However, it is hard to separate climatic changes that are induced by man from those that are natural. Murray Mitchell and Steven Schneider of the U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration have stated that, up to this point, the CO2 warming effect and the maximumparticle cooling effect turn out to be very nearly equal and opposite, thus tending to cancel one another out. Therefore, the observed climatic trend is probably natural. Yet Mitchell and Schneider do not imply that this will continue to be the case in the future. Increased pollution or direct injection of pollutants into the stratosphere by new large high-flying aircraft could tip the balance. . To understand long-term climatic change, we first need to know how climate has changed globally in the past, not just for one hundred years but for thousands of years.

As part of the International Decade of Oceanographic Exploration, which began in 1970, a unique research project called CLIMAP (Climate Long-Range Investigation

Mapping and Prediction) has been started in order to fill this gap in our knowledge. A consortium of American scientists working on this project is reconstructing the global pattern of climatic change through the last several hundred thousand years.

This multidisciplinary group, primarily from Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory, Brown University's Department of Geology, and Oregon State University's Department of Oceanography, is reading the climatic record in layers of sediment that continuously collect on the ocean floor. Preserved in the long columns of these sediments raised from the ocean floor by oceanographic ships are the fossil remains of minute shells from microscopic organisms that once lived in the ocean.

When alive, these organisms were delicately adapted to a narrow range of temperature and to other physical and chemical properties of the water they lived in. Climatically induced changes in these properties caused changes in the kinds of organisms that lived in any part of the ocean.

By means of mathematical techniques these fossil data can be transformed into estimates of past sea surface temperatures and other properties of the creatures' environment.

These studies from all the world's oceans will, for the first time, accurately record past climatic change over thousands and hundreds of thousands of years. This detailed world record then can be used to test various theories of climatic change and to predict future trends, either theoretically or by analogy with the past. These data also may be used to predict which areas of the globe will be affected and to what degree they will be affected.

CLIMAP is an important step toward an understanding of climate, but much more is needed in both basic and applied research, particularly in such interlocking fields as meteorology and oceanography.

The possibility of a future significant climatic shift, with its consequent impact on our food and energy resources, emphasizes the pressing need to understand the causes and mechanisms of climatic change. Like many other environmental problems, climate is international, and the adjustments that must be made in order to deal with a changing climate will affect many nations. The manner in which we will adjust requires long-term planning. Perhaps this planning should logically fall under the jurisdiction of the new U.N. program for safeguarding the human environment headed by the Canadian industrialist Maurice Strong.

In any case, the winter of 1973, when America shipped millions of tons of wheat to Russia and lowered its thermostats to conserve dwindling fuel reserves, should remind us, not only that we are living close to the limits of the world's resources under present climatic conditions, but also that our climate is changing-and could change substantially.

0 About the Author: James D. Hayes is an oceanographer and paleontologist at Columbia University's Geological Observatory.

Reprinted from U.S. News & World Repor/.

December 17. 1973. published at Washington. D.C.

CARS THAT WILL GULP LESS GAS WHAT AMERICAN RESEARCH IS DOING

American automotive technology has good news for drivers faced with rising petrol costs: more and more cars will have radial tires, gadgets that warn of wasted fuel, an extra gear that lets the engine cruise with minimum effort. And the future holds the promise of the hydrogen engine.

Cars are on the way that will go farther on a tank of gasoline. That's the encouraging word from Detroit.

The U.S. auto industry, spurred by fears of impending gasoline rationing, has em/ barked on a two-pronged campaign to improve gas mileage.

Involved are crash programs for the next few months, plus a fresh look at what can be done in future years.

First payoffs came early this year, when a number of new auto models were offered with proven gas-saving features.

More far-reaching developments will be slower in coming. These include an industry-wide swing to smaller cars, and new sources of power to drive them.

The gas stretchers. Among the changes that have come or will be coming are:

Overdrive. This involves adding an extra gear that lets the engine maintain cruising speed with minimum effort. Some cars of the 1940s had overdrive, but only on stickshift transmissions.

Gas-minder gauge. This dashboard indicator keeps the driver informed at all times on whether he is operating his car in the most efficient manner.

Improved tires. Radial-ply tires first promoted because they wear longer, have been found to extend gas mileage by at least five per cent. Such tires will become original factory equipment on a greater number of cars.

Detroit engineers acknowledge that nothing in this first wave of changes is revolutionary. The devices are variations of things that have been around for a long

time. But manufacturers are interested in anything that will help curb the thirst for fuel in their products.

General Motors, for example, is testing an automatic transmission with a fourth, or cruising gear. This gear revolves 10 times for every seven turns of the drive shaft from the engine. Hence, the engine doesn't have to wo'rk as hard and burns less gasoline. An added advantage: Noise also is reduced.

Chrysler Corporation says it is concentrating on changes in the rear-axle gears, a less expensive approach than a special automatic overdrive transmission. Most cars already offer optional-axle ratios-one preferable for gas economy and another that provides more power. The power option is a must for cars used to pull trailers.

,

Gas-minder gauges embody the same principle as the vacuum gauges that mechanics use in tuning auto engines. The devices simply warn when gasoline is being wasted.

Keep it green. Pontiac division of General Motors is testing such a gauge that would be fitted into the instrument panel next to the speedometer. Russell Gee, a Pontiac engineer, explains: "Our gauges have three different colors: green for economy, red for power and orange for intermediate. If you keep the needle in the green, you are definitely going to improve your gas mileage.

"That needle shows you just what is happening. It's just a way to help you drive the way you should."

Push for radials: Auto technicians say that one of the simplest moves they can make to improve gasoline mileage is to switch to radial tires. Tests by Firestone Tire & Rubber Company indicate a possible fuel saving of up to 10 per cent over conventional tires.

The secret, tire experts say, is in the way radials are built. Cords in the fabric run directly from side to side, rather than on the bias. The result is a firmer, rounder tire that rolls more freely.

Phase-out of bigness? On top of these short-term antidotes for curbing excessive use of gasoline, auto manufacturers are giving top priority to a number of longerrange panaceas. These center on major reductions in the size of American cars and, eventually, alternate sources of power.

Weight is the No. 1 enemy of fuel economy, the engineers point out. For each extra 400 pounds, the driver loses one mile per gallon of gas. So the prescriptions now call for crash "diets" to trim the size of automobiles.

But as with many diets, there are problems. Chief among these are U.S. Government safety and smog-control regulations.

Better bumpers and roofs mean hundreds of pounds of added weight, and devices to clean up exhaust emissions also make cars heavier. Even worse in times of scarce fuel is the fact that pollution controls add as much as 10 per cent to gas consumption.

In December 1973, the Government proposed delaying additional pollution controls that engineers said would impose even harsher fuel penalties.

Starting with 1975 models, General Motors says that it will turn to catalytic converters to control pollution, and that these converters will improve gas mileage

by upward of 13 per cent. Most other auto manufacturers are far less enthusiastic about the converters. They claim such devices are likely to make mileage worse, not better.

American minis. Not only will today's standard-sized cars shrink in the years ahead, but all the U.S. companies are planning whole families of minicars smaller than the present subcompacts. First of these is expected to come from American Motors in September of this year.

Weight-saving efforts also will see Detroit turning more and more to such materials as plastics and aluminum as alternatives to steel. But here, too, problems arise.

Aluminum requires great amounts of electric power for basic smelting. Plastics for cars usually come from crude oil.

Engines of the future. New engines for American cars are just down the road. The first of these will be General Motors' Wankel rotary for the 1974Chevrolet Vega.

The rotary is smaller and lighter in weight than a conventional piston engine of similar power. But it also has a tendency to use more gas. GM says its version, however, will be at least as fuel-efficient as a comparable piston engine. Because they are smaller, rotaries are regarded as likely candidates to power a new generation of luxury family cars.

Ford and Chrysler are working with Honda, the Japanese tTIanufacturer, on stratified-charge engines, which hold the potential for good mileage with low pollution. The stratified-charge principle varies from today's internal-combustion engines only in the way the air and gasoline mixture is burned. Combustion begins just outside the cylinder in a small chamber and quickly spreads inside. At first, there is more gasoline and less air. In the cylinder, there is more air and less gasoline than usual. The double burning reduces pollutants and promotes efficiency.

Also getting fresh attention is the diesel engine, which operates on fuel that is less expensive than gasoline and gets up to 30 miles a gallon. However, diesels are more expensive to build than gasoline engines and are much heavier. And for the moment, diesel fuel is even more difficult to buy than gasoline.

Mercedes-Benz of Germany and Peugeot, the French firm, build the only diesel passenger cars now sold in the U.S. A choice of fuels. Detroit engineers are investigating a number of other potential power plants that could prove practical

by the late 1980s. Three most often mentioned are these: Steam. This is attractive in concept but has proved extremely complicated in application. Experiments so far suggest that steam engines would be unsuitable for today's small cars because of weight. Fuel economy also is a problem.

Electrics. Some firms are building battery-powered electric vehicles now for short urban trips. Technological breakthroughs are needed so that vast amounts of power can be stored in small packages.

As yet, there is little saving in energy since there is simply a transfer in the power source from gasoline to electric-generating stations. The pollution problem also is transferred in the same way.

Gas turbines. Technological problems hamper the use of these engines, but the concept is viewed with great interest.

Chrysler possibly is the most advanced in gas-turbine development, and its expert, George Huebner, predicts the gas turbine will be powering some U.S. autos in the 1980s.

Some day, hydrogen? A 21st-century approach to solving the energy shortage for autos lies in using some new type of fuel. Shortages already exist for some alternatives once held in high regard, such as natural gas, propane and diesel fuel. A liquid derivative of coal is a possibility.

Hydrogen seems to hold the most promise as an eventual replacement for gasoline, some automotive experts believe. This light gas is available in almost unlimited amounts in the ocean.

Scientists know how to reduce sea water to oxygen and hydrogen. However, such massive quantities of energy would be required to do it on a large scale that the solutions are not yet in sight.

There are other problems. The "gas" tank for a hydrogen car, by today's technology, would need to be as big as the car.

And hydrogen is much more dangerous than gasoline.

If it can be obtained cheaply and harnessed for auto use, hydrogen offers one exceptional advantage. It can be burned in existing automobile engines. And pollution problems would vanish, since the exhaust would be mostly water.

All these innovations are on the horizon. But, for the present, engineers say, a light foot on the gas pedal is a driver's best bet for improving mileage.

0

'The rich are different from you and me,' F. Scott Fitzgerald is supposed to have once said to Ernest Hemingway. And as the story goes, Hemingway .replied, 'Yes, they have more money.' A neat and pleasing epigram for a democratic society, but one that Thorstein Veblen, writing almost 30 years earlier, had already proved too simple. In an introduction to a new edition of Veblen's most important book, 'The Theory of the Leisure Class,' John Kenneth Galbraith examines the ideas and life of this complicated and often misunderstood American economist and sociologist. The new edition was published last year by Houghton Mifflin, and SPAN is proud to publish Galbraith's illuminating and witty introduction.

Portrait of Thorstein Veblen (left), after a painting by Edwin Burrage Child.

The original Veblen portrait was presented to Yale University by a group of admirers whose thinking had been "quickened by his insight and spurred by his irony."

The nearest thing in the United States to an academic legend-equivalent to that of Scott Fitzgerald in fiction or the Barrymores in the theater-is the legend of Thorstein Veblen. The nature of such a legend, one assumes, is that the reality is enlarged by imagination and that, eventually, the image has an existence of its own. This is so of Veblen.

He was a man of great and fertile mind and a marvelously resourceful exponent of its product. His life, beginning on the frontier of the upper Middle West in 1857 and continuing, mostly at one university or another, until his death in 1929, was not without adventure of a kind. Certainly, by the standards of academic life at the time, it was nonconformist. There was ample material both in his work and in his life on which to build the legend, and the builders have not failed.

There is, in fact, a tradition in American social thought that traces all contemporary comment on and criticism of American institutions to Veblen. As with Marx to a devout Marxist, everything is there. The Marxist, however, is somewhat more likely to know his subject. It is possible, indeed, that nothing more clearly marks an intellectual fraud than a penchant for glib references to Veblen, particularly for assured and lofty reminders, whenever something of seeming interest is said, that Veblen said it better and first.

The legend deriving from Veblen's life owes even more to imagination. What is believed-about his grim, dark boyhood in a poor immigrant Norwegian family in Minnesota; his reaction to these oppressive surroundings; his harried life in the American academic world of the closing decades of the last century and the first two of this; the fatal

way he attracted women and vice versa and its consequences in his tightly corseted surroundings; the indifference of all right-thinking men to his work-has only a limited foundation in fact.

Perhaps one who writes prefaces should perpetuate any available myth. Economics is a dull enough business and sociology is sometimes worse, and so, sometimes, are those who profess these subjects. When, as with Veblen, the man is enlarged by a nimbus, the latter should be brightened, not dissolved.

One reason that economics and sociology are dull is the belief that everything associated with human personality should be made as humdrum as possible. That is science. Still, there is a certain case for truth, and in regard to Veblen the truth is also far from tedious.

His life was richly interesting; his boyhood, if much less grim than commonly imagined, had a deep and lasting effect on his later writing. Veblen is not a universal source of insight on American society. He did not see what had not yet happened. Also, on some things he was wrong, and faced with a choice between accuracy and a formulation that he felt would fill his audience with outrage, he rarely hesitated. He opted for the outrage.

But no man of his time or since has looked with such a cool and penetrating eye, not so much at pecuniary gain as at the way its pursuit makes men and women behave.

This cool and penetrating view is the substance behind the Veblen legend. It is a view that still astonishes the reader with what it reveals. While there may be other deserving • candidates, only two books by American economists of the 19th century are still read.

One of these is Henry George's Progress and

This article appeared in the American Heritage's April 1973 issue. abridged from John Kenneth Galbraith's introduction to The Theory 0/ the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen. published by Houghton Mifflin Company. Boston. Introduction copyright Š 1973 by John Kenneth Galbraith.

'Veblen's great work is a wide-ranging and timeless comment on the behavior of people who possess or are in pursuit of wealth and who, looking beyond their wealth, want the eminence that"... wealth was meant to buy. No one has really read very much if he hasn't read "The Theory of the Leisure Class.'"

Poverty; the other is Veblen's Theory of the

Leisure Class. Neither of these books, it is interesting to note, came from the sOIJhisticated and derivative world of the eastern seaboard. Both were products of the frontierreactions of frontiersmen, in one case to speculative alienation of land, in the other to. the pompous social ordinances of the affluent.

But the comparison cannot be carried too far.

Henry George was the exponent of a notably compelling idea; his book remains important for that idea-for the notion of the terrible price that society pays for private ownership and the pursuit of profit in land. Veblen's great work is a wide-ranging and timeless comment on the behavior of people who possess or are in pursuit of wealth and who, looking beyond their wealth, want the eminence that, or so they believe, wealth was meant to buy. No one has really read very much if he hasn't read The Theory of the Leisure Class at least once. Not many of more than minimal education get through life without referring at some time or another to "conspicuous consumption," "pecuniary emulation," or "conspicuous waste" even though they may not be quite certain whence these phrases came.

t first glance the Veblen origins are the American cliche. His parents, Thomas Anderson and Kari Bunde Veblen, emigrated from Norway to a farm in rural Wisconsin in 1847,10 years before Thorstein's birth. There were the usual problems in raising the money for the passage, the inevitable and quite terrible hardships on the voyage. In all, the Veblens had 12 children, of whom Thorstein was the sixth. The first farm in Wisconsin was barren or, more likely, seen as inferior to what, on the basis of better intelligence, was known to be available farther west. They moved, and in 1865they moved a second time.

The new and final holding was on the prairie and now about an hour's drive south from Minneapolis. It is to this farm that the legend of Veblen;s dark and deprived boyhood belongs. No one who visits this countryside will

believe it. There can be no farming country anywhere in the world with a more generous aspect of opulence. The soil is black and deep, the barns are huge, the silos numerous as also the special bins for sealing surplus corn, and the houses big, square, comfortable, if without architectural pretense. A picture of the Veblen house survives-an ample, pleasant white frame structure bespeaking not merely comfort but affluence. Since this countryside was originally open, well-vegetated prairie, it must have looked rewarding a hundred years ago. Thomas Veblen acquired 290 acres of this wealth; it is hard to imagine that he, his wife, or any of the children could have thought of themselves as deprived. Not a thousand, perhaps not even a hundred, farm proprietors-families working their own land -were so handsomely endowed in the Norway they had left. Nor, in fact, did the Veblens think themselves poor. Thorstein's brothers and sisters were later to comment, sometimes with amusement, on occasion with disgust, on the myth of their early poverty.

There were other things that separated the family from.the general run of Scandinavian immigrants and made Thorstein less of an accident. Thomas Veblen, who had been a skilled carpenter and cabinetmaker, soon proved himself a much more than normally intelligent and progressive farmer. And it seems certain that however he viewed the farm for himself, he regarded it as a steppingstone for his children. Even more exceptional perhaps was Kari, his wife. She was a notably alert, imaginative, self-confident, and intelligent woman who identified, protected, and encouraged the family genius from an early age. In later years, in a family and community where more hands were always needed and virtue was associated, accordingly, with efficient toil-effectiveness as a worker was what distinguished a good boy or girl from the rest -Thorstein Veblen seems to have been treated with some tolerance. Under the cover of a weak constitution he was given leisure that he used for reading. This released time could only have been provided by remarkably perceptive parents. One of Veblen's brothers later wrote that it was from his mother that "Thorstein got his personality and his brains," although others thought them his own decidedly original property.

Thorstein, like his brothers and sisters, went to the local schools, and on finishing with these he was,dispatched to Carleton College (then styled Carleton College Academy) in the nearby town of Northfield, Minnesota.

His sister Emily was in attendance at the same time; other members of the family went also to Carleton. Tnan engaging and characteristic exercise of imagination, their father acted to keep down college expenses. He bought a plot of land on the edge of town for the nominal amount ,charged for such real estate in that time and put up a house to shelter his offspring while they were being educated. The legend has alw~;ys held or implied that the winning of an education involved for Thorstein Veblen a major and even heroic hardship.

This should be laid finally to rest. A letter in the archives of the Minnesota Historical Society from Andrew' Veblen, Thorstein's brother, notes that "Father gave him strictly necessary assistance through his schooling.

Thorstein, like the rest of the family, kept his expenses down to the minimum ... all in line with the close economy that the whole family practiced." A sister-in-law, Florence (Mrs. Orson) Veblen, wrote more indignantly, "There is not the slightest reason for depriving my father-in-law of the credit of having paid for the education of his children-all of them-he was well able to do so; he had two good farms in the richest farming district in America."

t was, nevertheless, an exception to the general community practice that the Veblen children should be sent to college rather than put to useful work, as Norwegian farmers would then have called it, on the farm. They were also sent to a Congregational college-Carleton-rather than to one of the Lutheran institutions that responded to the language, culture, and religion of the Scandinavians. The Veblen myth (as the Veblen family has also insisted) has exaggerated the alienation of the Norwegians in general and the Veblens in particular. It is part of the legend that Veblen's father spoke no

English and that his son had difficulty with the language. This is nonsense. Still, in the local class structure, the Anglo-Saxons were the dominant town and merchant class; the Scandinavians were the hard-working peasantry. But the Veblen children were not educated to remain peasants.

Carleton was one of the denominational colleges that were established as the frontier moved westward, and unquestionably it was fairly bad. But like so many small liberal-arts colleges of the time, it was the haven for a few learned men and devoted teachers-the saving remnant who seemed always to show up when such a school was established. One of these men in Veblen's time was John Bates Clark, who later taught at Columbia University, where he was recognized as the dean of American economists of his day. Veblen became a student of Clark's; Clark thought well of Veblen.

This approval may have required imagination and tolerance, for in various class exercises Veblen was already giving ample indication of his later style and method. He prepared a solemn and ostentatiously sincere classification of men according to their noses; one of his exercises in public rhetoric defended the drunkard's view of his own likely death; another argued the case for cannibalism. Clark, who was presiding when Veblen appeared to favor intoxication, felt obliged to demur. In a denominational college in the Midwest at this time it seems possible that cannibalism had a somewhat higher canonical sanction. Veblen resorted to the defense that he was to employ with the utmost consistency for the rest of his life: no value judgment was involved; he was not being partial to the drunk; his argument was purely scientific.

Veblen finished his last two years at the college in one and graduated brilliantly. His graduation oration was "Mill's Examination of Hamilton's Philosophy of the Conditioned." It was described by contemporaries as a triumph, but it does not survive. While at Carleton Veblen had formed a close friendship with Ellen Rolfe; she was the daughter of a prominent and affluent Midwestern family and, like Veblen, was independent and introspective-very much apart from the crowd-and also highly intelligent. They were not married for another eight years, although this absence of haste did not mean that either had any less reason to regret it in later leisure.

The legend has always pictured Veblen as an indifferent and unfaithful husband who was singularly incapable of resisting the advances of the women whom, however improbably, he continued to infatuate. But the Veblen

ed in a general way by the other Veblens. In family considered the fault to be at' least later years his brother Andrew (a physicist partly Ellen's. She had a nervous breakdown and mathematician) responded repeatedly and following an effort at teaching; in a far from stubbornly to efforts to identify the sources reticent and not necessarily accurate letter of Thorstein Veblen's thought. He did not Florence Veblen concludes, "There is not the think anyone could be singled out: "I do not least doubt she is insane." It was, in any case, believe that anyone much influenced the an unsuccessful marriage. formation of his views or opinions." It must After teaching for a year at a local acadbe sufficient that after two and a half years at emy following his graduation from Carleton, Yale-underwritten by. a brother and the Veblen departed for Johns Hopkins UniverMinnesota family and farm-Veblen emerged sity in Baltimore to study philosophy. At this with a Ph.D. He wanted to teach; he had also, time, 1881, Johns Hopkins was being advertised as the first American university with a on the whole, rather favorable recommendations. But he could not find a job, and so he specialized graduate school on the European went back to the Minnesota homestead. model. The billing, as Veblen was later to There, endlessly reading and doing occasional point out, was considerably in advance of the writing, he remained for seven years. He profact. Money and hence professors were very fessed ill health for a part of this time; scarce; the atmosphere was that of a conserAndrew Veblen, later letters show, thought the vative southern town. Veblen was unhappy, illness genuine; other members of his family did not complete the term, and began what was to be a lifetime of wandering over the . diagnosed his ailment as partly an allergy to manual toil. He married, and Ellen brought American academic landscape. with her a little money. From time to time he was asked to apply for teaching positions; tentative offers were righteously withdrawn when it was discovered that he was not a subscribing Christian. In 1891 he resumed his academic wandering: he became a graduate is next stop was Yale. It was student at Cornell.

The senior professor of economics at Cora time of considerable controversy at Yale-of nell at the time was J. Laurence Laughlin, what scholars with a gift for metaphors from a stalwart exponent of the English classical the brewing industry call intellectual ferment. school who, until then, had declined to beThe principal focus of contention was between come a member of the American Economic one Noah Porter, a pretentious divine then Association in the belief that it was socialbelieved to be an outstanding philosopher istically inclined. Joseph Dorfman of Columand metaphysician, and William Graham bia University, the eminent student of AmerSumner, the American exponent of the British ican economic thought and the pre-eminent philosopher and sociologist Herbert Spencer.

The practical thrust of Porter's effort was to authority on Veblen, tells Laughlin's story of his meeting with Veblen in his massive and prevent Sumner from assigning Spencer's important Thorstein Veblen and His America Principles of Sociology to his classes. In this (Viking, 1934), a book to which everyone he succeeded; Spencer was righteously supwho speaks or writes on Veblen is indebted. pressed. Porter's success, one imagines, proLaughlin "was sitting in his study in Ithaca ceeded less from the force of his argument person, wearing a against Spencer's acceptance of evolution as when an anemic-looking a social as well as biological axiom than from coonskin cap and corduroy trousers, entered the fact that he (Porter) was also then the and in the mildest possible tone announced: 'I am Thorstein Veblen.' He told Laughlin of president of the university. In Veblen's later his academic history, his enforced idleness writing there is a strong suggestion of Spencer.

Natural selection is not the foundation of and his desire to go on with his studies. The a system for Veblen, but it serves him as an fellowships had all been filled, but Laughlin was so impressed with the quality of the man infinitely handy explanation of how some survive and prosper and others do not. In that he went to the president and other powers of the university and secured a special grant."

Veblen's scheme cupidity is more often the Apart from the impression of Veblen's basis for such selection than moral worth.

There has been solemn discussion of the manner and dress so conveyed, the account effect of this philosophical disputation at is important for another reason. Always in Yale, and of his own dissertation on Kant, Veblen's life there were individuals-a minute ~ on Veblen's later writing. My instinct is to but vital few-who sensed and were captured think it was remarkably slight. This is affirmby his genius. Often, as in the case of Laughlin,

, "The Theory of the Leisure Class" ... is a tract, the most comprehensive ever written, on snobbery and social pretense. Some of it has application to American society at the end of the last century-at the height of the gilded age of American capitalism-but more is wonderfully relevant to modern affluence.' they were conservatives-men who in ideas and habits were a world apart from Veblen.

And repeatedly these men rescued their prodigious and highly inconvenient friend.

Veblen was at CornelI rather less than two years-although long enough to begin advancinghis career with uncharacteristic orthodoxy by getting articles into the scholarly journals. Then Laughlin was invited to be head of the department of economics at the new University of Chicago. He took Veblen withhim; Veblen was awarded a fellowship of $520 a year, for which he was to prepare a course on the history of socialism and assist in editing the newly founded Journal of Political Economy. He was now 35 years old. In the next several years he advanced to the rank of tutor and instructor, continued to teach and to edit the Journal, wrote a great many re, views and numerous articles-among others, pieceson the theory of women's dress, on the barbarian status of women, and on the instinct of workmanship and the irksomeness of labor-all work that foreshadowed later books. In these years he also developed his teaching style, if such it could be called. He sat at a table and spoke in a low monotone to the handful of students who were interested and could get close enough to hear. He also discovered, if he had not previously learned, that something-mind, manner, dress, his sardonic and challenging indifference to approval or disapproval-made him extremely attractive to women. His wife found that she had more and more competition for his attention. This competition was something to which neither she nor the academic communities in which Veblen resided ever reconciled themselves. In 1899, while still at Chicago and while Laughlin was still having trouble getting him small increases in payor even, on occasion, getting his appointment renewed, he published his first and greatest book. It was The Theory of the Leisure Class.

There is little that anyone can be told about The Theory of the Leisure Class that he cannot learn better by reading the book himself. It is a marvelous book; it is also, in its particular way, a masterpiece of English prose. But the qualification is important. Veblen's writing cannot be read like that of any other author. Wesley C. Mitchellregarded, though not with entire accuracy, as

Veblen's leading intellectual legatee-once said that "one must be highly sophisticated to enjoy his [Veblen's] books." All who cherish Veblen would wish to believe this.

The truth is simpler than that. One needs only to realize that if Veblen is to be enjoyed, he must be read very carefully and slowly. He enlightens, amuses, and delights but only if . he is given a good deal of time.

t is hard to divorce Veblen's language from the ideas it conveys. The ideas are pungent, incisive, and insulting. But the writing itself is also a weapon. Mitchell noted that Veblen normally wrote "with one eye on the scientific merits of his analysis, and his other eye fixed on the squirming reader." Veblen also startles his reader with an exceedingly perverse use of words. Their meaning rarely varies from that sanctioned by the most precise and demanding usage. But in the context they are often, to say the least, unexpected.

This Veblen attributes to scientific necessity.

Thus, in his immortal discussion of conspicuous consumption, he notes that expenditure, if it is to contribute efficiently to the individual's "good fame," must generally be on "superfluities." "In order to be reputable it [the expenditure] must be wasteful." All of this is quite exact. The rich do want fame; reputable expenditure is what adds to their fame; the dress, housing, equipage that serve this purpose and are not essential for existence are superfluous. Nonessential expenditure is wasteful. But only Veblen would have used the words "fame," "superfluity," "reputable," and "waste" in such a way. In the case of "waste" he does decide that a word of explanation is necessary. This is characteristically both airy and matter-of-fact. In everyday speech, he says, "the word carries an undertone of deprecation. It is here used for want of a better term and it is not to be taken in an odious sense " And so he continues. The wives of the rich forswear useful employment because "abstention from labor is not only an honorific or meritorious act, but it presently

becomes a requisite of decency." "Honor," "merit," and "decency" are all used with exactness, although these words are not often associated with idleness. A robber baron, Veblen says, has a better chance of escaping the law than a small crook because "a wellbred expenditure of his booty especially appeals ... to persons of a cultivated sense of the proprieties, and goes far to mitigate the sense of moral turpitude with which his dereliction is viewed by them." One does not ordinarily associate the disposal of ill-gotten wealth with good breeding. ' Thus the way The Theory of the Leisure Class-or anything by Veblen-must be read.

If one goes rapidly, words will be given their ordinary contextual meaning-not the precise and perverse sense that Veblen intended.

Waste will be wicked and not a source of esteem; the association of idleness with merit, honor, and decency will somehow be missed as well as that between the crook and his expenditure. The book yields its meaning, and therewith its full enjoyment, only to those who too have leisure.

When Veblen had finished the manuscript of The Leisure Class, he sent it to the publisher, Macmillan, and it came back several times for revision. Eventually, it is believed, Veblen was required to put up a guarantee before Macmillan would agree to publish the book.

It is tempting to speculate as to the reason for this reluctance. The book could not have been badly written in any technical or grammatical sense. Veblen, after all, was by then an experienced editor. Nor was he any novice as a writer. One imagines that the perverse and startling use of words, combined no doubt with the irony and the attack on the icons, was more than any publisher could readily manage. But someone must also have seen how much was there.

The thesis of The Theory of the Leisure Class can be quickly given. It is a tract, the most comprehensive ever written, on snobbery and social pretense. Some of it has application to American society at the end of the last century-at the height of the gilded age of American capitalism-but more is wonderfully relevant to modern affluence.

The rich have often been attacked by the ~ less rich for enjoying a superior social position that is based on assets and not moral or

intellectual worth, for using their wealth and position to sustain a profligate consumption of resources of which others are in greater need, and for defending the social structure that accords them their privileged position.

And they have been attacked for the base and wicked behavior that wealth sustains and that their social position sanctions. In all this the attackers, in effect, concede the rich their superior power and position; they deny them their right to that position or to behave as they do therein. Usually the denial involves a good deal of righteous anger or indignation.

The rich have been thought worth the anger and indignation.

ere is Veblen's supreme literary and polemical achievement. He concedes the rich and the well-to-do nothing, and he would not dream of suggesting that his personal attitudes or passions are in any way involved. The rich are merely anthropological specimens whose behavior the possession of money and property has made more interesting and more visibly ridiculous. The effort to establish precedence for oneself and the yearning for the resulting esteem and applause are the most nearly universal of human tendencies. Nothing in this respect differentiates a Whitney, Vanderbilt, or Astor from a Papuan chieftain or what one encounters in "for instance, the tribes of the Andamans." The dress, festivals, or rituals and artifacts of the Vanderbilts and Whitneys are without doubt more complex; that does not mean their motivation is in any way different from that of their barbarian counterparts.

Indeed, it is inconceivable that the affluent should be viewed with indignation. The scientist does not become angry with the primitive tribesman because of the extravagance of his sexual orgies or the sophistication of his self-mutilation. Similarly with the social observances of the American rich. Their banquets are equated in commonplace fashion with the orgies; the self-mutilation of the savage is of a piece with the painfully constricting dress in which (at that time) the wellto-do bound up their women or their women corseted themselves.

It is well to remember that Veblen wrote in the last years of the last century-before the established order suffered the disintegrating onslaught of World War I, Lenin, and the leveling oratory of modern democratic poli-

tics. It was a time when gentlemen still believed they were gentlemen and-in the United States at least-that it was wealth that made the difference. And, by and large, the rest of the population still agreed. Veblen calmly identified the manners and behavior of these so-called gentlemen with the manners and behavior of the people of the bush. Speaking of the utility of different observances for the purpose of affirming or enhancing the individual's repute, Veblen notes that "presents and feasts had probably another origin than that of naIve ostentation, but they acquired their utility for this purpose very early, and they have retained that character to the present. . . . Costly entertainments, such as the potlatch or the ball, are peculiarly adapted to serve this end." The italics equating the potlatch and the ball are mine; Veblen would never have dreamed of emphasizing so obvious a point.

The book is a truly devastating put-down, as would now be said. But much more was involved. The Theory of the Leisure Class brilliantly and truthfully illuminates the effect of wealth on behavior. No one who has read this book ever again sees the consumption of goods in the same light. Above a certain level of affluence the enjoyment of goods-of dress, houses, automobiles, entertainmentcan never again be thought intrinsic, as in a naive way established or neoclassical economics still holds it to be. Possession and consumption are the banner that advertises achievement-that proclaims, by the accepted standards of the community, that the possessor is a success. In this sense-in revealing what had not hitherto been seen-The Leisure Class is a major scientific achievement.

It is also true, alas, that much of the process by which this truth is revealed-by which Veblen's insights are vouchsafed-is scientifically something of a contrivance. There is no doubt that before writing The Leisure Class he had read widely on anthropology. He has a great many primitive communities and customs at his fingertips, and he refers to them with an insouciance that suggests-and was probably meant to suggest-he had much more knowledge in reserve. But the book is wholly devoid of sources; no footnote or reference tells on what Veblen relied for information. On an early page he explains that the book is based on everyday observation and not pedantically on the scholarship of others. This is adequate as far as Fifth A venue and Newport are concerned. Accurate secondhand knowledge can be assumed. But Veblen had no similar opportunity for knowing about the Papuans.

n fact, Veblen's anthropology and sociology are weapon and armor rather than science. He uses them to illuminate (and to make ridiculous) the behavior of the most powerful class-the all-powerful class-of his time.

And since he does it in the name of science and with the weapons of science-and since no overt trace of animus or anger is allowed to appear-he does it with nearly perfect safety.

The butterfly does not attack the zoologist for saying that it is more decorative than useful. That Marx was an enemy whose venom was to be returned in kind, capitalists did not doubt. But Veblen's venom went undetected. The American rich never quite understood what he was about-or what he was doing to them. The scientific pretense, the irony, and the careful explanations that the most pejorative words were being used in a strictly non-pejorative sense put him beyond their comprehension.

This protection was necessary at the time.

And there is a wealth of evidence that Veblen was fully conscious of it. During the years when he was working on The Leisure Class, liberal professors at the University of Chicago were under frequent attack from the adjacent plutocracy.

The latter expected economics and the other social sciences to provide the doctrine that graced its privileges. In the mid '90s Chauncey Depew, the notable political windbag, told the Chicago students that "this institution, which owes its existence to the beneficence of Rockefeller, is in itself a monument of the proper use of wealth accumulated by a man of genius. So is Cornell, so is Vanderbilt, and so are the older colleges, as they have received the benefactions of generous, appreciative and patriotic wealth." In 1895 one Edward W. Bemis, an associate professor of political economy in the extension, i.e., outpatient, department of the university, attacked the traction monopoly in Chicago, which, assisted by wholesale bribery, had fastened itself on the backs of Chicago streetcar patrons. His appointment was not renewed.

The university authorities, like many godly men, especially in universities, believed that they had a special license to lie. So they compounded their crime in dismissing Bemis by denying that their action was an overture to the traction monopoly or reflected the slight- " est abridgment of academic freedom. The local press was not misled; it saw this as a

Veblen 'concedes the rich and the well-to-do nothing, and he would not dream of suggesting that his personal attitudes or passions are in any way involved. The rich are merely anthropological specimens whose behavior the possession of money and property has made more interesting and more ... ridiculous.' concession to sound business interest and applauded. In a fine sentence on scholarly responsibility, the Chicago Journal said: "The duty of a professor who accepts the money of a university for his work is to teach the established truth, not to engage in the 'pursuit of truth.' " A forthright sentiment.

The last chapter of The Leisure Class is "The Higher Learning as an Expression of the Pecuniary Culture." It anticipates a later, much longer, and much more pungent disquisition by Veblen on the influence of the pecuniary civilization on the university (The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Businessmen, published in 1918). In this chapter Veblenthough also concerned with other mattersstresses the conservative and protective role of the universities in relation to the pecuniary culture: "New views, new departures in scientific theory, especially new departures which touch the theory of human relations at any point, have found a place in the scheme of the university tardily and by a reluctant tolerance, rather than by cordial welcome; and the men who have occupied themselves with such efforts to widen the scope of human knowledge have not commonly been well received by their learned contemporaries."

No one will be in doubt as to whom, in the last clause, Veblen had in mind. Elsewhere he notes that "as further evidence of the close relation between the educational system and the cultural standards of the community, it may be remarked that there is some tendency latterly to substitute the captain of industry in place of the priest, as head of seminaries of the higher learning."

iven such an environment and given also his subject, Veblen, it will be evident, needed the protection of his art. On the whole it served him well. In the course of his academic career he was often in trouble with academic administrators-but mostly on personal and idiosyncratic rather than political or ideological grounds. He was not understood or appreciated by his more pedestrian, if often

more fashionable, academic colleagues. A man like Veblen creates problems for such people.

They accept the established view, rejoice in the favor of the Establishment. Anyone who does not share their values is a threat to their position and self-esteem, for he makes them seem sycophantic and pedestrian, as indeed they are. Veblen was such a threat. But the rich, to whom ultimately he addressed himself, never penetrated his defenses.

Veblen also enjoyed a measure of political immunity in a hostile world because he was not a reformer. His heart did not beat for the proletariat or even for the downtrodden and poor. He was a man of animus and not of revolution.

The source of Veblen's animus has regularly been related to his origin. He was the son of immigrant parents; he had experienced the harsh life of the frontier; he did so at a time when the Scandinavians were, by any social standard, second-class citizens. They were saved, if at all, only because they could not be readily distinguished by their color. What was more natural than that someone from such a background should turn on his oppressors?

The Theory of the Leisure Class is Veblen's revenge for the abuse to which he and his parents were subjected.

This, I am persuaded, misunderstands Veblen. His animus was based not on anger and resentment but on derision. I must here cite an experience of my own. Some 10 years ago, to fill in the idle moments of one of the more idle occupations, that of the modern ambassador, I wrote a small book about the clansmen among whom I was reared on the north shore of Lake Erie in Canada. The Scotch (as with exceptional etymological correctness we call ourselves), like the Scandinavians, inhabited the farms; the people of the towns were English. From Toronto in the 19th century other Englishmen, in conjunction with the Church of England as a kind of holding company for political and economic interest, dominated the economic, political, religious, and social life of Upper Canada to their own unquestioned advantage.

In writing the book Ifound it agreeable to recapture the mood of my youth-of my parents, neighbors, the more prestigious members of the other clans. We felt ourselves superior to the storekeepers, implement deal-

ers, poolroom operators, grain dealers, and other entrepreneurs of the adjacent towns.

We worked harder, spent less, but usually had more. The more prestigious clans and clansmen took education seriously and, as a matter of course, monopolized the political life of the community. Yet the people of the towns were invariably under the impression that social prestige resided with them. They were English not Scotch, Anglicans not Presbyterians, and identified, however vicariously. with the old ruling class. Their work, if such it could be called, did not soil the hands. We were taught to think that claims to social prestige based on such vacuous criteria were silly. We regarded the people of the towns not with envy but amiable contempt. On the whole we enjoyed letting them know.

When I published the book, by far the largest number of letters I received were from people who had grown up in German and Scandinavian communities in the Midwest. who told me that it was really the mood of their childhood that I had described: "That was how we felt. You could have been writing about our community."

I am sure it was Veblen's mood. The Veblens regarded themselves, not without reason, as the representatives of a superior culture. The posturing of the local Anglo-Saxon elite they also regarded with contempt. The Theory of the Leisure Class is this contempt extended to a class structure with class distinctions that were an enlargement of the posturing Veblen observed as a youth.

he reception of The Theory of the Leisure Class divided the men of reputable and orthodox position from those who were capable of thought. On the whole, however, it could not have disappointed Veblen. One Establishment reviewer said that it was such books by dilettantes that brought sociology into disrepute among "careful and scientific thinkers," science being here used in the still customary sense as a cover and defense for orthodoxy. ~ With wonderful solemnity he advised that it was illegitimate to classify within the leisure

class such unrelated groups as the barbarians and the modern rich. Another equally predictable scholar avowed that the rich were rich because they earned the money-the gargantuan reward of the captain of industry and the miserly one of the man with a spade were the valuation of their contribution to society as measured by their economic efficiency. But other and more imaginative men were delighted, a point on which again I am indebted to Dorfman. Lester Ward, the first American sociologist of major repute, said that "the book abounds in terse expressions, sharp antithesis, and quaint, but happy phrases. Some of these have been interpreted as irony and satire, but the language is plain and unmistakable the style is farthest removed possible from either advocacy or vituperation." Ward was admiring but a bit too trusting. William Dean Howells, also at the time at the peak of his reputation, was enthusiastic as well. He was also taken in by Veblen. "In the passionless calm with which the author pursues his investigation, there is apparently no animus for or against a leisure class. It is his affair to find out how and why and what it is." The sales of The Leisure Class were modest, although few could have guessed how durably they would continue. Veblen was promoted in 1900 to the rank of assistant professor. His pay remained negligible.

Veblen's writing continued and so, in 1906, did his academic peregrinations.

Although still ill-paid and in subordinate rank, he was, in a manner of speaking, famous. His married life had become tenuous; he did little to resist the aggression of other women. His classes were small, and orthodox scholars and those of his victims who could understand his argument were either adverse or outraged. But he had become a possible academic adornment.

Harvard, urged by Frank W. Taussig, considered inviting him to join its department of economics but quickly had second thoughts. David Starr Jordan, then creating a new university south of San Francisco, could not afford to be so cautious and invited Veblen to Leland Stanford as an associate professor. Veblen survived there for three years. But his domestic arrangementssometimes Ellen, sometimes others-were by now, for the time and community, an open scandal. Once he responded wearily to a complaint with a query: "What is one to do if the woman moves in on you?" What, indeed?

Jordan concluded that there were adornments that Stanford could not afford. Veblen was invited to move on. By the students, at least, he was not greatly missed. Dozens were attracted by his reputation to his classes; only

a handful-once only three-survived to the end of the term.

After leaving Stanford he had difficulty getting another post, but again an established scholar with an instinct for the dissenter came to his rescue. H.J. Davenport, then one of the major figures in the American economic pantheon, took him to the University of Missouri. There he encountered some of the students on whom he had the most lasting effect, including Isador Lubin, who was later to be a close aide of Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Hopkins and a protector of Veblen in the latter's many moments of need. Veblen divorced Ellen and in 1914 married Anne Fessenden Bradley, a gentle, admiring woman who, however, survived only a few years. (Tn 1918 she suffered severe mental il!ness, and in 1920 she died.)

From Missouri Veblen's wanderings were again resumed. He went to Washington during World War I-as one of the less likely participants in the wartime administration.

From Washington he went to New York to experiment with life as an editor and then to teach at The New School for Social Research.

His writings continued; as with the early ones, they are sardonic, laconic, and filled with brilliant insights. Nearly all of his nine sub-

sequent subjects hint-or,

books on economics and related develop points of which there is a in the case of The Higher Learning in America, a chapter-in The Leisure Class.

None of these books achieved the eminence of his first one. But the men of established reputation continued to be appalled. In a review of The Higher Learning in America in the New York Times Review of Books in 1919, Brander Matthews said of Veblen, "His vocabulary is limited and he indulges in a fatiguing repetition of a dozen or a score of adjectives. His grammar is woefully defective .... " The book is, in fact, one of Veblen's most effective and compelling tracts. Other critics were wiser. Gradually, step by step, it came to be known that Veblen was a genius, the most penetrating, original, and uninhibitedindeed the greatest-source of social thought in the time.

his did not mean that he was much honored or rewarded. The honors and rewards were reserved, as all good practice requires, for the reputable as distinct from the intelligent. Veblen's students had frequently to come to his support. Work became harder to find than ever. In the mid '20s, aging, impecunious, and tired, he returned reluctantly to California, and there in 1929 he died.

The Nation, following his death, spoke of Veblen's "mordant wit, his extraordinary gift of discovering wholly new meanings in old facts," saying in a sentence what I have said here in many. Wesley C. Mitchell wrote an obituary note in the Economic Journal, an organ of the Royal Economic Society, then pre-eminently the most prestigious economic publication in the world. Saying sadly that "we shall have no more of these investigations with their curious erudition, their irony, their dazzling phrases, their bewildering reversals of problems and values," he also observed that the EJ., as economists have long called it, had reviewed but one of Veblen's books. In 1925 it took notice of the ninth reprinting of The Theory of the Leisure Class, 26 years after its original publication.

0 About the Author: John Kenneth Galbraith, left, Professor of Economics at Harvard, is one of America's most distinguished intellectuals. His books include The Affiuent Society, The New Indus->trial Society, Indian Painting and The Triumph. {n 1961-63, he was U.S. Ambassador to India.

Many airline passengers are irked by present airport security measures-earlier reporting time, screening of baggage, submission to a personal search. Yet these measures, as the interview on these pages points out, clearly deter would-be hijackers, and have in the past turned up an amazing variety of weapons: guns, knives, explosive devices, even ice picks. Captain John J. O'Donnell, president of the U.S. Air Line Pilots Association, who is questioned here by James S. Aldrich, feels that airport checks should be made more stringent. Even more important, he says, is the need for international cooperation and action in closing off "sanctuaries"-those nations that harbor hijackers.

QUESTION: After more than a decade of hijacking, the safety of the world's airways is still threatened by sky pirates and politicized terrorists such as the hijacking at Rome airport on December 17. Why?

O'DONNELL: Skyjacking and aerial terrorism will continue as long as weaknesses exist in airport security anywhere in the world and as long as airborne criminals and terrorists find sanctuary in countries willing to harbor them. Even though airport security is being strengthened in many nations, often with impressive results, much more remains to be done. The problem of the sanctuaries, however, is still very much with us, and I have very little hope that the world community can act effectively on this issue. It is going to be up to individual nations, acting unilaterally or bilaterally, to close off the sanctuaries.

QUESTION: What of the complaint by some passengers that airport security is too much of an inconvenience?

O'DONNELL: How a momentary convenience of not submitting to preboarding security inspection can be balanced off against hours or days of hell by fanatical skyjackers is beyond comprehension.

QUESTION: What proof is there that airport security really works?

O'DONNELL: The U.S. experience in 1973 clearly demonstrates that airport security measures not only tend to deter would-be hijackers but also result in their apprehension. During 1972 there had been 31 hijacking attempts in the United States, including seven destined for Cuba, of

which six were successful, as well as two diversions to Algeria and four bail-outs.

It was a bad year. Early in 1973 U.S. airports began screening all passengers and carry-on luggage, and armed guards were placed at boarding gates. The security measures turned up thousands of weapons including guns, knives, ice picks, and explosive devices. In the following 10 months there were only four hijacking attempts, none of them successful. Two of the hijackers were apprehended in the terminals.

QUESTION: If there are fewer hijacking attempts, could not the security measures be relaxed?

O'DONNELL: The fact that there have been even four attempted hijackings in the United States-plus several successful incidents in Venezuela, Argentina, Colombia and elsewhere-should be ample evidence against relaxing airport vigilance anywhere in the world. There seems to be no time, as viewed from today, when security precautions may be relaxed. Such precautions, in fact, must be strengthened until there is no way for a hijacker to slip through the boarding gates at any airport.

QUESTION: If hijackings can be stopped at the boarding gates, why is it necessary to close off the sanctuaries?

O'DONNELL: The combined efforts toward tight airport security and no-safehaven for hijackers-be they criminals or political terrorists-are, if you will, attempts to attack both ends of the problem at the same time. Neither approach by itself is likely to be entirely successful. Both together, however, can put the squeeze on the hijacking caper with a success that no other measures could achieve.

It will certainly be impossible to even contemplate relaxation of airport security measures until there are no sanctuaries left anywhere in the world. When the hijacker knows he has no safe haven-that is, when he knows that he will be extradited to the country where he has committed his crime

or prosecuted in the country in which he lands-then, and only then, will he cease to be a problem at the boarding gate.

QUESTION:

You've been rather hard on the world community. Have not many governments, in fact, adopted three treaties on sky piracy, two of them aimed at eliminating sanctuaries?

O'DONNELL: Yes, a number of the world's governments have signed these treaties, but by no means all of them. The impetus for them came from the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a U.N.-affiliated agency. The ICAO sponsored three diplomatic conferences which produced, first, the Tokyo Convention of 1963 in which signatory nations agree to restore control of a hijacked aircraft to its commander; second, the Hague Convention of 1970 providing for extradition or prosecution of hijackers, and third, the Montreal Convention of 1971 providing for extradition or prosecution of persons committing aerial sabotage. The latter two have reduced the number of possible sanctuaries, and ICAO and the signatory nations deserve the world's thanks.

On the negative side, however, is the total lack of enforcement machinery in these treaties. Further, a number of nations-including countries that have granted sanctuary to past skyjackers-have shown that they have no intention of signing these treaties, or even adhering in principle. And it is equally evident that the world community will not act in unison to compel them to do so.

QUESTION: What more can the signatory nations do?

O'DONNELL: Merely signing or adhering to the three conventions is not enough.

They have an obligation, as a community of nations, to humanity, to the cause of international law, and to civil aviation itself, to use every peaceful means to compel sanctuary nations to end their practices.

They could do this through economic sanctions or by boycotts of air service to and

~

first, fact-finding, preferably by an independent commission; and second, recommendations by nations party to the violated convention as to what action should be taken to remedy the situation.

But even this watered-down version of the antisanctuary effort was unable to win passage by the 101 nations at the forum. The four weeks of meetings collapsed on their final day without reaching any agreement.

QUESTION: If the nations of the world acting multilaterally can't reach agreement on such a vital issue, what can nations acting unilaterally achieve?

The woman above walks through a weapons-detector. a new device being used in U.S. airports to make security checks less bothersome. As passengers walk through the detector, a threedimensional electromagnetic field distinguishes guns from commonly carried metal objects.

from offending states until adherence, at least in principle, is achieved. Such actions are not and would not be an infringement upon the sovereignty of any country. No nation has a sovereign right to encourage criminals and terrorists. And no nation that has ever signed an extradition treaty has ever regarded the action as an infringement upon its sovereignty.

QUESTION: But, you have said that you have "very little hope that the world community can act effectively on this issue."

O'DONNELL: Yes, the international community has repeatedly indicated its inability to act in unison on this matter. In September 1972,for example, ICAO's legal subcommittee tried to work out what we had hoped would be a new treaty aimed at

eliminating hijack sanctuaries by putting enforcement "teeth" into the Montreal and Hague Conventions. Instead, after two weeks of haggling over politically oriented issues, the subcommittee sent the matter up to ICAO's full legal committee.

In January 1973, after meeting for three weeks in Montreal, ICAO's top legal representatives found themselves again stopped by the brick wall of international politics. Instead of a firm draft treaty, the meeting produced four separate proposals for consideration at an ICAO diplomatic conference and extraordinary assembly session, held from August 28 to September 21 in Rome. The strongest of these proposals would have provided for a two-phase response to nations acting contrary to the Tokyo, Hague and Montreal Conventions:

O'DONNELL: A great deal, if they will.

For example, there is the bilateral agreement of February 1973 between Cuba and the United States. In the preceding 12 years there had been 160hijacking attempts aboard U.S. airliners, of which 101 were , aimed at Cuba. Those episodes are now hopefully at an end.

The U.S. Air Line Pilots Association is also much encouraged by efforts at the U.S. State Department to write sky piracy provisions into renewals of existing extradition treaties with other nations. We are also heartened to note that the Soviet Union has made skyjacking punishable by severe prison terms or death, and that East Germany has passed a law providing up to life imprisonment for skyjacking.

Meanwhile, we are continuing to press in the U.S. Congress for passage of legislation that would impose economic sanctions and boycotts of air service to and from nations which continue to provide sanctuary to air criminals and terrorists. This legislation, hopefully, will also allow for boycotts against third countries which continue to maintain air services with the offending states.

QUESTION: Will these unilateral, and bilateral, efforts be more successful than attempts to get the world community to act?

O'DONNELL: If they are not, then, I am sure, the airline pilots themselves will actand that action will be effective.

0

lIIR1CLIS liD lITSTIBIIS OFTII BRll1 Through amazing techniques of microphotography developed by one of America's leading photographers, Lennart Nilsson, pictures of the human brain on a scale hitherto undreamed of are helping medical science unravel the secrets of man's most complex organ. This picture essay offers a sampling of Nilsson's photographs of the brain and its sense organs-a terrain of weird, compelling images.

Emotions, thoughts, senses, movementsall flow from the most highly organized bit of matter in the universe, the human brain.

For as long as man has been aware of this great possession, he has been fascinated by it, awed by its power and intrigued by its potentials. He has made countless attempts to understand it, even devising an intricate system of attributing moral and intellectual values to certain bumps and configurations on its outer surface. Seeking insight into its mechanisms, he has hoped to use this knowledge to cure disease and improve the quality of life itself. And his efforts have met with some success: After decades of intensive scientific research, the brain has yielded up many of its secrets. But others still remainpossibly too complex for the human brain itself ever to understand.

The upper surface of the human brain is a sheet of gray matter folded into intricate convolutions called the cerebral cortex. This is the site of man's higher faculties-abstract thought, language and foresight. Here the messages from his sense organs are decoded and programed for the proper responses.

Almost nonexistent in lower animals, the cortex makes up 80 per cent of the volume of the human brain. Beneath its rear eaves is the cerebellum with its surface layer of densely packed gray cells. The control center of man's bodily movements, the cerebellum issues corrective orders when performance does not quite respond to intention.

The shiny wrinkled jelly of the human

brain (left) harbors an electrochemical network of more than 10 billion nerve cells in constant activity, whether we are awake or asleep. These cells control the numerous functions of the body (breathing alone requires the co-ordination of 90 muscles) and analyze sense messages from the outside world. Information that might disturb concentration or sleep can be suppressed; but when danger threatens, the brain will abruptly signal us to consciousness. A mother, for example, may sleep amidst the roar of traffic but awaken at her baby's tiniest cry. The brain can simultaneously handle hundreds of bits of information, sorting out reality, memory and fantasy. In some regions, 100 million cell bodies are packed into 16 cubic centimeters, each one connected to as many as 60,000 others, and none exactly alike. This web of interconnecting cells forms the basic machinery of the brains of all living things, flashing pulses that direct our every thought and action. The electrochemical pulses from our inner ears, for example, pass through at least four stages of analysis and refinement before we are consciously aware of any sound. The brain is a hierarchy of complex and specialized regions that have evolved over a period of two billion years. Biological evolution has not been the only determinant of capabilities of man's brain, however. The unique human capacity to transmit knowledge and ideas through language has enabled the human brain to build progressively upon the learning of the past as well.

The brain (left) is favored by a life support system that takes precedence over every other organ in the body. It is encased in bone to protect its soft tissue, and bathed in " cerebrospinal fluid to cushion it against impact. Though it comprises only two per cent of the body's total weight, it receives 20 per cent of the body's oxygen supply through a dense network of thousands of blood vessels. The brain also receives a disproportionate share of nutrients-even though the body may be starving. An undernourished child, for instance, may lose half his normal weight, but his brain will be only 15 per cent underweight.

SMELL Man's sense of smell is remarkably acute. Two dense thatches of tiny filamentsgreatly enlarged, they look like a bed of coral (Ieff)-sprout from about a million onion-shaped chemical receptors located in narrow niches in the roof of the nose. One of these filaments can detect the odor from as few as 50 molecules of perfume in the air. It is not yet known how the molecules activate the filaments. They may react chemically with substances in the receptors, or fit into tiny sockets reserved for molecules of a specific shape. Once activated, the receptors transmit their message along nerve fibers that run through the thin plate of bone at the roof of the nose directly to the brain through the olfactory bulb.

Most of our sense organs are located in the head, connected by a few centimeters of nerve fibers to the brain. But our sense of feeling is diffused throughout the body, recording not only our skin sensations but the conditions of the internal organs, the tension in all our muscles, and the angle and movement of every joint. Nerves from all these points of sensitivity converge toward the spinal column in a system of fibers which eventually coalesce in nerve trunks that enter the spinal cord (above)-a soft cable about as thick as a pencil-between the vertebrae.

BALANCE Balance, man's hidden sense, is controlled by a labyrinth of chambers and looped tubes tucked away in the inner ear. Within this vestibular system, which is attached to the cochlea, are two tiny units. One consists of two sets of receptor cells in each ear that directly measure the effects of gravity. From the receptors, sensory hairs extend upward to a jellylike membrane filled with minute crystals of calcium carbonate known as otoliths (above). Whenever we tift our heads, or alter the angle of our bodies, the crystals shift, bending the sensory hairs and stimulating the receptors. The vestibular ~ystem gives us poise and stability when we stand, run or turn, and feeds the brain with the information it needs to prevent us from toppling at every step.

HEARING The true organ of !learing is the cochlea, a fluid-filled tube shaped like a snail's shell and containing millions of tiny hairs (right). If straightened out it would be about the size of a matchstick. Sound reaches the cochlea by way of three tiny bones in the middle ear called the hammer, anvil and stirrup, which transmit the tiny vibrations of the eardrum to the fluid in the cochlea. The 25,000 receptors in each ear are lodged in a light membrane that runs the length of the cochlea. Sensory hairs rising from each receptor are attached to a jellylike shelf above the membrane. When vibrationspass through the cochlea, the hairs are alternately stretched and compressed and the receptors translate this motion into electrochemical pulses.

Sight is the dominant and most sophisticated of man's senses. Through our eyes we receive up to 90 per cent of all our information about the world, alld fully one-tenth of the cerebral cortex is required to interpret these complex visual data. The retina of the eye is actually a part of the brain itself-the only point at which it receives stimuli directly from outside the body. Light shining through the eye's pupil and lens strikes the retina, where sensitive cells called rods and cones transform light energy into the brain's electrochemical language. The inner segments of some of these receptors, magnified 4,500 times, are shown above. The slender rods, which are the more sensitive in dim light, report a simple black-and-white world, while the thicker cones, which need stronger stimulation, can distinguish color. In all, there are some 120 million rods and seven million cones in each retina.

Two massive optic-nerve tracts, each carrying fibers from both eyes, branch out toward the brain's two hemispheres from the optic chiasma (left) , a junction just behind the eyes. Each of the millions of fibers carries information from a single cell in the eye to its counterpart in the brain.

A LETTER FROM 11I1 AMERICA

I

on her first teaching assignment, leading a seminar in creative writing, a noted Indian author takes charge of 22 American students, and finds 'their struggles to write unbearably moving.'

The invitation, in January last year, to be "writer-in-residence" and lead a seminar in creative writing during the autumn semester at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas, Texas, took me unawares. I had never taught anything, nor had I even studied creative writing. (What was it anyway? I wasn't quite sure.) I had written four novels, two autobiographical books, a number of short stories, a history of the freedom movement for our high schools, and some three hundred articles for newspapers and magazines. None of this, however, added up to knowing how to teach. And compared with others in the writing profession I was sure I was notoriously un-read. The glut of books, magazines and journals regularly disgorged on the market had had the effect of making me retreat into a charmed circle of favorite authors, while I remained grossly ignorant of what was happening in the world of letters outside it.

This was also perhaps the result of being hectically involved in regular political writing for a newspaper, and occasionally for magazines; and politics being a preoccupation that, almost against my will, yet devouringly, claimed my mental, and it seemed at times my emotional energy. I returned to literature, to fiction particularly, with the relief of breathing naturally again. Reading and writing were like coming home to calm and sanity, to the created realm of order and form, so blessedly unlike the chaos and outpourings of the real world. The known, familiar authors were great replenishers at such times, giving me both the peace and stimulation I needed for my own fiction writing. So, among other things, I knew practically nothing about recent American fiction, having stayed close to the British writers. What could I possibly teach young Americans when I had had no contact with anything concerning them from literature to life-style for the last 10 years-a few of which had seen upheaval on some campuses and in the younger generation's ways of living and thinking?

I had another inhibition. I did not know Texas. I had lived in the United States, first for an uninterrupted four years as a student at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, and last on a lecture tour in 1963 when my third book, the autobiographical From Fear Set Free was published. One of my stops had been Dallas, where I had spoken on October 24th at a women's club. That evening at a dinner a Wellesley classmate gave for me, most of our conversation revolved around our shock at the physical attack on Adlai Stevenson who had earlier inaugurated U.N. Day in the city.

A month later President Kennedy was assassinated there. Tllis poignant recollection served to emphasize the strangeness and

remoteness of Dallas, a city whose political sympathies and culture seemed, from the little I knew, and from what I had heard, very different from that of the familiar East coast. Texas would be another world and value system altogether, and "another world" within America itself would surely be planets removed from India.

Both my reservations dissolved as I thought them over. It was, after all, a university in Dallas, Texas, and not on the international-conscious, sophisticated East coast that had invited me.

Part of the remoteness seemed to be bridged simply by that fact.

There remained the unpalatable memory of a killing, yet we tended to forget-or to blot out the reminder-that Gandhiji had been shot in New Delhi. For years I had lived within walking distance of that crime. Fanaticism was not regional. So I accepted the invitation and looked forward to the opportunity this would give me to reacquaint myself with America, and see a new part of it.

Leaving India in August, I spent a few days with friends in Massachusetts to get acclimatized. And acclimatization, I discovered, meant chiefly to speed, and its corollary, total paralysis of movement. Driving from Boston airport to Hingham along the expressway at a speed that after India felt like lightning, I watched other cars flow and vanish mercurially past us. Returning from an outing on a Sunday we found ourselves caught and congealed among a dense immobile mass of machinery as the week-end traffic outgrew the road. It was not surprising that the persistent anxiety expressed in the newspapers and on TV was (apart from inflation) over the shortage of petroleum products and the uncertainty of future supply. Already there was concern about how this would affect heating in the coming winter. What would happen when and if an oil supply were no longer available? One ready answer might lie in curtailing that assembly line of shiny new cars being turned out of factories, advertized lavishly, sold and poured like liquid along the expressways-cars changed, according to a wit, "as soon as the ashtray gets full." But fewer cars on the road seemed an unimaginable state of affairs where a car was an individual, and not a family possession, and as taken for granted as a wrist watch. Less of anything was hard to imagine, and actually choosing to have less, a sheer fantasy.

As my plane made its way some 1,600 miles across the continent to Dallas, I felt a little resentful at leaving Massachusetts, still summer-green and lush, but with amber-tipped foliage beginning to announce a festival of autumn colors. Texas would be huge and bare, dry, humid or rainy, hot or chilly, depending on whether a tornado was forming or moving over the area. It turned out to be all of these in fairly rapid succession, with only the breeze, rising at times to wind and gale, but always cheerfully About the Author: Nayantara Sahgal is a well-known novelist andjourncalled a "breeze," a constant factor. Texas, according to its inalist whose articles have appeared in India's leading newspapers and habitants, doesn't have a climate, only weather. If you don't like magazines. She has also writte'nfor AII1('/'icanpublications and has visited the U.S. many time'S.She wrote this arJiclefor SPAN while she was the weather, the saying goes, wait a minute.

Living in an apartment attached to one of the freshman wom"writer-in-residence" at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, en's residence halls (air-conditioned like most buildings here), and in '73. Her books include The Day in Shadow and Storm in Chandigarh.

'I had no intention of going along on "inspiration," which as any writer knows won't get him two words a month on paper. 1 was a lover of precision, with a dislike of people who waffle through.' eating at the student cafeteria, as I had chosen to do, I was spared the bother of housekeeping and cooking. But I h'ad fully expected to buy sheets, towels and other necessities. I found all my wants had been anticipated by my department chairman, Tom Arp, who had with loans from other faculty members assembled everything I needed, from towels to television. I daresay royalty is not loaned household goods by a helpful community, but I felt rather royally surrounded by these and the abundance of goodwill they represented. As the days went by invitations to dine by Tom and his friends in the English department introduced me to a warm and hospitable circle. I felt enclosed now by interest and affection, even spoilt by the attention paid to me. Messages kept arriving during the first week or two inquiring if there was anything I lacked, and generosity included offers of a lift whenever I needed one, around campus, into town, sightseeing, shopping, anywhere at all. For I was that oddity on campus. I didn't have a car. (Not that a car would have done me much good since I couldn't drivea shocking fact I had revealed only to a select few who I trusted would not consign me to museum status upon learning it.) The campus was a solid sea of gleaming cars, student and facultyowned. And the students who did not own cars made a grateful rush for the carrier that toured the grounds at intervals to pick them up and deliver them to the various buildings where classes were held, none of which was more than 10 minutes' walk from the residence halls. Walking is obsolete here. For exercise at the university there is swimming, tennis and squash, and the celebrated national game, football, for whose top honors SMU is now competing under a new coach and an ambitious training program for its athletes. The football team is separately housed and fed. Looking at what was available in the cafeteria in the way of quality, variety and abundance-the sheer volume and spectacle of good food, along with gallons of milk-I wondered what more was required for heroic physique. But this apparently was for ordinary mortals who did not play football and did not need extra reserves. It was a reminder to me of the way things are done in America. You have a target and then you set about systematically to achieve it. And any program, with finance behind it, has to show results or explain why it doesn't. The status of football players had, however, attracted the irony of the student newspaper, and some choice sarcasm was directed toward the policy.

But I was here to teach, and on this point there was neither assistance nor advice. There were no books that I knew of on creative writing, no syllabus issued by the university, no suggestions from my department chairman, who told me to proceed exactly as I pleased, and I had no idea how a course like this was taught elsewhere. My colleague, Rich Crossland, fresh from Paul Engle's Writers' Workshop at Iowa [see SPAN August 1973], who would be teaching the other section of the same seminar, told me the emphasis must be on technique. "The thing is to concentrate not on what a story means, but on its structure and technique -and to get the students to do as much writing as possible." This, at last, gave me a clue, though a broad general one.

I had seen the seminar room where I would meet about 22 students two afternoons (three hours) a week, and the delightful book-lined office (Tom's on loan to me) overlooking an expanse of ground in front of the imposing building where classes in the

humanities were held. The pillared facade, lofty dome, and regal proportions of Dallas Hall, with its commanding location on campus, had been designed to resemble the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., and the other buildings to match it in architectural style so that the whole campus had a geometric and pleasing regularity, with no upstart growth on it. I could see neat shapes of grass cut across by paved cement paths from my office window, and now knew other offices I had visited to complete all the technicalities connected with being a new member of the SMU faculty.

Everything was becoming gradually familiar-except what I was going to do with the hapless, anonymous 22 that the administration of SMU was with such nonchalance committing to my instruction. I had no intention of going along on "inspiration," which as any writer knows won't get him more than two words a month on paper. Besides, I was a lover of precision, with a professional dislike and distrust of people who waffiethrough.

I did have one substantial fact to go by. These 22 would want to write, a peculiarity that inexorably sets apart this section of the human race from the vast nonwriting majority. There are those who want to write and those who don't, and there's no telling how or why the difference arises-only that it is there, obsessive, irrepressible and satanic. And this single fact gave me a bond with the students I had not yet seen. I even felt sorry for them, because they were too young to know, poor creatures, and had not yet tested the strength of the urge that would prompt them to elect this course in "creative writing." Whatever else would be different between them and me, the earnest ones among them would share with me a frame of mind: somewhat restless, somewhat skeptical, somewhat sad, with a strong reliance on the imagination for insights, and with a tendency (against all advice and upbringing) to trust it much more than the "real" and the obvious. All this I knew without seeing them, and one more thing, that as they had not so far written under any discipline, they would probably write in the mistaken notion that art had no rules, that creativity was something that coursed through your veins and on to paper without any process or correctives in between. It was a notion that would have to be dispelled without much ado, right from the start, and that was how I began, doing all the talking myself. I wound up the first session by asking the students to write briefly why they wanted to study creative writing. Their answers introduced me to their first hurried classroom effort and were along the lines I had expected: "because I want to come to grips with an urge;" "I will write anyway, so I may as well get some help with it;" "there is something bottled up inside me which demands to be released;" "when everyday frustrations and anxieties make the world almost unbearable, I turn to writing. I never feel lonely when I'm creating;" "my secret weapon, my own revenge on a chaotic life." This last was the statement of a Dallas housewife, who along with a scientific writer for a Texas newspaper were the two older people in the class. The others, apart from four freshmen, were upperclassmen. And so began a relationship without preliminaries, though we had all introduced ourselves briefly at • the outset.

It soon foundered on their grammar and punctuation, and sentences that sometimes lost their beginning as they gathered momentum and imparted a bigger load of information than any

sentence should reasonably be asked to bear. I mentioned this to a TV il,lterviewerI met at a party and she told me this was a common failing. In high school, getting students to express themselves took priority over language and its construction. And, she thought, maybe a permissive upbringing had something to do, too, with a lack of discipline and definition in this type of subject. I also encountered the teacher-student version of the generation gap.

Personally I approve of gaps, and the generations, above all, need to stay separate and unglued. But I found myself fretting over the extent of this one. Without wanting a cosy-chat atmosphere in the classroom, I did want discussion, response, perhaps dissent, and had expected it. Earlier Rich had told me, "You have to keep them .to the point. They're likely, whatever they start talking about, to end up talking about Vietnam." But Vietnam was no longer an issue, and SMU reportedly a status-quo university, in which the prosperous and conservative Dallas community took a deep, proprietarY.pride. My group did not rise to the baits I tried to offer. They listened attentively, courteously, and seemed interested, but nobody had a question, nobody had. a comment.

And if anyone had a reaction to anything I said, it was clearly not being shared with me. They sat, their blond, brown, red heads glossyunder the light, docile as lambs, silent as the tomb.

"Maybe they are intimidated," suggested Rich. "By me?" I asked astonished, "Am I intimidating?" He thought it over.

"No," he said. I did have it from my daughter that I was bossy, but how could anyone boss 22 people over things like first person episodes and character sketches? "If they don't talk," said Rich, "try calling on them." I did, and got answers, but no take-off into discussion.

I wondered: Is this because I am a foreigner? There are 10 Indian professors at SMU and I talked to four, all in the sciences, about their work and contacts. But they were dealing with graduate students on an individual basis, a very different matter. I went on to ask them how they were treated by the community and whether they encountered any discrimination in this southern state. On the contrary, they had never known anything but cour~ tesy and friendliness. They were welcomed as tenants in the best residential areas, and though their neighbors were not the dropping-in kind, they were cordial and ready with help in an emergency. In shops, restaurants and hotels Indians were conscious, if at all, of the special interest taken in them. This was not the generalattitude toward the native "brown" population, the Mexicans (or Chicanos, as they are called). But the blacks, unlike the browns, seemed to have won their battle for self-respect during the last few years, coming out of it a determinedly separate community with no desire to integrate. On the whole, people said, this was not an area of racial tension. The atmosphere was fairly relaxed; a remarkable commentary, I thought, on a people's capacity to see the signs of the times and make way for constructive change. "The North and East is where the tensions are," an American professor, a native of New England, told me, "Their hypocrisy is catching up with them."

The impression of Dallas I had after a short stay was of clarity of air, plenty of space and cleanliness, qualities not connected with cities these days. And dailyp'assing contact with people in such places as shops and supermarkets convinced me that these must be the politest people on earth. They were also the most bursting-with-pride in their heritage. Texas has, in its own estimation, the biggest, best and most of everything. It even has the adjectives "Texanic" and "Texian" to heighten the sense of "Texan," and journalistic statements that are only half humorous when they claim it is "a state which may rule the world some day,

if it could only snrug off the hampering arm of the U.S.A." Even the outside world recognizes Texanness for what it is. The Royal Dutch Airlines inaugurated their service to Texas with this ad: "KLM now serves Texas and 74 other countries." All this swagger, this legend and lore, so irritating to the non-Texan, has an elemental vitality much larger than life, and the exploding attrac- . tion of the Texan weather, with its sudden thunder and cloudbursts, its fierce sun, its unpredictable fog. The whole scene reminds me, in its energy and flash and flair, irresistibly of the Punjab.

I got what I wanted-a definite response in my class-when with a thump of his hand on the table, and no previous warning of revolt, a student demanded of the write-up I had handed back to him, "I don't see why it has to be the way you say." Clyde Shaver was not won over by my explanation. Cherokee, as he called himself, had written of his reasons for wanting to study creative writing: "to become, as Siddhartha said, one with the universe." Bringing him down to the mundane business of fulfilling the requirements of assignments might well be beyond me.

I couldn't help thinking, however, as I repeated some of the elements of good writing to him that my next book would probably be so stuffed with "the elements of good writing" that no one would read it.

By this time I bad become inexplicably and rather achingly involved with each one of them, with the better writers as well as those who wrote clumsy sentences and unpunctuated paragraphs, and were casual with grammar. I had, under cover of their writing, got to know them. I was used to their individual way of putting things. I knew what they were trying to say, even when they did not succeed in saying it very well. I looked for the unmistakable signs of each one's "style." Jon Caswell's language, for example, was liberally sprinkled with undictionary words, contrasting oddly in its hardboiled content with the soft-spoken charmer he was.

"Jon," I said, "this language you use-do people really talk like that?"

"Oh sure they do. All the time."

The others round the table corroborated this emphatically.

"I don't," I said by way of inadequate argument.

The very idea of my (clipped accents and all) using "that language" sent Jon and the others into a fit of laughter.

I.was faced for the first time in my life with a new kind of relationship, and a new obsession, to reach and touch these minds in some way, so that at least a few might be able to say before we parted, "I understand what you mean." I found their struggles to write unbearably moving. I had to step softly, though clearly, with my criticisms, which could meet with the hurt rejoinder, "But that's just what I did do." The gap between having something to say and knowing how to say it sometimes seemed immense, and showing them how to close it would take more months than the semester hurrying by had left. By the time I had given them a short story assignment, I found myself waiting around in a state of growing agitation for 22 deliveries. Their arrival will mark the midway point in the course.

I have been involved at the university in another course called Images of Man, dealing with the cultures of Africa, India and the American Indians. For the Indian side I have been asked to draw up a list of reading that will also help build up the India section of the library. And all of this, I tell myself every morning, is happening in a place that is not supposed to be very interested in any other place, and at a time when, in the world outside Texas, Indo-American relations are not at their easiest. I find myself devoutly hoping that whatever well-deserved fate overtakes the governments of the earth, universities will continue to flourish. 0

THE DEVIL IS ALIVE AND WELL IN AMERICA It has inspired hyperbolic praise. It has also aroused shock, rage and outrage as few filmsbefore have done. The Exorcist, which opened in 22 American cities a few months ago, is an undoubted cinematic achievement: It may well become the biggest grosser in the history of world cinema.

More than that, it is a social and religious phenomenon that has compelled rethinking on the afflictions of contemporary society.

The New York Daily News described it as "a film that will fry your hair." Newsday noted that the film sustained "the experience of evil" for two hours, "an incredible feat."

WOR Radio said: "If you can stand to have your blood turned to ice water, don't miss it." WINS Radio assured listeners, "The Exorcist will . leave you absolutely drained."

A theater manager remarked, "I've never seen anything like it in the 24 years I've been working in movie theaters."

The New York Times, however, dismissed the film as "occulist claptrap" and said it was practically impossible to sit through. The $10 million that went into the movie "could have been better spent subsidizing a couple of beds at the Paine-Whitney clinic." A psychiatrist warned: "There is no way you can sit through that film without receiving some lasting negative or disturbing effects." But millions continue to see the movie. A few have discovered latent demons in themselves and real-life exorcists are in

great demand.

William Peter Blatty, who made The Exorcist from his own best-selling novel, is not the first filmmaker to cash in on man's fascination with the macabre. Many horror films have been good box-officeThe Cabinet of Dr. Caligari way back in 192I, the Dracula films of recent years. But none has evoked such strong reactions.

The film is about a 12-year-old girl possessed by a devil and seized with frequent paroxysms of fury and violence.

Doctors are helpless; an exorcist who is called in nearly banishes the demon but is himself killed by a heart attack. Finally a Jesuit psychiatrist invites the demon to "take me," and leaps out of the window, killing himself and the devil. The girl is saved.

The weird plot enables director William Friedkin to employ grotesque special effects and a host of visual and verbal gimmicks. A critic remarked, "Friedkin is a master of contrast, of quiet and then

sudden violence-of lovely pastoral scenes, and then again a horrible confrontation with the evil character ... and playing on your emotions back and forth." But the New York Times sneered: "The devil, it seems, for all his supposed powers, can't break and enter without sounding like L~urel and Hardy trying to move a piano."

Some see in the public obsession with the film, the surfacing of "underground anxieties, fears and frustrations" in contemporary American society.

Others say it reflects "man's fundamental yearning for some kind of reckoning with his destructive inclinations."

The business of the devil and the exorcist is dismissed by many as arrant nonsense. But Dr. Walter Brown, a New York psychiatrist, even describes all psychoanalysis and psychotherapy as "forms of exorcism, getting rid of demons." Another psychiatrist opines that in the "whole field of spiritualism, mysticism, religion and the human spirit, there are things so minimally understood that almost anything is possible." A Jesuit priest who has tried exorcism says the euphoria over the film has some value "if it brings out the reality of the Devil. If the Devil is real, then God must be real."

Producer Blatty himself insists that he has not made a horror film, only "a parable of good and evil showing the triumph of the former." To make it clear that the priest in the final scene vanquishes the demon-and not the other way round as some people have interpreted it-Blatty has filmed a new climax, promising

that "it will give you a surge of joy."

The furor created by The Exorcist may fade out. But it has provided fresh proof of the evocative power of the film medium, served many people's psychic needs, shaken up the dormant art of exorcismand made William Blatty a multimillionaire.

THE GREAT DEBATE: SHOULD AMERICA 'UNDEVELOP' ?

Even businessmen, those arch apostles of growth, have become converts to the nongrowth ethic that is rapidly sweeping America. Nation's Business, a monthly magazine of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, polled businessmen readers on the question "Should we stop economic growth?"

Two of every five replies said "Yes." The outcry against unbridled growth-of industry, housing, and population-has become increasingly strident. People are up in arms against the developers denuding the country of its natural beauty. And the amazing thing about the anti growth movement is that it has surfaced in action instead of in mere grumbling. Citizens' groups in cities and towns all over America are demanding -and getting-new restrictive zoning laws.

Tn Colorado voters decided against use of state funds for the 1976 Winter Olympics, thus killing the event in that state. In Maryland officials rejected plans for a huge amusement complex that would draw five million visitors during its first year. In Suffolk County, New York, officials

ERICANS RETALKING ~BOUli propose to buy thousands of acres of farmland to keep it from being used for development. Los Angeles authorities are closing their officein New York City opened sevenyears ago to woo business.

A decade ago, the Governor of Oregon (now Senator), Mark Hatfield, was trying to lure industry into the state.

The present Governor, Tom McCall, told Oregon visitors two years ago: "Come, but don't stay." Last year he suggestedthat maybe they shouldn't come at all. In New Mexico, an enterprising young newspaperpublisher, Mark Acuff,has formed an Undevelopment Commission and sold more than 4,000 "Undevelop" bumper stickers.

Florida and California, states that have traditionally vied to attract visitors and industry, are seeking to outdo each other in growth-control measures.

Boca Raton, north of Miami, has fixed a limit of 40,000 on the total number of dwelling units to be allowed within city limits. In California, the entire coastline is being protected for 1,000 yards inland. Any large project has to be preceded by an environmental impact statement.

Many Americans are obviously taking a hard second look at valuesonce considered basic.

But not everyone subscribes to the no-growth philosophy.

Someexperts point out that a broad no-growth policy could result in fewer jobs, fewerhours of work, lower tax revenues,perhaps Illgher tax rates. It would hurt those at the bottom of the economic ladder.

Senator Henry M. Jackson of Washington State cautions:

"The no-growth philosophy encourages rather than mitigates confrontations between the 'haves' and 'have-nots' and denies to our society the very wealth and technological advancements which we must have if we are to cleanse and improve the environment."

Business firms and individuals hit by the new environmental curbs are fighting them in courts. They want either withdrawal of the curbs or compensation for the full development value of their property. They cite the U.S. Constitution's Fifth Amendment which says that "No person shall be ... deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation. " The just-released report by the Task Force on Land Use and Urban Growth, headed by Laurance S. Rockefeller, makes a significant recommendation: It urges the U.S. Supreme Court to re-examine decisions made in an earlier era when land was regarded in terms of market value rather than as a precious natural resource.

A major case now awaiting decision in the New York County Supreme Court involves the owner of New York City's Grand Central Terminal, one of America's classic railroad stations. He prefers to use the space for a 59-story office building. The city has turned down the application for a skyscraper: he wants $8 million a year in compensation.

In a recent U.S. Court of Appeals decision that went in favor of the environmentalists,

Chief Judge Albert W. Coffin summarized the view from the bench: "This court, like other federal and state courts throughout the country, finds itself caught up in the environmental revolution.

Difficult and novel legal and factual questions are posed which require the resolution of conflicting economic, environmental and human values. The problem inherent in quantifying a 'way of life,' the beauty of an unspoiled mountain, may never be solvable with any degree of certitude."

The results of all of these decisions-and of the whole "no-growth" movement-will obviously playa large role in determining the life-style of Americans in the decades to come.

THE LIFE OF A PRESIDENT When a former President of the United States speaks out, he does not merely make news: he creates and amends history.

Particularly if he is Harry Truman, 33rd President of the U.S. This month Americans of all shades of political

persuasion are talking about what New York magazine called the "sunniest and most valuable book published last year"-Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman.

The book is the result of taped conversations between Truman and author Merle Miller, held in 1961 for a TV program. The program did not come off, and Miller filed away his tapes and extensive notes, working on them only after Truman's death in December 1972.

Half the book is chronological and devoted to the pre-Presidential years. Half is by subject-Truman sounding off on people, events, likes and dislikes, integrity, politics, freedom. People are talking about the book because it islike Truman was in real lifebluntly candid in its opinions.

There are Ills characteristically outspoken quotes on Kennedy, Eisenhower, Nixon, MacArthur and Stevenson. There are the deeply moving quotes on subjects like obedience to his mother and loyalty to his friends. There are the deadly serious quotes on things like his hatred of McCarthyism.

The book reveals Truman as being-perhaps like all great men-both a very proud and a very humble man. He saw himself as a man who did his duty as his mother and the Constitution gave Illm to understand it-and did it well.

Part of his humility lay rooted in Ills belief in democracy. In talking about Presidential power he said: "EverytIllng, all of it, belongs to the people. I was just privileged to use it for a while ... it was only lent to me."

0

STIITBIIBS rOB II BIVIDIIIBIT1L DBCADI 'If the development of nuclear weapons represented the start of one age, an increased consciousness of the environment and its limits may be the beginning of another,' says the author. He adds: 'A damaged environment is an infinitely more powerful force for destruction than nuclear might.'

Within the next decade what has been called "the environment" holds promise of emerging as the most troublesome of all international irritants. Complex enough in a physical sense, the issue grows even more intricate on the political plane through its powerful association with health and survival. National interests that may hitherto have been difficult to define shed their turbidity under an onslaught of new and immediate concerns-the depletion of vital resources, the threats to life support systems, and the question of continued growth. In this charged atmosphere, options become limited. The policies flowing from them tend to channel nations in directions that make conflict all but unavoidable.

Three Constraints A deterministic matrix is being superimposed over the free conduct of international relations. Its elements are already operative and discernible. One is the spreading realization that pollution, despoliation and degradation are not isolated issues but the dark side of progress, prosperity and development. Any action in one area evokes consequences in the other. The two are not inseparable, of course, but the price of severing them may range from sizeable costs to economic stagnation and bankruptcy. Some nations are reluctant to pay this price. Instead, they are searching for means that permit continued growth but shift the ensuing environmental penalties to other nations or mankind's common property of oceans and atmosphere.

Another element, even more unsettling, is the growing fear that the globe cannot provide all men with an affluent style of life.

There are distinct limits to its ability to furnish raw materials, absorb wastes and withstand massive alteration to its surface. The visualization of the home planet as a finite spaceship turns the hopes of poorer nations from the future to the present. It inspires them with two new goals-to take what can still be taken and to develop what can still be developed-and it adds greater urgency to their demand for an equitable share in the world's resources and wealth.

A third element is the exploding knowledge of the behavior of pollutants. Many cannot be confined to their source but travel freely with the wind, on the currents and through food chains, respecting neither checkpoints, tollgates nor borders. Pesticides sprayed in the south reduce the number of migratory birds that return to nest in the north. Inland dams diminish the catch of anadromous fish in international waters. The river an upstream nation uses as its sewer is the source of drinking water for a neighbor downstream. The scientific disclosure of these movements, and of the harm they cause, prompts concerned nations to take an increasing interest in matters that, but a few years ago, would have been judged to be sovereign, inviolate, and above outside scrutiny. It arouses them to take actions that lead to fundamental revisions in relationships. There may be protests, unilateral acts in international waters, proposals for a joint clean-up with a strategic foe, or severe sanctions against an ally. Above all, the movement of pollutants raises a host of new and puzzling questions about national sovereignty and a state's obligation to protect its citizens and terrain from externally caused harm.

Co-operation or Conflict?

These trends should stimulate more intensive international cooperation. The environment, after all, is indivisible and no nation can cope on its own with the problem of universal degradation.

The scientific community, which discovered ecology, has been in the forefront of advocates who urge the formation of a global regime, with detection, monitoring, standard-setting and enforcement mechanisms to bring order to the environmental chaos.

Unfortunately, however, such schemes are easier proposed than enacted. When translated from the abstract to the concrete, nations note quickly that they exact sacrifices, create new inequities, , shift or limit power, and place lids on ambitions. The environment may be indivisible, but cultural, social, economic and spiritual values are not. They are fragmented.

Consequently, it is unrealistic to expect nations to embrace

meaningful international controls at any time before global decay assumes a visible and terrifying shape. Until then, they will characteristically face up to the problem on their own terms, in line with their unique character and status, and in accordance with immediate goals and aspirations.

In fact, it should not be ruled out that some nations may seek out global pollution to manipulate like a volatile stock in the hope of deriving profit from the losses incurred by others. The tally sheet is rich in opportunities that stem from the unequal distribution of concern, the unequal perception of the problem, the unequal capabilities, resources and will for solving the problem, and the unequal physical capacities for absorbing environmental abuse. So long as the air is tolerably breathable, it will be these inequalities, and the political, economic and social realities that derive from them, that influence the behavior of nations; and not, as scientists may hope, an idealistic response to the physical effects of environmental degradation.

This essay is an exercise in political ecology. It attempts to classify the behavior of nations as they adjust to the new environmental realities. From there it seeks to project the altered concepts and power ingredients that may emerge and that could redefine national interests and supporting strategies in the coming decade.

Essentially, there are but two methods by which the environmental issue can enter the international arena. It may be introduced by choice as a novel tactic for securing a political objective.

Or-and this method is ultimately far more significant for national security-it may burst on stage in a dominant part, as a determinant of action.

Political Use of the Environment In illustration of the first method, a nation may employ an environmental issue as a tool for advancing a traditional goal not associated with ecological well-being. For several years the Soviet Union linked participation in international environmental conferences with the separate issue of recognition of East Germany.

The People's Republic of China, too, has learned to use the environment to advance political goals. Its representatives are among the most forceful spokesmen to link environmental issues with the dialectics of anticolonialism and anti-imperialism.

Environmental rationales become part of the techniques of eviction. Strategically important regions, such as straits, must be "neutralized" to minimize the risks of a massive oil spill. Even more "far out" reasons should be expected to enter the bargaining arsenal. Overflight rights could be denied because jets destroy protective ozone layers. Docking rights may be withheld because nuclear power plants aboard ship expose harbor waters and the port city to the dual dangers of radioactivity and accidental explosions.

The Environment as a Determinant of Action In its other method of entry, the environment is not subordinated to a political objective. Rather, it becomes the objective itself or, at least, a source of conflict. It may attain this central role by design. More commonly, however, the environment appears at the vortex suddenly and unexpectedly, as the unanticipated consequence of policy, or lack of policy, for environmental considerations are yet to be accorded weight in the problem-solving apparatus of strategists and diplomats. Once it becomes the nucleus of events, it sets in motion actions that tend to alter power accounts and modify relationships.

A variety of phenomena, effects, perceptions and cross-currents operate in surfacing environmental problems. They can be segregated into four interrelated sets of determinants.

• The Great Lock-in. Under the first category, a nation will appropriate or damage environmental assets that it shares with neighbors or the world in general in pursuit of the welfare of its inhabitants. The offending nation may feel that it had no other choice; that it was driven to its act by the need to take care of an expanding population, to maintain a planned rate of economic growth, to test the effects of a new weapon, or to hitch its future to a technology such as nuclear power generation.

• Destroy and Search. The second category of determinants comes into play when nations grossly mismanage their domestic ecology or approach the limit of their environment to absorb industrial pollutants. In either case, they reach out beyond their borders to compensate for mismanagement or to maintain continued growth. Thus, ocean fishing fleets are built to fill the gap left by a pollution-caused decline in river and lake fishing. Smokebelching factory complexes are dispersed from heavily industrialized nations to the developing world to take advantage of its rich assets of clean air and water.

• Environmental Protectionism. The third form of determinism stems from the desire to protect one's own country from pollution and despoliation. It creates an aura of public opinion that limits technology and growth and forces extractive industries, smelters and other heavily polluting processes to leave the homeland and find shelter abroad with nations that, for the time being, still value payrolls more than they fear pollution. It leads to domestic pollution standards which cannot be met through domestic resources. Clean-burning fuels may have to be imported.

Finally, the sentiment bars any activity that might lead to a role as a pollution haven for other nations. A country unwilling to be torn open to satisfy its own needs will develop obvious reservations about undergoing surgery to meet the needs of trading partners. Thus, the net effect of protectionism is to embroil environmentally conscious nations in new and unplanned dependencies while trade deficits become progressively larger.

• Finite Universe. A final form of determinism emerges from fears about the globe's ultimate resource limits. With future vistas eliminated, the ocean now becomes the last frontier. Expropriation of formerly international waters accelerates, and the over-all assessment of the ocean's importance shifts from its role in trade and transport to a new use as the resource of last resort. Concurrently, nations may eye the distribution of existing resources and absorptive capabilities, and begin to ask disturbing and unsettling questions about them. For instance: Can thinly spread populations continue to command vast resources, while other parts of the world face a halt in growth because they are approaching a pollution barrier? For that matter, can land-rich nations be asked to burn nothing but dirty fuel, of which there is a plentiful supply, so that the scarcer, clean-burning power sources-e.g., natural gas-can be allocated to densely settled, more highly industrialized regions?

Expected Behavior The evidence of global decay is accumulating, Jacques Cousteau tells of dead stretches of sea that were brimming with marine life when he began his underwater career. The computers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology grind out ominous curves showing the intricate relationships among capital investment, pollution, resource consumption, population and the quality of life. Stimulate one and it drives up the others until Nature halts the growth, either because her riches have been exhausted, or because the poisonous accumulations in the air, water and soil can no longer sustain life.

E.J. Mishan, in analyzing current economic measurements,

Pollution was formerly regarded as a problem to be tackled on the individual level, with people resorting to all manner of attention-getting devices (see facing page). Today, with the promise of becoming the most troublesome of international irritants, it has risen to the political plane.

notes that every inch of growth leaves in its wake a foot of deferred social and environmental costs. But the unfolding of this evidence, frightening as it is, is not sufficient to overcome the selfishness of nations. Even if a well-intentioned state proved willing to alter its course, its resolve would weaken as less principled nations seized on gaps in our knowledge of the environment-and there are many-to justify further depredations.

Thus, the nation endeavoring to place clean products on the market must contend with competition from 10 others willing to engineer cheaper but dirty models. For every SST not built, there is a Tupolev or Concorde ready to fly. For every defensive weapon not tested for environmental reasons, an offensive system is produced to exploit the breach. If aid is withheld because a project may prove harmful to the ecology, a competitor will gladly advance the funds and engineering assistance.

In short, a display of hesitancy by nations sensitive to the environment becomes a source of strength to the many tha~ are not. For the latter, the temptation is great to use a domestic capacity to absorb pollution and a willingness to take chances as newfound weapons in a contest promising shares of the world's unequally distributed wealth as the ultimate prize.

Changing Concepts "Now everything is changed," Einstein is reputed to have said after the first atomic blast, "except the picture in men's minds of what their world is like." This contrast, between what is and what man's institutions strive for, may well be the root cause of the great difficulties that lie ahead.

There will be an increase in conflict opportunities because the actions that stem from environmental contacts and environmental fears lead so readily to the clash of national goals and objectives.

It may be well-nigh impossible to avoid collisions: potential opponents are driven by matters they deem essential to survival; the issues are easily understood by the citizenry, and they appear in stark colors. Under these circumstances, the chances are slim that what is under contention can be negotiated or compromised into a peaceful settlement.

But there should also be opportunities for increased co-operation, for any trend that creates new opposing interests must also bring to life new partnerships. What may be unsettling to present long-range plans is that the emerging arrangements for conflict and co-operation stand apart from known patterns of alliances and enmities. New.interests create new groupings. It may develop that nations sharing a wind pattern, a major drainage basin, or a resource like the Mediterranean are held together by a common bond stronger than any treaty could forge, whereas nations competing for the remaining, diminishing resources, in the knowledge that this is a finite earth, may oppose each other with great ferocity, regardless of the cultural and ideological bonds they share.

Many of the basic concepts on which international relations rest must change under the pressures of new environmental concerns and knowledge. How will a nation assert its rights to territorial integrity now that it must protect its land, air space, rivers and seashores from the infiltration of unfriendly, debilitating pollutants? Nations have pushed their sovereignty into inter-

national waters and claimed jurisdiction over straits to protect. their coasts from harmful agents dumped or spilled far offshore.

Will the trend stop there? Or will the day come when nations reach out farther and farther to suppress a pollutant at its source of emission? Should that day come, the purpose of military power could shift from the exercise of territorial control to the prevention of territorial damage.

The oceans assume new roles that may overshadow their present value. Trade, commerce and shipping lanes remain important, but to these uses must now be added the mining of fuel and minerals, the harvest of fish and aquatic plants, and the preservation of the sea's life-sustaining powers under an onslaught of filling, spilling and dumping.

The idea of sovereignty over a territorial sea embraces control over both water and the sea bottom. But it becomes hard now to assert ownership of waters that science has shown to be constantly in motion. The wastes one nation dumps into what, ostensibly, is its own property, appear in due time on another nation's shores.

The sea bottom, on the other hand, is fixed and stands a better chance of resisting challenges to ownership.

If anarchy is not to prevail, the 1974 Law of the Sea Conference must resolve the many disruptive issues relating to the extent of the territorial sea, ownership of the sea bottom, ownership of the water, the regulation of anadromous and migratory fish, and the rights of free passage. Acceptance of the bold and imaginative United States plan for international control of the seabed and the more recent proposals on fishing rights could be a large step in removing the sea as a source of contention.

Questions for the Future New situations create the need for new strategies. How does one cope with alliances that are based on economic rather than geographic bonds, when copper producers in Africa and Latin America and oil producers in the Middle East, North Africa, South America and Southeast Asia act in concert? Is the nationstate still the starting point for solving international problems?

Or must one commence with a transnational phenomenon like global pollution and work backward to the nation-state? Problems that overlap the sovereignty of several states introduce complexities overshadowing the problems themselves.

If the development of nuclear weapons represented the start of one age, an increased consciousness of the environment and its limits may be the beginning of another. There are parallels.

The dreaded power of the bomb altered international relations in ways that had not been expected. While the bomb was fitted into national strategies, the nations, in turn, had to adjust to the presence of the bomb. A damaged environment is an infinitely more powerful force for destruction than nuclear might. It is not too early to include the environment and all that it implies in strategies and to think about how strategies, unwittingly, may be affected by this awesome new factor.

0 About the Author: Robert Leider, a Colonel in the U.S. Army, has

written numerous articles for military and scholarly journals, and is the author of the study titled The Environmental Crisis: A New Consideration for National Security, published by the National War College.

'If my constituency supports my position, well and good; if it doesn't, then I have an educational job at hand, and perhaps I ought to review my own position. ~

A CONGRESSMAN DISCUSSES FOREIGN POll'CY On these pages, Congressman Paul Findley of lIIinois discusses the role of the U.S. Congress-more specifically the House of Representatives-in the formation of American foreign policy. Explaining how this role has grown in recent years, he goes on to stress the importance of keeping in touch with his constituents and of being responsive to the shifting tides of U.S. public opinion.

A Republican, Representative Findley has served in Congress since 1960 and is a member of the influential House Foreign Affairs Committee. He is interviewed here by U.S. Information Service staff writer Barrett McGurn.

QUESTION: In the first weeks of the Nixon Administration you came forward in your newsletter to your constituents with a blueprint for relations with Peking that were almost identical with those now in effect. Can you tell us how you happened to launch that and do you think that circulating it in your area had any effect on bringing about this dramatic change in our foreign policy?

ANSWER: I believe that it did have an effect, although perhaps a minor one. My interest in this area actually began nine years ago in very personal terms when a constituent of mine who was with the U.S. Air Force was shot down and captured by China.

Our government did not recognize the existence of the Peking government and this incident dramatized to me the importance of great powers having a way to talk to each other. This, plus a review that I undertook at that time of other factors, caused me to recommend a number of steps and I'm happy to say that all of them have been put into effect by now.

The fact that I spoke out publicly and perhaps was about the first Republican of either side of the Capitol building to do so made me somewhat a focus of attention on this issue. My position was well received in Washington, by and large, and back home.

While there was some criticism, it was not nearly what I had expected. Others no doubt observed this and it may have given them heart to move ahead with the changes that have occurred.

QUESTION: How satisfied are you as to how the Peking detente has been going?

ANSWER: I think it has been going as well as we could possibly expect. We don't have diplomatic relations but we are moving very close to it and I doubt if we will have the formal diplomatic relationship that prevails with other countries until the issue of Taiwan is settled to the satisfaction of Mainland China as well as

to ourselves. And that is going to take a long time. But in the meantime, travel has opened up. There are many people going to China, including government officials, since there is no reluctance on the part of the Chinese to welcome visitors now. Also, trade has begun, so the channels of commerce are opening up. I think that this is a great achievement that we can all take great pride in, especially the Administration.

QUESTION: What is the basic difference between the Senate and the House of Representatives as to their input into foreign policy?

ANSWER: There are two constitutional provisions that give the Senate an advantage, but only two. One is the authority to confirm appointments of individuals involved in making policyfor example, Dr. Henry Kissinger's nomination as Secretary of State was subject to approval by the Senate. This right of the Senate to confirm or reject nominees is a very powerful weapon that of course does influence foreign policy. The second provision of the Constitution that gives the Senate an advantage is the exclusive authority to accept or reject treaties that are entered into by the Executive.

Beyond that, both House and Senate have various ways to affect foreign policy. This can be done by voting resolutions, by amendments to bills, by designating in spending bills that the money can only be used for specific purposes or denied to other purposes. Both houses, by those means, have effective ways to influence foreign policy.

In practice, I must say that the Senate has dominated the legislature to a great degree in matters of foreign policy. That was particularly true in the early years that I was in the Congress. But I have noticed some changes that have made the House much more visible in this field.

QUESTION: In what way has the role of the House been improved?

ANSWER: The attitude of the House Foreign Affairs Committee itself has changed very markedly in the last few years. I attribute that to two factors: First of all, Vietnam. Vietnam has been such a miserable experience for the American people that first President Johnson and then President Nixon were under constant pressure from the Congress to change policy and get us out swiftly. And this, I think, caused a greater degree of action on the part of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

The other factor was a change in the House rules under which no member could serve in more than one committee or subcommittee chairmanship. This meant that a senior member on the Foreign Affairs Committee who already was chairman of a subcommittee or a full committee elsewhere in the House was disqualified from being chairman of a subcommittee of foreign affairs. This put the leadership of the foreign affairs subcommittees in the hands of younger and, I must say, more aggressive members, who were more determined than their elders to have the House effective in foreign affairs. I think these are two principal factors.

Another, and I think salutary, change has been the "Sunshine Rule" in the House of Representatives, under which the business of the committee is open to the press and therefore the world.

The press can sit in and watch what's going on, can listen to amendments being offered and discussed and see the final vote on amendments. I think this has produced a focus on the action of the House Foreign Affairs Committee that did not exist before.

QUESTION: Does the fact that members of the House face reelection every two years-as compared to the President every four years and Senators every six-mean that Representatives are more closely attuned to the shifting tides of American public opinion? Is that a significant factor in influencing the House's role in foreign policy; in helping to create it?

ANSWER: That was the expectation of our founding fathers,

who drafted the Constitution creating a very neatly balanced system in which the House, holding the purse strings of government, would theoretically be more responsive to changes in public attitudes and the public in turn would be able to change the entire membership of the House on rather short notice if it had the will to do so. And this would, of course, allow public opinion very promptly to be felt on almost any field of policy, including foreign policy. I admire this system, even though it means that Election Day is always just around the corner for all of us in the House.

But, nevertheless, I have to say that many Senators are just as sensitiveto public opinion and are back home as often as House members. It depends on the political character of the constituency, as to how close in touch the member or the Senator must be. In my case I have a politically well-balanced district and I have to get back home often. The same is true of Adlai Stevenson, III, a Democrat, and Charles Percy, a Republican, who are the U.S. Senators from Illinois. Neither of them dares neglect Illinois, evenfor a few months. They can't walk off for six years and come back for re-election. They feel the necessity to keep in touch.

QUESTION: How often do you get back to your district?

ANSWER: Well, the government authorizes at public expense

18trips a year. And I make more trips than that. I average 25 to 30 trips a year. And I would imagine that is typical. In my case, that's nearly 2,000 miles in a round trip. One part of my district is about 800 miles from Washington.

QUESTION: You mentioned that you produce a newsletter. How does that help you keep in touch with your electorate?

ANSWER: I issue a questionnaire once a year and on it I try to

present what are the big issues that will soon confront the Congress,both in foreign policy and in domestic policy, and I do my levelbest to phrase these in a fair manner so that they don't invite a particular answer. I sincerely want to get a feeling of my constituency, for obvious reasons. Then, at two other times in the year I send a newsletter, one includes a report on how the questionnaire went as well as a review of my own activities and interests, and the other is a summation of that session of the Congress. This broad mailing three times a year is a priceless way to keep in touch, to get a feel of the constituency and to have them have a part in representative government.

QUESTION: To what extent does the electorate lead you in your thinking on foreign policy and to what extent do you try to educate your electorate?

ANSWER: I like to think of myself as a leader, in all modesty.

If I don't have the capacity for some leadership I shouldn't be here at all. I don't view the questionnaire just as a means of decidinghow I should vote. It's rather a means of testing the opinion of my constituency. If my constituency supports my position, welland good; if it doesn't, then I have an educational job at hand, and perhaps I ought to review my own position. So I try to decidewhat seems best to me for the country and then hope to persuade my constituency that I've taken the right stand on it.

QUESTION: Are domestic issues really the main issues concerning your voters or are there issues of foreign policy that deeply and immediately affect them?

ANSWER: Foreign policy has dropped as an item of interest

with the return of our men from Vietnam and the end of our involvement in that conflict. It is at a rather low level now except in the field of trade expansion, and the effect of trade on food prices here at home. My district is a mixed district, with both industry and a very diversified agriculture. Thus, we have a great stake in world trade; I think that, perhaps more than many other inland areas of the United States, my district is keenly interested in world markets and sees the need for friendly relations. Even with governments like the Soviet Union and China which may be potentially hostile to our interests, my constituents see advantages to them as producers and in trying to win and maintain markets there. So in that respect foreign policy has a high level of interest.

QUESTION: You are the ranking Republican member on the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on National Security Policy and Scientific Developments. How sanguine are youfor the success of the SALT [Strategic Arms Limitation Talks} negotiations?

ANSWER: Frankly, I have never been very optimistic that sub-

stantial advances will result from the SALT negotiations. At the same time, I see the political necessity of engaging in talks in good faith. That, I feel, we have done. I think it's more important, actually, that our government try to settle differences and negotiate a broader and better means of co-operation and co-ordination with Western European nations; to eliminate, in every way we can, points of friction between ourselves and the Common Market nations, between ourselves and the North Atlantic Treaty nations. Negotiations there-an agreement there-would, I think, bear far greater fruit and promise in the years to come than anything we could work out with the Soviet Union.

QUESTION: Are you hopeful that much can be done at the other current conferences on Europe, involving co-operation and security and mutual reduction in force?

ANSWER: I view those conferences in much the same light that

I view the SALT talks. I don't have high hopes of anything substantial coming from them and I see a considerable danger if we, for example, were to agree to a substantial reduction and pull our troops back from Europe and the Soviets agreed to the same and pulled their troops back to their own borders. It would not be a great task for them to move part of their forces back.

I think, also, that we ought to face the possibility that the Soviets may like things the way they are, despite what they say.

They have security problems in the nations of Eastern Europe.

The presence of their troops there is important for two reasons.

I would put the first reason from the Soviet standpoint as being security-keeping order within the countries. And secondly, and perhaps of a relatively low importance to them, the threat from NATO countries; but I don't see any threat there and I doubt if the Soviets do either. So it could well be that we are serving Soviet interests in keeping our troops levels where they are. What I recommend is not that we negotiate with the Warsaw Pact in the person of the Soviet Union but rather with our NATO allies to work out a long term agreement on force levels in which we will insist that ours have to be lower in relation to other NATO forces.

Then let the Soviets react however they wish.

I would like to add this thought. I have long advocated putting our relationship with China on the same basis as our relationship with the Soviet Union, not to play favorites. And for many, many years we did play favorites-for the Soviets and against China.

We are in the process of rectifying that and I think it is all to the good. When the day arrives that we have the same arrangements with Peking as with Moscow I think we will have a more stable 0 world order in which there is less danger of miscalculation.

lTRIBDTI 10

.rOBI FORD b, Sit, lilt II'

Paying homage to the great American film maestro who died last year at 78, India's most distinguished moviemaker says: 'Much of the best things in a Ford film have the mysterious quality of poetry.'

John Ford was nearly 80 when he died. He had been in the film business for 60 years. By the end of the silent era, he had already made something like 50 films, short and long. By the time he died, he had made well over a hundred. The most prolific of directors, Ford was also the one who scaled the heights most frequently. He was also remarkable in that his haIImark had remained virtually unchanged over the last 40 years, which is as long as I have known him. A haIImark is never easy to describe, but the nearest description of Ford's would be a combination of strength and simplicity. The nearest equivalent I can think of is a musical one: middleperiod Beethoven. The same boldness of contour, the simplicity and memorability of line, the sense of architect~re, even the same outbreaks of boisterousness, and the heroic, action-packed finales. AII of this is undoubtedly best expressed in the Westerns, but also to be met with in some celebrated departures as The Young Mr. Lincoln, The Grapes of Wrath, They Were Expendable, The Quiet Man. There were other departures, too, which lacked many of these qualities. Near-expressionist essays, almost WhoIIy preoccupied with the visual aspect: The Informer, The Fugitive, The Long Voyage Home. And commercial chores which appeared with despairing frequency--Hurricane, Wee Willie Winkie, FourMen & A Prayer-embarrassing in their lapses of taste and their indifferent technique.

Why did such a great talent stoop to such trivialities? Ford himself gave the answer in an early interview. He said filming for him was a job which he enjoyed for its own sake.

If a good story didn't come his way, rather than sit about and wait for one, he would plunge into a run-of-the-mill concoction just to keep on the job.

This could mean one of two things: Either Ford didn't think of himself as an artist, and didn't care for his reputation; or he was so confident of his crests that he knew the troughs wouldn't amount to a serious dent The study of John Ford at left brings out the qualities that characterized his lifesimplicity and strength. Above him are scenesfro 111 his films. Clockwise from top lefl:

Stagecoach,Drums Along the Mohawk, Stagecoach and The Grapes of Wrath.

in his reputation in the long run. I personally believe the second to be true, simply because in no other director's work is the confidence in one's mastery so evident as in the Dest of John Ford. And much of his best work is undoubtedly in the Western. Like Picasso's obsession with the buII, Cezanne's with the apple, Bach's with the fugue, and the Hindu miniaturists' with the theme of Krishna, John Ford had a lifelong affair with the Western.

"When in doubt, make a Western" is reported to have been his maxim. One only wishes he had been in doubt oftener.

For those who look for "commitment" in the cinema, in the new, fashionable sense of the term, the work of Ford-as weII as of most great American directors prior to the 1960s-will have nothing to offer. But for those who look for art, for poetry, for a clean, healthy, robust attitude to life and human relationships John Ford is among the most rewarding of directors. He was also unique in having won unreserved admiration from eminent filmmakers from aII parts of the world-from Eisenstein in Soviet Russia, Kurosawa in Japan, Bergman in Sweden, Orson Welles in the U.S. There is little doubt that this admiration was based primarily on the genre that Ford perfected. Along with slapstick comedy, the Western is the least literary of film genres.

No wonder Ford's genius for pure cinema shone most luminously in it. For those who have a resistance to the genre itself, as well as those who are only concerned with Subject Matter and Its Relevance To The Contemporary Scene-Ford's Westerns will remain a closed book. It would also be difficult to convey the greatness of Ford to someone who can only see what lies on the surface of a film; in other words, the aspect which is conveyed adequately in a screenplay. Ford's real achievement always transcends the literary framework. Plot and character are not what especiaIIy distinguish films like Wagonmaster, The Sun Shines Bright, or My Darling Clementine. The distinction consists, as in aII great filmmakers, in the manner of teIIing the stories; in how Ford uses his tools, how he stages his actions and photographs them, where he places his camera, how the shots and the scenes foIIow one another, how the pace and the pulse of the film derive from the cutting. Among other things, Ford was a master of the static shot, of the "teIIing" composition. There is rarely any movement of the camera within a shot unless it happens to be part of a larger action. This is a method which lies at the other extreme from, say, Orson WeIIes. One can say that in a Ford film the camera is a sensitive observer, always sure of the best viewpoint, while in WeIIes it is a dexterous participant, exploring aII manner of viewpoints.

Much of the best things in a Ford film have

the mysterious, unanalyzable quality of poetry. Because some of them appear casualeven accidental-it is difficult to realize how much experience and mastery lie behind them. Let me describe one such moment which occurs in the film Fort Apache. Two men stand talking on the edge of a deep ravine. There is a broken bottle lying alongside. One man gives it a casual kick and sends it flying over the edge. A few seconds later, in a gap in the conversation, the soundtrack registers the faintest of clinks. That's aII. This is the sort of thing that belongs uniquely to the cinema. What it does is to invest a casual moment with poetic significance. Those who look for "meaning" here, whether symbolic or literary, and are disappointed not to find it, are obviously unaware of what makes for poetry in the cinema. AII the best Ford films are fuII of such poetic details which, taken in conjunction with the sweep and vigor of the action sequences, give the films their satisfying richness.

A professional filmmaker to the core, Ford had remained distinctly aloof about the critical reaction to his work. He had been accused, often rightly, of sentimentality, of excessive proneness to nostalgia, of his readiness to yield to commercial pressures. Nothing ever seemed to touch him or ruffle the serenity of his convictions. I suspect he had been too busy making films to bother, not only about critics, but about other directors and their work, least of aII about young directors who were branching out in directions unexplored by himself. More than just indifference or preoccupation, one suspects here an inflexibility of mind which refused to accommodate alternative approaches to filmmaking. Let me record here an instance of Ford's encounter with a young filmmaker 15 years ago. Lindsay Anderson-whose adulation of Ford amounted almost to deification-had just made an hour-long documentary caIIed Every Day Except Christmas which showed what went on behind the scenes at London's famous Covent Garden Market. It was a fine, poetic film, primarily a film of mood, vaguely akin to Ford in its images of working-class camaraderie, but on the whole a very different kettle of fish. John Ford happened to be in town, and Lindsay was anxious to show his film to his mentor. A screening was arranged, and Ford was pressed into going after having been told who made the film and what it was about. Ford was weII aware of the high regard in which his work was held by this young critic-turned-filmmaker.

At the screening, Lindsay sat next to the Master. For half an hour after the film commenced, Ford said not a word. Then, just as the conviction had begun to grow in the chela that the guru had succumbed to the speII of the film, Ford turned to Lindsay and said: "Now, when are we going to see those god dam vegetables?" 0

TBEIEW DIRECTORS They are a diverse lot with names like Scorsese and Oshima, Bakshi and Troell, Fassbinder and Lucas. They come out of a variety of professional backgrounds: improvisatory acting, screenwriting, TV films, cartoon animation. At times. it seems that the only thing they have in common is a palpable love of movies as an artistic medium.

Their own recent film releases run the gamut from gut-searing depictions of violence to the bittersweet nostalgia of the adolescent years.

But as a group, they are winning critical acclaim and a growing international reputation as one of the best and the brightest new crops of new movie directors since the talkies first flickered on the silver screen.

Fortunately enough for film buffs, the cub directors are finding their running legs just when they are needed most. For these are' times of profound and fundamental changes in the motion-picture industry. Despite occasional hits that rake in box-office profits, moviemaking as an art form is locked in the doldrums from Hollywood to Hong Kong. Through an era of rising costs and tight financing, fragmenting cinematic tastes and the emergence of television as the dominant mass medium, the fall of the old Hollywood style of monolithic control over all

phases of films is nearly complete. And the new new-wave directors could well carry the decentralization process to its logical conclusion: the transformation of moviemaking into something approaching a cottage industry.

By now, the broad outlines of the new cinematic technique are pretty much familiar to any movie cognoscente. It is the approach that shuns the make-believe environment of the elaborate sets and sound stages of the big studios and, instead, shoots "in the raw" on location, often with hand-held cameras and available natural lighting. It is a system that Swiss director Alain Tanner says "preserves our provincial autonomy." It is also a compact, mobile and relatively economical operation in which an entire production crew and all sundry filming paraphernalia can be squeezed into a single modified bus. Yet, when an early practitioner of the new method, American actor-director Dennis Hopper, literally and figuratively roared off down the pike and came back with the watershed film Easy Rider four years ago, the imp~ct of the new technique stood the international film world on its head. From some $425,000 invested in the enterprise, Easy Rider ultimately grossed over $35 million world-wide.

With Hopper's stunning breakthrough,

the once-closed shop that was movie land was flung open to young, unknown filmmakers.

To be sure, that phenomenon could not always be regarded as an unqualified blessing.

Inevitably, those with mere pretension were attracted along with those of real potential.

One negative result of the new do-it-yourselfism was a belief that anybody could be a successful movie director if he owned even a second-hand camera and had the inclination to point it at something. "Such people," sniffed a leading New York film critic, "shoot hours of footage, and then start looking for a real movie somewhere inside." But, in the end, the passage of time tends to cull the casual dilettantes from the seriously committed. And in the U.S. at least, that sifting process has paid off in a near-simultaneous appearance of a cluster of major films by young American directors. Among the hottest new names hailed by U.S. critics and audiences alike in the 1973 film season: GEORGE LUCAS. Peering from behind horn-rimmed glasses, his face framed by a full beard, slight and soft-spoken Lucas, at 29, ~ still looks like an earnest college undergraduate. Though he first attracted attention three years ago with THX 1138, a Godardesque science-fiction film, his next offering, American

A new breed of young filmmakers in the U.S. and elsewhere is 'winning critical acclaim and a growing international reputation as one of the best since the talkies first flickered on the silver screen.'

Graffiti, was rejected by every major Hollywood studio until Universal Studios finally picked it up. Graffiti, a nostalgic, semi-autobiographical look back at teen-age life and fantasies in the early 1960s, obviously struck a responsive chord among American audiences. It became a nationwide smash hit.

Shot on a tight schedule (28 nights, since all of the film's action is supposed to span one night) and a frugal budget to match (about $700,000), Graffiti is expected to gross at least $15 million-a profit ratio that can make believers out of even the most hidebound Hollywood traditionalists.

"Just because we're young doesn't mean we're crazy," Lucas says of the struggle of new directors to gain recognition. "It took [the big studios] a long time to figure that out."

JOHN MILIUS. Like Lucas, Milius sports a beard, is an alumnus of the film school of the University of Southern California, and has now emerged as one of the most talked-about new screenwriter-directors around. But there's where the resemblance ends. The 31-year-old Milius is a bearlike man with a fondness for guns and hunting, the Japanese code of Bushido and President Theodore Roosevelt-to list a few favorites in no particular order. Because of his macho

outlook, he has been labeled as either a cryptoFascist or a right-wing reprobate. "But 1 am just a feudalist," he has protested. "I just believe in staunch individual freedom." His first directing effort, Dillinger-a study of America's Depression-years bank robber-has won him a contract from United Artists to write and direct a new gutsy action film that pits Teddy Roosevelt against the Barbary pirates.

MARTIN SCORSESE. A short, jumpy young man who talks with machine-gun speed, Scorsese, 3 I, is a self-admitted film freak who eats, thinks, drinks and lives movies. Like many of the young American directors, he entered movies by way of the academic world; in his case, first as a student and later as a combination teacher and local whiz kid of the New York University film school. He learned and polished his craft by working on the filming of the 1969 Woodstock rock music festival, then moved on to Hollywood to direct Boxcar Bertha, a violent, misshapen but enormously energetic movie about a female hobo during the grim 1930s.

Scorsese's major achievement to date, however, is his new movie, Mean Streets, a film set in the Little Italy district of Manhattan's Lower East Side. He grew up in that tough neighborhood and says simply, "Mean Streets

is the story of my life." Shot in just 27 days on a total budget of $550,000, the work dazzled the critics at last year's New York Film Festival. With this big success behind him, Scorsese is now working on four new scripts simultaneously.

RALPH BAKSHI. A Brooklyn-born son of Russian immigrant parents, screen-animator Bakshi has been described as "the new Disney." But in fact, any simplistic linking of the two is approximately as informative as saying that peaches and pineapples are both fruits. Where Disney cavorted in a magic kingdom of his own making, Bakshi prowls the big-city ghettos that were the reality of his youth. His full-length "adult cartoons," characterized by a sophisticated blending of drawn figures with live action, have delighted some critics and outraged others, but they have all been "boffo" at the box office.

Bakshi, 33, burst on the scene two years ago with Fritz the Cat, a tale of an amorous anthropomorphic feline that earned the distinction of being the first X-rated full-length cartoon. He followed that success with a ribald, violent look at America's urban night¡ . mare in Heavy Traffic (which, coincidentally, was mounted against the same lower Manhattan backdrop used by Scorsese in Mean

The new directors have shunned the self-indulgent, agitprop rectitude of the 'message' film. Instead, 'there is a kind of objectivity in them that allows the filmmaker to accept what's really happening.'

Streets). Now he is completing work on his latest, a comic homage to American blacks titled Coonskin.

Remarkably enough, even the distinguished quartet of Lucas, Milius, Scorsese and Bakshi hardly fills out the lengthening list of budding filmmakers who have exploded onto the U.S. screen scene all at once. Feature billings are certainly due to 29-year-old Terrence Malick, who amazed critics with his control and discipline in Badlands, his initial filmdirecting effort; and to tall, mild-mannered John Hancock, 34, who abandoned the stage and hit the jackpot in his first film, Bang the Drum Slowly. Some, such as James Frawley (Kid Blue), may be on the verge of putting it all together, while another, the up-andcoming Steve Spielberg, only 26, has already receivedraves for his Sugar/and Express.

For all of their individualism and diversity, however, some common threads run through the experiences of the new American directors. Most of them were powerfully influenced by the non-American film renaissance a decade or so back. "We were film students at the best possible time," recalls Scorsese of the era when France's Godard and Truffaut, Italy's De Sica and Visconti, Sweden's Bergman and Japan's Kurosawa achieved their towering international stature. Along with the shining examples came the "auteur theory" from France, which saw a film as essentially the creation of its director-and not of a studio head or big-name superstar.

With auteur technique firmly establishedand because many of the new directors write their own scripts-the inevitable result is movies that are highly personal statements.

Yet, unlike the young directors of the first wave of movies that rolled in right behind Easy Rider, the new American filmmakers have shunned the self-indulgent, agitprop rectitude of the "message" film. Instead, notes Jim Frawley, "there is a kind of objectivity in all of them that allows the filmmaker to accept what's really happening." As Martin Scorsese puts it, "Looking back at the past 10 years in America, we see a crazy decade.

We are trying to put the pieces of it back together." How? "The only way I know," he says, "is to go back to the smallest levelwithin yourself-and hope to appeal to other people."

This inward search for reality is echoed by the new filmmakers around the world. Sweden's 41-year-old Jan Troell has shot more than 400,000 feet of film, most of it with a hand-held camera, and then personally edited it all down to a manageable 30,000 feet. Out

of that 70 miles of editing have come two well-received films, The Emigrants and Unto a Good Land, based on the Vilhelm Moberg novels that chronicle the emigration of a 19th-century Swedish family to the U.S. In Switzerland, too, the new film techniques appear to be thriving in the skilled hands of Alain Tanner (La Salamandre), Claude Goretta (L'Invitation) and Michel Soutter, who is now editing a new film, Pardon Auguste. All have a decade of solid experience in television directing and, in fact, they branched off from documentaries into feature films only through a special arrangement under which Swiss TV picks up half of their production tab in return for eventual television showings.

Yet despite the fact that films like Tanner's Salamandre and his latest-The Return From Africa-have received rave reviews from critics and audiences alike, rising costs and TV inroads into movie audiences have conspired against directors hoping to make films with artistic merit. For the most part, the once innovative movie industries of France, Italy, Britain, West Germany and Japan have turned their attention to grinding out what they regard as "safe" box-office fare: slapstick comedies, tearjerkers, potboilers and heaping table.spoons of pornography. In Japan, director Susumu Hani simply ignores the times and makes sensitive films like Midmorning Schedule and Inferno of First Love.

One of the few other Japanese directors willing to fight the trend is Nagisa Oshima, whose latest release, A Summer Sister, explores the relationship between Japan and the recently returned island of Okinawa through the human terms of a Tokyo girl going to Okinawa in search of a boy who may be her long-lost brother. Oshima, however, does not resort to allegory to lash out at the state of movies in general-and at current Japanese films in particular. "Every form of film entertainment now appeals to the base and the prurient," he complains. "Mindless entertainment companies compete to cater to the lowest common denominator in tastes."

Not that there is any lack of young directors around who would like to buck that global tide. Vienna-born actor-turned-director Maximilian Schell (The Pedestrian) sees enormous potentials for the German film industry. "It's all here-the talent, the technical capacity," he says. "All that needs to be done is to let the world in on it." In Canada, awardwinning director Claude Jutra (Mon Oncle Antoine) thinks that a part of the problem can be solved with more distribution outlets

for "smaller or more difficult films." But Britain's 31-year-old Michael Apted (Triple Echo) has reached quite a different conclusion about young filmmakers these days. "I think you have to go to America-if you want to work," he says.

Yet, even in America, it is a bit premature to proclaim a new millennium for independent filmmakers. Despite the changing Hollywood system, the major studios remain powerful in the financing and distributing ends of the commercial-movies business. "For a young director," says 37-year-old Herb Freed, a successful international producer of TV commercials before switching to feature films, "the questions from the studios are: 'Let's see your last picture. Did it make money or not? Will we have complete supervisory control over it?' " The alternative, of course, is independent financing whenever available or, as often is the case, some combination of the two. But such financing is uncertain at best for a young independent with no big hits, and besides, as Freed observes, even this route offers no iron-clad guarantee of total artistic freedom. Freed says that the Italian distributor of his latest film project, The Captive, had him rewrite the script "to put in more tits and action."

Moreover, given the tight money in moviemaking these days, the new directors know that they have little margin for mistakeseven after an initial success. All remember only too well that Dennis Hopper almost ended the Hollywood youth movement just as suddenly as he started it when he followed Easy Rider with a critical and box-office bomb called-of all things-The Last Movie. Observed Martin Scorsese: "You've got to be careful with what you're doing. There's no security any more. If you don't do well, forget about staying in the business. There's nothing backing you up." And says Jim Frawley: "The saying 'You're only as good as your last picture' is as true as ever."

But one salvation may lie in the fact that the current crop of new directors are an unusually close group who, despite the inevitable competition among themselves, enjoy an extremely strong sense of camaraderie. They call up one another on the telephone, ask to see each other's works, offer critiques and congratulate one another on their triumphs.

"It's important for young directors to stick • together and talk," says Ralph Bakshi. "If we stay together and stay honest, we can push the business into better films. If we play it alone and play it safe," Bakshi adds quickly, "we can blow it alL" 0

INDO-AMERICAN COMMERCIAL RELATIONS

by STEPHEN DUNCAN-PETERS Commercial Attache American Embassy, New Delhi

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Surveying the gamut of Indo-U.S. commercial relations, the author remarks: 'We both need to expand trade between our countries and we assume both of us want to do so.' But the relationship 'must be mutually beneficial. It will also require frankness, trust and pragmatism.'

Much has happened within these last few months to make the harmonious commercial relationship between the United States and India a reasonable objective for both our nations. In reaching agreement on the disposal of the PL-480 rupee fund, our two governments have opened a new chapter in economic relations.

What can one say about Indo-American commercial relationsboth trade and investments? This is a dangerous area to explore.

A morass of misconceptions and misunderstandings, it also harbors some statistical minefields and a few ideological booby traps. It is difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction, so we had best tread carefully.

The United States is India's largest trading partner. According to Indian Fiscal Year 1971-1972 data-the latest annual data available-th~ U.S. provided over 22.7 per cent ofIndia's imports and absorbed 16.2 per cent ofIndia's total exports. Both of these shares represented the: largest single entity in India's foreign trade. On the other hane}, India's trade with the United Statesas measured by U.S. statistics for calendar year 1972-shows that India accounted for only Rs. 263 crores out of total U.S. exports of Rs. 37,291.4 crares. This represents only seven-tenths of one per cent (0.70 per cent). America's imports from India amounted to Rs. 319 crores out of a grand totaL of Rs. 41,672 crores or about eight-tenths of one per cent (0.71 per cent).

India ranked only 24th amongst the United States' trading partners. That disparity underlines-and complicates~Indo-American commercial relations.

This complication (which appears again and again in IndoAmerican statistical comparisons) can be demonstrated by the example of two people looking at the state of the world. The optimist says, "This is the best of all possible worlds." The pessimist says, "Too true, too true." Looking at your imports from the United States you, naturally enough, view them as something large and significant, accounting for one-fifth or onefourth of your total world-wide imports. We, on the other hand, react differently because they represent only a minute fraction of our overseas sales. Our current annual exports to India are somewhat less than the value of our annual sales to Denmark.

Or, gauged against those of our major customer, Canada, they are roughly equivalent to one week's purchases by America's northern neighbor.

At this point some people may very well think: "Poor India."

Yet-paradoxical as it may sound-India has a favorable balance of trade with the United States! Your 1972 exports to the United States exceeded our exports to you by Rs. 57.8 crores. Last year followed the same trend because the January-June totals show Indian exports of $207.4 million versus U.S. exports of $193.9 million, a difference of $13.5 million or Rs. 10.8 crores in your favor.

These figures may evoke some surprise-and perhaps some doubt. Well, there should not be any surprise or dOUbt, because

'What we in America regard as an Indian mouse is-when examined in an Indian context-suddenly transformed into an American elephant in India.'

India has been enjoying a favorable balance of trade, where the United States is concerned, for several years.

A casual reading of Indo-American trade statistics over the previous five years (i.e. Indian Fiscal Years 1966-1967 to 19711972, inclusive) show total U.S. exports to India valued at Rs. 2,682 crores ($3,578 million) whereas your exports to America for this period come to only Rs. 1,145 crores ($1,528 million).

At first glance the balance of trade appears to be overwhelmingly adverse-minus Rs. 1,537 crores. But appearances can be deceiving.

Of the Rs. 2,682 crores India imported from the U.S., some 48 per cent or Rs. 1,285 crores ($1,726 million) were U.S. AIDfinanced imports while another 23 per cent or Rs. 624 crores ($825 million) were PL-480 financed imports. In other words, only 29 per cent or Rs. 773 crores ($1,020 million) were paid for

by Indian-owned free foreign exchange. So, the adverse balance of trade of minus Rs. 1,537 crores is suddenly transformed into a respectable favorable balance of plus Rs. 372 crores.

We have seen how easy it is to reach erroneous conclusions.

Even with the best of intentions, inadvertently false premises can be established and accepted as unquestioned fact. To a very considerable degree the disparities and mistaken assumptions surrounding Indo-American trade reappear in American thinking about U.S. private investment in India.

Americans tend to diminish or downgrade the importanceand therefore the impact-of U.S. investments in India. Viewed from American perspective and American statistics, U.S. investments in India accounted for .0038 per cent or less than fourtenths of one per cent of total world-wide U.S. investments. As with American trade statistics, the level of U.S. investments in this country was slightly below the level of U.S. investments in Denmark.

But when we view these very same investments from an Indian perspective, we see a completely opposite picture. U.S. investments in India as of March 31, 1968, accounted for a substantial 27.3 per cent of all foreign investments in India. They were second in importance only to those of the United Kingdom with its solid share of 40.5 per cent. So, what we in America regard as an Indian mouse is-when examined in an Indian contextsuddenly transformed into an American elephant in India. Is it any wonder therefore that honest differences of opinion arise?

Sincere misunderstandings are unavoidable, but we are also called upon to deal with arguments based upon ideological or theoretical premises often presented in the form of partisan political polemics. One hears or reads much criticism of the profits made by foreign firms and their repatriation of the same as dividends. How valid is this and other related criticisms of the multinational or other foreign enterprise? Empirical answers are not easy to find because precious little statistical data exists. But a few signposts do exist.

According to U.S. statistics, American investments in India in 1971 returned a percentage of 12.8 per cent. Compared to moreor-less comparable developing country markets, U.S. investors earned 9.3 per cent in Latin America, 12.9 per cent in Africa (South Africa and Libya excluded), and 16.8 per cent in Asia and

the Pacific (Japan, Australia, New Zealand excluded). A return of that size is neither inordinate nor unreasonable. It warrants neither alarm nor apology.

One can, of course, select a specificcase and, by misrepresenting it as a typical example, create an impression that every company in that industry or in that country has behaved in a similar manner. Hardly anyone would be miive enough to believe that all foreign business entities in any large economy will be model corporate citizens and-like Caesar's wife'-be above reproach.

I trust we can be equally realistic in rejecting any converse claims branding all foreign companies as economic Messalinas (who, by the way, was a wife of a Caesar!).

If we are to achieve a mature or balanced relationship, we must be prepared to evaluate each issue that will arise-and many will crop up to disturb or distract us-on its respective merits. This is more easily said than done, especially when the issue involves strangers from another community or a distant land. You will be called upon from time to time to pass judgment on the earnings of a foreign company making substantial profits in India. You will not have a similar problem with foreign firms losing money because, oddly enough, their travails are accepted with commendable equanimity.

But I digress, so let us return to the foreign company making substantial profits. What else has the company been doing?

How many people does it employ? How many others (dependents of employees, workers in transportation and other ancillary services) depend upon the company, directly or indirectly for their livelihood and well-being? What technology, what production methodologies, what marketing techniques has the company introduced into India? What impact has its presence had on India's imports and exports? What taxes does it pay? Put these and all other related or relevant factors in your judgment scales.

¡Both India and the U.S. have balance-of-payments problems.

The balance quickly tips the other way. The image of the comWe assume that both India and the U.S. will strive to obtain the pany changes. It is no longer a leech but a hard-working buffalo, earning its keep and contributing many times more than what it maximum benefits from our foreign trade. We are also aware of and respect India's decision to maintain a mature or balanced earns or merits. relationship, one based upon political equality and economic You will also hear (usually in "enlightened" academic circles) freedom of choice. In brief, we both need to expand trade or read (usually in the "progressive press") that large foreign companies abuse their monopolistic advantages and hold the between our countries and we assume both of us want to do so.

On our part we do not intend to let political or ideological country in economic thrall. Horsefeathers!

No capitalist has considerations steer our trade promotion efforts into narrow, ever succeeded in finding a monopolistic Shangri-La. No contemporary civilized society, able to direct its own destiny, will restricted channels. We are seeking new markets in the Soviet tolerate domination of its productive resources by any cartel or Union and the People's Republic of China. We are no longer confining investors to the "capitalist" or developing countries. other coteries of capitalistic entrepreneurs.

When one reviews India, too, has weighed the many political and economic the ample legislative and judicial powers available to any sovereign government today it soon becomes evident that it is the factors affecting its commercial interests. One thing is self-evident.

India has current and in some cases urgent needs for a wide company and not the state that has the most to fear. variety of capital goods: power-generating equipment, steel As a sovereign state, India has exercised the right to determine mills, fertilizer plants, ships, commercial aircraft, mining what kind of a relationship it will accord foreign enterprise. machinery, scientific and laboratory equipment, pulp and paper Investments from abroad are permitted under prescribed criteria and conditions. Yet, for one reason or another, my office in the mills, textile machinery, etc. Some of these are more readily American Embassy in New Delhi has not been deluged by in- available in the United States than elsewhere. We can deliver quiries or visits from American business concerns. them sooner than anyone else and our prices are competitive.

I investigated this situation in the United States last summer Many of them are available to you in several markets. We and have discussed it with Indian officials in New York as well as believe that we have more to offer in advanced technology, and in in New Delhi. There is no simple answer. Economics would not dependability of performance than our competitors.

In any be the most dismal of sciences if explanations were readily event, we are in a position to meet many if not most of India's available. The answer may perhaps be guessed at by examining needs. The question confronting both of us is not one of desire the few facts we have at our disposal. to trade but of means. We want to trade but how can we overcome the primary, inhibiting factor-India's limited foreign Well over 100 countries, developed and developing, with exchange resources? economies that range from the prospering to the poverty-stricken, The immediate but overly simplified answer is expand India's are currently competing for foreign investment. It should perthat is not an immediately available haps be. emphasized that all of the developed countries are exports. Unfortunately, solution. But let us discuss India's exports to the United States. striving to attract foreign manufacturers to their markets. Many of these industrialized nations have ample capital resources of India has unrestricted' access to the American market, and this is reflected by India's steadily increasing sales which reached a their own, but they are seeking proven contemporary production record level of Rs. 342 crores ($427 million) in 1972. technologies and/or the very latest results of successful research Despite drought and other domestic difficulties, India's export and development projects undertaken in other advanced societies. efforts will probably approach that level this year. Without The United States is also doing its best to provide a favorable oversimplifying matters, I can aver that the future of Indian investment climate for foreign as well as domestic capital within exports to the United States depends upon India. The market its own borders. This effort has seen foreign direct investments demand for quality, reasonin the United States rise steadily from the 1965 level of only is there. Meet its requirements-a able prices, reliability of delivery-and India can double or reRs.46 crores to Rs.824 crores in 1970. double its exports.

These facts should belie the oft-repeated and still widely Our task of expanding our exports to India and helping India prevalent fiction that American and other foreign investors are hungrily seeking new prey. meet its needs will be much more complex. We have no illusions The competition for advanced¡ technical know-how and for of immediate success, but that has neither discouraged nor deterred us. We have been investigating every reasonable prospect foreign investment capital is intense. The number of multinational and other large companies able to supply these on a sig- and testing many techniques to develop more sales to India.

In co-operation with Indian state trading entities, foreign trade nificantly large scale is surprisingly limited-considerably under firms, banks and commercial associations, we have been jointly 1,000major industrial or banking enterprises in all. discussing a wide range of possible alternatives ranging from the Some but by no means all large companies may be interested in investing in developing countries. However, precious few if development of new, previously unutilized sources of credit to any will be under any immediate compulsion to risk their know- multilateral barter deals. We will continue these efforts and will welcome suggestions or assistance to develop other approaches. how, time, resources and personnel in questionable ventures.

They generally have a number of options available to them. They Given good will and equitable consideration, we hope to overcome many of the factors which have inhibited purchases carefully pick and choose before committing themselves.

I have discussed our current commercial relationships at of American machinery and products in recent years. And again, given good will and mutual understanding, we can eliminate most considerable length because, like it or not, that is the foundation of the doubts and suspicions that prevent a more satisfactory and upon which India and the U.S. will build whatever new relationmore productive partnership between foreign investors and India. ship is to be ¡erected in the future.

A more mature and more balanced Indo-American comIf India and America are to have a viable commercial relationship, it must be mutually beneficial. It will also require frankness, mercial relationship is needed, is desirable, and is feasible. Both 0 trust and pragmatism. To be pragmatic we must also be honest. India and America can and should strive to bring it about.

About 30 of the world's poorer countries in Asia, Africa and the Americas will become the principal victims of the increased cost of oil and its resultant effect on both the price and availability of food and fertilizer, according to recent press reports.

While there is almost unanimous agreement that high oil prices are having a near ruinous effect on the world's economy, there seem to be differences of opinion among the major oil-producing nations as to what should be done about it.

For example, the Los Angeles Times reported from Bonn that "Iranian Premier Amir Abbas Hoveida said he was certain 'the price of oil is not something that will come down.' " The Bonn dispatch added, that "his remarks to a press conference appeared to be at variance with the opinion of Sheik Ahmad Zaki Yamani of Saudi Arabia. In several interviews in recent days, Yamani has been quoted as saying the price of crude oil, currently about $11 a barrel, was too high and should come down to maybe $7 a barrel."

There also seem to be differences of opinion between oil-producing nations on how to handle aid to less developed nations. While the Shah of Iran has proposed contributions to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, a New York Times dispatch from Kuwait reported that "Kuwait intends to deploy her oil riches primarily through channels under Arab control and will not contribute to special funds proposed by the Shah of Iran and the International Monetary Fund to meet the world's oil payments crisis."

Meanwhile, planning officials in developing nations around the world are left in a state of perplexity concerning the eventual price of oil and the future aid they may, or may not, receive.

A regional energy conference in Bangkok, sponsored by the United Nations Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East (ECAFE), warned that soaring import costs could lead to "further deterioration in the already low standard of living" in Asia's developing nations.

"The disastrous impact of soaring oil prices," a Baltimore Sun dispatch said, would hit "the three popuIQu.s,poor countries of the South Asian subcontinent, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh."

As an example, the Sun said, in India "the. cost of petroleum imports rose from $355 million in 1972 to $535 million last year, and is expected to more than triple to $1,700 million this year."

The Sun article said India's representative at the conference, T.!.

Shanker, "told the meeting that unless substantial financial aid could be found, the rising prices would mean that India will not be able to import the petroleum products needed for its 1974-1979 five-year plan." He predicted a "shortfall of one million tons of fuel for agricultural purposes alone" and explained that "would mean inability to irrigate about 10 million acres of land with the resulting loss of five million tons of food grains."

The Sun also reported that Pakistan's representative at the conference, V.A. Jafery, said "10 tons of wheat would be lost for every ton of urea-the petroleum-based ingredient of nitrogen fertilizer -that is unavailable because of the oil crisis."

A similar forecast in the Christian Science Monitor said, "the poorest fourth of the world could slip into a period of incredible chaos within the next 12 months."

"Normally restrained experts on energy, agriculture, population and the global economy are starting to predict bankruptcy, social breakdown and starvation for as many as 1,000 million people by late this year or early 1975," the Monitor said.

The Monitor article said "the cost of energy, mostly oil," was among the chief elements of the crisis and would raise the cost of food and fertilizer imports by "at least $5,000 million more."

A report in the New York Times, based on a study made by James P. Grant, head of the Overseas Development Council, said that approximately 30 countries with a population of over 900 million people would be "the most serious victims of the big increases in the prices of oil, food and fertilizer .... " "The group includes such nations as India, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, several countries in Central America and the Caribbean and the countries of West Africa," the Times reported.

Quoting Grant, the Times said these nations "need about $9,000 million to avoid having their noses go under water."

An editorial in the Colombo Daily Sun indicated displeasure there with the combination of rising oil prices and terrorism that are victimizing many nations in the world.

The Colombo editorial said: "The time has come when we shall have to call a spade a spade, and take our stand among the nations of the world who have minced no words in condemning the breakdown of international law and order, and the exposure of innocent people as victims of causes in which they have not the remotest interest."

The editorial continued that the Arab countries did not spare Asia when they decided "to hold Europe and America to ransom on the oil hike. This was the first sign that the Zionist quarrel was acquiring an unwarranted universality."

The editorial went on to condemn this combination of steeply rising oil costs and terrorism that has brought "the law of the jungle" to too many nations.

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PROBING JUPITER'S SECRETS On March 2, 1972, a little spacecraft named Pioneer-IO was launched from America's Cape Canaveral, and by now it has traveled farther than any man-made object. Last December it flew by Jupiter and transmitted back to Earth a wealth of valuable information about what many astronomers regard as the most interesting and mysterious planet in the solar system. Some of the things it sent back were color photographs like the one above, which shows Jupiter's famous Red Spot (left), its striated cloud structure, and the small shadow of 10 (right), one of the planet's 12 moons. After takin,.g measurements of Jupiter's temperature, magnetic field, radiation belts and atmospheric composition, Pioneer also sent

back data which scientists are using to hypothesize that Jupiter was originally a "little brother" to the sun but never "made it" as a star. Having now passed Jupiter, Pioneer-IO is heading toward the deepest recesses of the solar system-and beyond. Next stop will be the orbit of Saturn in 1976, Uranus in 1979, Neptune in 1983, and finally Pluto in 1987. An estimated 11 million years after the spacecraft has left the solar system, mathematicians expect it to reach the constellation Taurus. And in case'Pioneer-IO meets intelligent life on its 19n9:;nd, Ibnely journey' toward infinity, it carries a plaque on thesi~e ~ith diagrams of a h~l:nan male and female-plus directionsabout how to locate the Earth.

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