SPAN: July 1978

ALmER

FROM

THE PUBLISHER Daniel J. Boorstin is one of the most exciting interpreters of American history. His innovation has been to tell the story of the United States in terms of its technological development.

Thus, for example, in one of the chapters of his Pulitzer Prize-winning trilogy, The Americans: The Democratic Experience, Professor Boorstin describes how Americans, in developing the manufacture of ready-to-wear clothing, put into practice the democratic principle of equality. Not merely in the United States, but all over the world, ordinary people could wear relatively inexpensive clothing of good quality and fit. The social and psychological consequences of this democracy of clothing were considerable-the common person came to feel the equal of his social "superior" inwardly as well as outwardly. Politically, too, he could feel freer to assert his independence of former masters.

July being the month of American independence from British colonial rule, SPAN presents as its lead article Professor Boorstin's further thoughts on the connection between politics and technology-as well as education-in the American experience.

April 1978 witnessed a milestone in American history: the ratification by the U.S. Senate of treaties gradually yielding the sovereignty of the Panama Canal to the Government of Panama. The treaties were the subject of strong controversy in the United States, since the canal had been built by American ingenuity at an enormous cost in lives and money, and is considered important for American security. But the U.S. Government had committed itself to cede the canal to the country of its location. There was a full and prolonged public debate, accompanied by compromises on the part of both the American and Panamanian governments, before the treaties were presented in a form acceptable to the U.S. Senate, as representative of the people. The Panama Canal treaties have been hailed as a model of the democratic process and international cooperation. A colorful article on the Panama Canal, how it was built, how it works and the lives of the people who live in the Panama Canal Zone is presented here to supply the background for the signing of the treaties.

At home, in the United States, commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the tragic assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., served as an occasion for pause and reflection.

How far has the United States gone in realizing King's immortal phrase, "I have a dream .... "? To what extent has the historic injustice against blacks been reduced-in jobs, homes, education? A SPAN correspondent in the United States soberly appraises the pluses and minuses of the past decade of full-scale effort to provide equal opportunity for American blacks.

In response to what is obviously a matter of much concern to our readers, we asked our managing editor to interview one of the U.S. consular officers on the procedures connected with getting visas to go to the United States, particularly for student nonimmigrants. It was a no-holdsbarred session; difficult questions were posed insistently, and the answers were equally forthright. Readers of this article will learn who, and under what circumstances, can get a visa; the role of the visa officer; and the general provisions of American immigration legislation. The subject is a complicated one; in subsequent issues of SPAN we will publish articles on the background of U.S. immigration legislation, -J.W.G. and on the lives of new immigrants.

SPAN 2 A Guide for Visa Seekers 4 Black America: A Decade Mter the Death of SPAN Interviews a U.S. Visa Officer

Martin Luther King

by Ross Chomiak

5 Political

Technology: The Continuing American Experiment by Daniel l. Boorstin

11 Understanding Indian Music 1 4 Surrounding Our Lives With Art 1 8 The Rise of Citizen Power 20 A Passage Through the Panama Canal 2 6 The Art of the Poster 2 8 The Five Careers of Rene Dubos

by Yehudi Menuhin

by Krishna Chaitanya

by Gerald Rosen'

by Bart McDowell

by Richard Kostelanetz

32 34 41

Revisiting America

by Anees lung

44 46

The American Record on Disarmament

by Hugh O. Muir

49 Front cover: Imaginatively using one art form, painting, to portray another, music, Milton Glaser's poster for the Temple University Music Festival colorfully demonstrates the theme of the Poster and the Arts exhibition being shown in India. See pages 26-27.

Back cover: Art Anthony takes two friends for a ride in his bare-framed, homemade airplane Breezy, one of over 400 unusual aircraft on display at the annual exhibition of the 48,000-member Experimental Aircraft Association in Wisconsin. See page 49.

JACOB SLOAN, Editor: JAY W. GILDNER, Publisher.

Managing Editor: Chidananda Dasgupta. Assistant Managing Editor: S.R. Madhu.

Editorial Staff: Krishan Gabrani, Aruna Dasgupta, Ninnal Sharma, Murari Saha, Rocque Fernandes. Art Director: Nand Katyal. Art Staff: Gopi Gajwani, B. Roy Choudhury, Kanti Roy. Chief of Prodnction: Awtar S. Marwaha. Photo Editor: Avinash Pasricha. Photographic Services: ICA Photo tab. Published by the International Communication Agency, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001, 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 Aroon Purie at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Haryana.

Photographs: 14-15 botlom-Avinash National Geographic Society. 2S-Joe

Pasricha. 19-Paul Conklin. 21.25-George F. Mobley, copyright Š 1975 Baker. 41- Yog Joy. 49 and back cover- Mickey Pfleger.

Use of SPAN articles in other publications is encouraged, except when copyrighted. For permission, write to the Editor. Price of magazine: one year's subscription (12 issues). tS rupees; single copy. 2 rupees 50 paise. For chanse of address, send an old address from a recent SPAN envelope along with new address to A.K. Mitra, Circulation Manager, SPAN Magazine, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001. .

A GUIDE FOR VISA SEEKERS The United States has been called 'A Nation of Immigrants'; but today it takes some effort to get a visa even to visit it, not to speak of emigrating. The need to guarantee the freedom and to protect the interests of its citizens-i.e., the 'immigrants' from all over the world who are already there-induced the United States to guard against an uncontrolled entry of more people from abroad. Some of the control procedures may seem onerous to an applicant who does not know the reasons for them. So that these procedures as well as the reasons for them may be better understood; the managing editor of SP AN interviewed a visa officer who faces the daily task of granting and refusing visas. Their candid exchange follows.

Q: Suppose I want to go to the United States, how do I get a visa?

of proving that he does not intend to do so is on him. This is categorically laid down in the U.S. immigration law. Very often this does present a problem, especially for young people who are not well settled in a job or do not have a going business, or property and family ties in their own country.

Q: That's rather unfair, isn't it, this presumption

A: It depends on what kind of visa you want.

If you want to go and live in the United States, you need a permanent or immigrant visa; to visit there, a temporary one.

Q: First ten me about the temporary one.

A: Temporary visas are for tourists, students, diplomats, temporary workers, trainees, news- of guilt? Why should it be necessary for the paper correspondents on an assignment, and person to prove that he is innocent and that be all others who wish to go there without wanting does not wish to settle down in the United States? to live there permanently. These are known as A: Because once a person is in the United nonimmigrant visas. If you apply for a non- States, he or she is completely free. We have immigrant visa, you must show first that you do no means of knowing who is a citizen and who not intend to stay there .permanently; that you is not, or who has a temporary visa but has have a place of residence somewhere outside taken a job and turned illegal immigrant. the United States where you will go after your Q: You have no identity card system? temporary stay in the United States is over. The A: We have no internal controls at all. Only second requirement is that you should have proof twice is an alien screened to see if he meets the of having sufficientfunds available to cover your requirements of immigration laws; once at the expenses while you are in the United States as a Consular Office in the country in which he tourist or a student or whatever. The visa officer . applies for his visa, and once more at the Immigration Office at the port of entry into will also look for certain other things-for instance in the case of students, academic the United States. People say, "Well if they qualifications, adequaty grasp of the English overstay, why don't you throw them out?" language, and so on; if you are a businessman, We can't do that. American courts are very who your contacts are, what the trip is all strict about human rights and the freedom of the individual, and they have often slapped about. ... down the Immigration Service for trying to Q: It sounds fairly simple, but I bear that actually deport people. They are not allowed to go many people have difficulties in getting a visa.

A: Hundre.ds of visas are being issued all the around kicking c;lowndoors and hauling people time, especially temporary visas. The problem up in the middle of the night. In fact, the courts is that immigrant visas have rather strict require- have ruled that Immigration can't pick up ments, and not everyone who wants to live in someone for questioning just because he looks the United States permanently can get an like a foreigner. immigrant visa. So it happens sometimes that Q: But is just anybody allowed to work in the people apply for a temporary visa in order to United States? get to the United States, and then try to change A: No, only those who have permanent status their status and become immigrants. We have and hold a green card. There is legislation against to guard against this misuse of the temporary employers who knowingly hire people who are visa. You see, U.S. law presupposes that anyone not authorized to work and are there illegally; applying for any kind of visa intends to stay in but it only provides for civil penalties, it is not me United States indefinitely;. and the burden a criminal offense.

Q: And that is not a sufficient deterrent?

A: Well, some employers do want to see the green card before hiring yoa, but very often there are others ready to take aqyantage of your illegal status to exploit you, pay you substandard wages, avoid deducting your income tax or social security or to provide any of the normal benefits. This has led to a very undesirable situation in many American cities.

So, you see, it becomes very important to go into every aspect of an applicant's case before he gets to the United States. That is why even when a person wants to go on a visit or to study there, he has to prove that he is not going to stay on indefinitely.

Q:

Yes, but bow does he prove that?

A: There is no hard and fast rule. We do not prescribe what he has to do to prove his intention of leaving the United States after he has finished his studies or signed his contract or when the purpose of his trip is over. This is why we interview almost everyone who applies for a visa.

We have to get the sense of the whole situation.

It is not merely a question of whether the person has a relative in the United States, not just whether his English is good, or whether he has a job waiting for him on return to India. It's more a question of all his circumstances taken together. Where is his money to come from?

What are his family circumstances? If he is working, what kind of a job does he have?

What are his own financial obligations? We look at all these facts, and listen carefully to anything else he wants to tell us about himself and his situation to show that the trip is only temporary.

Q: But take the case of a student who has been accepted by an American. university. How does he prove that be does not intend to stay forever?

In fact, is it possible to prove it?

A: Certainly. We issue lots of student visas, and those people have evidently satisfied the visa officer that they intend only to go for their

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" studies and then come back.

Q : Yes, but what is the nature of this proof?

A; It depends. I cannot say, "Bring us documents ABCD and we will give you a visa." If does not work that way. We can't apply the same requirements to everybody except in a very general way. In other words, the person must show us that he does not intend to remain permanently in the United States. It is up to the person, because everyone's circumstances are different, his intentions, plans are different.

Q: Take the case of a student. Let's say his circumstances are comfortable-he has the assurance of a job in his own country, he is a good student, his English is good, he has strong family ties at home. Can't you say, okay, that's the kind of person who will get a visa? Or, can you specify any other requirements you have?

A: That is what I am trying to say. We cannot lay down specific requirements, because that's as if we are trying to fit everybody into the same mold, and we can't do it. Just as people come in different sizes, they also come in different situations and we must consider each case on an individual basis.

Q: Wouldn't that give people the impression that yourjudgments are subjective?

A: In a sense they are, and they have to be.

We are dâ‚Źaling with people. Any time you do that, there is an element of subjectivity somewhere along the line. We try to be as objective as possible. Even if someone does not get a visa the first time, 'if he has additional information later that would help establish his intention of a temporary stay, we are always willing to reopen the case.

Q: All this is because you think anyone who wants a visa is a potential immigrant?

A: The term "potential immigrant" is incorrect.

We do not refuse a visa because we think that at some point in the future, the person may change his mind and decide to remain permanently in the United States. As a matter of fact, he has a perfect right to ruake that decision. The law recognizes that people do change their minds, and the Immigration Service in the United States meets this situation all the time. There is a procedure for it. You apply to Immigration for a change of status from temporary to permanent, and, quite often, it is granted. But the term "potential immigrant" is a misnomer, because what we try to understand is the person's intention at the time that he applies for a visa and meets the consular officer.

Q: That's rather a fine difference, isn't it? You say that in the law the presumption is that he is a potential immigrant.

A: No, not a potential immigrant. The law presumes that his intention at the time that he appliesfor a visa is to stay permanently.

Q: Wen, it comes to the same thing.

A: No, it doesn't. A potential immigrant is one who may want to become an immigrant in the future.

Q: SO the presumption is the presumption of intention at the time of application?

A: That's exactly right, and it is a very important distinction. There is a lot of misunderstanding on this. People who do not qualify for a temporary visa seem to feel that their visas have been refused because in tpe opinion of the visa officer they may in the future become immigrants. This is not correct, because the visa officer makes a judgment on the basis of what he understands to be the applicant's intention at the time that he stands in front ofthe visa officer.

This is what the law requires.

Q: Of the various temporary visa applicants, which type encounters the greatest difficulty?

A: Dh, students, undoubtedly. They have the highest rate of adjustments from temporary to permanent status of all such adjustments40 per cent. In the five years from 1971 to 1975, 20 per cent of all Indian students who went to the United States stayed on. They are the ones who are in the United States for a long time, and tend to change their mind. It is not surprising. And India is different from ruany other countries in that student applicants all want to go to the United States for graduate training.

Q: Whereas in other countries?

A: Many go for undergraduate training, or even lower school studies. Besides, most of the Indian student applicants are well qualified and very talented; of the people who go on temporary visas, they are the ones who stay the longest. When you are young and have been away from home for (our or fiv~ years, it is more difficult to come back and adapt. It is

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natural to want to stay on. This is a factor that has to be considered, and one that students are aware of. If you are a student applicant, I must ask: With the problems of re-entering your society after a long stay abroad and a graduate degree earned in the United States, are you actually thinking of staying on or are you coming back to face all the re-entry problems? These days, students often have their wives and families with them, making return still 'more difficult.

They finish their degrees and begin to feel more at home where they are, where they have been living and working-than in the country they left. Frequently, that is when the change of plan occurs, after four or five years. It is a legitimate change of mind. The question that concerns us is whether the applicant for a visa is thinking of staying on in the United States at the time he comes to the visa office.

Q: Do students who go for certain types of study have a greater tendency to stay on than others?

For instance, does this happen more in medicine than in engineering or anything like that?

A: Dh yes. We did a breakdown in our sample of adjustments last year, and the main field of adjustments was engineering by a wide margin; then came the sciences in general, then computer programing and business administration. Everything else trailed way, way behind.

Usually, after they have taken their advanced degree, there is practical training with a company in their field of specialization, for up to a year.

It is really employment; and it is frequently the source of the job offer that follows.

Q: O.K., so that's an about students. Now the other temporary visas, are they any simpler to get?

A:, Usually, yes. A visitor visa, for instance, is pretty simple and usually involves very little documentation. People go to see relatives or friends or somebody they know who is going to (Continued on page 45)

BLACK AMERICA: A DECADE AFTER THE DEATH OF MIRTIN LUTHER KING And this year the U.S. Congress is expected to pass special It is now 10 years since Martin Luther King, Jr. died. The passing of a decade has stimulated the American media, political legislation designed to reduce unemployment. The Humphreyleaders and observers to examine the present status of black Hawkins bill, named for the late Senator Hubert Humphrey and Americans and compare it to that at the time of Dr. King's black Congressman Augustus Hawkins who sponsored it, was forcefully supported by Dr. King's followers, including his widow assassination.

Since there are 25 million black Americans in all socio- Coretta, because it is aimed primarily at the blacks and other economic strata, it is possible to show both progress and the minorities who are unemployed.

But it would be wrong to peg the progress of blacks in America lack of it.

For example: Figures show that now a third of black America to the death of Martin Luther King. It was what¡ Dr. King has joined the nation's middle-class. Blacks comprise the largest accomplished during his lifetime, and a small segment of it at segment of the nation's poor, and there are now more blacks that, that set the foundation for change in America as a whole and for the betterment of blacks in particular. who are millionaires than there were 10 years ago.

It is worth remembering that in the spring of 1963-five One-quarter of all college-age black Americans are enrolled in colleges-the same proportion as that for the whites. At the years before he was shot-Dr. King was writing from a southern same time, young blacks constitute the highest category of jail about the reasons for his protest marches against the segregation which was still practiced in that part of the country. In the unemployed Americans.

It was a decade ago that the U.S. Government started summer of that year he was addressing 250,000 people who programs aimed at encouraging minority-owned businesses and marched on Washington. The next year-1964-Congress directed a portion of government contracts their way. A recent passed the Civil Rights Act, followed by the Voting Rights Act survey indicates that the rate of growth of these businesses is in 1965. Both these acts are now recognized as important milenow two to three times higher than that for American businesses stones in the history of blacks in America.

It is also worth remembering that before he died, Martin in general.

Lurther King was already expanding his movement into wider spheres, encompassing the entire American society~ The major civil rights accomplishments were behind him, and he was awakening the conscience of America to the "evils" of the war in Southeast Asia. He warned that the bombs dropped in those distant lands were going to explode in American cities, because they were diverfing funds away from the needs of the urban poor.

He was proved right, when the pent-up frustrations exploded shortly after his death, in riots, fires and lootings in a number of American cities ..

These calamities shook the sensitivities of many Americans and forced them to see things they chose not to see before.

Meanwhile, the civil rights and voting rights acts led to a dramatic increase in the number of black Americans holding elected public office. There are now more than 4,000 of them, and thousands more are in important government offices and in industry.

Perhaps the most brilliant and visible example of this change is Dr. King's close associate, Andrew Young. Ten years ago, Young worked out of small offices of the movement, or while traveling, from motels like the one in Memphis, Tennessee, where Dr. King died on April 4, 1968. Today, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, he represents the United States before the world, after winning two terms as an elected member of Congress from a southern district that had not elected a black for 100 years.

These people both represent a change since Martin Luther King's time, and are in positions from which they can and do Coretta Scott King listens to a prayer by her father-in-law, the Reverend effect more change.

But all the problems of black Americans are not yet solved.

Martin Luther King, Sr., during a service marking the tenth anniversary 0 The struggle continues. of the death of her husband, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.

hen we look back on the series of events between 1776 and 1789 which brought forth the United States of America, we must first be struck that the leaders were interested less in the ideology-the formulation of a systematic philosophy-than in the technology of politics. They were testing well-known principles by applying them to their specific problems. Their special concern was "to organize the means for satisfying needs and desires" -which is a dictionary definition of technology. There are a number of clues to this open, experimental, technological spirit of our North American revolutionaries.

Our first and most obvious clues are in the basic and enduring documents of the Revolution. The most important of these, of course, was the Declaration of Independence, which bore the date of July 4, 1776. The most quoted and best known passage, the Preamble, was actually the least characteristic. The colonists' principles were first described as "selfevident." Then "a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind" (as well as the exigencies of diplomacy) required a cogent summary of the causes of the particular act which they declared - the separation of 13 British colonies. When Thomas Jefferson was accused of writing a document that had not one new idea in it, he recalled his clear, simple, practical purpose: "Not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take." The body of the document applied these well-known principlesnot the dogma of a particular sect, but accepted tenets of British political life during the previous century-to the conduct of the British king, who had asserted unlimited sovereignty over certain American colonists. The heart of the document was a list not of principles but of grievances. Some 26 items indicted the king for a wide range of specific crimes. These ranged from the king's wanton refusal to assent to needed legislation, to interference with the courts, the imposition of standing armies without the consent of the colonial legislatures, the quartering of troops on unwilling inhabitants, the protection of murderers, the obstruction

of seaports, and the cutting off of trade.

The American birth certificate thus unwittingly but obviously certified a congenital concern for everyday consequences. The document was not primarily a declaration of principles or a proclamation of the rights of man, it was a declaration of independence ....

While, of course, independence was what made the new nation possible, confederation was what made it durable.

Despite its eloquence, the Declaration of Independence might have remained buried in colonial archives along with the early state papers of Bermuda, the Bahamas, and Jamaica if it had not been followed within a dozen years by the Constitution of the United States of America. The longevity and vitality of the Constitution came from the fact that the framers aimed to guide the future but not fence it in. The best evidence of their self-denying intention was that their document was so brief.

The Constitution of the United States, which anyone can read in an hour is a scant 25 pages long. By contrast the constitution of my home state of Oklahoma is 158 pages, not counting amendments. Because the framers of the Federal Constitution were scrupulous to say no more than necessary, they provided a document uncannily open to the future.

The three opening words, "We the People," would prove troublesome. In their ambiguity was rooted the bloody Civil War of 1861-1865. For the leaders of the Southern states, preferring to imagine that these words really. meant' "We the States," argued that the .states which had made the Uniori could' also dissolve it.

The Constitution was not to take effect until the people had adopted it.

"This expression [We the People]," explained Henry ("Light-Horse Harry") Lee, "was introduced ... with great propriety. This system is submitted to the people for their consideration, because on them it is to operate, if adopted.

It is not binding on the people until it becomes their act." The framers had the wisdom, in preparing a Constitution for posterity, not to try to elaborate or make more explicit the meaning of "the People." They did not say "we the property-owners" or "we the qualified voters."

Their words, an adequate working definition in their time, would be a

Daniel J. Boorstin,

who received the Pulitzer Prize for his book, The Democratic Experience, is the director of the Library of Congress.

Among his other published works are Decline of

u.s.

Radicalism: Reflections on America Today, The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson and What Happened to the American Dream. This article is drawn from Boorstin's book, The Republic of Technology: Reflections on Our Future Community, to be published this month by Harper & Row.

providential receptacle for new meanings-as civil and political rights were extended to nonproperty owners-to former slaves, to women, to persons above the age of 18, and possibly to other categories now still beyond our imagining.

All the listed purposes of the Constitution grew out of the urgencies of the framers' recent experience. The tribulations of the loose confederation during the late war signaled the need for a "more perfect Union," the oppressive interference of the British Government with the courts indicated the need to "establish Justice," recent civil disorders (Shays' Rebellion in western Massachusetts, and others elsewhere) made obvious the need to "insure domestic tranquillity," while the war itself and the later designs of European powers on the new nation showed the need to "provide for the common defence." This antidoctrinaire empirical spirit would keep the document openly responsive to later needs ....

In these and countless other ways the founding fathers decla~ed themselves custodians of an expanding future. Federalism was their grand device for holding together experimenting communities.

Each state's experiments were limited only when they violated the rights of individuals, threatened the experiments of others, or weakened the whole national community. The ingenious add-a-state plan allowed a national laboratory to grow by installments.

"We may safely trust to the wisdom of our successors the remedies of evils to

arise," Jefferson wrote to John Adams less than a decade after the Constitutional Convention: Never was a finer canvas presented to work on than our countrymen. All of them engaged in agriculture or the pursuits of honest industry, independent in their circumstances, enlightened as to their rights, andfirm in their habits of order and obedience to the laws. This I hope will be the age of experiments in government, and that their basis will be founded on principles of honesty, not of mere force. We have seen no instance of this since the days of the Roman republic, nor do we read of any before that. Either force or corruption has been the principle of every modern government.

and the American colonial governments a working federalism had already emerged unannounced. While certain questions were decided in London, others were left to the capitals of the 13 colonies.

Sovereignty was diffused and divided.

American federalism-a product of Atlantic distances, American space, and the slowness of communication-existed in fact long before there was an American theory. Those who ruled the British Empire remained ideologues, but American colonial leaders were glad to learn lessons from their new situation. Divided sovereignty, grown up in violation of legal metaphysics, was a leading fact of the Anglo-American experience, and a key to the American political future.

The founding fathers prepared the way to extend their laboratory of diffused and divided sovereignties into the full westward extent of the continent. What would happen if a growing people of varied origins and on varied landscapes went on trying federal experiments? The United States became a nation in quest of itself.

The new nation was to be not a citadel but a laboratory.

The best symbol of the founders' experimental spirit was the Federal system itself, the very framework of the new nation. In retrospect, their inspiring tentativeness stands out against the new absolute, the empyrean abstraction which others at that time imagined to be embodied in Two kinds of revolutions every really modern state. That abstracIf we look back on the great political tion was "sovereignty." It haunted govern- revolutions and the great technological ments, inflating them with an ill-founded revolutions (both of which are clues to sense of omnipotence. the range of mankind's capacities and The feudal world of medieval Europe possibilities) we see a striking contrast. saw political powers, rights, and duties Political revolutions, generally speaking, diffused across the land in myriad, varie- have revealed man's organized purposegated clusters. As new national states fulness, his social conscience, his sense of aggressive, assertive side of emerged after the 16th century, each tried justice-the to homogenize its piece of the political his nature. Technological change, inlandscape. Each tried to build a pyramid of vention, and innovation have tended, power, which, of course, could have only rather, to reveal his play instinct, his desire and his ability to go where he has never one apex. gone, to do what he has never done. y the later 18th century, British The one shows his willingness to sacrifice lawyers and political thinkers in order to fulfill his plans, the other his had imagined sovereignty to willingness to sacrifice in order to pursue be the elixir of modern nation- his quest. Many of the peculiar successes hood. They defined "sover- and special problems of our time come eignty" as one and indivisible. from our efforts to assimilate these two "It is impossible," Governor Thomas kinds of activities. We have tried to make Hutchinson of Massachusetts insisted in government more experimental and to 1773, "there should be two independent make technological change more purLegislatures in the one and the same state." posive, more focused, more planned than "In Sovereignty," Samuel Johnson wrote ever before. in Taxation Not Tyranny (1774), "there are These two kinds of change-political no gradations." and technological-differ not only in For the American colonies the British their Why and their How, but also in were able to see only two alternatives, their What of It? By this I mean the "absolute dependence" or "absolute special character of their consequences. independence."

Political revolutions tend, with certain Yet between the British Government obvious exceptions, to be displacive. The

Weimar' Republic displaced the regime of Imperial Germany; the Nazis displaced the Weimar Republic; and after World War II, a new republic displaced the Nazis. Normally this is what we mean by a political revolution. Moreover, to a surprising extent, political revolutions are reversible. In the political world, you can go home again. It is possible, and even common, for a new regime to go back to the ideas and institutions of an earlier regime. Many so-called revolutions are really the revivals of anciens regimes.

The familiar phenomenon of the counterrevolution is the effort to reverse the course of change. And it is even arguable that counterrevolutions generally tend to be more successful than revolutions.

The reactionary, whose objective is always more recognizable and easier to describe, thus is more apt to be successful than the revolutionary. It is the possibility of such reversals that has lent credibility to the largely fallacious pendulum theory of history, which is popularized under such terms as "backlash."

Technological changes, however, thrive in a different sort of world. Momentous technological changes commonly are neither displacive nor reversible. Technological innovations, instead of displacing earlier devices, actually tend to create new roles for the devices which they might at first seem to displace. When the telephone was introduced in the later 19th century, some people assumed that it would make the postman obsolete (few dared predict that the United States Post Office might become decrepit before it was fully mature); similarly when wireless and then radio appeared, some wise people thought that these would spell the end of the telephone; when television came in, many were the voices lamenting the death of radio; and we still hear Cassandras solemnly telling us that television is the death of the book. But in our own time we have had an opportunity to observe how and why such forecasts are ill-founded. We have seen television (together with the automobile) provide new roles for the radio, and most recently we have seen how both have created new roles (or led to the new flourishing of older roles) for the newspaper press. And all' these have created newly urgent roles for the book.

A hallmark of the great technological changes is that they tend not to be reversible. I have a New England friend who has not yet installed a telephone

Despite pressures toward uniform standards and conditions, American higher education retains i because, he says, he is waiting until it is perfected. And a few of my scholarly friends (some of them, believe it or not, eminent students, writers, and pundits of American civilization) still stubbornly refuse for even less plausible reasons to have a television set in the house.

Who, having had a telephone, now does without one, or having once installed a TV set, no longer has one? There is no technological counterpart for the political restoration or the counterrevolution. Of course there are changes in style, and the antique, the obsolete, and the camp have a perennial charm. There will always, I hope, be some individuals, devotees of "voluntary simplicity," who go in search of their own Waldens. But their quixotry simply reminds us that the march of modernity is ruthless and can never retreat.

Finally, there remains a crucial difference between our ability to imagine future political revolutions and to imagine future technological revolutions. This is perhaps the most important, if least observed, distinction between the political and the technological worlds. Our failure to note this distinction I describe as the "Gamut Fallacy." "Gamut," an English word rooted in the Greek "gamma" for the lowest note in an old musical scale, means the complete range of anything.

When we think, for example, of the future of our political life and our governmental forms, we can have in mind substantially the whole range of possibilities. It is this, of course, which authenticates the traditional wisdom of political theory. It illustrates what we might call "John Adams' Law," namely, that political wisdom does not substantially progress.

No wonder the astronomical analogy of "revolving" (the primary meaning of "revolution") was so tempting!

But the history of technology, again, is quite another story. We cannot envisage, or even imagine, the range of alternatives from which future technological history will be made. One of the wisest (and, surprisingly enough, one of the most cautious) of our prophets in this area is Arthur C. Clarke, the author of 2001 and other speculations. Clarke provides us with a valuable rule of thumb for assessing prophecies of the future of man. In his Profiles of the Future (after offering some instructive examples of prophecies by experts who proved beyond doubt that

the atom could not be split, that supersonic transportation was physically impossible, that man could never escape from the earth's gravitational field and could certainly never reach the moon). he offers us "Arthur Clarke's Law": "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."

This is Clarke's way of warning us against what I have called the "Gamut Fallacy" - the mistaken notion that we can envisage all possibilities. If anything is possible, then we really cannot know what is possible, simply because we cannot imagine everything. Where, as in the political world, we make the possibilities ourselves, the limitations of the human imagination are reflected in the limitations of actual possibilities themselves. But the physical world is not of our making, and hence its full range of possibilities is beyond our imagining.

Experimenting with education Of all a nation's institutions, its colleges and universities-next to its churches -are the most easily petrified. In England, for example, before the end of the 19th century the political system had been liberalized, the franchise broadened, the economy industrialized. But Oxford and Cambridge, the centers of academic prestige and power, remained relices whose customs could be understood only by a sympathy for the Middle Ages. The Old School Tie and the college blazer remain remnants of class snobbery. Long after Americans had ceased to study Latin, and the language was employed only by medical doctors writing their prescriptions, Latin continued to be the language of college diplomas.

In view of this worldwide phenomenon. of academic stasis, the story of higher education in the United States is remarkable, perhaps unique. While our colleges and universities have not failed to be citadels of the status quo, here, more than in most other nations, these institutions have been frequently and liberally irrigated by the currents of change. They have even become some of the more conspicuous areas for democratic experiment.

Needless to say, the American phenomenon has not been the product mainly

of the desire of professors to dissolve the ancient categories of their revered expertise or to enter the risky competitive marketplace. Rather it has been a byproduct of characteristically American circumstances. In the United States we offer a spectacle-unfamiliar on the world scene-of the endless fluidity of the categories of knowledge, and the intimate entanglement of the so-called higher learning with the changing needs and desireseven the whims-of the larger community. n the United States, by 1977, there were some 10million students in about 3,000 institutions of higher learning.

The faculties of these institutions numbered some 700,000. During most of our history, excepting certain periods of war and depression, all these figures have been steadily increasing. The G.!. Bill of 1944and its successor programs (1952; 1966) offered unprecedented opportunities and inducements for veterans of World War II, the Korean war, and the Vietnam war to enter colleges and universities. During much of our recent history, the absolute numbers, the proportion of the American population in such institutions, and the rate of increase of these numbers have been significantly higher than those in other industrially developed countries. At the same time, American education (including higher education) has been characterized by the lack of any national system.

In most places. and certainly in Europe, the system was built like a pyramid.

Elementary schools prepared vast numbers of people to read and write, then smaller numbers were selected for secondary schools, and finally a tiny proportion of these were sent on to colleges and universities. This elite group at the top tended to come, of course, from the wealthy and the wellborn.

Our arrangement-it should not be called a system-grew quite differently.

American democracy gave a bizarre shape to our educational institutions. Instead of being a pyramid wide at the bottom, these institutions are very much like an inverted pyramid-top-heavy at the upper levels. From the traditional European point of view, our educational structure is upside down.

In place of an educational system we have had a widely diffused national program of educational experiment. Despite,

historic strengths and weaknesses-creative even because of, this lack of a system, certain features have emerged in American education as a whole: Community emphasis and community control. American institutions of higher education have tended to be founded by communities and to be supported by communities for particular purposes.

They have been expected to justify themselves to the communities which founded them (commonly defined geographically or by religious denomination). For example, Harvard College, the oldest institution of higher education in the United States, was set up in 1636 by the Massachusetts Bay Colony for a communal purpose, to provide a learned ministry.

It was founded by an Act of the colony, was established with a gift from John Harvard, and then was supported by the whole colony through public appropriations and private gifts. The governing body did not consist of the scholars teaching there (as in Oxford or Cambridge colleges), but of a lay, nonacademic board which was the ancestor of all the boards of trustees that control American universities today. A continuing community emphasis has kept these American institutions under the control of community representatives, and has created and confirmed the pressure to satisfy the expectations of the community which has supported the institutions by municipal or state funds or by

energy, endless varietY"near-chaotic independence ....

private donations. The spectacular growth of community colleges after World War II expressed this additional emphasis anew and helped expand opportunities for higher education under local control.

Adaptability of institutions and fluidity of subject matters. Such institutionsfounded by a particular communityhave tended to be willing, or even eager, to adapt themselves to whatever at the moment has been considered to be their sponsoring community's urgent needs.

Just as Harvard College aimed to provide a learned ministry for the Massachusetts Bay community, so land-grant institutions (many of which were originally called agricultural and mechanical colleges) aimed to train farmers and their wives for rural America, and normal colleges aimed to train teachers. The host of law schools, business schools, engineering schools, schools of journalism, schools of nursing, and their descendants have aimed to provide qualified practitioners.

Traditional distinctions between high culture and low culture, between the "liberal arts" and the practical arts, and other time-hallowed distinctions have tended to dissolve. As new schools and new "programs" and projects for degrees and certificates have been freely added, the boundaries of traditional disciplines have been befogged. In England, for example, there has been a tendency to dâ‚Ź-

fine history as what is taught or examined in the Honours School at Oxford or in the Tripos at Cambridge. But in the United States, where we have had no Oxford or Cambridge to dominate the scene, people supply their own definitions. Sometimes these are crazy, often they are faddish, but often, too, they are fertile and suggestive. New subjects enter the curriculum casually. "No Trespassing" signs are harder for professors to erect. Sociology, anthropology, psychology, economics, and statistics become more easily interfused with history, or begin to be taught in a regular curriculum. One man's sociology is another man's history.

There come to be nearly as many definitions of subjects as there are institutions; institutions compete in their definitions of subject matter and in their invention of subject matters. This fluidity has, of course, encouraged fashionable, "newsworthy," and up-to-the-minute subject matters and those which seem to have some instant vocational use. The prestige pool-for both students and faculty-is indefinitely expanded. Just as German and French officers serving with the American Revolutionary Army were astounded at the omnipresence of Americans who bore the title of captain, so European visitors nowadays are understandably puzzled at the range of subjects for which Americans can be awarded the B.A. degree and at the countless American "professors."

Competition among institutions. In countries with organized, centralized systems of higher education, there tend to be a hierarchy of institutions, a uniform salary scale, and roughly uniform conditions of employment. In the United States the rule is diversity. An instructor in one institution may receive a salary as high as that of a full professor in another; he may have a smaller teaching load and greater freedom to define his job.

Institutions compete for faculty, faculty members compete for positions elsewhere.

The variations in the conditions of student life, in academic standards, and in extracurricular facilities produce a widespread competition for students. The diversity can increase opportunities for self-fulfillment for both faculty and student. A student who has been disadvantaged in family or in early education can enter an easy institution and transfer to a more difficult institution with higher

Technological innovations create new roles for devices they appeared to displace. Television has provided new roles for the radio, both have created new roles for newspapers and books. standards. While each institution has an incentive to be "with it" in curriculum and living conditions, and to employ the full apparatus of advertising and public relations, it also has an incentive to excel.

All these history-rooted characteristics have been modified and confused by certain developments that have climaxed in the later 20th-century America. These have tended to remove or reduce the benefits of our traditional experimentation and to substitute dogmatic central purpose -or the demands of a homogeneous populism-for the plural experimental spirit. Most of these recent developments have tended to encourage or enforce a greater uniformity in American educational institutions: • The interpretation of the Federal Constitution, and numerous Federal laws, to ensure the constitutional right of students to nondiscrimination in educational opportunities. The landmark here, of course, is the desegregation decision of the Supreme Court, Brown v. Board of Education (1954). One consequence has been a general reduction in the differences between institutions, even where their differences showed a variety of interest rather than an intention to discriminate.

Thus there are fewer all-male or allfemale institutions.

• Increasing sources of Federal funding for education, e.g., funds for buildings, books, audiovisual aids, and numerous special programs (Head Start, et cetera), the founding of and increasing appropriations for the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities.

• Increasing Federal support of scientific and technological research and development, using university faculties and facilities. An obvious example is the Federal support of the research climaxing in the first nuclear chain reaction at the University of Chicago. As much as half of the budget of some "private" institutions consists of Federally funded projects.

The National Institute of Health has become a potent influence.

• Increasing foundation support for education, research, and publication. The Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and a host of other foundations in the country, large and small, operate in the national arena.

• Increasing strength of professional organizations for teachers and specialized groups of scholars and of accrediting organizations.

• Increasing influence of students dominated by one or another current national political or reformist dogma.

• Increasing pressure for sexual, racial, and other "minority" quotas for teachers and students. Often these pressures take the form of special Federal and state programs, enforced by administrative or quasi-judicial bodies, and by the threats of Federal agencies to withdraw aid.

Despite these and other pressures toward uniform standards, uniform conditions, and uniform opportunities in American educational institutions, American higher education retains many of its historic strengths and weaknesses. At best, the American situation has offered national opportunity for creative chaos, endless variety, and open opportunity.

At worst the American situation has been anarchy and philistinism.

One notable consequence of this maelstrom has been the peculiar difficulty we Americans find in agreeing on the definition of an educated person. We become increasingly wary of traditional humanistic definitions of a liberal education, and dangerously reluctant to make literacy, much less literariness, a necessary ingredient of the highly educated. he American experience-a federal experience with a strong tradition of community variety and local control-suggests that any effort to provide a more feasible, more precise definition of the "educated person" is not apt to succeed here through the proclamation or enforcement of national norms. Efforts to establish national standards in education have not been spectacularly successful.

The American preoccupation with the future-to which the past and present are considered only a clue-has always made it difficult here to instill a decent respect for the body of traditional learning, and the vocabulary required for that acquisition. Perhaps the closest approach to a universally acceptable American definition is Alice Freeman Palmer's "That's what education means, to be able to do what you've never done before."

This experimental spmt, which had made the new nation politically possible, would explain much that would be distinctive of the nation's life in the following two centuries. The American limbo-a borderland between experience and idea, where old absolutes were dissolved and new opportunities discovered -would puzzle thinkers from abroad.

With their time-honored distinction between fact and idea, between materialism and idealism, they labeled a people who had so little respect for absolutes as vulgar "materialists." In the gloriously filigreed cultures of the Old World it was not easy to think of life as experiment. But American life was experiment, and experiment was a technique for testing and revising ideas. In this American limbo all sorts of novelties might emerge. What to men of the Old World seemed a noman's-land was the Americans' native land.

The experimentalism which had worked on the land, and would test the varied possibilities of 50 states, had found new arenas in the course of the 19th century.

What federalism was in the world of politics, technology would be in the· minutiae of everyday life. While ideology fenced in, federalism-and technologytried out. Just as federalism would test still unimagined possibilities in government, so technology would test unimagined possibilities in the modes of experience.

It was not surprising that the United States would become noted-some would even say notorious-as a land of technology. The S~iss writer Max Frisch once described technology as "the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it." But in American history technology could equally well be described as "the knack of so arranging the world as to produce new experiences."

In America the time-honored antithesis between materialism and idealism would become as obsolete as that old petrified absolute of "sovereignty," which had made the British Empire come apart, and then made the American Revolution necessary. American experimentalismin its older political form of American federalism and in its more modern generalized form of American technologywould become the leitmotif of American civilization.

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No Western musician has loved Indian music with Yehudi Menuhin's sense of revelation, or done more to make it understood by his compatriots in the West.

Few are more qualified to ~o so than the great American violinist, from whose autobiography titled Unfinished Journey this account of his response to Indian music is excerp!ed.

Dipali Nag, the famous musician of the Agra gharana, got together with Harold Joseph, conductor of Delhi Symphony Orchestra, to prepare the notation (left) in an effort to indicate the microtonal subdivisions of the octave to which Yehudi Menuhin refers in his article. The song is in the raga Jaijawanti set in Teentaal, a cycle of 16 beats, composed by Ms. Nag's guru, Ustad Faiyaz Khan (1881-1950).

ndian music reflects Indian life, having no predetermined beginning or end but flowing without interruption through the fingers of the composerperformer: the tuning of the instrument merges imperceptibly with the elaboration of the melody, which may spin itself out for two, three or more unbroken hours (or which, nowadays, for the purposes of broadcasting, can tailor itself to a thirty-minute slot).

Despite predisposition in India's favor, I have to acknowledge that Indian music took me by surprise. I knew neither its nature nor its richness, but here, if anywhere, I found vindication of my conviction that India was the original source. The two scales of the West, major and minor, with the harmonic minor as variant, the halfdozen ancient Greek modes, were here submerged under modes and scales of (it seemed) inexhaustible variety.

Even the arcane rules of dodecaphonic composition had been anticipated and surpassed, for where the dodecaphonic system requires-somewhat arbitrarily, in my view-all twelve notes to be sounded in a given sequence and forbids their repetition within it, any given Indian raga chooses five or six notes, never more than seven or eight, while the hundreds of ragas between them exploit all possible notes in permutations of a subtlety and flexibility we can scarcely conceive. Melodically and rhythmically Indian music long ago achieved a complex sophistication which only in the twentieth century, with the work of Bartok and Stravinsky, has Western music begun to adumbrate.

What Indian music has not, and Western music richly has, is, of course, harmony. This is not fortuitous.

Just because the Indian would unite himself with the infinite rather than with his neighbor, so his music assists the venture. Its purpose is to refine one's soul and discipline one's body, to make one sensitive to the infinite within one, to unite one's breath with the breath of space, one's vibrations with the vibrations of the cosmos. Outside the family, the Indian's concern does not easily fasten on the group.

Europe's genius, on the other hand, has been to form individuals into communities, each accepting loss of freedom in the interests of the whole. Hence collective worship, hence armies and industries and parliamentary democracy, and hence chorales in which each voice has a certain independence but is nonetheless severely constrained by other voices.

When I was invited in 1965 to collaborate in the Commonwealth Arts Festival held in several British cities that autumn, I was granted a first close view of the music of yet another culture which added perspective to the links between social and musical organization. If Indian melody and Western harmony had seemed to provide matter for comparison, Indian individualism and African collectivism set the poles of the issue further apart. The African music was tribal, the music of a society which worked, worshipped, celebrated, mourned, and brought up its children together, without any European compromise between the one and the whole, and without need of a harmonic structure. Complexity of rhythm, equally a mark of Indian and African music, is based in an African ensemble on a division of labor, different players keeping their own beat against each other, and contriving to pull off this difficult feat by playing in a kind of hypnotic trance.

The sum of the divisions is a subtlety of rhythm which so far not even jazz has reproduced.

In con~rast, Indian rhythmic complexity is primarily one man's doing. Before beginning to play, the Indian group-consisting of some combination of three solo players providing drone, melody and rhythm (in order of sound)-chooses a raga and a tala, the warp and woof of the fabric about to be created. A raga is a scale-cummelody, a given sequence of notes whose interrelationships are already determined, so that each note may be approached only from particular directions and in particular ways. The tala is the rhythm. Dozens exist. The Indian pulse beats to our basic 3/4 and 4/4 time, and beyond that to every conceivable odd and prime number (some variations of which were also discovered by Bartok in Hungarian and other folk music and given by him to the world at large). To make the whole exercise more Intricate, the Indian, having chosen a tala of, say, eleven beats, will then improvise in groups often, leaving to the audience the responsibility of beating the basic rhythm, which, unperturbed, it does with unfailing accuracy. It becomes a game in which each tries to put the other off his stroke, a sort of intellectual motor race in which concentrated precision keeps apart two rhythms which start close, separate, then converge. The excitement mounts until, at the IlOth beat, when at last the two rhythms meet, there is a tremendous Ha! of glee from the audience.

As if the Indian rhythm player's task were not. already complicated enough, he also contributes to the melody.

The tabla, or Indian drum, is an almost melodic instrument, the pressure of the player's hand altering the tension of the skin and therefore the pitch; the player can slide between notes with precision-tool accuracy, asserting the rhythm with inflections of pitch, attack and volume, varying from the most delicate to the most powerful.

Indian music thus accommodates the group, but the individuals within it remain soloists, never coalescing into a harmonic statement. To form orchestras of Indian musicians would be to run counter to nature. I have been spared such bastard growths, but I have suffered the excruciating experience of hearing the Indian sitar or vina or violin accompanied by a harmonium, a relic of Christian missionaries' misunderstanding of the culture they were attempting to change.

The West had to invent the tempered scale, each note adjusted up or down from its true center to reconcile the different keys and permit modulation from one to another, thus advancing the development of harmony. I can't pretend to regret a development which has fed my whole musical life, but equally it is impossible to deny that the tempered scale corrupts our Western ears. The perfect fifth, set by the drone in Indian music and established as the overture to performance, is the criterion of all the other intervals, its continuing presence preventing absentminded sliding out of the given key. As a result of such meticulous preparation, Indian musicians are sensitive to the smallest microtonal deviations, subdivisions of tones which the violin can find but which are outside the crude simplifications of the piano (or harmonium).

I once enjoyed a striking object lesson in Indian musical priorities. It occurred in Delhi, at a congress assembling musicians from all parts of the country. Most venerated of all participants were singers of eighty years of age and more, whose voice, in"our meaning of the word, had gone, but whose accuracy of intonation would have shamed celebrated coloraturas, and' whose intelligence in improvi-

a

East and West met in music in one of the earliest such encounters when violinist Menuhin and sitarist Ravi Shankar played together

sation was, of course, a virtue which Western singers are not generally called upon to display. These ancient singers joined the ancient gurus in my mind, joint symbols of a system of values which put time at the service of accomplishment.

If not necessarily an inherited trade in the manner of ear cleaning, music making is something to begin practicing early, say at three years old, with the prospect of a measure of excellence before one is thirty. As with other improvised music, a rigorous structure must be mastered if creation is to flower at the moment of performance. Otherwise, to improvise would be to invent a language on the spur of the moment. Grammar, syntax, vocabulary must all be known before the everyday miracle of speech occurs. So it is with improvisation. It presupposes a path between the mind's dictation and the fingers' obedience so short that it can't be measured, but the laying of the path is the work of technique and discipline developed in years of training. I have heard Indian music played by the untalented and the insufficiently trained: it is the most tedious thing imaginable, safely straitjacketed within the laws and observances of the raga, never straying from the worn banalities of the cliche.

I have also heard, and indeed helped introduce to the West, the masters-Ravi Shankar, who plays the sitar, Ali Akbar Khan, whose instrument is the older, perhaps less brilliant sarod, Chatur Lal, the tabla player who took the United States by storm, then died tragically young of cancer. None of the instruments in the Indian classical range, developed for temple performance to the greater glory of God, have great carrying power, a shortcoming which nowadays is got the better of by electrical amplification permitting performance in stadiums holding several thousands of listeners. But to be present, as I have been, at a "chamber music" recital by Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan, each goading the other to new heights of invention, is an experience more magical than almost any in the world. One is in the presence of creation.

Given his form and meter before he starts, like a poet commissioned to write a sonnet or a ballad, the Indian musician resembles more a medieval troubadour than a composer sitting before blank paper at his desk. He does not interpret; he is. An oral tradition is a wonderful thing, keeping meaning and purpose alive and accessible. As soon as an idea is confined tq the printed page, an interpreter is required to unlock it. The Indian musician requires no intermediary; he creates in public and does not keep

a record. Naturally I am novice in the matter, having neglected at the age of three to begin the necessary schooling and to anchor myself in the tradition; when I play with Ravi Shankar I must learn my lines beforehand. But even at this subordinate distance from genuine improvisation, participation in Indian music means much to me-urging in sequences which will never be repeated the savoring of each note; heightening the ear's perception of the notes, the rhythms arid the flexible tensions between them; increasing, as some drugs are said to do, awareness of phenomena; safeguarding against the staleness of repetition. A great artist, a Rubinstein or a Rostropovich, does not repeat, but relives his repertoire, assisted by orchestra and audience and the urge to live life to the full with the means at his disposal. But repetition remains a hazard for us all, in the office, the factory, even the concert hall; and perhaps it becomes more crucial as one reaches an age to indulge in fewer adventures, to find acceptable less new music.

I have said that Indian music sprang surprises on me, a statement which, while true enough, requires qualification. There had been a long apprenticeship in my devotion to gypsy music, one European debouching of the Indian stream. Among the earliest pieces to move me was Sarasate's "Gypsy Airs," a predictable enthusiasm for a Jewish violinist of Russian provenance, but also an augury of later passions. The phrase "It's the gypsy in me," generally offered in extenuation of disorderly conduct, bears witness, however, to a need wider than mine alone for the refreshment of living with the moment as if one had never known it before. Perhaps because I was by temperament or training inclined, even at the crest of a wave, to calculate its amplitude and momentum, I have always thirsted for abandon. Just as yoga promised release from physical impediments, so improvisation promised abandon to musical impulse. Thus, Ravi Shankar followed the gypsies and, in course of time, Stephane Grappelli, the great jazz violinist, followed Ravi Shankar, successive mentors on a journey to spontaneity. But the desire to travel that path was always latent; as probably it is for other violinists.

I was introduced to Grappelli through his recordings, which so impressed me that a few years ago I persuaded him to play with me. Again, my part was prepared in advance (by Max Harris, an excellent musician), but in our recording sessions Grappelli never repeated himself; each "take" he played differently, as the inspiratiOn of the moment suggested. He is a man I envy almost as much as I love him, who off the cuff can use any theme to express any nuance-wistfulness, brilliance, aggression, scorn-with a speed and accuracy that stretch credulity.

If we pursue our joint sessions long enough, I may, even at my advanced age, learn the knack of improvising. It is a process that cannot be hurried, however, nor can I give it the time it requires; so at present I am content with the role of novice, happy to take what jazz can teach me.

To reach our apogee, we have to subjugate our natures, then to free them. In the venture, each tradition, the extempore and the interpretative, can help the other, and those musicians who synthesize the two are the most complete, the worthiest of our admiration. That is perhaps why I have always adored Enesco. As I have suggested, the lines of my life are mostly simple, rounding the circle where they are not straight.

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SURROUNDING OUR LIVES WITH

The art of Pierre Clerk exemplifies his mission: to bring art out of the confines of museums and art halls to create an awareness and appreciation for it among ordinary people. His colors are primary: red, green, yellow, blue, black and white-his lines, vivid and definite, his executions, as large as life.

Right: Pierre Clerk's tapestries, paintings and silkscreen prints represented America at the Seventh International Contemporary Art Exhibition of the All India Fine Arts and Crafts Society in New Delhi late last year. Right above: Clerk's 7-foot-by-50-foot mural of tapestries at the Continental Bank of Illinois is among his many "decorations" that add warmth and color to office buildings.

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landed e on this sublunar earth in 1928, a whole decade after I had hit the planet and been around.

But Pierre Clerk and I could talk without the sense of even a mini-generation gap, because we shared a basic concern : the restoration of art as a friendly ambience for all, not just as a cult of the elite.

Clerk, born in Atlanta, Georgia, lived twenty years in Canada and eight in Europe before moving to New York in 1959. Painter, graphic artist, sculptor, he has taken to tapestry-designing too during the last six years.

Clerk was recently in India on a breathlessly hurried visit along with his paintings, silkscreen prints and tapestries. They represented the American participation in the Seventh International Contemporary Art Exhibition of the All India Fine Arts and Crafts Society (AIF ACS) in New Delhi. Clerk was also a delegate to the International Conference on Art held on the same occasion.

The ebullience and energy intrinsic to the New World man have been tempered in Clerk by his long sojourn in Europe.

He is tolerant of the many perspectives that prevail today in art, and though he would smilingly excuse himself from taking any partisan practitioner at his word, he would concede that fine possibilities are latent in all styles. Absolutely free from dogmatism, he is willing to leave the final verdict to history. "Art movements," he says, "continue to proliferate in bewildering numbers and at a frantic pace. Abstract expressionism was followed by Pop, Op, Conceptual, Earthworks, \Lyrical, Kinetic, Abstraction, Superrealism-one loses track. Whether this activity will produce masterpieces, only time will tell." Meanwhile, the artist should, instead of trying to follow all fashions, settle down in the style most congenial to him and do the sincere best he can. Clerk himself has liked the representationalism of Cezanne and Matisse, but has found the abstract increasingly more congenial since the middle '50s. "If you want to label me," he says, "you can regard me as a latterday constructivist."

Does abstract art tend to be a little cold and alien to human concerns? We have an interesting exchange on this.

When I point out that what now seems wholly abstract, in the traditional decorative arts of many peoples were schematic reductions from figural representations, Clerk readily agrees. But he presses the point that the aesthetic impulse was always autonomously working alongside the ritualistic and magical motivations

in early art. Any representation of a horse, even an inept notation, would do for a hunter's anticipatory ritual; but a Lascaux horse is an aesthetic masterpiece. Likewise, over the centuries, the abstract design has lost all its associations with the original representation and has today become aesthetically autonomous in its own right. It is not alien to man's sensibility; it continues to be popular in the traditions of all regions.

Clerk cites the geometrical inlays in the Taj Mahal which were no less effective in decorating the surface than the floral motifs. But today we have discovered that asymmetry could immensely enlarge the repertoire of the abstract design. His own paintings and graphics are constructed out of asymmetric components whose placements-with their tilts, pointed thrusts, weight of broad bases, and sensuousness of slow-arching curvescreate surges of local tensions and dynamism ultimately reconciled in the overall composition. He himself uses primary colors whose forthright utterance becomes monumental in the large scales in which his works are executed.

The historical vicissitudes in the patronage of art come up during our talk, and Clerk's comments are characteristic of his quiet optimism and faith that one can do a lot, whatever the parameters within which one had to work. Generalizations in the classical idiom of philosophical

Above and right: Pierre Clerk's aim of making art a cooperative community adventure and of taking it to the general public finds happy expression in his sculptures at the two-acre plaza around Waterside, a housing complex on the East River in New York City.

discourse are utterly foreign to Clerk's speech style. Nevertheless, what he has to say reminded me of what Ortega y Gasset wrote long ago : "We must try to find for our circumstance, such as it is, and precisely in its very limitation and peculiarity, its appropriate place in the immense perspective of the world ....

I am myself plus my circumstance, and if! do not save it, I cannot save myself."

Clerk recognizes that the skyscraper has replaced the cathedral spire as a symbol of communal aspirations. But he does not waste rhetorical lament over it, for the change is not necessarily hostile to art. Patronage has now passed on to government and corporate sources.

Though he would like to see much more done, he is happy with the record of the United States GSA (General Services Administration), the largest single patron of the arts today in that country. Clerk is also happy with the trends in tax legislation which help art and artists.

For instance, if a collector donates a painting now valued at $5,000 to a museum, he gets a $5,000 deduction from his taxable income, even though he may

have originally paid only $500. This encourages people to collect and donate, which in turn helps support art and artists.

Since the artists also pay taxes, Clerk points out, they too were contributing to the total support to art by the community. As for business patronage of art, he adds, it is not a new phenomenon; it has been flourishing since the Renaissance, from the time of the Medicis of Florence, the burghers of the Netherlands, and the merchant princes of Venice.

"By making works of art available to the general public," Clerk says, "both the government and the large corporations are educating a very large group of people to expect, and indeed to demand, art in public places." Admittedly, this can create a salutary environment only if the art is good and well chosen. His own experience has been that the corporations impose practically no restriction on the artist as regards style and expression.

This of course makes the artist's responsibility greater; he has to give of his best and also be guided by the response of the community.

A fine illustration of the manner in which art is becoming a cooperative community adventure in creation and appreciation is the sculptures Clerk has done for Waterside, the housing complex on the East River on 25th Street in New York. The two-acre plaza was a vast void; landscaping would have been pro-

hibitively costly. The Public Arts Council, a branch of the New York Municipal Arts Society, had the happy idea of using the plaza as the setting for major, longterm exhibitions of sculpture.

Clerk has done four large pieces which will remain there for an indefinite period.

Ultimately to be executed in welded steel and aluminum, they are at present in painted plywood. They have insinuated themselves with grace into the location, making an amorphous and empty space come to life with interesting visual relations, among the sculptures themselves and between them, individually and as a whole, and the vertical backdrop of the towers and the horizontal spread of the plaza. The forms are combinatIOns of rectangular prisms and segments of circles; with the choreography of the shadows they cast on themselves and on the plaza, the sculptures celebrate the dance of the daylight hours everyday.

In 1972, as artist-in-residence at the Tamarind Institute of Lithography in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Clerk became greatly impressed by the American Indian weavers of the area. Realizing in those geometric designs, as well as in the Mayan art of Mexico, a relationship to his own hard-edge paintings, he collaborated with a local weaver to reproduce his designs in wool. The result led him into what for him was the new medium of tapestry design. Since then he has

produced nearly 50 tapestries, measuring from 15 to 55 feet in length. Three of these were shown in New Delhi at the AIFACS International in December 1977.

This part of the story seems to be moving toward very pleasing possibilities. Some writers, like Chaman Lal for instance, claim the American Indians to be distant cousins of Indians. This is debatable, though there are intriguing affinities.

But Clerk, it seems, is going to forge a new and definitive link. During his hectic and brief visit to India, he was fascinated by this country's tradition in weaving.

He has commissioned a weaver family in Panipat to execute a few of his designs.

If this experiment succeeds, he will be coming to India frequently. His friends here thus have a stake in its success.

Incidentally, the same family of traditional weavers executed, years ago, the tapestry designs of Le Corbusier which now hang in the Haryana Legislative Assembly building in Chandigarh. Impulses from far off lands are commingling in fascinating ways-as they have done throughout the long history of India's cultural traditions.

0 About the Author: Krishna Chaitanya, a versatile writer on a broad range of subjects, has published a nine-volume history of world literature and several books on Indian culture. In 1964, he was invited as a "Critic of Fdeas"for a sixmonth tour of the United States by the Institute of International Education, New York.

THE RISE OF CITIZEN

Increasing affluence is another reason Not a day goes by in the United States for the growth of citizens' movements. that one public-interest group or another Their membership is largely college-edudoesn't testify before the U.S. Congress, cated and in the middle- and upper-income petition City Hall or picket some corporabrackets, and their idea-oriented causes tion in the interest of energy, the environreflect a society in which the majority ment, or causes that may range anywhere is no longer struggling simply to obtain from Congressional ethics to Pentagon the necessities of life. waste. Indeed, the anti-Establishment moveProbably the most important reason ment seems to be everywhere, and it somefor the burgeoning of these groups, actimes even appears to be bigger than the cording to John Gardner, is the enormous Establishment itself. The members of these organizations are generally perceived as Public-interest groups in the growth of government and the plethora of issues in which government is assuming being young, woolly-headed idealists, rangUnited States play a role. Sheer indignation is not enough ing from liberal to radical, with little a vital role in shaping the to make the government more responsive. knowledge of the real world and the policies of the nation.

Only organized pressure will do the job, practical problems involved in getting things says Gardner. At the same time, both done.

The reality is far different. Certainly, public-interest organizabusiness and labor have reached gargantuan size and their lobbies have grown and proliferated. tions contain their share of naive youngsters. But the movement includes much, much more. There are literally thousands of Of the untold number of public-interest groups that try groups. While most of the organizations appear to be liberal, to influence the Federal Government, the most influentialthere are a great many devoted to conservative causes such the anti-Establishment Establishment, if you will-are Common as tax reduction, greater military efforts and bans on abortion.

Cause, the Consumer Federation of America (CF A) and the As for knowing what the world is all about, the most important various groups associated with Ralph Nader. The first two derive groups are dominated by knowledgeable political professionals power from their ability to seize popular issues and then create and lawyers with ready access to the corridors of power. grass-roots pressure on legislators in their home districts. The Right now, the public-interest movement seems to be wielding Naderites get their influence from the ability of Nader himself more clout than ever. Ralph Nader has ready access to President to dramatize an issue, and the sheer tenacity of the 100 or so Jimmy Carter, and longtime Nader aide Joan Claybrook is bright young people who work for his causes. head of the U.S. National Highway Safety Administration.

Here is a rundown on some of the more powerful and interestPresident Carter appointed consumer lobbyist Carol Tucker ing groups and what they have accomplished: Foreman Assistant Agriculture Secretary and James Speth, co• The brainchild of former Health, Education and Welfare Secretary John Gardner, Common Cause was founded in 1970 founder of the U.S. Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), as a member of the White House Council on Environmental when he persuaded about 100 wealthy individuals and corporaQuality. Environmental groups have successfully lobbied the tions to fund a massive advertising and direct-mail campaign.

White House to raise the budget of the Environmental Pro- Most of the $5.3 million-a-year Common Cause budget now tection Agency, while Congress has responded to pressure from comes from the dues ($15 a year) of its 250,000 members. In Common Cause for many procedural changes. sharp contrast to its sister public-interest groups, which are But what, exactly, is a public-interest group? And why has largely concerned with very specific issues, Common Cause its power to influence government grown so much? concentrates on the political process itself. "We want to make Admitting that the public interest is "an elusive concept," the system responsive and accountable,'.' says David Cohen, John Gardner, who retired in early 1977 as head of the 250,000- a onetime American Federation of Labor and Congress of member "citizens' lobby" Common Cause, defines such a group Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) lobbyist who is Gardner's as one organized around ideas that aren't based on their members' hand-picked successor. economic interest. A special-interest group, in marked contrast, When it wants to put pressure on Congress, Common Cause stems from its members' economic (business, labor), occupa- Washington staffers call 10 of their members in a Congressional tional (doctors, lawyers) or institutional (schools, hospitals) district, each of whom calls 10 other Common Cause members. self-interest.

Almost overnight, 100 letters or telegrams are sent to the legisPublic-interest groups in the United States have a constitu- lator whom the citizens' lobby wishes to persuade. tional right to press their views on the government. It is one Successful Common Cause fights include the public financing enshrined in the First Amendment right to petition, and it has of Presidential elections, opening Congressional bill-drafting been exercised by individuals and organizations since the Re- sessions to the public, and the breaking of the House seniority public was founded. One of the first periods of growth in public- system in 1975. interest groups came in the 1830s, when antislavery societies • Founded in 1967 to give the myriad consumer groups a sprang up. But their golden age didn't arrive until the mid- national voice, the Consumer Federation of America is 1960s, when the civil rights and peace movements sparked a an amalgam of 220 organizations, including local consumer great deal of citizen activism. After seeing that their efforts could groups, cooperatives, labor unions and senior citizens' groups. move society, many activists turned to other causes like consu- With a budget of $165,000 and 13 employees, CFA lobbied merism, tax reform and the environment. Starting with enthusi- hard for such measures as the Toxic Substances Act, which astic indignation, many of the groups became professional, regulates the introduction of new chemicals, and the tough well·organized lobbies. new Omnibus Antitrust law. Unlike Common Cause, which

POWER

Studentsform an important element of the citizen lobby in the U.S. Here, members of the Consumer Information Service of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville make price comparisons in a local market.

never endorses candidates, CF A labels legislators either proconsumer or anticonsumer and then goes to work to elect its friends and defeat its enemies .

• Ralph Nader has become the conglomerateur of the publicinterest groups since he achieved national fame in the mid1960sas the auto industry's chief critic. Under the umbrella of Public Citizen there are nine different Nader organizations.

They include Critical Mass, an antinuclear group; the TaxResearch Group, which pushes tax reform; and Congress Watch, which does most of the intensive lobbying. They are financed by $1.1 million raised from public donations and by Nader's lecture fees (he gives six or seven speeches a month for high fees). . The election of Jimmy Carter had a major impact on Naderites. During the 1976 Presidential campaign, Nader and his followers became convinced that the Georgian was receptive to their point of view. While Carter rejected the Nader call for the Federal chartering of corporations, he backed the Agency for Consumer Protection. Nader is currently enjoying his access to the top and the possibility of achieving some of his goals.

• No issue has caused such a proliferation of public-interest groups as that of the environment. The New York-based Environmental Defense Fund (ED F) and Natural Resources Defense Council have carried the brunt of the legal battle against pollution. The EDF, headed by former Time-Life staffer Arlie Schardt, has 45,000 members and a budget of $1.7 million.

The NRDC, led by former Wall Street lawyer John Adams, has 35,000 members and a $2 million budget. Both groups have received substantial grants from the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. EDF was started by scientists and has specialized in the toxic substances area, while lawyer-led NRDC has pushed hard on the nuclear front.

• While the public-interest movement is often equated with liberal and left-leaning groups, there are many conservative ones as well. Among the most active on the Washington scene is the Liberty Lobby. Founded in 1956 to fight the "leftward drift" in the United States, the lobby has a $1.2 million budget and 35 employees supported by its 25,000 members. It is headed

by 80-year-old Curtis Dall, a onetime son-in-law of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who says that the group is "anti-Establishment and pro- American." It lobbied against the confirmation of Theodore Sorensen as Central Intelligence Agency director and Paul Warnke as U.S. arms negotiator.

The Liberty Lobby also opposes deficit spending, the United Nations, the Rockefeller interests that "foster corporate socialism" and doing business with communist countries.

• An anomaly among the public-interest groups, since it is hard to pigeon-hole ideologically, is the National Taxpayers Union (NTU). It could be called a conservative group because of its opposition to big government and its determination to achieve a balanced Federal budget. At the same time, in sharp contrast to the Liberty Lobby and other right-wing groups, the NTU is strongly anti-Pentagon. A. Ernest Fitzgerald, who was fired as a Pentagon cost analyst because of his exposure of military waste (and then subsequently reinstated), is on the NTU executive committee. The organization worked with environmentalists to block Federal money for the supersonic transport plane and additional funds for nuclear development, because it is basically opposed to more spending.

• The latest public-interest group to hit the Washington scene is New Directions (ND), which describes itself as the international counterpart of Common Cause. It is headed by former Delaware Governor Russell Peterson, who chaired the Federal Council on Environmental Quality during the Ford Administration. ND has just launched a direct-mail campaign for members, using free lists supplied by Common Cause and the United World Federalists. The brainchild of World Bank President Robert McNamara, anthropologist Margaret Mead and Saturday Review Editor Norman Cousins, ND plans to zero in on such issues as the arms race and population growth.

However, it is the big three-Common Cause, the Consumer Federation and the Nader groups-plus the environmentalists, that seem to have the most clout in Washington. In any event, both business and government now realize that a professionalized public-interest movement has become a permanent part of the- tugging and hauling process through which American policy is hammered out.

0 About the Author: Gerald R. Rosen is the executive editor of Dun's Review-a

leading business magazine in the United States.

APASSIGI

TBBOUGB

TBI PAID1A ClIIL Friday, 0936

HOURS, port of Cristobal. Preparing to transit Panama Canal, Atlantic to Pacific.

A traveler could have logged similar words aboard any of some three dozen ships that daily make the 51-mile inland voyage between the seas.

The entry comes from a log I kept aboard the Andros Castle, a Greek-manned freighter of Liberian flag carrying Texas sorghum to Japan.

Ships, crews, cargoes are routinely international here, and these days the canal carries more than a hundred million tons of cargo a year. Little wonder that the complex new treaties for operation and control of this canal have sparked worldwide interest and headlined debate.

The headlines have brought me here to make this transit. I want to look behind them, to observe the everyday operation of this vital waterway, to meet some of the people~American "Zonians" and Panamanians-who make it work. I have personal memories here, for I celebrated V-J day aboard a transport in Gatun Lake. Not so strange. Just as this isthmus often intersects with history, so my logbook sometimesconverses with the past.

Icons on bulkhead in chart house. We drink thick Greek coffee on the bridge. Our two pilots discuss work with captain; helmsman stands by. I scan the crowded harbor and city of Colon.

The Spanish name honors Columbus, whose frail fleet visited these shores in 1502, arriving upon "seas so high ... a mass of foam ... boiling like a cauldron on a great fire."

Balboa followed, and found the legendary "other ocean" he named the South Sea. Peruvian gold and silver crossed here by muleback. Later, fortyniners plodded the other way, bound for California's gold rush. In 1855the first transcontinental railroad here charged $25 in gold to ride one way, or $5 to walk the ties. (Today it's $1.75-in an airconditioned coach.) Colon stood on pilings above mud in 1879 when the builder of the Suez Canal, Ferdinand de Lesseps, came to inspect and inspire his new waterway project with a prophecy: "The canal willbe made!"

It was. But first came the Republic of Panama itself-with full encouragement from the United States. During four swift days of November 1903, Panamanians declared independence from Colombia, the cruiser U.S.S. Nashville arrived off Colon, and the U.S. State Department recognized the new country. In less than two weeks a French citizen serving as minister plenipotentiary of Panama signed a canal treaty in Washington, D.C. For $10 million and a $250,000 annual fee, the U.S. took exclusive control of the lO-mile-wide canal zone.

Malaria and yellow fever had brought death

An engineering feat that opened the gate between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, the Panama Canal will be handed over to the Republic of Panama by the United States on December 31, 1999, under the two treaties signed recently by the two nations. In this article, Bart McDowell and George F. Mobley, who made a passage through the waterway, recount their impressions-in words and photographs-of the Big Ditch, the people who make it work and the problems and the hardihood of those who built it way back in 1914. and bankruptcy to de Lesseps' canal plan, but the dream of a waterway had survived. Theodore Roosevelt summed up succinctly: "I took the Isthmus, started the canal, and then left Congressnot to debate the canal, but to debate me .... But while the debate goes on the canal does too."

In 1914 the Big Ditch was completed. The total cost was $387 million, including 40 million for French property rights and equipment, but the new waterway cut 9,000 miles off the voyage between New Yark and San Francisco.

In 1978the debate ends.

Delayed by lock repairs, Capt. N. Doryzas has been waiting his ship's turn for two days, among two dozen other vessels. Pilot Dick Andrews takes command. Captain Doryzas is nervous about possible collisions. Dick is not. It's his 1,127th canal transit.

Even the captains of warships must yield control of their vessels to pilots here. The Pilots Handbook charts currents at the Gatun sea entrance with split-level movement: Fresh water on the surface flows in one direction, while heavier salt water at the bottom moves the opposite way. The handbook discusses hazards of "bank suction," "vessel 'squat' and 'surge' in Gaillard Cut," shoaling, tides of twenty feet on the Pacific side and mere

Dick's orders to the engine room are gentle: "Half ahead, please." We pass a fruit ship named Jakov Alksnis in Cyrillic lettering.

"The second Soviet ship we've had today," notes Jim Wallace, pilot-training coordinator.

Jim, making his 2,049th transit, will take the bridge during the southern half of the run. Ship size and type of cargo determine the number of pilots.

We need two; ships that fill up the 1l0-by-l,000foot chambers require at least four to watch the narrow clearances.

With the aid of the tugboat Morrow we approach Gatun Locks. Dick points. "There on the starboard hand you see the old French effort. Small ditch.

But deep enough to drown in," he says. "Someone did recently." The French managed roughly onethird of the necessary excavation before giving up.

1040 HOURS. Dick orders, "Stop engine-Morrow stop." Our whistle toots once. We ease alongside canal entrance and wait. Electric locomotives called mules will now tow us with lines fore and aft.

1115 HOURS. Over his walkie-talkie Dick directs the locomotives: "Number Ones can go to towing positions ....

Hold her steady!" We slide through massive gates 'into the lowest chamber of Gatun Locks.

The three chambers here lift ships 85 feet to the level of Gatun Lake. All the water flows by gravity from the lake itself through three culverts, each more than half the diameter of the Holland Tunnel. Our ship will use 26 million gallons of water to climb to Gatun Lake, a like amount to descend on the Pacific side. Nine months of heavy tropical rain each year keeps the canal working.

1142 HOURS. "Full the next chamber.

ahead,

please."

We

enter

Yesterday, when I visited Dick's house, I could see ships in the Gatun Locks from his windows.

Now, from the freighter, I can see the threebedroom house, a pleasant, old-fashioned place renting for $120 a month.

Right: Opening the way just a crack for an inspecting workman, the massive gates at Gatun Locks swing wide for ships of different nations passing through the Panama Canal. The United States took over construction of the 51mile-long canal in 1904, and 10 years later finished the waterway. Now, in response to the demand of the people of Panama, led by their President GeneralOmar Torrijos Herrera, control of the canal will pass to that nation on December 31, 1999.

The 51-mile-long man-made canal has cut 9,000 miles off the voyage between New York City and San Francisco.

Pretty Irene Andrews, a schoolteacher until she married Dick, lives an outdoor life with tennis and golf. Daughter Elizabeth is bused to school and enjoys horseback riding.

Irene had a maid until four years ago, when U.S. minimum-wage laws were applied to Panamanian domestics in the zone. "I wasn't used to maids anyway," says Irene. Nor to other things: Once, putting out the garbage, she encountered a boa constrictor. ("That was before the vampire bat got into the kitchen.")

Irene shops at the local commissary, where U.S. grocery prices are based on those in New Orleans. "I used to go into Colon twice a week.

But now"-Irene pauses-"I just don't feel that comfortable about it. I haven't been outside the zone for some time."

The last significant anti-American riots flared in 1964, when Panama temporarily broke relations with the United States. The two governments began negotiating new terms. A 1967 treaty was rejected by Panama. In 1968 diplomacy was delayed by the overthrow of the government.

The present treaties, signed late in the summer of 1977 were in negotiation for four years. The Senate ratified both treaties in the spring of 1978, and the House of Representatives must now enact legislation to implement transfer of U.S. property in the canal zone to Panama.

I watched the Panamanian campaign during the plebiscite on the treaties last October. Graffiti penned on University of Panama buildings by leftists who want immediate control of the entire zone railed, "No bases!" Full-color wall cartoons pictured blue-eyed imperialist devils. Yet at one rally opposing the U.S.A. as well as the treaties, three young lawyers bought me a beer, saying "Nothing personal."

The treaties carried by a two-to-one vote in Panama, less than expected. And the charismatic strong man, Gen. Omar Torrijos Herrera, responded to some U.S. Senators' criticism that his regime disregards human rights by offering to resign if his presenceshould endanger ratification of the treaties by the U.S. Senate.

1210

HOURS. "You can open the gate now, please."

We move ahead.

In Rainbow City, a community of Panamanians within the zone, an illiterate gardener raised his own ten children as well as four adopted ones in a small three-bedroom apartment so they could learn English in a zone school.

"Home was noisy," recalls the youngest of those children, Juan Luna. He graduated from high school with honors, joined the Panama Canal Company apprentice program, and became the first Panamanian to qualify as a control-house operator. Today at 27 he orchestrates the flow of water and ships in and out of the Gatun chambers,

taking home $900 a month.

Another Zonian, Leverne Jackman, grew up in Paraiso,. a community of folk descended from the black, English-speaking construction laborers brought from the West Indies. "My father worked for the dredging division," Jackman recalls. "The commissary at Gamboa had a wall down the middle.

People who were paid on the Panamanian pay scale -mostly blacks-could shop only on their own side, but whites could shop in both places."

When Maj. Gen. William A. Carter was appointed Governor of the canal zone in 1960, he ended that practice promptly: "We issued everyone new identity cards-all the same color so everyone could shop on both sides of the wall.

Integration didn't even make the local papers."

Leverne Jackman grew up free of grudges, moved to New York City, and made the U.S. Army his career. Today he is back, using his bilingual gifts, a sergeant on liaison duty between U.S. military police and the Panamanian Guardia Nacional.

"No incidents last night in the entertainment district," Sergeant Jackman grinned. "In fact, it's usually quiet, even on paydays."

The provost marshal of the 193rd Brigade, Col. SJ. Lobodinski, concurs. "I've rarely seen any trouble between Americans and Panamanians.

Relations are friendly."

I heard about one American woman who, in two years, had never left the zone for the adjoining Republic of Panama. But she was an exception.

Conversely, I learned, the First Baptist Church at Balboa Heights transferred from the Southern Baptist Convention to an association of Panamanian churches. It holds services in both Spanish and English and seems unselfconsciously integrated.

1256 HOURS. Bos'n gang casts off lines from electric mules. "Half ahead, please." Ship moves onto Gatun Lake.

"If you want to take on fresh water for your boilers, it's good here," Dick advises the captain.

A cool breeze, lush green shoreline, a sense of exhilaration. Deckhands with cameras record their personal encounter with history.

I feel it too. At this precise spot on August 14, 1945, my transport, the U.S.S. Crosby, picked up the radio dispatch that World War II was over.

A proud moment -especially for the canal; without it victory could never have come so soon.

Off our port bow a ship waits at anchor. She's named the European Highway, Atlantic-bound with a cargo of automobiles; her flag is Japanese. Much water has flowed through Gatun since V-J day.

Today trade patterns have shifted; no longer is the canal chiefly a corridor between the U.S. coasts. More ships now ply the waters between Asia and the east coast of North America. Despite that, 45 per cent of all canal cargo still originates in the U.S. and 26 per cent is destined for U.S. ports.

The canal was always a money-maker until About the Author: Bart McDowell is an assistant editor of National Geographic magazine. He is also author of The American Cowboy, Revolutionary War: America's War for Independence and Gypsies.

recessionary pressures in 1973 gave it its first recorded deficit. Losses through 1976,compounded by the reopening of the Suez Canal and an increase in the number of supers hips too large for the Panama locks, totaled $29 million. Today, however, bolstered by newly arriving tankers carrying North Slope oil from Alaska, the canal is again in the black. And changes have come to the canal itself.

New lighting now permits night transit for most ships. And Gaillard Cut has been widened from 300 to 500 feet. Excavations were once begun for a third lane of locks, but the work was abandoned at the outbreak of World War II and never resumed.

Some of the steel sheathing that once protected gates against World War II bombs has been removed now. What could protect them against a nuclear missile?

Although the Pentagon no longer lists the Panama Canal among the strategic necessities of U.S. defense, the canal is not obsolete. Only 13ships of the U.S. Navy, the biggest of the nation's aircraft carriers, are too large for these locks, and

"Hard to starboard .... Hold her steady .... Dead slow ahead" -calling commands by radio, James Wallace (left), one of a group of 200 canal pilots who guide every ship going through the Panama Canal, maneuvers a leviathan cargo ship into the locks at Miraflores. Any vessel traversing the waterway must pass through six locks, half of them raising the ship 85 feet into the canal at the start, and the other three dropping the ship back to sea level. Atfar left (top and center), a container ship waits inside Miraflores Locks as the water slowly lowers it to the Pacific level. For each transit of the canal some 52 million gallons of water-enough to supply a city of 250,000 population for a dayspills through systems of 18-foot culverts and out of the locks. Left: The map shows the Panama Canal, the building of which through the Isthmus of Panama took 10 years and cost $387 million. Below: Halfway between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, a cargo ship headed toward the -Pacific furrows jungle-lined Gatun Lake.

95 per cent of the world's ships over a hundred gross tons can still use the Big Ditch.

1343 HOURS. At 12 knots we approach Boh/o Bend, sharpest turn in the passage. On our starboard hand spreads Barro Colorado.

That's the largest island in Gatun Lake, a hill until moated by the dammed-up Chagres River. Today it serves as a living laboratory for the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

Studies conducted here touch the fundamentals of tropical life.

Howler monkeys, for example. The howler has a special importance as a sentinel against yellow fever. Dr. Nathan Gale, veterinarian with the canal zone government, notes that in 1949 the island's population of howler monkeys dropped by 50 per cent. (It now stands at 1,300.) "The cause was yellow fever," says Dr. Gale. "That was the only time in 50 years that yellow fever had crossed the canal. The deaths of the howler monkeys warned us."

1418 HOURS. Alongside buoy 62. Passing clumps of water hyacinths. Dick advises skipper, "We'll soon be in Chagres River. Poor water there."

We are approaching the cut known to excavators as Culebra and renamed to honor the engineer David Gaillard. Yet the greatest challenge in building the canal was not engineering, but medical. During the railroad-construction days, yellow fever and malaria provided the isthmus a ghastly export: cadavers preserved in barrels of alcohol for medical schools. During the de Lesseps era, the same diseases took some 20,000 French lives, dooming their project. Not until after Dr. Walter Reed's experiments with mosquitoes in Cuba following the Spanish-American War did Americans possess the medical skills to build the Panama Canal. Even then one man complained of "mosquitoes so thick I have seen them put out a lighted candle with their burnt bodies."

The job of mosquito control is never finished.

Last September, for example, the 10-year-old son of a U.S. serviceman at Howard Air Force Base came down with the zone's first case of malaria in four years. "We beefed up our ditch crews and fogged more often," said Willard S. Sweeney, head of the sanitation department.

Today malaria control is complicated by waterweeds-hydrilla, water hyacinths, water lettuce.

Some of the plants provide a mat that protects mosquito larvae from the oil sprays and from predatory fishes. The dread malaria vector Anopheles albimanus even uses these plants as breathing tubes, plugging into them for oxygen.

If neglected, clogging waterweeds could seriously hamper canal operations. Present measurespoisoning, cutting, and dredging-clearly are not preventing their spread. Ecologists are now considering the introduction of white Amur fish into Gatun Lake. This Siberian native is a carp that can eat its weight in hydrilla each day.

Meanwhile there are manatees. In the 1960s Dr. Gale, the veterinarian, began introducing those huge, sad-faced herbivores into the canal zone. It took some doing.

Dr. Gale knew that in remote Bocas del Toro,

in western Panama, hunters sold manatee meat.

He arranged to buy the animals alive for $300 apiece. Then he convinced the U.S. Air Force to fly training missions there-and haul them back. "With an 800-pound manatee flopping around, few pilots wanted to make the trip twice," he recalls.

Nonetheless, Dr. Gale brought back nine manatees to feast on the pernicious waterweeds.

"And they've been breeding," he reports. "Just last week a man reported seeing 'two walruses' in the cut."

1434 HOURS. Jim Wallace relieves Dick on the bridge. Rain clouds gather. "Dredging Division" proclaims the lettering on a gray building. A floating skyscraper stands nearby, the 250-ton crane Hercules.

Each day a hydrographic survey boat electronically scans the bottom of the cut, for this region is subject to frequent quakes and landslides.

More earth has been removed since the completion of the canal than during its initial construction.

Dredging may even have to be expanded.

Gatun Lake's watershed-more than half of which lies outside the zone-is steadily losing its forest, with erosion and siltation the result. Maps of the watershed in 1952 show 90 per cent of the forest intact; a 1976 map shows only 40 per cent left.

Some trees have been cut by timber poachers, others by squatters trying to wring a living from the jungle by clearing land and planting crops.

As the forest recedes, siltation grows and water storage capacity declines. Officials also worry about changing weather patterns. Water conservation measures have already been necessary for Zonians during the past two dry seasons. Without abundant rainwater the canal cannot work.

1518 HOURS. Entering Empire Reach, we meet a northbound tanker,. perhaps it carries Alaskan North Slope oil .... Below Contractors Hill, at the Continental Divide, we meet other ships. At Pedro Miguel Locks, begin descent .... Rainstorm catches us. Wearing oilskins, we enter Miraflores Locks ....

These are our last steps down to sea level, and we now use another 26 million gallons of rainwater; precipitation at this wet moment seems to be keeping pace. Ours had been an easy transit, thanks to 1,754 catalogued job skills practiced along this waterway.

1715 HOURS. In hard rain we climb down rope ladder to pilot's launch. We bob upon salty Pacific waters. Traffic on Teddy Roosevelt's canal goes on.D The Panama Canal has brought prosperity to the Panamanians. The work done by U.S. doctors there has dramatically cut down the incidence of malaria and yellow fever, which once took a heavy toll.

Making a total workforce of about 75 percent of the waterway's employees, Panamanians, like Juan Luna (right, top), who became theftrst native control-house operator, and the worker at right, are getting much better jobs today. At right center is Dr. Katharine Milton of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute at Barro Colorado. Facing page: Ninety-three-year-old Valentin Rivas worked on the building of the canal. He still picks up a pension check, butforgets what his medal was for.

ML5FJ~1

THE ART OFTHE POSTER

Posters once sold just ideas and goods. Today they sell themselves. They are still a form of advertisement, but of a take-home variety. Long after their "sales appeal" is over, they continue to decorate the walls of offices and homes. In a century of interesting developments, the poster has arrived-as a status symbol and as a highly prized, yet not highly priced, piece of art. After decades of being little more than bland announcements, posters began to grow (around the last quarter of the 19th cen~~ry) along with printing technology and, then, with art trends.

They didn't just imbibe all the influences of art; poster art paralleled modern art movements. Posters became art.

Well-known artists succumbed to its appeal; they were

stimulated to create new graphic, calligraphic, photographic and pictorial styles.

Among the most creative posters have been those on the performing arts. This use of art to capture the spirit, mood and images of other art forms is the central theme of the poster exhibit "The Poster and the Arts" organized by the International Communication Agency of the Embassy of the United States. The exhibit has already been shown in Calcutta and Madras in May and comes to Delhi later this year.

The 18 artists represented are among America's finest, and their works give an exciting glimpse of the vitality of America's cultural life.

JOHN SINGER SARGENT (above) : The portrait, Madam X, used in this poster of the Brooklyn Museum's "Triumph of Realism" exhibition has ironic significance:

SAUL STEINBERG (above) : In this 1969 collage usedfor a Guild Hall Museum exhibition, Steinberg, "the thinking man's cartoonist," shows Commodore Matthew Perry (leader of the first American expedition to Japan in 1852, and the man responsible for opening up Japan to American trade) from the Japanese point of view-as an inscrutable Occidental.

CHWAST/GLASER (right): Seymour Chwast and Milton Glaser have created "endless revolution in design" with Push Pin Studio, a dominant school in the international graphic design movement. The studio has excelled in the use of lettering alone for dramatic effect.

Sargent had to leave Paris in 1884 because indignant reaction to the "startling realism" in his characterization of a notorious beauty of the day in decolletage.

0/ the

THE FIVE CAREEBSOF

The secret of Rene Dubos' outstanding achievements in many fields from agronomy and biology to envir,onment and social philosophy lies in the wholeness of his approach.

'The main intellectual attitude that has governed all aspects of my professional life has been to study things, from microbes to man, not per se, but in their complex relationships.'

by RICHARD KOSTELANETZ

Rene Dubos greeted me in the prime of his fifth career; for in his 77 years he has been successively a graduate student in agronomy, a cellular biologist, an investigator into tuberculosis, the administrator of a medical research department and, now, a writer and lecturer on environmental science and social philosophy. Although definitions of his activity may have changed over the years, Dubos has remained pretty much the same man, working at the Rockefeller University for nearly all of his last 50 years and living chiefly in mid-Manhattan in New York City. Typically, he greeted me in the office he still retains in Rockefeller University, even though he has officially retired and presently holds the title of professor emeritus.

A tall, broadly built, rugged-looking man, with large hands, thick fingers and a handsome face, Dubos welcomed me with a broad engaging smile, much the way he greets his readers in the photographs that grace his books, and then invited me to take a chair adjacent to his uncluttered desk. After pleasantries that revealed his pronounced French accent, he told me about his early life. Born February 20, 1901, in Saint-Brice-sousForet, he grew up on farms in the small towns of Ile-de-France, the province directly north of Paris. In February 1913, his father purchased a butcher shop in Paris itself, moving his family there; but within 18 months, Georges Alexandre Dubos was called off to World War I, in which he suffered a head wound that eventually terminated his life. "I ran the butcher shop with my mother," the son recalled in a r~sonant voice, "and went to the public school across the street. From the social grace with which my mother dispensed lamb chops to the humblest customer, I learned that all human contacts~at any level and in any profession~could contribute to the diversity and charm of life."

Toward the end of his high school years, Dubos thought of becoming a historian but decided instead that he could better help his family if he pursued a course that was academically less demanding and financially more secure~agronomy. "It teaches you to have a scientific mind about agriculture." He chuckled, "It's for the head, not the hands." After earning the degree of Ingenieur Agronome in 1921, Dubos had a brief and inconsequential military tour. He then worked for two years as a research reviewer in Rome for the International Institute of Agriculture, a League of Nations precursor to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. His principal job was the preparation of abstracts of scientific papers that were then appearing in scholarly journals. In passing, young Dubos read an article by the bacteriologist Sergei Winograd sky, who suggested that soil microbes should be studied not only in the laboratory but also in their own natural environment. "This is really where my scholarly life began," Dubos remembered, shifting from one pair of thick glasses to another. "I have been restating that idea in all forms ever since. The main intellectual attitude that has governed all aspects of my professional life has been to study things, from microbes to man, not per se but in

their {;omplex relationships."

Deciding that he wanted to see America, Dubos had by 1924 saved enough money from tn;l.llslating books on forestry and agriculture to take the S.S. Rochambeau to New York. On the ship he happened to meet an American professor whom he had previously guided around Rome~Dr. Selman A. Waksman, who was then an agricultural bacteriologist at Rutgers University. "He asked me what I was going to do; and when I told him I had no clear plan, he suggested that I come to Rutgers to take a doctorate in agricultural microbiology. So, through this chance meeting, I took the train to New Brunswick, 'the very afternoon I landed in New York, and spent my first two and one-half years in this country at Rutgers." Dubos earned his doctorate with research into microbes that would destroy the cellulose of paper.

He applied for a National Research Council fellowship, but was rejected because he had not yet obtained American citizenship. On the rejection letter, he remembered, "A secretary had written, 'Why don't you go talk to your fellow countryman at the Rockefeller Institute, Dr. Alexis Carrell?''' With the confidence of a fresh Ph.D., Dubos called on Carrell, who introduced him in turn to the Rockefeller Institute's famous bacteriologist, Dr. Oswald T. Avery. Avery's department, which specialized in respiratory diseases, was then working on lobar pneumonia. Several years before, they had discovered that one reason why the pneumococcus could cause disease and resist treatment was that the microbe, especially in its virulent form, is surrounded by an envelope of gummy material. Called polysaccharide, this envelope protects the pneumococcus from the human body's natural defense mechanisms. .

Opening his drawer, Avery pulled out a small tube which he said contained this polysaccharide in its pure form. He asked the young man if he could solve a problem that had preoccupied the department for several previous years~decomposing the polysaccharide with an enzyme, or digestive agent, mild enough to be used in the body. Even though Dubos knew no more about human medicine than the next agronomist, he fortunately had done his doctorate on the decompositional capabilities of microbes. So, with some confidence, the young man told Avery, "I think I can find in the soil a bacterium that.would decompose the substance. From that bacterium, I can probably extract an enzyme that can do it." Springing up from his desk chair, Dubos reached into his own cabinet to show me Avery's actual vial, filled with white stuff~an historical artifact that the younger scientist has since kept as a memento (see picture on opposite

~~.

.

Granted a fellowship from the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, as it was then called, Dubos went quickly to work on his boast, gathering at least a hundred kinds of soil; and it was in a New Jersey cranberry bog, several kilometers from Rutgers, that he eventually found a bacterium that was capable of decomposing the capsular polysaccharide that

surrounded the virulent form of pneumococcus. "Next I did¡ by 'total environment,' I meant the sum of the factors which experiments with animals," he remembered. "I infected mice are not only physical and social conditions but emotional with type 3 penumococcus and then I gave them the enzyme. conditions as well. Disease cannot be eradicated simply by It cured them without fail-absolutely without fail." When medical treatment; social conditions must also be managed.

I suggested that his discovery sounded easy and obvious in So, from the beginning, I decided I would work both on vaccinaretrospect, he reminded me that in a research institute that tion against tuberculosis and on the social determinants of the generally favored chemistry and artificial substances, scien- disease." With respect to the first, Dubos developed an original tists were not likely to look in cranberry bogs for their most way of making the tubercle bacillus grow while submerged effective weapons. By the age of 30, this young immigrant, in water; it consisted, simply, of wetting it with either of two with a doctorate in agricultural microbiology, had suddenly nontoxic brands of the nearly thousand home detergents that he tested. Having an abundant supply of tubercle bacillus in a become a noted American medical researcher.

One peculiarity of the cranberry-bog microbe was that it readily available state facilitated research that might otherwise did not produce the enzyme, or digestive agent, of its own accord. have been more difficult. Some of these results were published Confronting this problem led to Dubos' second major dis- in The Journal of Experimental Medicine, a Rockefeller publicovery-that the microbe generated the enzyme only if the cation that he edited from 1946 to 1972. During the late 1940s polysaccharide was the essential component of its food, which and early 1950s, Dubos also ran Rockefeller's clinical departis to say that the enzyme is produced only as an adaptive re- ment of tuberculosis, where medical doctors on his staff treated sponse to an extreme situation. (And even then, if the microbe human patients. (With only a Ph.D., Dubos is not legally authowere returned to a normal situation, it would lose the capacity rized to write even a drugstore prescription in America.) to produce the anti-pneumococcus enzyme.) This Dubos called "an adaptive enzyme," and he speaks today of its discovery 'Most of man's problems in the modern as "my greatest hour in science. I am convinced that it is one world arise from the constant and of the important biological laws that I have ever been in contact unavoidable exposure to the stimuli of urban with, and this idea has also influenced my social philosophy."

Incredibly lucky in some respects, Dubos was less fortunate and industrial civilization ... in others; for by the time he completed his work in this areato all the environmental conditions that the mid-'thirties-sulfa drugs had arrived and were, by compariundisciplined technology creates.' son, more convenient for treating pneumonia.

These first two major discoveries led Dubos to "the fundamental conviction," as he told me, "that you can find in nature However, it was the second theme of his tuberculosis remicrobes to do anything you want, including the decomposition search that provoked Dubos' subsequent thought, which has of other microbes-even ones that appear resistant to most been largely concerned with the relation of environment to agents. Otherwise, all substances would accumulate endlessly. health and disease. The key book in his thinking about illness They don't, because they are decomposed by all sorts of mi- is also his single most popular work, The Mirage of Health crobes." Further research along this line led to Dubos' third (1959). This holds, as its title suggests, that "good health" major discovery-the isolation in 1939 of a soil microbe that is a mirage that one never completely attains, primarily because would kill staphococcus, the causative agent of boils and osteo- environmental conditions are forever changing. Dubos suggests myelitis. From this soil microbe Dubos extracted substances that that we are" 'healthy' only to the extent to which we adapt to he called "gramicidin" and "tyrothricin," which were the first our environments and also adapt the environment to ourselves." antibiotics to be produced 'Commercially. Although too toxic A more elaborate and scientific version of this thinking is his to by taken internally, both were effective in treating wounds later book, Man Adapting (1965).

Not until the late '60s (and his own late 60s) did Dubos and other surface infections. One secondary benefit of this research followed from Dubos' oftband remark that gramicidin assume his most recent career, as an influential social philosopher resembled penicillin in some of its activities. For, this inspired and prominent author. He has contributed countless articles to many magazines and has, since 1970, also written a regular English scientists to revive Alexander Fleming's dormant research into the medicinal possibilities of penicillin, which column forthe quarterly American Scholar. He has also produced a could, for one practical advantage, be taken internally. (Selman series of fairly popular books. So Human An Animal (1968), A. Waksman, Dubos' former teacher, used similar principles to which won the coveted Pulitzer Prize, he describes as dealing isolate streptomycin). with "how man is shaped by surroundings and events, but Dubos' first wife died of tuberculosis during World War II; is different from animals." Picking up copies as he talked, he and once he was relieved of his war work in tropical diseases, explained that A God Within (1972) "deals with what is peculiar the sometime agronomist faced yet another new medical prob- to each of us." Beast or Angel? (1974), originally written in lem. Noticing that his wife had had tuberculosis as a child French as Choisir d'etre humain (1974), focuses on "how we and guessing that it had never been entirely eradicated, Dubos choose the surroundings and events that make us human." then conjectured that the strains of World War II, coupled with In these three books, Dubos sees a progress from an emphasis the serious illness of her sister, "reawakened her latent tuber- "upon determinism to free will. Technically, we can do anything culosis." Further research into the disease led him to recognize we want; the real hard questions are the choices-what do we that the incidence of it increased during times of social stress, want." He paused to remember his own aphorism, "Human and decreased in more placid eras. [The results of this historical beings become human only by living in a human way. This research were published in The White Plague (1952), a definitive I feel strongly."

Most Dubos books are, like his conversation, rich in anecdote, book written in collaboration with his second wife, Jean.]

This observation led Dubos to conclude, as he told me, aphorism and generalization; and most can be read easily by educated laymen. "I have a feeling that we can never convey "That the total environment was a determinant of the disease-

what we think in abstract terms. I like to speak in parables.

I like to create an image or borrow an image." My own favorite among his recent books is perhaps the least-known-The Professor, The Institute and DNA (1976), a memoir of his initial supporter, Oswald T. Avery, whose most memorable achievement was demonstrating that DNA carries genetic information.

Because Dubos has spent nearly all of his professional life at "The Institute," the book is also very much about himself and the world in which he worked. His next book, he promises, willdeal with energy, architecture and ecology.

Few critics of modern civilization can match Dubos in his comprehensive critique; no one else could have written this passage from So Human An.Animal: "Most of man's problems in the modern world arise from the constant and unavoidable exposure to the stimuli of urban and industrial civilization, the varied aspects of environmental pollution, the physiological disturbances associated with sudden changes in ways of life, the estrangement from the conditions and natural cycles under which human evolution took place, the emotional trauma and the paradoxical solitude in congested cities, the monotony, boredom and compulsory leisure-in brief, all the environmental conditions that undisciplined technology creates."

Nowadays, Dubos is sponsoring the principle of biomass, which advocates deriving domestic energy from organic sources, such as plants, trees, garbage and animal excretions, rather than the construction of large generators and nuclear power plants.

"I do not favor nuclear plants, not because I fear radiationthat is a technical problem that can probably be controlledbut because they increase social centralization, which I find objectionable." For a country like India, say, with its thousands of villages, biomass that is locally generated would, he feels, be preferable to centralized power. "Each and every person is different," he continued, moving his hands in patterns symmetrical to each other. "We must create as much diversity as possible, even at the cost of efficiency, because it is through diversity that we can select situations that we want for ourselves.

To despair of events is the attitude of the coward; I believe we can also act."

When I suggested that his books revealed a religious sense of experience, he agreed, "Yes, I am religious in believing that there is more than we know. I believe in the symbolic meaning of all religious teaching." After some hesitancy, he acknowledged that he was a Roman Catholic and remains a communicant.

Within the Church's activity, he feels closest to the Benedictines and hence keeps close relationships with three particular monasteries-two in America and one in France. "Benedictines believethat human beings can change the earth, and must do so in the right way. In this sense, I am a Benedictine."

Medically, he opposes the increasing dependence that many of us have on medical drugs. "For most things," he declared, removing his glasses to look me straight in the eye, "we can take care of ourselves. Most diseases are self-terminating.

We simply get better." He then spoke of the mythical physician of ancient Greece, Asclepius, who had two daughters, Hygea and Panacea; Dubos deplores the tendency to neglect the former for the latter. Nonetheless, he admits with regret that he has, in recent years, begun to take either sleeping pills or vodka to cope with his own chronic insomnia. Several years ago, to cure his endocarditis, which is a streptococcus infection of the heart, he took penicillin and streptomycin-two drugs whose development was influenced by his own early work, thereby ultimately inspiring the cure to save himself.

As a large robust man, who has overcome the rheumatic

condition thaI; plagued his childhood, Dubos eats a normal diet, eschewing food fetishes, and keeps in shape mostly by walking.

"I'm the only person in this building," he boasted with a twinkle, "who walks up three .flights of steps." He also walks to the Manhattan railroad station, three kilometers from Rockefeller. At least once a week, he and his wife retreat to their l70-hectare farm in Garrison, New York, 80 kilometers up on the Hudson River. "We engage in a great deal of physical work.

We created a garden out of the rocks-my Benedictine stunt.

We are now creating a moss garden out of our admiration for a moss garden that we saw in a Zen temple near Kyoto." The farm just north of New York is an American successor to the farming country just north of Paris of his pre-Parisian childhood.

North of Garrison lives Dubos' friend Lewis Mumford (b. 1895), whom Dubos identifies as the single greatest influence upon his social philosophy. By chance (again !), Dubos read Mumford's critical essay on American architecture, Sticks and Stones (1924), soon after arriving in America. "I learned English from that book," he avers, and has been following Mumford's writings ever since. "We disagree on only one thing.

He is anti-city, because he removed himself from New York City. Otherwise, I have boundless admiration for him." Dubos raised both arms in unison. "What I love most about New York is walking in the street and seeing the diversity of people."

When Mumford was awarded the National Medal for Literature a few years ago, it was Dubos who made the presentation.

(Dubos himself has received more major awards than he has fingers on his hands, in addition to nearly 40 honorary doctorates, including three M.D.s. It is commonly said that by now he should have received the grand prize of world science, the Nobel Prize.)

Most of Dubos' "work" nowadays consists of lecturing and writing; whereas his scientific research made him prominent in his profession, now his fame has expanded to a wider public.

He gives nearly two hundred talks a year-sometimes as many as three a day-to audiences of students, teachers, physicians, population groups and conservationists, among others. His current articles and books are all drawn from these lectures.

Generally, he composes his writings initially by reading voraciously, copying both the thoughts of others and his own ideas into looseleaf notebooks, Every month, he goes through the notebooks, and out of them writes up new lectures that eventually get collected into books. Nearly every night he spends at home, in either Garrison or his New York apartment (adjacent to Rockefeller). He writes in longhand. Now, at the age of 77, he is at the height of yet another new career. As he ushered me out the door, he told me that a prominent publisher had personally asked him for his memoirs; but that, he decided, 0 was one book that Rene Dubos was not yet ready to do.

Richard Kostelanetz is one of the most prolific and controversial writers and literary critics in the United States.

His scholarly essays, poems and fiction often appear in such prestigious publications as The New York Times Book Review, Commonweal, Partisan Review, Esquire and New York.

Among his numerous published works are The End of Intelligent Writing:

Literary Politics in America, Master Minds: Portraits of Contemporary Artists and Intellectuals, and Rain Rains Rain. Kostelanetz is also the cofounder and coeditor of Assembling, an annual book-length periodical.

ARE H_AN RIGHTS UNIVERSAl iI The current preoccupation with human rights raises a very serious question.

When Americans make statements about human rights, are they simply giving voice to a specific set of biases of their own?

Or is there some universally valid standard of morality to which they can appeal in making judgments about countries with different traditions from theirs?

The question of the universal validity of moral judgments is an old one in the history of human thought. It is, indeed, one of the oldest questions of Western philosophy, going back to the twin sources of Western civilization in ancient Israel and ancient Greece. And the question is just as old in the great religious and philosophical traditions of Asia, as in the passionate quest for the oneness of reality in the religious imagination of India, and the (perhaps more secular) ef1'ortsto define the nature of humaneness' in Chinese ethical thought. In the contemporary world, however, this issue has attained an urgency which I believe is new in human history.

The reason for this is to be sought in one main historical factor-the global . process of modernization. The "external" effects of modernization are very clear and generally acknowledged: there has been a quantum jump in what anthropologists call "culture contact," as a result of modern technologies of transportation and communication. This means, quite simply, that everyone today is rubbing shoulders with everyone else (or nearly everyone else). On a practical level, therefore, the necessity has arisen of coming to terms with all sorts of people different from oneself. This, however, includes the necessity of coming to terms with them morally as well-that is, coming to terms with standards of conduct that are different from one's own.

Of course, one must make distinctions.

Not everyone in the world is rubbing . shoulders with everyone else in the same way. The overwhelming majority of people in the contemporary world do not, for example, enjoy the pleasures of international air travel, that emblem par

Genocide, the massacre of innocent people, the systematic use of terror, religious persecution, enslavement through forced labor, are against the tenets of all the major world cultures.

of modernization; those who do, constitute a very small and highly privileged group. Still, very few people in the world today are truly immune from modernization, the same process that hurls mighty jetliners into the sky invades the villages and rice paddies over which they fly, and it does so in innumerable ways-establishing modern political and economic institutions, setting up govern- . ment agencies and schools, connecting hitherto separated locales with roads and railways, supplying tons of manufactured products, and (ultimately most important of all) drawing people into the massive physical movement of population that is one of the inevitable consequences of modernization.

But the external manifestations of modernization are not the only manifestations; they are accompanied by profound changes of consciousness. One such change is pluralization-the progressive interpenetration of the worlds of meaning in which human beings live. Through most of history most people lived in situations that were not only highly integrated in terms of their governing values and their definitions of reality, but were also quite effectively protected against challenges to those values and definitions of reality. The most effective protection was isolation, or at least segregation, from all those "others" who perceived and valued reality differently.

Modernization weakens and often shatters the protective walls around all traditionally integrated worlds of meaning; the "others," once distant strangers, now become neighbors in a sometimes uncomfortable way.

The discomfort is not only social, but cognitive and moral as well. For each world of meaning, as it is penetrated by other worlds of meaning, becomes ipsofacto relativized. Some three centuries ago Pascal could exclaim, with a sense of discovery, that what is truth on one side of the Pyrenees is error on the other.

This discovery has by now become commonplace knowledge.

The consequence for morality is simple

excellence

but revolutionary. When my neighbors make moral judgments different from mine, then the question of the universal validity of moral judgments (theirs or mine) imposes itself urgently. Thus, modernization makes reluctant moral philosophers of us all.

In regularly dismissing human rights issues when they are raised by Westerners as irrelevant to their own countries, leaders of other political systems and cultures force us once again to face the question of how one may make moral judgments with a claim to universal validity. Indeed, they raise the even sharper question of whether the very habit of making universally relevant moral judgments may not be a specifically Western propensity.

Most intellectual problems are carried further toward solution by the making of distinctions, and this one is no exception. A. crucial distinction to be made here is between those notions of human rights¡ that emerge exclusively from a Western view of the world, and which will only be plausible to those sharing this view, and those notions of human rights that derive their warrant from a wider consensus.

The former category undoubtedly includes those rights that have emerged from the Western development of political democracy-the ones which in America are commonly designated as civil liberties and civil rights. Freedom of speech and of the press, the inviolability of the electoral process, equal protection of the law, due process-all these are rights that find little warrant outside the orbit of Western history.

To this list must be added the economic rights of which the Left is so enamored.

The notion that economic justice demands an ever greater measure of equality is as specifically Western as the notion that liberty is the highest political value; non-Western man, almost everywhere, has been homo hierarchicus.

Yet the grossest cases called violations of human rights today are of an altogether different kind. Genocide; the massacre

of large number of innocent people by their own government or by alien conquerors; the deliberate abandonment of entire sections of a population to starvation; the systematic use of terror (including torture) as government policy; the expulsion of large numbers of people from their homes; enslavement through various forms of forced labor; the forced separation of families (including the taking away of children from their parents by actions of government); the deliberate desecration of religious symbols and the persecution of those adhering to them; the destruction of institutions that embody ethnic identity. Each one of these items is routine policy in many countries today.

It is my contention that, in condemning these as violations of human rights, we can call upon a consensus far wider than that of Western civilization. That consensus emerges from all the major world cultures, especially in their religious foundations-and it is a consensus all the more impressive in view of the vast (and. partly irreconcilable) differences among the world religions in their understanding of reality and of human destiny.

Buddhism has as its highest moral tenet the "respect for all sentient beings."

The entire corpus of ethics of the Chinese tradition holds, among other things, that government should be "human-hearted" and that "filial piety" is one of the highest human goods. Every call to prayer, from every Muslim minaret, begins with an invocation of God who is al-rahman al-rahim, whose nature is to be compassionate and who has compassion, and who commands men to be compassionate also.

A truer understanding of the moral convergence of the human race on the question of fundamental human rights is essential if Americans (in or out of government) are to speak credibly on the international scene.

0 About the Author: Peter L. Berger is a professor of sociology at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and author of Pyramids of Sacrifice and Facing up to Modernity: Reflec-

tions on Society, Politics and Religion.

Bernard Malamud Q. Am I a man in a horse or a horse that talks like a man?

Suppose they took an X-ray, what would they see?-a man's luminous skeleton prostrate inside a horse, or just a horse with a complicated voice box? If the first, then Jonah had it better in the whale- more"room all around; also he knew who he was and how he had got there. About myself I have to make guesses. Anyway after three days and nights the big fish stopped at Nineveh and Jonah took his valise and got off.

But not Abramowitz, still on board, or at hand, after years; he's no prophet. On the contrary, he works in a sideshow full of freaks-though recently advanced, on Goldberg's insistence, to the center ring inside the big tent in an act with his deaf-mute master-Goldberg himself, may the Almighty forgive him. All I know is I've been here for years and still don't understand the nature of my fate; in short if I'm Abramowitz, a horse; or a horse including Abramowitz.

Why is anybody's guess. Understanding goes so far and not further, especially if Goldberg blocks the way. It might be because of something I said, or thought, or did, or didn't do in my life. It's easy to make mistakes and it's easy not to know who made them. I have my theories, glimmers, guesses, but can't prove a thing.

When Abramowitz stands in his stall, his hoofs nervously booming on the battered wooden boards as he chews in his bag of hard yellow oats, sometimes he has thoughts, far-off remembrances they seem to be, of young horses racing, playing, nipping at each other's flanks in green fields ; and other disquieting images that might be memories; so who's to say what's really the truth?

I've tried asking Goldberg but save yourself the trouble.

He goes black-and-blue in the face at questions, really uptight.

I can understand-he's a deaf-mute from way back; he doesn't like interference with his thoughts or plans, or the way he lives, and no surprises except those he invents. In other words questions disturb him. Ask him a question and he's off his usual track. He talks to me only when he feels like it, which isn't so often-his little patience wears thin. Lately his mood is awful, he reaches too often for his bamboo cane-

whoosh across the rump! There's usually plenty of oats and straw and water, and once in a while even a joke to relax me when I'm tensed up, but otherwise it's one threat or another, followed by a flash of pain if I don't get something or other right, or something I say hits him on his nerves. It's not only that cane that slashes like a whip; his threats have the same effect-like a zing-zong of lightning through the flesh; in fact the blow hurts less than ) the threat-the blow's momentary, the threat you worry about. But the true pain, at least to me, is when you don't know what you have to know.

Which doesn't mean we don't communicate to each other.

Goldberg taps out Morse code messages on my head with his big knuckle -crack crack crack; I feel the vibrations run through my bones to the tip of my tail -when he orders me what to do next or he threatens how many lashes for the last offense. His first message, I remember, was NO QUESTIONS. UNDERSTOOD? I shook my head yes and a little bell jangled on a strap under the forelock.

That was the first I knew it was there.

TALK, he knocked on my head after he told me about the act. "You're a talking horse."

"Yes, master." What else can you say?

My voice surprised me when it came out high through the tunnel of a horse's neck. I can't exactly remember the occasion-go remember beginnings. My memory I have to fight to get an early remembrance out of. Don't ask me why unless I happened to fall and hurt my head or was otherwise stunted. Goldberg is my deaf-mute owner; he reads my lips. Once when he was drunk and looking for a little company

he tapped me that I used to carry goods on my back to fairs and markets in the old days before we joined the circus.

I used to think I was born here.

"On a rainy, snowy, crappy night," Goldberg Morsecoded me on my skull..

"What happened then?"

He stopped talking altogether. I should know better but don't.

I try to remember what night we're talking about and certain hazy thoughts flicker in my mind, which could be some sort of story I dream up when I have nothing to do but chew Qats. It's easier than remembering. The one that comes' to me most is about two men, or horses, or men on horses, though which was me I can't say. Anyway two strangers meet, somebody asks the other a question and the next thing they're locked in battle, either hacking at one another's head with swords, or braying wildly as they tear flesh with their teeth; or both at the same time. If riders, or horses, one is thin and poetic, the other a fat stranger wearing a huge black crown. They meet in a stone pit on a rainy, snowy, crappy night,¡ one wearing his cracked metal crown that weighs like a ton on his head and makes his movements slow though nonetheless accurate, and the other on his head wears a ragged colored cap; all night they wrestle by weird light in the slippery stone pit.

Q. "What's to be done?" .

A. "None of those accursed bloody questions."

The next morning one of us wakes with a terrible pain which feels like a wound in the neck but also a headache. He remembers a blow he can't swear to and a strange dialogue where the answers come first and the questions follow: I descended from a ladder.

How did you get here?

The up and the down.

Which ladder?

Abramowitz, in his dream story,

Sometimes when Abramowitz gets tired of talking to ~imself . in his frustration he rears, rocks, gallops in his stall; but what good is a gallop if there's no place to go?

suspects Goldberg walloped him over the head and stuffed him into his horse because he needed a talking one for his act and there was no such thing.

I wish I knew for sure.

DON'T DARE ASK. That's his nature; he's a lout though not without a little consideration when he's depressed and tippling his bottle. That's when he taps me out a teasing anecdote or two. He has no visible friends.

Family neither of us talks about. When he laughs he cries.

GT

t must frustrate the owner that all he can say -- J.aloud is four-letter words like geee, gooo, gaaa, gaaw; and the circus manager who doubles as ringmaster, in for a snifter, looks embarrassed at the floor. At those who don't know the Morse code Goldberg grimaces, glares, and grinds his teeth. He has his mysteries. He keeps a mildewed three-prong spear hanging on the wall over a stuffed pony's head. Sometimes he goes down the cellar with an old candle and comes up with a new one though we have electric lights. Although he doesn't complain about his life, he worries and cracks his knuckles. Maybe he's a widower, who knows? He doesn't seem interested in women but sees to it that Abramowitz gets his chance at a mare in heat, if available. Abramowitz engages to satisfy his physical nature, a fact is a fact, otherwise it's no big deal; the mare has no interest in a talking courtship. Furthermore Goldberg applauds when Abramowitz mounts her, which is humiliating.

And when they're in their winter quarters the owner once a week or so dresses up and goes out on the town. When he puts on his broadcloth suit, diamond stickpin, and yellow gloves, he preens before the full-length mirror. He pretends to fence, jabs the bamboo cane at the figure in the glass, twirls it around one finger. Where he goes when he goes he doesn't inform Abramowitz.

But when he returns he's usually melancholic, sometimes anguished, didn't have much of a good time; and in this mood may hand out a few loving lashes with that bastard cane. Or worse-make threats.

Nothing serious but who needs it? Usually he prefers to stay home and watch television. He is fascinated by astronomy, and when they have those programs on the educational channel he's there night after night, staring at pictures of stars, quasars, infinite space. He also likes to read the Daily News, which he tears up when he's done.

Sometimes he reads this book he hides on a shelf in the closet under some old hats. If the book doesn't make him laugh outright it makes him cry. When he gets excited over something he's reading in his fat book, his eyes roll, his mouth gets wet, and he tries to talk through his thick tongue, though all Abramowitz hears is geee, gooo, gaaa, gaaw. Always these words, whatever they mean, and sometimes gool goon geek gonk, in various combinations, usually gool with gonk,

which Abramowitz thinks means Goldberg. And in such states he has been known to kick Abramowitz in the belly with his heavy boot. Ooof.

When. he laughs he sounds like a horse, or maybe it's the way I hear him with these ears.

And though he laughs once in a While, it doesn't make my life easier, because of my condition.

I mean I think here I am in this horse. This is my theory though I have my doubts. Otherwise, Goldberg is a small stocky figure with a thick neck, heavy black brows, each like a small mustache, and big feet that swell up in his shapeless boots.

He washes his feet in the kitchen sink and hangs up his yellowed white socks to dry on the whitewashed walls of my stall. Phoo.

He likes to do card tricks.

In winter they live in the South in a small, messy, one-floor house with a horse's stall attached that Goldberg can approach, down a few steps, from the kitchen of the house. To get Abramowitz into the stall he is led up a plank from the outside and the door shuts on his rear end. To keep him from wandering all over the house there's a slatted gate to just under his head. Furthermore the stall is next to the toilet and the broken water closet runs all night. It's a boring life with a deaf-mute except when Goldberg changes the act a little. Abramowitz enjoys it when they rehearse a new routine, although Goldberg hardly ever alters the lines, only the order of answer and question. That's better than nothing. Sometimes when Abramowitz gets tired of talking to himself, asking unanswered questions, he complains, shouts, calls the owner dirty names. He snorts, brays, whinnies shrilly.

In his frustration he rears, rocks, gallops in his stall; but what good is a gallop if there's no place to go, and Goldberg can't, or won't, hear complaints, pleas, protest?

Q. "Answer me this: If it's a sentence I'm serving, how long?"

A. Once in a while Goldberg seems to sense somebody else's needs and is momentarily considerate of Abramowitz-combs and curries him, even rubs his bushy head against the horse's.

He also shows interest in his diet and whether his bowel movements are regular and sufficient; but if Abramowitz gets sentimentally careless when the owner is close by and forms a question he can see on his lips, Goldberg punches him on the nose.

Or threatens to. It doesn't hurt any the less.

All I know is he's a former vaudeville comic and acrobat. He did a solo act telling jokes with the help of a blind assistant before he went sad. That's about all he's ever tapped to me about himself.

When I forgot myself and asked what happened then, he punched me in the nose.

Only once, when he was half drunk and giving me my bucket of water, I sneaked in a fast one which he answered before he knew it.

"Where did you get me, master? Did you buy me from somebody else? Maybe in some kind of auction?"

I FOUND YOU IN A CABBAGE PATCH. Once he tapped my skull: "In the beginning was the word."

"Which word was that?"

Bong on the nose.

NO MORE QUESTIONS. "Watch out for the wound on my head or whatever it is."

"Keep your trap shut or you'll lose your teeth."

Goldberg should read that story I once heard on his transistor radio, I thought to myself. It's about a poor cab driver driving his sledge in the Russian snow. His son, a fine promising lad, got sick with pneumonia and died, and the poor cabby can't find anybody to talk to so as to relieve his grief.

Nobody wants to listen to his troubles, because that's the way it is in the world. When he opens his mouth to say a word, the customers insult him.

So he finally tells the story to his bony nag in the stable, and the horse, munching oats, listens as the weeping old man tells him about his boy that he has just buried.

Something like that could happen to you, Goldberg, and you'd be a lot kinder to whoever I am.

"Will you ever free me out of here, master?"

I'LL FLAY YOU ALIVE, YOU BASTARD HORSE. We have this act we do together. Goldberg calls it "Ask Me Another," an ironic title where I am concerned.

In the sideshow days people used to stand among the bearded ladies, the blobby fat men, Joey the snake boy, and other freaks, laughing beyond belief at Abramowitz talking. He remembers one man staring into his mouth to see who's hiding there.

Homunculus? Others suggested it was a ventriloquist's act even though the horse told them Goldberg was a deaf-mute. But in the main tent the act got thunderous storms of applause.

Reporters pleaded for permission to interview Abramowitz and he had plans to spill all, but Goldberg wouldn't allow it. "His head will swell up too big," he had the talking horse say to them. "He will never be able to wear the same size straw hat he wore last summer."

en -r

or the performance the owner dresses up in a balloony red-and-white polkadot clown's suit with a pointed clown's hat and has borrowed a ringmaster's snaky whip, an item Abramowitz is skittish of though Goldberg says it's nothing to worry about, little more than decoration in a circus act. No animal act is without one. People like to hear the snap. He also ties an upside-down feather duster on Abramowitz's head that makes him look like a wilted unicorn. The five-piece circus band ends its brassy "Overture to William Tell"; there's a flourish of trumpets, and Goldberg cracks the whip as Abramowitz, with his loose-feathered, upside-down duster, trots once around the spotlit ring and then stops at attention, facing clownGoldberg, his left foreleg pawing the sawdust-

Sometimes I think of myself as an idea, yet here I stand in this filthy stall, my hoofs sunk in my yellow balls of dreck. I feel old, disgusted with myself. covered earth. They then begin the act; Goldberg's to watch the performance, and they laughed at the ruddy face, as he opens his painted mouth to ex- riddles though they had known them from childpress himself, flushes dark red, and his melancholy hood. eyes under black brows protrude as he painfully That's how the season goes, and nothing much has squeezes out the abominable sounds, his only changed one way or the other except that recently Goldberg, because the manager was complaining, eloquence: "Geee gooo gaaa gaaw?" added a couple of silly elephant riddles to modernize the act.

Abramowitz's resonant, beautifully timed response is: A. "From playing marbles."

A. "To get to the other side."

Q. ~'Why do elephants have wrinkled knees?"

There's a gasp from the spectators, a murmur, A. "To pack their dirty laundry in." perhaps of puzzlement, and a moment of intense Q. "Why do elephants have long trunks?" expectant silence. Then at a roll of the drums Neither Goldberg nor I think much of the new Goldberg snaps the long whip and Abramowitz jokes but they're the latest style. I reflect that we translates the owner's idiocy into something that could do the act without jokes. All you need is a makes sense and somehow fulfills expectations; talking horse. though in truth it's no more than a question followOne day Abramowitz thought he would make up a ing a response already given. not that hard question-response of his own-it's Q. "Why does a chicken cross the road?" to do. So that night after they had finished the Then they laugh. And do they laugh! They pound routine, he slipped in his new riddle. each other in merriment. You'd think this trite A. "To greet his friend the chicken." riddle, this sad excuse for a joke, was the first they Q. "Why does a yellow duck cross the road?" had heard in their lives. And they're laughing at the After a moment of confused silence everybody translated question, of course, not at the answer, cracked up; they beat themselves silly with their which is the way Goldberg has set it up. That's his fists-broken straw boaters flew all over the place; nature for you. It's the only way he works. but Goldberg in unbelieving astonishment glowered Abramowitz used to sink into the dumps after murderously at the horse. His ruddy face turned that, knowing what really amuses everybody is not black. When he cracked the whip it sounded like the old-fashioned tired conundrum, but the fact a river of ice breaking. Realizing in fright that he it's put to them by a talking horse. That's what had gone too far, Abramowitz, baring his big splits the gut. teeth, reared up on his hind legs and took several "It's a stupid little question." steps forward against the will. But the spectators, "There are no better," Goldberg said. thinking this was an extra flourish at the end of the "You could try letting me ask one or two of my . act, applauded wildly. Goldberg's anger apparently own."

YOU KNOW WHAT A GELDING IS? I gave him no reply. Two can play at that game.

After the first applause both performers take a row bow. Abramowitz trots around the ring, his head with panache held high. And when Goldberg again cracks the pudgy whip, he moves nervously to the center of the ring and they go through the routine of the other infantile answers and questions in the same silly ass-backwards order. After each question Abramowitz runs around the ring as the spectators cheer.

A. "To hold up his pants."

Q. "Why does a fireman wear red suspenders?"

A. "Columbus."

Q. "What was the first bus to cross the Atlantic?"

A. "A newspaper."

Q. "What's black and white and red all over?"

We did a dozen like that, and when we finished up, Goldberg cracked the foolish whip, I galloped a couple more times around the ring, then we took our last bows.

Goldberg pats my steaming flank and in the ocean-roar of everyone in the tent applauding and shouting bravo, we leave the ring, running down the ramp to our quarters, Goldberg's personal wagon van and attached stall; after that we're private parties till tomorrow's show.

Many customers used to come night after night

eased, and lowering his whip, he pretended to laugh. Amid continuing applause he beamed at Abramowitz as if he were his only child and could do no wrong, though Abramowitz, in his heart of hearts, knew the owner was furious.

"Don't forget WHO'S WHO, you insane horse," Goldberg, his back to the audience, tapped out on Abramowitz's nose.

He made him gallop once more around the ring, mounted him in an acrobatic leap onto his bare back, and drove him madly to the exit.

Afterwards he Morse-coded with his hard knuckle on the horse's bony head that if he pulled anything like that again he would personally deliver him to the glue factory.

WHERE THEY WILL MELT YOU DOWN TO SIZE. "What's left over goes into dog food cans."

"It was just a joke, master," Abramowitz explained.

"To say the answer was O.K., but not to ask the question by yourself."

Out of stored-up bitterness the talking horse replied, "I did it on account of it made me feel free."

At that Goldberg whacked him hard across the neck with his murderous cane. Abramowitz, choking, staggered but did not bleed.

"Don't, master," he gasped, "not on myoid wound."

Goldberg went into slow motion, still waving the cane. ''Try it again, you tub of guts, and I'll be wearing a horsehide coat with fur collar, gool, goon, geek, gonk." Spit crackled in the corners of his mouth.

Understood.

He dreams of other lives he might live ... of a horse that can't talk .... He sees himself pulling a wagonload of yellow apples.... More adventurously, he sees himself a racehorse in goggles.

Sometimes I think of myself as an idea, yet here I stand in this filthy stall, my hoofs sunk in my yellow balls of dreck. I feel old, disgusted with myself, smelling the odor of my bad breath as my teeth in the feedbag grind the hard oats into a foaming lump, while Goldberg smokes his panatela as he watches TV. He feeds me well enough, if oats are your dish, but hasn't had my stall cleaned for a week. It's easy to get even on a horse if that's the type you are.

So the act goes on every matinee and night, keeping Goldberg in good spirits and thousands in stitches, but Abramowitz had dreams of being out in the open. They were strange dreams-if dreams; he isn't sure what they are or come from-hidden thoughts, maybe, of freedom, or some sort of selfmockery? You let yourself conceive what can't be? Anyhow, whoever heard of a talking horse's dreams? Goldberg hasn't said he knows what's going on but Abramowitz suspects he understands more than he seems to, because when the horse, lying in his dung and soiled straw, awakens from a dangerous reverie, he hears the owner muttering in his sleep in deaf-mute talk.

GA

bramowitz dreams, or does something - nOf the sort, of other lives he might live, let's say of a horse that can't talk, couldn't conceive the idea; is perfectly content to be simply a horse without problems of speech. He sees himself, for instance, pulling a wagonload of yellow apples along a rural road. There are leafy beech trees on both sides and beyond them broad green fields full of wild flowers. If he were that kind of horse, maybe he might retire to graze in such fields. More adventurously, he sees himself a racehorse in goggles, thundering along the last stretch of muddy track, slicing through a wedge of other galloping horses to win by a nose at the finish; and the jockey is definitely not Goldberg. There is no jockey; he fell off.

Or if not a racehorse, if he has to be practical about it, Abramowitz continues on as a talking horse but not in circus work any longer; and every night on the stage he recites poetry. The theater is packed and people cry out oooh and aaah, what beautiful things that horse is saying.

Sometimes he thinks of himself as altogether a free "man,". someone of indeterminate appearance and characteristics, who, if he has the right education, is maybe a doctor or lawyer helping poor people. Not a bad idea for a useful life.

But even if! am dreaming or whatever it is, I hear Goldberg talking in my sleep. He talks something like me: As for number one, you are first and last a talking horse, not any ordinary nag that can't talk; and believe me I have got nothing against you that you can talk, Abramowitz, but on account of what you say when you open your mouth and break the rules.

As for a racehorse, if you take a good look at the broken-down type you are~overweight, with big

sagging belly and a thick uneven dark-brown coat that won't shine up no matter how much I comb or brush you, and four hairy, thick, bent legs, plus a pair of slight cross-eyes, you would give up that foolish idea you can be a racehorse before you do something very ridiculous.

As for reciting poetry, who wants to hear a horse recite poetry? That's for the birds.

As for the last dream, or whatever it is that's bothering you, that you can be a doctor or lawyer, you better forget it, it's not that kind of a world.

A horse is a horse even if he's a talking horse; don't mix yourself up with human beings if you know what I mean. If you're a talking horse that's your fate. I warn you, don't try to be a wise guy, Abramowitz. Don't try to know everything, you might go mad. Nobody can know everything; it's not that kind of a world. Follow the rules of the game.

Don't rock the boat. Don't try to make a monkey out of me; I know more than you. We got to be who we are, although this is rough on both of us. But that's the logic of the situation. It goes by certain laws even though that's a hard proposition for some to understand. The law is the law, you can't change the order. That's the way things stay put together. We are mutually related, Abramowitz, and that's all there is to it. If it makes you feel any better, I will admit to you I can't live without you and I won't let you live without me. I have my living to make and you are my talking horse I use in my act to earn my living, plus so I can take care of your needs. The true freedom, like I have always told you, though you never want to believe me, is to understand that and live with it so you don't waste your energy resisting the rules; if so you waste your life. All you are is a horse who talks, and believe me, there are very few horses that can do that; so if you are smart, Abramowitz, it should make you happy instead of always and continually dissatisfied. Don't break up the act if you know what's good for you.

As for those yellow balls of your dreck, if you will behave yourself like a gentleman and watch out what you say, tomorrow the shovelers will come and after I will hose you over personally with warm water. Believe me, there's nothing like cleanliness.

Thus he mocks me in my sleep though I have my doubts that I sleep much nowadays.

In short hops between towns and small cities the circus moves in wagon vans. The other horses pull them, but Goldberg won't let me, which again wakes disturbing ideas in my head. For longer hauls, from one big city to another, we ride in redand-white-striped circus trains. I have a stall in a freight car with some nontalking horses with fancy braided manes and sculptured tails from the bareback riders' act. None of us are much interested in each other. If they think at all they think a talking horse is a showoff. All they do is eat and drink, piss and crap, all day. Not a single word goes back or forth among them. Nobody has a good or bad idea.

The long train rides generally give us a day off without a show, and Goldberg gets depressed and

surly when we're not working th~ matinee or evening performance.

Early in the morning of a long train-ride day he starts loving his bottle and Morse-coding me nasty remarks and threats.

"Abramowitz, you think too much, why do you bother? In the first place your thoughts come out of you and you don't know that much, so your thoughts don't either. In other words don't get too ambitious. For instance what's on your mind right now, tell me?"

"Answers and questions, master-some new ones to modernize the act."

"Feh, we don't need any new ones, the act is already too long."

He should know the questions I am really asking myself, though better not.

O

nce you start asking questions one leads to the next and in the end it's endless. And what if it turns out I'm always asking myself the same question in different words? I keep on wanting to know why I can't ask this coarse lout a simple question about anything. By now I have it figured out Goldberg is afraid of questions because a question could show he's afraid people will find out who he is. Somebody who all he does is repeat his fate. Anyway, Goldberg has some kind of past he is afraid to tell me about, though sometimes he hints. And when I mention my own past he says forget it. Concentrate on the future. What future? On the other hand, what does he think he can hide from Abramowitz, a student by nature, who spends most of his time asking himself questions Goldberg won't permit him to ask, putting one and one together, and finally making up his mind-miraculous thought-that he knows more than a horse should, even a talking horse, so therefore, given all the built-up evidence, he is positively not a horse. Not in origin anyway.

So I came once more to the conclusion that I am a man in a horse and not just a horse that happens to be able to talk. I had figured this out in my mind before; then I said, no it can't be. I feel more like a horse bodywise; on the other hand I talk, I think, I wish to ask questions. So I am what I am, which is a man in a horse, not a talking horse. Something tells me there is no such thing even though Goldberg, pointing his fat finger at me, says the opposite. He lives on his lies, it's his nature.

After long days of traveling, when they were in their new quarters one night, finding the rear door to his stall unlocked-Goldberg grew careless when depressed-acting on belief as well as impulse, Abramowitz cautiously backed out. Avoiding the front of Goldberg's wagon van he trotted across the fairgrounds on which the circus was situated.

-Two of the circus hands who saw him trot by, perhaps because Abramowitz greeted them, "Hello, boys, marvelous evening," did not attempt to stop him. Outside the grounds, though exhilarated to be in the open Abramowitz began to wonder if he was doing a foolish thing. He had hoped to

But to exit a horse as a man takes some doing. Abramowitz planned to ... appeal to public opinion. It might take months, possibly years, to do what he must. Protest! Sabotage if necessary! Revolt! find a wooded spot to hide in for the time being, surrounded by fields in which he could peacefully graze; but this was the industrial edge of the city, and though he clop-clopped from street to street there were no woods nearby, not even a small park.

Where can somebody who looks like a horse go by himself?

Abramowitz tried to hide in an old riding-school stable and was driven out by an irate woman.

In the end they caught up with him on a station platform where he had been waiting for a train.

Quite foolishly, he knew. The conductor wouldn't let him get on though Abramowitz had explained his predicament. The stationmaster then ran out and pointed a pistol at his head. He held the horse there, deaf to his blandishments, until Goldberg arrived with his bamboo cane. The owner threatened to whip Abramowitz to the quick, and his description of the effects was so painfully vivid that Abramowitz felt as though he had been slashed into a bleeding pulp. A half hour later he found himself back in his locked stall, his throbbing head encrusted with dried horse blood. Goldberg ranted in deaf-mute talk, but Abramowitz, who with lowered head pretended contrition, felt none.

To escape from Goldberg he must first get out of the horse he was in.

Bernard Malamud is one of the most important authors of contemporary fiction in America. Literary critic Herbert Gold considers Malamud's writings, which have been compared with those of Dostoevski, Chekov and Joyce, "lyric marvels ... the headlong architectural daring of a great novelist .... " Winner of a Pulitzer Prize for The Fixer, Malamud's other novels are The Natural, The Assistant, A New Life and Th~ Tenants. His short story books include The Magic Barrel, Idiots First and Rembrandt's Hat.

But to exit a horse as a man takes some doing.

Abramowitz planned to proceed slowly and appeal to public opinion. It might take months, possibly years, to do what he must. Protest! Sabotage if necessary! Revolt! One night after they had taken their bows and the applause was subsiding, Abramowitz, raising his head as though to whinny his appreciation of the plaudits, cried out to all assembled in the circus tent, "Help! Get me out of here, somebody! I am a prisoner in this horse!

Free a fellow man!"

After a silence that rose like a' dense forest, Goldberg, who was standing to the side, unaware of Abramowitz's passionate cry-he picked up the news later from the ringmaster-saw at once from everybody's surprised and startled expression, not to mention Abramowitz's undisguised look of triumph, that something had gone seriously amiss. The owner at once began to laugh heartily, as though whatever it was that was going on was more of the same, part of the act, a bit of personal encore by the horse. The spectators laughed too, and again warmly applauded.

"It won't do you any good," the owner Morsecoded Abramowitz afterwards. "Because nobody is going to believe you."

"Then please let me out of here on your own account, master. Have some mercy."

"About that matter," Goldberg rapped out sternly, "I am already on record. Our lives and livings are dependent one on the other. You got nothing substantial to complain about, Abramowitz. I'm taking care on you better than you can take care on yourself."

"Maybe that's so, Mr. Goldberg, but what good is it if in my heart I am a man and not a horse, not even a talking one?"

Goldberg's ruddy face blanched as he Morsecoded the usual NO QUESTIONS. "I'm not asking, I'm trying to tell you something very serious."

"Watch out for hubris, Abramowitz."

That night the owner went out on the town, came back dreadful!y drunk, as though he had been lying with his mouth open under a spigot pouring brandy; and he threatened Abramowitz with the trident spear he kept in his trunk when they traveled. This is a new torment.

Anyway, the act goes on but definitely altered, not as before. Abramowitz, despite numerous warnings and various other painful threats, daily disturbs the routine. After Goldberg makes his idiot noises, his geee gooo gaaa gaaw, Abramowitz purposely mixes up the responses to the usual ridiculous riddles.

A. "To get to the other side."

Q. "Why does a fireman wear red suspenders?"

A. "From playing marbles."

Q. "Why do elephants have long trunks?"

And he adds dangerous A.'s and Q.'s without permission despite the inevitability of punishment.

A. "A talking horse."

Q. "What has four legs and wis~es to be free?"

At that nobody laughed.

He also mocked Goldberg when the owner wasn't attentively reading his lips; called him "deaf-mute," "stupid ears," "lock mouth"; and whenever possible addressed the public, requesting, urging, begging their assistance.

"Gevalt! Get me out of here! I am one of you!

This is slavery! I wish to be free!"

Now and then when Goldberg's back was turned, or when he was too lethargic with melancholy to be much attentive, Abramowitz clowned around and in other ways ridiculed the owner. He heehawed at his appearance, brayed at his "talk," stupidity, arrogance. Sometimes he made up little songs of freedom as he danced on his hind legs, exposing his private parts. And at times Goldberg, to mock the mocker, danced gracelessly with him-a clown with a glum-painted smile, waltzing with a horse.

Those who had seen the act last season were astounded, stunned by the change, uneasy, as though the future threatened.

"Help! Help, somebody help me!" Abramowitz pleaded, but nobody moved.

Sensing the tension in and around the ring, the audience sometimes booed the performers, causing Goldberg, in his red-and-white polkadot suit and white clown's cap, great embarrassment, though on the whole he kept his cool during the act and never used the ringmaster's whip.

In fact he smiled as he was insulted, whether he "listened" or not. He heard what he saw. A sly smile was fixed on his face and his lips twitched.

And though his fleshy ears flared like torches at the gibes and mockeries he endured, Goldberg laughed to the verge of tears at Abramowitz's sallies and shenanigans; many in the big tent laughed along with him. Abramowitz was furious.

G'i\ -rl.ped

fterwards Goldberg, once he had stepout of his clown suit, threatened him to the point of collapse, or flayed him viciously with his cane; and the next day fed him pep pills and painted his hide black before the performance so that people wouldn't see the wounds.

"Y ou bastard horse, you'll lose us our living."

"I wish to be free."

"To be free you got to know when you are free.

Considering your type, Abramowitz, you'lJ be free in the glue factory."

One night when Goldberg, after a day of profound depression, was listless and logy in the ring, could not evoke so much as a limp snap out of his whip, Abramowitz; thinking that where the future was concerned, glue factory or his present condition of life made little difference, determined to escape either fate; he gave a solo performance for freedom, the best of his career. Though desperate, he entertained, made up hilarious riddles: A. "By jumping through the window." Q. "How do you end the pane?"; he recited poems he had heard on Goldberg's radio, which sometimes stayed on all night after the owner had fallen asleep;

Abramowitz then cried out to the faces that.surrounded him, 'I also am a man in a horse. Is there a doctor in the house?' Dead silence. 'Maybe a magician?' No response but nervous tittering.

he also told stories and ended the evening with a moving speech.

He told sad stories of the lot of horses, one, for instance, beaten to death by his cruel owner, his brains battered with a log because he was too weakened by hunger to pull a wagonload of wood.

Another concerned a racehorse of fabulous speed, a sure winner in the Kentucky Derby, had he not in his very first race been doped by his avaricious master who had placed a fortune in bets on the next best horse. A third was about a fabulous flying horse shot down by a hunter who couldn't believe his own eyes. And then Abramowitz told a story of a youth of great promise, who, out for a stroll one spring day, came upon a goddess bathing naked in a stream. As he gazed at her beauty in amazement and longing she let out a piercing scream to the sky. The youth took off at a fast gallop, realizing from the snorting, and sound of pounding hoofs as he ran, that he was no longer a youth of great promise but a horse running.

Abramowitz then cried out to the faces that surrounded him, "I also am a man in a horse. Is there a doctor in the house?"

Dead silence.

"Maybe a magician?"

No response but nervous tittering.

He then delivered an impassioned speech on freedom for all. Abramowitz talked his brains blue, ending once more with a personal appeal.

"Help me to recover my original form. It's not what I am but what I wish to be. I wish to be what I really am which is a man."

At the end of the act many people in the tent were standing wet-eyed and the band played "The Star-Spangled Banner."

Goldberg, who had been dozing in a sawdust pile for a good part of Abramowitz's solo act, roused himself in time to join the horse in a bow.

Afterwards, on the enthusiastic advice of the circus manager, he changed the name of the act from "Ask Me Another" to "Goldberg's Varieties."

And wept himself for unknown reasons.

Back in the stall after the failure of his most passionate, most inspired, pleas for assistance, Abramowitz butted his head in frustration against the stall gate until his nostrils bled into the feedbag. He thought he would drown in the blood and didn't much care. Goldberg found him lying on the floor in the dirty straw, half in a faint, and revived him with aromatic spirits of ammonia.

He bandaged his nose and spoke to him in a fatherly fashion. ''That's how the mop flops," he Morse-coded

with his blunt fingertip, "but things could be worse. Take my advice and settle for a talking horse, it's not without distinction."

"Make me either into a man or make me either into a horse," Abramowitz pleaded. "It's in your power, Goldberg."

"You got the wrong party, my friend."

"Why do you always say lies?"

"Why do you always ask questions you can't ask?"

"I ask because I am. Because I wish to be free."

"So who's free, tell me?" Goldberg mocked.

"If so," said Abramowitz, "what's to be done?"

DON'T ASK I WARNED YOU. He warned he would punch his nose; it bled again.

Abramowitz later that day began a hunger strike which he carried on for the better part of a week; but Goldberg threatened force-feeding with thick rubber tubes in both nostrils, and that ended that. Abramowitz almost choked to death at the thought of it. The act went on as before, and the owner changed its name back to "Ask Me Another." When the season was over the circus headed south, Abramowitz trotting along in a cloud of dust with the other horses.

Anyway I got my own thoughts.

O

ne fine autumn, after a long hard summer, Goldberg washed his big feet in the kitchen sink and hung his smelly white socks to dry on the gate of Abramowitz's stall before sitting down to watch astronomy on ETV. To see better he placed a lit candle on top of the color set. But he had carelessly left the stall gate open, and Abramowitz hopped up three steps and trotted through the messy kitchen, his eyes flaring. Confronting Goldberg staring in awe at the universe on the screen, he reared with a bray of rage, to bring his hoofs down on the owner's head. Goldberg, seeing him out of the corner of his eye, rose to protect himself. Instantly jumping up on the chair, he managed with a grunt to grab Abramowitz by both big ears as though to lift him by them, and the horse's head and neck, up to an old wound, came off in his hands. Amid the stench of blood and bowel a man's pale head popped out of the hole in the horse. He was in his early forties, with fogged pince-nez, intense dark eyes, and a black mustache. Pulling his arms free, he grabbed Goldberg around his thick neck with both bare arms and held on for dear life. As they tugged and struggled, Abramowitz, straining to the point of madness, slowly pulled himself out of the horse up to his navel. At that moment Goldberg broke his frantic grip and, though the astronomy lesson was still going on in a blaze of light, disappeared.

Abramowitz later made a few discreet inquiries, but no one could say where.

Departing the circus grounds he cantered across a grassy soft field into a dark wood, a free centaur. 0

REVISmNG On a visit to America after a lO-year gap, the author finds the country moving on, as always-changing, breaking fresh ground, exploring, experimenting-and yet retaining its familiar, 'enduring' traits.

America is no more the country you once knew, a friend had warned. "Ten years ago it was a far more vulnerable and sensitive place than it is today. It has become remote and indrawn." With his words pushed back in my consciousness I arrive in Washington.

The Kennedy years are over. New faces swing the city.

Visions of Camelot have receded, have almost disappeared.

There are more high-rise buildings, more glass and concrete, more traffic, more pollution, more society gossip. But I have returned to the russet browns and reds of an ebbing fall, to the changeless Potomac, to my friends. I have returned to continue the conversations that I left ten years ago, resurrect old friendships, revive my faith in those positive traits of America which initially endeared me to the country-the boundless energy, vitality and enthusiasm; the childlike but refreshing hunger to absorb, the ceaseless questioning about itself. Things change but those that one knows, understands and lives with do not.

One sees, observes and records one's own vision of the world deliberately. I have lived in Washington and known its seasons.

The city has known mine. The bond, though distant, is deep.

"Y ou from India?" asks the large black lady as I step into a cab at National Airport. She knows I am from another country, am an outsider. But I detect none of the caution or reserve in her that one tends to find in strangers when they meet. "Yes, the city has changed," she tells me, as if she has read my thoughts.

"I have been driving cabs for fifteen years. My children have grown, a number of streets have turned one way."

1 already feel drawn into the life of the city, her own life, the changed times.

"My mother left Louisiana and came here to stay with me.

The bum [her husband I presume] left years ago. The children, the rats are still here. We get on one another's nerves. Yeh, the younghave a mind of their own these days. Times have changed," she repeats almost as a refrain. The fact that they have, though, givesher no reason to despair. She is the same American I met ten years ago, looking ahead.

Autumn in Washington is a time of wistfulness, a time of mellowedjoys. The mood returns but without the nostalgia that pulls one backwards. I see the old with a sense of the new.

Landmarks, though familiar, seem transformed. Experience, theirs and mine, has lent them a different look. Yet their physical presence reassures. Reconnecting with things past seems less forbidding. The fountain in Dupont Circle is alive. Gray and white pigeons fly around it in circles over the heads of passers-by.

They are like pigeons that I associate with places that are timeless. And here around this white fountain of concrete with a European copy of a figurine, the pigeons still seem in place. The park is their habitat and it has its own permanence. The electric clock across the fountain that I saw everyday continues to show the minutes, the hours. Others going to work watch it with the same hurry and pass by.

I visit the People's Drug that stands at the old corner. But I have forgotten how to operate the newspaper machine. A man standing by sees my discomfiture and comes around to help.

He makes the right change, pushes the coins in a slot, lifts up the glass lid and produces the weighty Washington Post. When I thank him he grins like a schoolboy and gives me a friendly wink. I regain my poise and walk away. Memories begin to cohere. Old addresses in a faded address book have not lost their relevance. I locate friends on the streets where they once lived. They recognize my voice on the phone and rush back to meet me. Lapse of time has not created a lapse of interest or camaraderie. It seems strange how little they have changed living in a land known for its mobility, its constant convulsions, its lack of enduring relationships.

Annetta is as pert and beautiful as. she was ten years ago.

No, she is not married, she does not have a job and she still lives in the antique-filled apartment with her mother. She continues to spend her summers in Europe and winters on the East coast.

"Doing what?" I ask her. "Just living," she says. I suggest lunch at a restaurant called the Golden Temple. "Why not the Jockey Club like old times?" she bubbles. ~'Let's explore the Temple," I tell her. The Golden Temple is a small neat restaurant with wooden tables and chairs and a contrived ascetic atmosphere. The place smells of pungent herbs and makes me think of India as a very strange place. Young American men and women, garbed in spotless white kurtas and flowing white turbans, wait on tables, looking innocuous and "divine." They are American Sikhs. As they move, work and talk I sense¡in them a quality of dedication that one finds in people who have decided to serve man through God. It is the kind of service that makes me uncomfortable.

I am relieved when I see Annetta sailing into the restaurant dressed in black palazzo pants. She brings with lier an air of the outside, the fragrance of Nina Ricci. She is escorted by a bearded black man, whom she introduces as a divine painter. We settle around a wooden table and order pea soup, a specialty of the Temple. Annetta begins to question the young waiter who, she

'Everyone I meet wants to do something else, express himself in another form.... I marvel at their courage to break away, to change lifestyles, make another home, another place.' says, has unnerved her. "I come from Jacksonville, Florida," he murmurs.

"Why the white dress, the turban and the golden temple?" she demands.

"I was fed up with the sameness of things in Jacksonville.

Wanted to try something new. So Ijoined the Sikh order."

Does he like it?

"It is different," he says in a voice that has no emotion. "I feel I am doing something for God, for others, and not just things for myself."

The next day I meet Frank. He arrives in a dark pinstripe suit driving a red sports car. My memory of him in crumpled suits, eating in Chinese restaurants, recedes. He buys a bunch of violets and takes me to a sidewalk cafe at the end of a cobbled street in old Georgetown.

"I still imagine you as a girl with a flower, living in places that have mellowed with age and an ancient sun," he says.

Within minutes of our meeting we are breathlessly telling each other how great the world is and how beautifully we fit into it. Frank now runs a successful insurance business, sits in a glass-encased office with a secretary and several telephones, and is the president of a choral group in the community church.

Between his croissants and coffee he takes out a large glossy photograph from his brief case. It is him in a black tie shaking hands with Leonard Bernstein in a black tie.

"Guess where I was last night," he says, a secure smile filling his small round face. "Escorting the wife of a government secretary to a reception at the Japanese Embassy. No more going through back doors," he laughs, recapitulating the times when we gate-crashed embassy parties as press correspondents.

"Yes, I love my job and get a kick out of working. You might call me a success. But you won't believe it- I still live in myoid yacht down the river and don't have a telephone or a television at home. On weekends I go away to the country and sleep in haystacks. I work because I have to. But that has nothing to do with my private self.

"Let me show you the house which I once bought and lived in," he says driving me down a street lined with large houses that all look alike. They have barbecue pits and backyards, porches and front lawns. His is the house that has bright blue windows. "I lived there for five years with my wife. We have separated and the house doesn't belong to me any more."

He does not dwell on the loss, seeks no sympathy. He is on to other things, other worlds. A morning with Frank has helped open a little window on a wider vista, re-establishing my faith in the American spirit that seeks to go beyond the search for security and established values. Years ago when I had visited his room there was a poster on his kitchen door that read: Life's a bummer but hang on there We'll survive with luck and love-and

a little effort.

In his own way Frank, I feel, has achieved that. So have a number of other friends who in the sixties shared bleak visions but have now begun to interpret reality differently. In San Francisco I meet Louis, who had left the glamor of New York's Park Avenue and withdrawn into a world of sunshine, permis-

siveness and the new frontiers. In the sixties he was staying in a Berkeley farmhouse, selling vegetables in a loudly painted bus and was living with a woman who had given him a child and was hooked on drugs.

Now Louis returns to see me in San Francisco on a fogfilled morning, driving the same bus. Its paint has peeled and Louis no longer sells vegetables. Instead he has begun to build low-income houses for himself and his friends. "I have begun to use my hands again, build with them. No more drugs, no more commune living. But I will never return to New York. Those were rough years when I came to live here-the California of the sun, the fruit, the palms and the cool shores. Some writer said Americans come here when they are weakened by America.

I was too. Now I have found a way out, found my own level.

I do not know if it is the right one, but I will live by it."

"But that does not sound like you," I tell him. "You've lost your ambition, your sense of adventure, the desire to go places, see the new."

"That is no longer necessary," he tells me. "One does not have to always be challenging life in order to understand it and enjoy it. I have found my peace." And I know he has when I look into his still blue eyes.

I meet others like him in the Bay area-exploring, experimenting, piercing the fog. "What are you doing?" "I don't know," is the regular answer. Everyone I meet wants to do something else, express himself in another form. I meet a group of people

We now get things done through petitions, signature campaigns.

Even the system has got less authoritarian. The elders too have learned and mellowed. There is less automatic obedience and generally a more liberal atmosphere on campus."

Back in New York I visit Columbia University. At the entrance to the campus gates, a student distributes pamphlets for free pregnancy tests. The young dean of student activities later tells me that premarital sex is accepted now as a matter of course and there is even a greater tolerance of homosexual and bisexual behavior. Co-ed dorms are an accepted feature on campus. Columbia even has a "gay" club where I am invited to come and observe the Friday evening dance. Instead I go to see a play in Broadway's Booth Theater.

The title of the play is long and intriguing. It has an allblack cast. I do not know what to expect. But even as I sit in the theater I sense the enthusiasm of the audience, most of whom are black. They have come, it seems, not merely to see a play but share an experience that is part of their being. I participate in the communion, the poignancy. The play I feel is not just for colored girls, or for women alone, but for all human beings who are struggling to be born . . . . sing a black girl's song Bring her out to know herself, to know you But sing her rhythms of caring and struggle and hard times Sing her song of love.

She has been dead so long She does not know the sound of her own voice Her irifinite beauty.

She is half notes scattered without rhythms No tune; Sing her sighs Sing her song of her possibilities Let her be born ....

in the dingy apartment ofacrippled professor. A number of them have left established professions to take to creative writing. One of them is a former professor of law from Yale, another is a professional theater producer from New York, still another is a man who says that he has done everything but now does nothing in particular.

"I always find myself standing in lines-at the post office, at the bank, in cafes."

"Don't we all stand in lines of some kind or another?"

"But I don't like the lines I stand in," he tells me.

I listen to them and marvel at their courage to break away, to change lifestyles, make another home, another place.

At the UCLA (University of California at Los Angeles) I meet the students, a generation removed from me and my friends. They have begun to talk of other things. The mood is of the now, of jobs, of finding more security. The war is over.

Watergate is left behind. Social pressure is less. Academic pressure is more. I talk to the editor of the Daily Bruin, the campus newspaper.

"The basic outlook has not really changed, just the priorities," she tells me. "Today idealism does not register itself in radical or high-flown rhetoric as it did in the sixties. Idealism no longer means occupying buildings, burning files or picketing. We have become more sophisticated in our expression now, are willing to sit down and talk. We have learned to get around within the system,have learned to look hard at it and verbalize our demands.

This is for colored girls who have considered suicide but are moving to the ends of their own rainbow-a song in the play written by the black poetess Ntokake Shange. I have returned to the vibrant streets of New York, the quickened pace and the thousand faces-black, brown and white; beautiful, ugly, painted, frantic, at times distorted. The faces disappear in a haze.

New York for a while loses its magic as I step out of the theater with the black girl's song stuck in my throat. I walk down the tight sunless streets off Broadway, see black faces everywhereno longer the black that was once obscure, threatening, unknown. These faces have begun to speak to me. It is as though I have crossed a new bridge, seen a little light. Shange's play in a small way becomes part of the larger feeling that has come back to me with my return to America after ten years. It is like the bursting open of windows that had been shut for some time without my knowing it.

As I travel across the country meeting old friends, making new ones, I realize that the pendulum has swung-as it does in America again and again. What fascinates me in this country is the search, the restlessness, self-awareness, and the urge to find a way out. A number of Americans I meet tell me that they have no culture. "But American culture is change," I tell them.

Building and breaking your own shibboleths, indulging in inquiry, expansion, movement. Why should culture be synonymous with the old, the tradition-bound? I define American culture as a continual state of becoming.

D About the Author: Anees lung is the editor of Youth Times, a Times of

India publication. She lived and worked in the United States in the '60s.

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE

It is because a person, once he is in the U.S., has complete freedom-there are no identity cards, no midnight knocks-that it becomes important to go into his case carefully before he goes there. put them up and take care of their expenses for a relatively short while. The financial question is usually very secondary in these cases. Sometimes just a letter' is sufficient evidence that somebody is waiting for them at the other end.

As for the presumption that they wish to stay permanently, we talk to them, look into their personal circumstances, see if they are well settled in India or not. Do they have responsibilities and a job that enables them to meet their obligations? And so on.

Q: When you issue a visa valid for six months, that becomes the length of time one is authorized to stay in the United States, right?

A: No. A U.S. visa is not an entry permit; it is more of a travel permit which gets you as far as the Immigration Officer at the other end.

The. actual entry permit is the little 3" x 5" slip of paper that he staples at the back of your passport which says how long you may stay and in what capacity. Tourist visas are usually valid for six months, but that only means that you can travel to the United States any time during that period. Sometimes we will issue a tourist visa to a person and he will be turned back by Immigration at the other end because they find job letters in his baggage, or a letter from a relation in the United States saying: "Once you get here, we fill fix up a job for you." You see, Immigration is authorized to search baggage, and if they find such evidence of intention td stay on, they have to turn the person back, because tourists are not allowed to work in the United States. On the other hand, we get a lot of .older people who have children settled in the United States. They can stay several months visiting their family and may decide to stay longer if Immigration will let them. And what Immigration wants to be sure of in such cases is just that the person is not working.

Q: Now shall we go on to the immigrant visa?

What are the categories of immigrants that the U.S. Government allows and what happens when somebody from India applies for a visa in order to stay indefinitelyin the United States?

A: Every country has what is called a "numerical limitation." We do not call it a "quota" any more; in the old days there used to be a quota for each country based on the percentage of that country's nationals in the U.S. population at a given time. Then the law changed in 1965 and now there is a ceiling of 20,000 immigrant visas per country per year.

Immediate relatives are excluded from this limit-parents, husbands, wives, and children (natural or adopted) of U.S. citizens, U.S. residents returning home, and other special categories. All others come under the limitation and are divided into seven preference categories, plus "nonpreference."

The first, second, fourth and fifth preferences are all based on relationships. The two big

categories we deal with in the North India Consular Office here are the second and fifth preferences. The second preference is the spouse of a permanent U.S. resident, a "green card holder" who is not a U.S. citizen and lives there on an immigrant visa. We have a flood of these whenever the marriage season arrives, and many green card holders come to India to marry the girl from their home town and take her back to the United States with them. The fifth

preference is the brothers and sisters of U.S. citizens, like the Sikh community in central California who even have their own high schools conducting classes in Punjabi. Many of them are U.S. citizens and often send for their brothers and sisters to join them-brothers and sisters with their wives and husbands.

In both cases, the sponsoring relative must file a petition for the person in India. In second preference cases, when marriages take place in India and the green card holder is present, we can approve his petition right in the visa office.

Our approval puts the beneficiary, or the "applicant," in the queue for an immigrant visa.

There is another important thing. People applying for an immigrant visa must show that they will have enough funds available and will not become a public charge, that is they will not have to receive welfare payments. Usually enough is provided by the relatives until the new entrant can get a job.

Q: SO there aren't too many instances of people going on welfare?

A: Not really-and certainly not from India.

Q: What about people who are offered a job in the United States?

A: In such cases the employer in the United States applies to the Labor Department or the State Employment Service and has to satisfy them that the job cannot be filled locally.

On the basis of a Labor Certificate, the person is then placed in a nonpreference category.

Again, this just puts him on the books. The employer then may apply to the Immigration Service and ask for a preference status for the person-the third or the sixth, depending on how skilled the job is. Professional skills are usually classed as third preference-this is for people like doctors and engineers. More specialized skills are placed in the sixth preference category.

One preference I have not mentioned is the seventh. This is for refugees, like the IndoChinese refugees, many of whom have recently been admitted to the United States.

Q: So you must have either a close relative in the United States, or a labor clearance, or be a refugee. Are there no other categories?

A: The nonpreference category includes all others who can show that they are not going to enter the labor market. Such persons may be parents or children who would not take jobs because of their age. Then there are people with their own resources and people who are going as investors; the minimum investment is at present fixed at $40,000. All these people can apply to get themselves registered.

Q: But that does not get them a visa?

A: It gives them a place in the queue, a "priority date." And provided they have all the documents-birth certificates, marriage certificates, police certificates, medical certificates, passports (all of which are required by the law)-they get their visa very quickly, if a visa number is available. (A word of caution about nonpreference-at present visa numbers are available only to persons with priority dates earlier than July L 1976) Q: One final question. Is there anything else that the applicant for a visa should know? Has anything important beenleft out?

A: Applicants should not ask for an appointment, i.e., send back their "check list cover sheet," until they have all the documents actually in hand. Very often they assume that the documents will come through by the time the appointment does, but this does not happen. Many of our applicants come from a long distance; they have made that trip for nothing. The appointment is wasted, because we turn down the application and take another look at it only when all the papers have come. It makes twice the amount of work for them and for us.

So we try to keep the appointment time down to the minimum. But in the marriage season, well, it is a bit difficult ...

Q: You do have a problem with marriages, it seems.

A: Oh, only with the quantity, not the quality!

It's just that we can tell when November and February roll around-in North India, 0 anyway. . . .

THE AMERICAN RECORD ON DISARMAMENT International disarmament has long been one of the major goals of the United States. Negotiations proceed on many lines at the same time, and progress is necessarily uneven. What has the United States done so far in the various aspects of this all-important issue, involving both nuclear and conventional arms? Landmarks in the ongoing process are set out in this article, spelling out the steps taken so far by the United States since Jimmy Carter became President.

"Let's look at the record," is an admonition that American politicians trade with each other in explaining their positions on important campaign issues. The United States suggested a similar approach as it and 149 other nations sat down recently to discuss the major topics on the agenda of the United Nations Special Session on Disarmament.

"Clearly, foremost in the minds of the delegations is the problem that the nuclear superpowers must end their arms race," said Thomas Halsted, Public Affairs Adviser for the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), "especially to reach agreement on the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) and on a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty."

"The United States," Halsted continued, "is engaged in more arms control negotiations than ever before. Apart from SALT and the Comprehensive Test Ban, we are in negotiations on Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions in Europe, on chemical and radiological weapons, stability in the Indian Ocean, conventional arms transfers and antisatellite weapons developments; also it's been a year since President Carter announced his nonproliferation policies."

What has been accomplished in that year? What is the U.S. trying to bring about? Compiled from Administration sources, the American record on major disarmament issues at the opening of the 1978U.N. Special Session was as follows:

SALT alternatives to the Soviets during a visit to Moscow by Secretary of State Cyrus Vance: • A deferral proposal in which the 1974 Vladivostok proposals would be ratifiedfor the first time setting equal ceilings on the two countries, of 2,400 nuclear delivery systems each-with deferral of consideration of the United States cruise missile and Soviet backfire bomber issues.

• An alternative comprehensive proposal, calling for a substantial reduction in the overall aggregate of strategic delivery vehicles and sublimits on modern large Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), on Multiple Independentlytargeted Re-entry Vehicles (MIRVs) and on MIRV launchers, in addition to limits on development, testing and construction of new nllssiles.

Neither proposal is accepted; but the Soviets agree to continue the talks.

May 1977: Secretary Vance and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko meet in Geneva and establish a three-part framework for a prospective SALT-II agreement: An eight-year treaty growing out of the Vladivostok accords, a threeyear protocol to cover the more controversial aspects of the accords, and an outline of the areas to be covered in a subsequent SALT-III negotiation.

September 1977: On the eve of the expiration of the SALT-I agreement (October 3), the two foreign ministers agree on which elements of a SALT-II SALT agreement would go into which of the March 1977: The Carter Administrathree parts of the framework. Both sides tion makes its first formal presentation of ..also agree to continue to negotiate in the

context of the existing agreement, honoring the SALT -I restraints despite its formal expiration.

February 1978: The United States makes public the basic outline of negotiations to date: .

• A treaty to last until 1985 confirming the Vladivostok limits of 2,400 delivery systems with a 1,320 sublimit on vehicles carrying MIRVs; during the life of the treaty the limits would come down to between 2,160 and 2,250 systems and between 1,200 and 1,250 MIRVed vehicles.

• A protocol to last until September 1980 banning mobile missiles and limiting cruise missile deployment.

The ACDA affirms that the prospective agreement appears to be adequately verifiable.

April 1978: Secretary Vance, 'in a major speech, says that "any SALT agreement must be measured against the yardstick of our national safety," but adds "we have made substantial progress over the past year toward such an agreement. . .. I hope that we can reach an agreement in the near future, but we will continue to negotiate for as long as it takes to achieve a SALT agreement which enhances our security and that of our allies."

Comprehensive Test Ban June 1977: Following an agreement during Secretary Vance's March visit to Moscow, the United States and the Soviet Union meet in Washington to begin formal negotiations toward a ban on all forms of nuclear testing-a successor to the

1963 treaty, which bans nuclear detonations everywhere except underground.

A week later the United States and the United Kingdom also hold talks on Comprehensive Test Ban (CTB) negotiations, in preparation for a trilateral effort toward such a treaty.

July 1977: The U.S.-British-Soviet talks begin in Geneva. The United States reaffirms its belief that all nuclear explosions must fall under the ban, including "peaceful nuclear explosions," in the belief that s\lch a ban would retard the growth of nuclear weapons technology and hamper the proliferation of nuclear weapans.

October 1977: The trilateral talks resume in Geneva with key unresolved questions involving detection and identification of low-yield nuclear tests, thus stalling agreement on verification of any comprehensive treaty. The United States suggests that "on-site inspection is a useful supplement to other verification procedures. " April 1978: Secretary Vance says the CTB talks "have made some progress, although problems remain. Achievement of such a ban would reduce the likelihood of further nuclear proliferation by demonstrating the seriousness of the nuclear weapons powers in accepting restraints on their own activities. We are committed to seeking such a treaty. It must be adequately verifiable. And we will assure . that we maintain confidence in the reliability of our nuclear warheads." Any draft treaty resulting from the trilateral talks would be submitted to the Genevabased Conference of the Committee on Disarmament (Ceo) to seek broad international :ratification.

Other CCD-related Negotiations March 1977: Secretary Vance's visit to Moscow revives bilateral effort to eliminate both chemical and radiological weapons, and initiates plans for bilateral discussions on arms limitations in the Indian Ocean. The ongoing results of all three negotiations are to be reported periodically to the 30-nation CCD. April 1977: Talks initiated in August 1976 seeking an international convention dealing with the most dangerous, lethal means of chemical warfare are resumed in Geneva. The U.S.-Soviet effort is a 'first step toward COinplete and effective prohibition of chemical weapons .....

In March 1978 Paul Warnke, Chief U.S. Arms Connol Negotiator, tells the CCD . that "considex:able progress has

been made," but that "major issues ... remain to be solved, particularly with respect to verification."

May 1977: U.S.-Soviet consultations begin in Geneva to prohibit radiological weapons, those which even in the absence of, a nuclear explosion would scatter material which is already radioactive, causing damage or injury by the resulting radiation. By May 1978 four sessions have been held. In March 1978 Warnke tells the CCD that "considerable progress on a joint initiative dealing with radiological weapons" has been made, although no details are made public. In April 1978 Vance says of these talks: "The 'indiscriminate and random character of many weapons in these categories is so great that virtually all nations agree they should be foresworn forever as instruments of war."

June 1977: The Indian Ocean talks begin in Moscow, in what are to be the first of four sessions during the succeeding year, principally in Berne, aimed at stabilizing the military presence of the big powers in the area. The following January, Paul Warnke says he feels that "the talks have progressed very well." In April 1978 Secretary Vance, reviewing the negotiations, says, "Our objective is first to stabilize the military presence of both sides at the levels which prevailed until recent months, and then to consider possible reductions. The build-up of Soviet naval forces in the area, however, is of deep concern, and we will not accept an increased Soviet naval presence as part of such an agreement."

Nuclear Nonproliferation April 1977: President Jimmy Carter announces his nonproliferation policy saying, "The benefits of nuclear power are ... very real and practical. But a serious risk accompanies the worldwide use of nuclear power-the risk that components of the nuclear power process will be turned to providing atomic weapons." He announces a seven-part program: • "We will defer indefinitely the commercial reprocessing and recycling of the plutonium produced in the U.S. nuclear power programs."

• "We will restructure the U.S. breeder reactor program to give greater priority to alternative designs of the breeder and to defer the date when breedeJ reactors would be put into commercial use."

• "We wilL .. accelerate our research into alternative nuclear fuel cycles which do not involve direct access to materials

usable in nuclear weapons."

• "We will increase United States production capacity for enriched uranium to provide adequate and timely supply of nuclear fuels for domestic and foreign needs."

• "We will propose the necessary legislative steps to permit the United States to offer nuclear fuel supply contracts and guarantee delivery of such nuclear fuel to other countries."

• "We will continue to embargo the export of equipment or technology that would permit uranium enrichment and chemical reprocessing."

• "We will explore the establishment of an international nuclear fuel cycle evaluation program aimed at developing alternative fuel cycles and a variety of international and U.S. measures to assure access to nuclear fuel supplies and spent fuel storage for nations sharing common nonproliferation objectives."

October 1977: The U.S.-sponsored international nuclear fuel cycle evaluation, attended by 40 nations, opens in Washington. Inaugurating the three-day session, President Carter proposes the establishment of an international nuclear fuel bank, "so that if there is a temporary breakdown in the bilateral supply of nuclear fuel, there might be a reservoir."

The challenge facing the evaluation conference, he says, "is to find a means by which the consuming nations that need atomic power to produce electricity and to serve peaceful purposes can draw a distinction between that need, which is legitimate, and the threat of the development of atomic explosives." The session results in the establishment of eight working groups that will spend two years studying technical ways to control nuclear proliferation.

January 1978: Fifteen nuclear exporting nations-led by the world's seven major suppliers, including the United Statesissue a code on nuclear export safeguards.

It establishes a "trigger list" of materials and technology which suppliers should export "only upon formal government assurances from recipients explicitly excluding uses which would result in any nuclear explosive device," and all transfers should be under the safeguards of the International Atomic.Energy Agency.

February 1978: U.S. Congress approves President Carter's nonproliferation program. A White House spokesman says the law "will allow the Administration to go forward with a clearly defined and consistent nonproliferation policy," and

"will permit us not only to advance our nonproliferation goals, but will also permit the United States to function as a reliable nuclear supplier." The law requires all countries involved in nuclear trade with the United States to accept international inspection of all nuclear activities and to end such trade with a nation that sets off a nuclear device.

third countries; and • limits on promoting U.S. sales.

Arms Control in Europe

knowledge since the 1960s. However, controversy develops on its possible deployment in Europe, principally West Germany.

March 1978: The two sides in MBFR talks reach agreement on "modalities" involved in exchanging breakdowns of troop numbers. The seven NATO nations participating in the talks also subsequently make a "major new initiative" in which the West's proposal that the Soviets withdraw a single army of 68,000 troops and 1,700 tanks according to reports is modified: Such a withdrawal can now be spread over three countries. This would be matched by an American withdrawal of 29,000 troops and 1,000 nuclear warheads. The talks adjourn in April.

April 1978: President Carter announces his decision to defer production of the neutron weapon, after receiving West German approval for its deployment in that country. However, the President says, "The ultimate decision regarding the incorporation of enhanced radiation features into our modernized battlefield weapons will be made later, and will be influenced by the degree to which the Soviet Union shows restraint in its conventional and nuclear arms programs and force deployments affecting the security of the United States and Western Europe."

0

July 1977: At the Mutual and Balanced Force Reduction (MBFR) talks in Vienna -underway between NATO and the Warsaw Pact nations since November 1973-the West asks the East for a breakdown of its military manpower in Conventional Arms Transfers the area under discussion. The two sides March 1977: Secretary Vance's Moscow have exchanged figures on total troop visit results in an agreement with the strengths in the previous year, but the West Soviet Union to meet to discuss the world- contends that its estimates of Warsaw wide sale of conventional weapons. The Pact strength is '150,000 greater than those first talks are held the following December of the East, while the Pact's contention is in Washington, and a second session that approximate numerical parity in opens in May 1978 in Helsinki. The talks ground forces exists between the two. are described by Vance in an April 1978 July 1977: U.S. development of an speech as "an important step in our enhanced radiation and reduced blast efforts to bring about a serious inter- nuclear weapon is publicized in the press. national discussion on multilateral re- The so-called "neutron weapon" is destraint." signed specifically to defend against attack May 1977: President Carter announces by major armored forces. MBFR statistics' his conventional arms transfer policy. indicate that Warsaw Pact tanks out"The virtually unrestrained spread of number NATO's armored forces by three conventional weaponry threatens stability to one, and U.S. officials affirm that the in every region of the world," he says. neutron weapon-which penetrates tanks "Total arms sales in recent years have to kill the crew by radiation while limiting risen to over $20,000 million and the destruction from blast in areas adjacent United States accounts for more than half to the battlefield-is designed for NATO I believe that the use. The warhead has been under developof this amount....

United States must take steps to restrain ment since late 1950s and generally public its arms transfers." Exempting those countries allied with the United States in major defense treaties (NATO, Japan, Australia and New Zealand), the President ~~r------------------------... pledges to reduce the dollar volume of such exports the following year.

February 1978: President Carter announces the specifics of his program to cut back conventional arms exports: A reduction of eight per cent for the year ending September 1978 from the previous fiscal year, down from $9,300 million worth in fiscal 1977 to $8,600 million worth. "I intend to make further reductions in the next fiscal year," he says.

Name "The extent of next year's reduction will Address~ depend upon the world political situation and upon the degree of cooperation and understanding of other nations." He announces five specific controls on all I enclose payment of Rs 18 in favor of SPAN sales except to the exempt countries: o Balik Draft 0 Postal Order 0 Money Order • No first introduction of certain advanced systems into an area; • no U.S. development of advanced systems for export only; • restrictions on coproduction arrangements; '-• tighter controls on retransfers to

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BUILD IT AND FLY IT

"Why is it going backward?" the little boy whispered to his father as the plane whizzed by. The youngster's bewilderment was understandable, for the tiny plane has its engine and wings in the rear and a horizontal stabilizer in the front (left). Named the Varieze, the plane is the most popular of some 2,000 aircraft designs that can be bought in the United States, like dress patterns, and built at home. The other popular designs are replicas of old models, such as the 1912 Bellanca (above, right) and Curtiss Pusher (above, left). Homebuilding-as initiates call the hobby-is enjoying tremendous popularity in America . .More than 5,000 of these homebuilt machines are already flying.

Fostering interest in recreational flying is the Experiment Aircraft Association, which sponsors each summer a week-long convention and exhibition of sports aviation at Oshkosh, Wisconsin. The festival attracts 20,000 spectators (top) and gathers the strangest collection of homemade planes ever assembled outside a science fiction novel.

Pointing to one such machine called Breezy, in which the pilot and the passengers sit in an open cockpit (see back cover), a nervous spectator said: "I wouldn't get up out of the electric chair to go fly in one of those."