July 1981

lAUNCH

, OFA NEW SPACE ERA

July 1981

SPAN 1

Launch of a New Space Era

6 Government and Business: Forging a New Partnership

by President Ronald Reagan

¡8 Reagan, Conservatism Get Strong Ratings in Polls

9 Americans Speak Up

by Sandy Greenberg

12

"No Advances Without Risks" An Interview With Philip Handler

14

Give Your Child a Good Start -

by Bernard Ryan, Jr.

16

Lee Strasberg: Actors' Guru

by Steven Hager

20

Creating Jobs in Appalachia

by Neal R. Peirce and Jerry Hagstrom

25

Mexican Americans: A People on the Move py Griffin Smith, Jr.

30

How Ethnic Groups Influence Foreign Policy

32

The Waste Land Revisited

by Sisirkumar Ghose

37

The Waste Land Vindicated by c. D. Narasimhaiah

40

On the Lighter Side

41

The Talloires Declaration: Press Freedom Is a Basic Human Right Foreign Aid-Still

42

Vital to U.S. Policy

Harry Ellis Interviews R. T. McNamar

44

World Citizens Tribunal's Verdict on Afghanistan

45

A Dialogue With Clay

by Vicki Goldberg

48

Ceramics as History

by Garth Clark

Editorial Staff

Art Director Assistant Art Director Art Staff Chief of Production

Aruna Dasgupta, Manu Sahi, Nirmal Sharma, Murari Saha, Rocque Fernandes

Nand Katyal Gopi Gajwani B. Roy Choudhury, Kanti Roy Awtar S. Marwaha

Photographs: Front cover, Inside front cover, 1-4-NASA. 5'-Avinash Pasricha. 9-courtesy Warner Cable Company; Joe Brooks; James A. Parcell, The Washington Post. 16-Ken Regan.

19-copyright Š 1979 Warner Bros. Inc. 20-23-Matt Bradley. 26-29-Stephanie Maze, Š National Geographic Society. 32-Collection of Mr. & Mrs. N .M. Wagle, Bombay. 45-47--G1ristopher Springmann except 45 bottom three by Joseph Schopplein and 47 left by Bobby Hanson.

48-49-Tohru Nakamura, courtesy of American Craft.

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Front and back cover: This concept of a colony in space, as envi)lioned by American scientists, comes closer to reality with the new vistas of research opened up by the space shuttle's successful flight.

Made of ore mined from the moon (or even material taken from the earth), it envisages an earthlike environment-with streams, parks, houses, officesfor 10,000 people. Unlimited sunlight and intensive farming will supply energy and food needs. See pages 1-4.

"It was magnificent on the pad, a space-age Taj Mahal that leapt into the sky on twin pillars of impossibly bright yellow and. blue flame," wrote Newsweek of the space shuttle's maiden launch from Cape Kennedy in Florida on April 12.

And 541/2 hours and 36 orbits of the earth later, when Columbia streaked back into the atmosphere at 27 times the speed of sound, and made a perfect touchdown on the desert runway in Southern California, Time wrote: "So it was; simple and flawless, almost as if it had been performed countless times before."

The most daring flying machine ever built, the space shuttle took, off as a rocket, worked as a spacecraft in space, and returned to earth as an airplane.

The reusable shuttle, which can fly 100 or more missions, is the first step toward the exploitation of space, rather than the exploration of space as has hitherto been the case. It has opened up the possibility of turning space from a pioneering frontier into a settled domain of human activity.

Designed by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the shuttle, which has been termed the "space truck," can haul 65,000 pounds of payload-scientific, industrial and building materials-into earth's

orbit on a routine basis.

The most immediate practical use of the shuttle will be to hoist communications satellites in geosynchronous orbit. Already a number of countries, including India (see page 4), have booked space on the shuttle for placing their satellites into orbit.

As a launch vehicle, the shuttle has many advantages over conventional rockets. For one thing, its payload is much bigger-it can carry two large satellites. For another, the orbiter will be cheaper to haul satellites in orbit. NASA is now renting the entire payload space for one mission for as much as $30.9 million, compared with the $45 million to $55 million it would cost to place two small communications satellites in orbit

on conventional rockets.

Once in orbit, the shuttle will place communications satellites in geosynchronous position simply by tossing them overboard with its mechanical arm.

The arm can also retrieve ailing satellites for bringing them back to earth for servicing and repairs. Even that may not be necessary. The shuttle could simply put a space-suited technician to do on-the-spot repairs on a satellite in orbit.

Even the energy crisis could find a solution with the shuttle.

Its crews could construct massive solar panels to capture sunlight, beam it to earth as microwaves. These could then be converted into electricity .

However, what is more intriguing is the use of space as a scientific and industrial park.

"Now that the shuttle has established itself capable of journeying back and forth," says a NASA engineer, "space seems like the most benign environment to conduct scientific experiments and manufacture industrial products."

Among the scientific experiments already lined up, one of the most ambitious is being designed by the European Space Agency: Spacelab, whiCh will be launched into space in 1983 by the shuttle. Among other experiments, Spacelab will study the effects of weightlessness on plant and animal metabolism. This will provide useful information for selfcontained space colonies, if and when these are built, NASA says.

In 1985, the shuttle will hoist a remote-controlled, massive 12-ton, 13-meter-Iong telescope into orbit. Far above the atmosphere, the telescope will be the most powerful window to observe the farthest recesses of space. It will expand man's Left: Space shuttle pilot Robert Crippen grabs his knees as he floats in the zero gravity of space during Columbia's maiden voyage.

This photograph was taken on the mid-deck of the orbiter by the shuttle's .m...mmander, John Young.

Facing page: Signaling the dawn' of a new age in spaceflight, Columbia rises off its launching pad and climbs toward orbit.

THE SPA SHUTTLE

Called the orbiter, the shuttle is a delta-winged glider with three maio rocket engines which are far more complex and powerful than the Saturn engines ltrat put the Apollo mission to the moon. The shuttle is attached to two mas: sive solid-propellant boosters and one external fuel tank that carries compressed liquid oxygen and hydrogen.

Besides its .thre~ main engines, Columbia has two secondary - rockets which, along with 44 other smaller ones, give it maneuverability in space and control for the re-entry into earth's atmosphere.

Otte hundred twenty-one eet in length and seventy-nine et in wingspace, the shuttle s a crew compartment the sIZe of a small house. with an :earthlike atmosphere and sealevelpressure. It can accommodate up to seven people.

It has a 60-by-15-foot cylindrical cargo bay that carl' carry 65,000 pounds of scientific equipment and building materials.

About 70 percent of the shuttiF surface is covered with 31,000 special tiles. Each 15.30 centimeters square, the tiles are made of a foam silicate to protect the shuttle from the 1,050 degrees Centigrade heat generated during the re-entry into earth's atmosphere. Each

tile is custom-designed-no two tiles are alike-......and cut into three dimensions for a specific spot on the orbiter's skin to avoid bumps. The tiles are so efficient at dissipating heat that they can be handled by the bare hand within secoIfds after glowing cherry red.

All of the shuttle's parts and systems are totally dependent upon, ~nd controlled by, five computers.

Although commander John Young with pilot _ Robert Crippen guided Columbia to landing, theoretically it can '"be operated completely by the computersthrough launch to re-entry and landing- what the engineers c~1! "flying by wire."

Below: Columbia's cargo bay, which is much bigger than that of conventional rockets, is opened for test exercises on the first day in earth orbit. This will be used to maximum advantage in future flights, which are expected to make major scientific and

industrial breakthroughs.

The drawing at bottom shows a shuttle orbiter paying a visit to a space operations center in earth orbit. American scientists hope to establish a permanent floating station to support future space explorations.

According to O'Neill, the shuttle could haul into space the bujlding blocks for vast structures where people could live and work~ What he envisions are long hollow cylinders designed to hold human beings plus a complex life-support system, facilities for growing food and making industrial products, recycling wastes and so on.

The cylinders would be made of long, alternating strips of opaque and transparent material-aluminum and plastic.

Sunshine, reflected by long mirrors, would illuminate the cylinders. Mirrors would also control the entry of light allowing the alternation of day and night.

"What makes the concept plausible and lifts the vision out of the realm of science fiction," says Isaac Asimov, "is the careful manner in which O'Neill has analyzed the masses of material necessary, the details of design, the thicknesses and strengths of material required, the manner of lifting and assembly, and the cost of it all."

Whether or not the present generation of the shuttle-and its successors-will be able to live up to the formidable tasks expected of them is something that only the future will tell.

But what is certain is the determination of the people who designed Columbia, and who are now working on three other orbiters-Challenger, Discovery and Atlantis.

In fact, the peerless performance of Columbia has so buoyed their spirits that NASA has advanced the date of Columbia's second launch from October 18 to September 30.

"The toughest part was to put Columbia into space for the first time," says a NASA official. "There were so many imponderables. Now that that is' over, the rest is routine."

By 1985, NASA engineers predict, there will at least be one space shuttle launch or landing each week.

0

INDIA AND THE SHUTTLE India will be one of the first few countries to use the space shuttle to place the country's first commercial communications satellite into geosynchronous orbit.

Under an agreement between the Indian Department of Space and the U.S. Nation_al Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA w{1l launch INSA T-IA and INSA TIB, two of India's multipurpose first-generation Indian National Satellite (INSAT).

INSAT-IA is scheduled for launch in 1982 by a Delta expendable vehicle, and INSA TIE will be carried aloft by the space shuttle in 1983.

The two satellites are now being built by the Ford Aerospace and Communications Corporation of USA under a contract from the Indian Department of Space. (India, which recently launched Rohini, is one of the seven countries that have launched satellites with their own rockets. It plans to build indigenous second-generation INS AT spacecraft as well as the powerful launch vehicles to place them into geosynchronbus orbit later in the decade.)

An important milestone in India's space program, INSAT is equipped to perform such diverse tasks as providing: .Communications facilities to the remotest areas of the country through its 8,000 twoway long-distance telephonic channels; • Direct television broadcasting to India's rural areas as well as to the national network of terrestrial transmitters; and • Round-the-clock halfhourly synoptic observations of weather all over India and adjoining sea and land areas.

Besides using the shuttle to launch INSA T-IB, India will also set up an experiment for cosmic ray studies on the space shuttle's third Spacelab mission, scheduled for 1984.

HAILAND FAREWELL! Malcolm Oettinger, the new editor of SPAN, has a very wide background in the fiiยงld of communication--in radio and television, as well as periodicals.

He was a reporter and editor for Broadca sting magazine, and the author of a well-received book on the activities of the Federal Communications Commission, which oversees commercial broadcasting in the United States. Before joinIng the U.S. International Communication Agency in 1974, Mal was coordinator of news information for the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). He also worked briefly for the Washington Post, where his wife, Louise, wa s a reporter and editor for more than 20 years.

Mal wa s graduated from Harvard College in 1954. A prolific writer, his articles, as befits a Harvard English major, have tended toward the arts and literature.

But he ha s written on an impressively eclectic array of subj ects: chess, horse racing, the city of 'San Diego (California), moviemaker and comic Woody Allen, and his own struggle to give up cigarettes. .

Readers of SPAN may remember Mal' $ coverage of the solar eclipse a s seen from the Hyderabad observatory--it appeared in the May 1980 issue, together with a much-admired cover photograph of the eclipse taken by SPAN S ace photographer, Avinash Pasricha. :Earlier, SPAN published Mal's articles on the poet Robert Lowell (JuJy 1978), American Musicals (July 1977), and Hollywood s New Reality (July 1976).

Mal's firsthand connection with SPANand India came last year when he spent three months in New Delhi as acting editor during the absence of the undersigned.

Mal fell in love with the country and its people, and eagerly welcomed the opportunity to return. Why? In his own words: I

I

"India is the least boring country I've ever visited. The people seem open to ideas and curious about many things. So many of the cliches about India turn out to be true--and, in the quintessential Indian paradox, they are also not true. It's a nation of individualists.

In'the short period I was here before, I could tell that SPANreaders really read the magazine--and don't hesitate to tell us what they think of it. What a delightful challenge!" "/ At the same time as SPANwelcomes new editor Mal Oettinger, it bids a fond farewell to its veteran circulation manager, A.K. Mitra, who has been with the magazine since its inception more than 20 years ago.

A.K. has won many awards for his superior service during this period, matching the award s SPAN itself ha s won. Besides being the excellent administrator of a large circulation staff, A.K. has been a remarkably ingenious idea man. For only one example among many: It was A .K. who thought up the idea of offering the gifts of packages of greeting cards with attractive illustrations from past issues that have proven so popular w~th SPAN's subscribers.

SPAN wishes A.K. the best of luck in his new career.

Finally, it is now time for this old editor of SPANto bid the readers of the magazine-and its fine staff, and his many friends throughout India--a reluctant farewell. His wife and he hope from time to time to revisit this country where they have spe~t so many full years.

Farewell! !

-- J โ ข S.

GOVERNMENT AND BUSINESS

'OBll18 A IIW PAITIIBSBIP In recent years, the relation between business and government in the United States has become increasingly adversarial. This has resulted in a complex web of regulations that have hurt U.S. productivity and led to inflation. Through a new spirit of cooperation and shared responsibility, President Reagan .emphasizes, business and government can re-establish U.S. competitiveness in world markets, control inflation and achieve near-independence in energy supplies.

T

oday the United States stands virtually alone among the industrialized nations in the adversary nature of the relationship between its government and the businessindustrial sector. While this may have had its roots in the market crash of 1929 and the loss of public faith in the private sector that followed, the adversary relationship between the Federal Government and the business world reached its greatest intensity in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, the years of Vietnam and Watergate. Public opinion polls during those years showed steady declines in public confidence in business.

Although the notion that government inherently possesses greater wisdom and greater good than private business is impossible to prove, it was nevertheless widely held through much of the last two decades. Only in recent years has there been widespread realization that well-intended government programs can and do fail of their own cumbersomeness; that laws and regulations put into place to solve one problem may create another that is even worse. And it is only in recent years that the public has come to understand that government's appetite for money and its propensity to spend more than it takes in is the root cause of our chronic inflation.

During much of the sixties and seventies Washington attracted many bright men and women who saw the Federal Government as the ultimate tool for solving all social problems.

They mistrusted the ability of states and cities to do the job, and they had a deep suspicion of the motives of business and industry.

The resulting web of laws and regulations, coupled with tax policies which inhibited capital formation, contributed significantly to the erosion of U.S. productivity. In Japan productivity increased by an average of 9.9 percent from 1960 to 1973 and by 3.6 percent from 1973 to 1978. In West Germany, during the same periods, it increased by 5.8 percent and 4.2 percent, while in the United States the increases were only 2.9 percent from 1960 to 1973 and less than half that from 1973 to 1978. Several months of 1980 actually showed a net decline in productivity.

As a result, U.S. competitiveness in world markets has declined and inflation and unemployment have become not only our major economic problems but great social problems as well.

One can argue validly, I think, that as Washington's influence

over our lives increased, the political value of corporate criticism increased, too. By the early 1970s, some congressional hearings actually seemed to have been designed to make various industry representatives look foolish. As more realism about the nature of our economic problems began to set in with the people, however, this sort of thing was treated with suspicion. In fact, in many public opinion polls in recent years, the Congress has received even lower "confidence" ratings than business. However, such low ratings for either U.S. institution is not helpful to the health of the nation.

Today there is widespread sentiment for rolling back various regulations to reduce the nonproductive paperwork burden on the private sector and to make it possible to effectively use our natural resources to move toward energy independence.

At the same time, it is widely understood that we must restructure our tax policies to encourage savings and investment, so that business and industry will have access to the capital they need to replace aging plants and equipment. This is the key to restoring U.S. competitiveness.

I see as the major goals of this decade the control of inflation, the re-establishment of U.S. competitiveness and the achievement of near-independence in energy supplies. To reach these goals, both business and government will have to learn to lay aside old hostilities and assume a new spirit of cooperation and shared responsibility.

We have an unusually good opportunity to begin developing that cooperation at this time. I interpret the 1980 election as a call by the people to draw a "bottom line" on the recent era of pessimism, "no-growth," excessively high taxes and overregulation. Historically, Americans have been optimists and problem-solvers. The national character includes an attitude that says there is no problem so big or tangled that it can't be solved if we apply determination and ingenuity to it. Because my election was supported by a wide spectrum of the people and because they also called for major changes in the composition of the Congress, I believe we can move forward as a people, united as to the goals of economic opportunity and progress for all through. incentive and growth.

First, we must re-examine many of the ways our government goes about its work. Businessmen and women can help in this process. In Sacramento, soon after' I became governor of California, I appointed a task force drawn from business and the professions to conduct what amounted to a management audit of all the offices of state government. Some 250 voluntee'rs served up to three ,months conducting and analyzing this review. When they were finished, they submitted a report containing nearly 1,800 recommendations. We implemented more than 90 percent of them, at an annual savings to the taxpayers which was equivalent at the time to more than one percent of the state's budget.

That is the kind of cooperation between government and the private sector which could benefit the Federal Government, too. The California volunteers brought a positive attitude to their job. They did not assume that government workers were inherently wasteful. Rather, like those performing management audits in business, they realized that inefficiencies creep into the

"Your majesty, according to our study, the shoe was lost for want of a nail, the horse was lost for want of a shoe, and the rider was lost for want of a horse, but the kingdom was lost because of overregulation."

op'erations of any large organization and that it often takes a disinterested outsider to identify them and propose remedies.

At the Federal level, the very important matter of U.S. productivity might be the subject of a presidential task force.

By bringing together representatives of business, labor, academia and government, we could lead to a consensus which could, in turn, be translated into action through both Feqeral legislation and private initiative.

"Consensus" is a word you will hear often in the months ahead-, for when it comes to goals shared by U.S. institutions and constituencies that may have other goals not in common, consensus-building is the only effective way to gain widespread support from the people, thus making attainment of the goals possible.

Today, for example, there is a widespread 'agreement that OU( tax system needs correction. It is so seriously outmoded that when a worker gets a cost-of-living wage increase he may lose its entire value because it has vaulted him into a higher income-tax bracket. On the other hand, when people get to keep more of what they earn they have an incentive to produce-to create. We need a tax system that recognizes this.

The significant, across-the-board income-tax cuts I have proposed are designed not to "stimulate" the economy as some critics used to thinking in terms of economic "fine-tuning" may believe. Rather, the purpose of the tax cuts is more basic: to correct our chronic economic problems through a policy aimed at encouraging human incentive and innovation, thus greater economic production and growth. Enactment of the tax cuts will not perform miracles overnight, of course, but the first positive effects should be felt soon and they will build upon themselves. The history of major tax cuts in this century has

been that they generate growth, and the public treasury ultimately gets more revenues.

Business and industry have every right to be heard in Washington in this and all policymaking processes, just as the voices of other constituencies should be heard. At the same time, though the Reagan Administration will have a keen appreciation of the need to end the adversary relationship between government and business, it does not follow that our purpose will be to protect business or to help one business or industry stifle competition by another. I believe the private sector is capable of taking care of itself, provided government does not impose undue burdens on it. The market system has many self-correcting aspects, but they can be thrown out of kilter by tax and regulatory policies which prevent new capital formation or impose heavy, unproductive costs.

In the regulatory area, government exists to protect us from one another-that is, from the excesses of a few who might try to take advantage of the many. But it does not exist to protect us from ourselves.' Many of the idealists who came to Washington in the sixties and seventies seemed to believe that we could attain a risk-free world if only they could plan it centrally and enforce the rules and regulations they devised to implement the plan. That proved impossible, of course. Each of us takes risks every day. We may make unwise, frivolous or foolish decisions in the marketplace, but we should be free to do so and to learn from such experiences. .

On the other hand, where public health and safety are concerned we need standards that provide proper protection for all. Toward this end, we need to examine the regulatory structure that has been built up, to determine if the benefits of going from, say, 90 percent of perfection to 99 percent in a certain area are worth the cost. We need to examine regulations that may be stifling industries from providing jobs. We must not start with the assumption, as some of the Utopian regulators have in the past, that businessmen and women have ulterior motives or will always sacrific~ civic responsibility for profits.

There is far too much evidence to the contrary.

Government is no better than the rest of society. The regulators are not necessarily endowed with wisdom or motives superior to those of the regulated. That, to me, is a basic reality. My administration's approach to regulatory matters will reflect that belief. We must be ready and willing to identify harmful excess and take remedial action, but we must also put an end to the aura of blame-laying and scapegoating that has surrounded some public issues in recent years.

It will take time to accomplish the things I have described.

Government is like an ocean liner, not a speedboat. If you turn the wheel a few degrees, it must come around gradually, lest it capsize ';;0, though we shall move deliberately, with clearly identified goals, we won't do so in haste.

The nation belongs to all of us. To solve our problems we need the help and talent of a wide range of well-motivated Americans. The business and industrial sector has a vital stake in this process and we shall look to it to provide men and women for both short-term government careers and voluntary assignments, to help us put our nation on the proper track. 0

DAGAI, COISIIVATIS. GIT STIOIG BlTIIGS II POLLS

B

cent public opinion polls indicate that President Ronald Reagan has won the approval of two out of every three Americans for his handling of the presidency.

The polls also show a trend to conservatism in American life and a move back to traditional values.

In the latest Gallup Poll, 68 percent of the respondents expressed approval of the president's performance in office, with only 21 percent disapproving and 11 percent undecided.

A separate poll conducted for Time magazine points to a new American conservatism that appears to reflect a return to traditional values, not an embrace of the so-called "New Right" or the "Moral Majority."

"Perhaps most important," says Time, "there is a fresh sense of optimism about the way things are going in the country."

This change in national mood seems closely related to the American people's approval of President Reagan.

In the first week of January, only 26 percent of Americans polled for Time magazine believed things were going well in America. That figure has now just about doubled, to 51 percent.

Expectations about inflation have also taken a new, positive turn. In April 1979 only 9 percent of Americans believed that President Jimmy Carter could halt or curtail inflation. Under President Reagan, that number has jumped to 45 percent.

Significantly, the Time magazine poll shows that Americans are tired of government interference in their private lives. This was the basic political t.!leme upon which Ronald Reagan built his presidential campaign.

Seventy percent believe that the government has become far too involved in people's lives. Similarly, 71 percent say the Supreme Court and the U.S. Congress have gone too far in keeping religious and moral values out of their lives.

A solid majority, 60 percent, believe the

media, especiafly television, reflect a A majority of 56 percent also opposes permissive and immoral set of values Federal moves to declare abortion illegal, a top priority item for the New Right. In "which are bad for the country."

There was 62 percent approval of the addition, 68 percent of Americans polled idea that the U.S. Government should believe that it should be up to the individual woman to decide whether or stop regulating private business firms.

However, 73 percent, or the second- not to have an abortion.

Similarly, 61 percent surveyed favor largest consensus on any of the points pat.sage of the Equal Rights Amendment covered in the polls, said the United States must build up its military strength for women.

Yet 74 percent lined up in favor of one so that America is "clearly number one."

These Americans also believe that this of the New Rights' priority concerns: a constitutional amendment permitting strength should be used "whenever necessary for our nationaLinterests, even prayer in public schools.

Some 73 percent back wider use of the if other nations complain." 'the poll found widespread confidence death penalty for crimes involving hijack(82 percent) in the president's handling of ing or killing a police officer; a requirement for registration of handguns IS firmly the economy, even though Americans raised questions about the need for the favored. three-year tax cut and the equity of some The Time poll found 76 percent of of the budget cuts.

Americans have confidence in President Time said that" what confirmed the, Reagan's handling of foreign policy and swing to conservatism in America was the give strong support to his pledge to keep comparison of a poll it commissioned in U.S. defenses strong.

1974 with the current one.

But Americans differ slightly on some Between 1974 and 1981 there was a of the specifics. By a margin of 47 to 35 lO-point increase, from 38 to 48 percent, percent, the decision to send military in agreement that "there is too much advisers to EI Salvador is opposed. By a concern with equality and too little with margin of 65 to 2~ percent the Americans law-and-order. " polleq favor reopening strategic arms There was an II-point increase, from talks with the Soviets.

53 percent in 1974 to 64 percent in 1981, On human rights, those polled 9Pposed of Americans who agreed that "there is by 67 to 23 percent giving military and more concern today for the welfare reci- economic aid to anticommunist allies "if pient who doesn't want to work than for they violate human rights." the hard-working person who is strugPerhaps because of the president's gling to make a living." personal popularity and the public's Significant increases were also found in move toward conservatism, the Time poll favor of organized religion and of a found a growing approval of the Republigovernment crackdown on pornography can Party. in movies, books and nightclubs. A sizRepublicans, Americans now say, are able increase was noted in favor of the better able to deal with inflation and proposition that people in authority energy problems, foreign affairs, strong should be shown greater respect. national leadership, and "making sure However, the Moral Majority, the the country is able to defend itself.", "New Right" organization led by televiIn a 1975 poll done for Time, only 14 sion evangelist Jerry Falwell, was found percent of Americans agreed that Repubby 60 percent of those who had heard of licans were better able to handle the it to have left an unfavorable impres- national defense. In 1981, that number sion on them. ~has grown to 51 percent.

0

o Taxation Without Representation!

Free Territory for a Free People! All We Ask Is to Be Let Alone! Votes for Women! The Saloons Must Go! Do Something; If That Doesn't Work, Try Something Else! I Have a Dream! Black Is Beautiful! Peace Now! Forthright, unconstrained, often strident, voices echo across the years of American democracy.

Americans have always been outspoken in expressing their views.

And they expect those views to be heard-and heeded.

Perhaps the basic way citizens take part in their government is through elections, where candidates with different philosophies and proposals are presented for the voters' choice. But influence on

government, whether Federal, state or local, can be wide-ranging and take many forms beyond simply voting.

I nterest groups representing divergent ideologies, geographic areas, economic groups, and minorities constantly work to exert their influence over legislation affecting their constituents.

This lobbying, or pressuring of legislators, I11flY be at the behest of "special interests" such as automobile manufacturers or tobacco or sugar growers, oil companies or professional organizations like the American Medical Association, which hire lobbyists to present their views. Or it may be for the benefit of the "public interest," and carried out by representatives of citizen-supported and donation-funded organizations such

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AMERICANS SPEAK UP

Top: Using new systems that can be hooked to a subscriber's television set, viewers can talk back to TV, responding directly to programs being shown. Here, afamily watches the results of a TV survey. Above: In a massive' demonstration ofsol(darity, some 2,000 members of the American Agriculturallv!ovement drove their tractors from all over the country to lobby on behalf of farmers at the Capitol, Washington.

Left: Determined to have a bus stop relocated to better serve their needs, a group of senior citizens confront the transportation official who can effect the change. After an exchange of views, he agreed to have the stop changed.

10

as Common Cause or Ralph Nadar's Public Citizen.

As the complexity of legislation increases, the expertise of the lobbyist, who represents those directly affected by the laws and regulations, also becomes increasingly important.

Now defining their'purpose as "advocacy for social change to benefit the larger public good," the Gray Panthers are an example of a relatively small organization achieving widespread influence and impact (see SPAN November 1980). Originally founded to combat discrimination based on age, the coalition of young and old has evolved to encompass broader concerns. Gray Panthers have been instrumental in changing the mandatory retirement age in the United States from 65 to 70, effecting nursing home reform, and enacting legislation to benefit the handicapped.

Other groups have focused attention on the media, partIcularly television.

Citizen committees now monitor U.S. television presentations, arguing for programming that is diverse and more responsive to the needs of all citizens. Action for Children's Television (ACT), started by determined parents in a Boston suburb, and the Washington Association for Television and Children (WATCH), have campaigned diligently for changes in programs directed at children.

When major questions of public policy arise, more than advisory committees may be needed. It may be necessary to amend the U.S. Constitution; the means for doing so are specifically spelled out in that document. Two-thirds of the members of both Houses of Congress vote to propose an amendment, which then must be ratified by the elected legislatures of three-fourths of the states.

The Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments, were proposed by the first Congress at its first session, and became effective in 1791. Only 16 additional amendments have been added in the ensuing years, testifying, at least in part, to the wisdom of the framers of the Constitution in creating a broad and flexible document. Of the amendments ratified, the majority are devoted to protecting or extending the rights of citizens. 0 Nearly a quarter of a million people marched on Washington in 1963 to voice their demand/or an end to racial discrimination. And the next year, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the strongest civil rights bill in U.S. history. Following the signing, President Johnson shook hands with the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (inset), the prime mover of the civil disobedience movement used to make the people's views known.

"NoAdvances

Without Risks" Misplaced fears have resulted in a damaging slowdown in U.S. laboratories, says a top scientist. Now is the time to move ahead forcefully with research and development projects.

QUESTION: Mr. Handler, have people become disillusioned with science?

in the United States

HANDLER: Some people feel that way, but it's hard to know whether they're a very vocal, very small minority or a larger constituency. Certainly the halcyon days of the 1950s and the early 1960s are no more. Science then had an aura about it.

Science was going to remake the world, manage our problems, and few examined what the price might be.

What changed people's minds?

HANDLER: The atomic bomb was the first signal that there might also be an ugliness associated with some applications of science. Still, for some years we were so caught up with the nuclear potential for good that most of us even gave insufficient thought to life in a world containing atomic bombs.

Then the consumer and environmental movements forcefully called our attention to some of the dysbenefits of an insufficiently regulated industrial society. Like all pendulums, the environmental movement tended to swing too far. And the circumstance is complicated by the fact that many of those who are most articulate in such matters are really using environmental risks as a surrogate for their dissatisfaction with society in general.

What they're really against is big government, big industry, big labor, big universities that they view as nameless, faceless bureaucracies outside popular democratic control. Their general thrust has exaggerated seriously the magnitude of the hazards of life in our society.

For all of that, most Americans still trust science and continue to believe-as do I -that science and technology have done far more good than harm, and can continue to do so.

We're going to have very large technological decisions to make in the next 10 or 20 years, such as the future of coal or how much total energy we may have-particularly in the light of what the effect of releasing more carbon dioxide will be.

I don't think John Doe will ever have enough information to justify technological public policymaking by public referenda.

To make intelligent decisions about science-based technology, we will have to rely on analyses and advice from institutions thrt the polity trusts. We need to find knowledgeable wise men in a manner equivalent to the Founding Fathers of this country or the original ideal of the Electoral College, a group who could deal capably with the subject at hand while enjoying the trust of their fellow citizens.

In modern form, that means institutions that can be relied on to analyze the great technical problems and then make clear to the larger society what our options may be. Then all of us can debate those options and communicate with those whom we elect to serve as decision makers on our behalf.

Can scientists assure the public that all major ventures in the future-such as genetic research-will be useful and safe?

HANDLER: Safe? The world has never been safe. But it is getting safer. The surgeon general of the United States says that the American people were never as healthy in the past as they are today. Insurance companies provide the actuarial data: We live longer.

We are hyperconcerned about risk as no previous societies have been. Previous societies have not had the luxury of worrying about risk. They had to worry about survival, not risk.

There will be no advances without risks.

Consider nuclear energy. It is, so far, the safest major technology ever introduced into the United States. There's nothing comparable-no other comparable safety record. Nobody was injured at the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant.

That's the cup half-empty, half-full analogy, depending on which way you want to look at Three Mile Island. You either consider it a great disaster, or say, "Isn't it amazing how well with all those human errors, nobody Should the public be allowed to help decide what projects are designed it was-that pursued or not pursued? was injured?"

HANDLER: Generally, no, if what you mean is basic scientific I think Three Mile Island was good for the industry, good for the system. It taught lessons which can be implemented research. The institutional procedures in place should so serve.

To be sure, some people have the sense that if all Americans and from which the United States can benefit in the futureknew more about science, we would benefit by having everybody providing it doesn't simply deny itself nuclear energy. contributing to the process of making decisions about technology -a real participatory democracy. I regret to say that I can't And if popular opinion does turn against nuclear power? imagine that it would work well, because most members of the HANDLER: If we deny ourselves nuclear energy, we are heading public usually don't know enough about any given complicated for real catastrophe down the road, a day when we will simply technical matter to make meaningful informal judgments. And not have enough energy to meet the nation's needs. I suggest that includes scientists and engineers who work in unrelated that that would be a much greater catastrophe than the kind areas. None of us can hope to be sufficiently informed concerning the critics are talking about, even though I agree that there is a small but finite possibility of a truly major accident in a nuclear all technical issues. reactor somewhere down the road.

There are risks associated with every technology. They About the Interviewee: Philip Handler is president of the U.S. National should be identified and minimized by reasonable means at Academy of Sciences and q professor at George Washington University, reasonable cost-reasonable in relation to the benefits involved.

Wasliington, D.C. He is coauthor of Principles of Biochemistry.

How does

u.s. science

compare with the Soviet Union's?

HANDLER: We are enormously more productive than they are of first-rate science. They will tell you so.

On the other hand, they are working hard to change that.

Ever, since 1967, we've been sliding downhill in terms of the fraction of the Gross National Product we're willing to devote to science, while the conduct of science becomes more expensive.

This has made research very difficult for most scientists.

The Soviets, in contrast, have been increasing support for science regularly and building new scientific institutes on a large scale. Many have hard currency available for buying sophisticated equipment from Western Europe, Japan and the United States. And they treat their politically reliable scientists as princes. Moreover, they are systematically upgrading the science component of their secondary schools to assure a supply of young scientists as well as a more sophisticated labor force. I can say with complete confidence that, at this moment, we are decidedly more productive in first-rate science than they are. I don't have confidence that, a decade from now, we will still be able to say such a thing.

Are you discouraged by the lowering of government science over the past decade or two?

Large benefits warrant significant risks; trivial benefits warrant little or none.

Unfortunately, assessment of risk is frequently difficult and must await gathering appropriate data. Moreover, concern usually relates to chronic exposure to very low levels of some chemical or radiation. And then we find it intrinsically impossible to measure risk. So we quarrel about it, thereby deflecting attention from the fact that the risk is known to be extremely small.

Finally, there are risks that are entirely conjectural, science ti.ctionrather than science, as, for example, those raised with respect to genetic engineering. At this early stage, one can only say, "Sufficient unto the day" and press forward.

It would be foolish to deny our people all the benefitsmost of them unforeseeable-of such a broad new technology out of fear of the unknown. Should real risks become apparent, there will be ample time to address them.

support of

HANDLER: I'm unhappy rather than discouraged. Part of the problem is that there are so many Americans, so many in the government, who have a sense that the United States isn't what it was and never is going to be again. They seem willing to settle for that conclusion, to adjust to it, instead of asking, "What the hell are we going to do about it?" We should spend much more, not less, on research-and-development efforts-our modern seed corn-leading to the fruition of whole new technologies that provide work and material benefits for millions of people. If we plant no seed corn, we're going to be hungry tomorrow.

With all the strikes against science you've mentioned, do you think that there's much hope for scientific advances in the United States in the future?

HANDLER: Certainly there's hope. If the United States is to be the kind of country most of us have known and would like to see it be again, we have to stake our future on research and development (R&D). And the best is yet to come.

In the world of tomorrow, if we are to be viable and able to manage whatever threat other nations may pose, we're going to have to do it with our wits, our scientific wits. Remember that we only reached the point of basing our technology on our own research after World War II. Until then, American industry rested on European research.

Is American science still No.1 in the world?

When we reached that point, we sold our science relatively HANDLER: Yes. There are very few fields in which we are not at the top. In solid-state physics, we have been at the top, but cheaply abroad. In our benevolent fashion, we encouraged our recent installations in France, Holland and West Germany foreign competitors, lifted them up by the bootstraps, sold them begin to threaten that position. In theoretical physics, we're our know-how for royalties. They took if from there superbly. in a class apart.

Now we must confront an ironic dilemma. Our military In plastics chemistry, which is largely done in industry and R&D is conducted by some of our most talented physical not in basic-science laboratories, we are way ahead. In other scientists and engineers. On the other hand, our greatest commerareas of chemistry, the world is catching up. The quality of cial competitors, West Germany and Japan, do almost no much of the chemistry done in West Germany and England, military R&D. Their very brightest physical scientists and and even in the Soviet Union, is as good as ours. engineers are happily designing products for the American In molecular biology,. we still are out front. It began in consumer market while their countries are protected by the England, but we have run with that ball faster than others. American military umbrella, enhancing their competitive In the rest of the biological sciences-aside from certain islands capabilities. There is no obvious solution other than to ask them of real excellence such as the Max Planck Society, in West to help defray the costs both of some of our more expensive Germany, Cambridge University in England and one or two research and of their own military protection. institutes in the Soviet Union-our biology, taken across the In any case, the future welfare of the United States and the future of our R&D enterprise are tightly linked. R&D mustn't board, is more productive than that of others. . . All told, the United States has about a third of the world's sci- be thought of as something we'll do only if we can afford it. It's ence effort, measured in money or number of trained scientists and something we can't afford not to do. It's what we absolutely 0 range of equipment. Western Europe plus Japan have a second must assure if the nation's tomorrow is to be acceptable. third, and the Soviet Union and the other East European countries have another third. Ours is still the most productive third.

GIVE YOUR CHILD A GOOD START

by BERNARD RYAN,JR

If you have a 4-year-old who will begin school this year, what can you do now-every day-to help the child get a good start?

You can do what many kindergarten teachers do-recognize that learning comes through experience and that all experiences come through the senses.

Kindergarten teachers give their pupils learning experiences that are sensory.

A child has been discovering the world through all his senses, ever since birth. A parent can help guide his energetic sense of discovery in many ways, but shouldn't think of getting the child ready for school as a program of instruction. There's no way a parent can chromium-plate a child and deliver a perfect little learner at the schoolhouse door. Rather, a parent needs to encourage basic habits and sensitivities that will help develop a specific person.

The fundamental aspect of human intelligence is the knowledge of a self that is separate and distinct from the objective world. This knowledge begins at birth, when the baby, by free movements and sensations, starts to experience the world of reality. Thereafter, the child reaches toward those experiences that enhance her or his world and make it more attractive, and avoids those experiences that do not. Thus the child has learned two basic conditions for the knowledge and grow~h of the self: freedom and choice. They have led to trial and error, discovery and exploration.

To help that self, through discovery and exploration, get ready for school, a parent should begin with the child's awareness of the senses.

Start with the child's sight. Encourage the child to notice subtle differences and variations-to see that the leaves of different trees have different shapes, that houses vary in size and design, that countless individual differences can be found in things that are generally the same. Help the child to collect things of the same color and to discover their variables-bright, dull, pale, deep. Assemble buttons, coins, bottle tops, anything, and make a game of "What's

missing?" when you take one or two away. Draw stick figures with missing parts to help a child "see" what is absent.

Anywhere, any time of day, ask a child to close the eyes and listen. Traffic noises, bells, workmen hammering, trains whistling, distant instruments being practiced-help the child distinguish sounds. If you have a piano or other musical instrument, or a fairly good ear, try the child on listening to the pitch of a note or two and repeating it. Play or sing a simple melody, repeat, leaving out a note, and let your child pitch it in.

A 4-year-old with eyes shut can have a merry guessing game while listening to the sound of rice, salt or cereal when the box is shaken. Tap tumblers and teacups so the child discovers varieties of tinkle. Have the child bounce a ball on the floor indoors, then on the ,sidewalk outdoors, to hear the differences.

Taste and smell? Give your little child learning experiences at breakfast, lunch and dinner by including him or her regularly in meal preparations. Many foods smell and taste differently before and after cooking-let the child smell and taste them before and after. Help the child discover the odors of soap and perfumes in the bathroom, antiseptic when the child suffers a cut, a magazine fresh from its wrapper, gasoline vapors at the service station, shoe polish and paint.

Draw attention to the feel of things.

Try touch guessing games with the eyes closed-using wool and wood, apple and peach, metal and plastic, linen and chintz. Then the textures of paper and cardboard, leather, glass, carpeting.

Shapes are as important as textures.

Invite the child to explore the insides of boxes and shoes and pots and pans, the outsides of keys and tableware, eggs and pears. Help the child discover change: An unused tea bag ha.s one shape and feel, a used one quite another (in formal kindergarten III the United States, observation of such a change 1S a "science experience").

Indoors arid out, activities that develop skill in the large muscles should be encouraged. Your child can run and jump, but can he or she skip? (Girls

can usually skip before boys the same age.) Can the child walk on all fours with back to the floor and tummy to the ceiling, like a crab? Throwing and catching a ball are important-first a large one, then a small one.

Help the small muscles, too. Cutting and pasting are fine exercises. Draw simple shapes for the child to cut out, and let the child draw some. Then cut pictures from magazines. Let the child make paste from flour and water. Keep crayons and cheap blank paper on hand and be sure to use the big crayons, not the common ones, which are too small for the limited small-muscle control of most preschoolers. But tracing or coloring should not be forced-this stifles the imagination and discourages creativity.

Counting is a highly abstract art and achievement. To implant an idea of math that is more basic than just rattling off the words "one" to "ten" by rote, set aside the face cards from a pack of old playing cards. Line up one suit in a row from one to ten, and let your youngster make a game of lining up the other three suits to match. Help the child discover how the sets are grouped in each card and how the number is printed in the corner.

For a touch of "reading," cut up big simple newspaper headlines, then single letters from a second set, and let the child match them together.

Caution: There is no shame in not being able to go this far, and no fun if it becomes work. The child should not be given the impression that any of this has to be done. Keep it all simple, informal, unstructured.

The start a parent can give a child can't be too good, for only two or three precious years are left before he or she reaches 7, the age by which a youngster's whole attitude toward school, for years to come, will be established. Even more important, by then the child will have established, through such simple discovery and exploration and probably for life, the knowledge and estimation of herself or himself.

0 About the Author: Bernard Ryan, Jr., is the author of How to Help Your Child Start School.

Eating, bathing, playing-each experience of the child can be used to help him or her discover the world through the medium of the senses, long before the child's intellectual development starts at school.

Peaceable Kingdom

by Edward Hicks (1780-1849) Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania.

,

LEE STRASBERG

For the past 40 years, Lee Strasberg has been the brilliant mentor of some of the best actors in the United States. This article touches upon both his teaching methods and his own acting.

While the name Lee Strasberg might not be well known to the public in and outside the United States, it assumes legendary overtones within the American acting profession. Strasberg is a synonym for the Method. And the Method is synonymous with Elia Kazan, Lee J. Cobb, Marlon Brando, James Dean, Shelley Winters, Maureen Stapleton, Rod Steiger, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Ellen Burstyn, Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, and Robert De Niro-all of whom were Strasberg's students, or if not students, disciples.

For the past 40 years Strasberg has been quietly churning out some of the best actors in the United States. In the last 10 years Strasberg's life has taken on some added dimensions. Recently celebrating his 79th birthday he has remarried, fathered two children, founded his own acting school, started work on a number of books, and begun a career as a film actor.

"But don't call it a career," he protested. "I'm too old to start a career. My career remains what I have dedicated my life to-the clarification of what produces good acting." The films, asserted Strasberg, are merely a diversion. It all started when Francis Ford Coppola offered him a role in The Godfather, Part II. He took the part and was nominated for an Academy Award. Bombarded with requests, Strasberg has made five films since The Godfather, including Boardwalk, ... And Justice For All, and Going in Style.

Strasberg is a small, frail-looking man with wispy white hair and rimless glasses. During a break in the filming of Going in Style he was resting in the dressing room of Astoria Studio in Queens in Manhattan, eating a honeydew melon with cottage cheese and a slice of rye bread. He was wearing a green short.

sleeve shirt, tan pants, and ankle-high black boots.

"Every now and then you hear the common misconception that the less an actor thinks the better," he sighed. "The less an actor thinks mechanically the better. But that's true fot everyone. There is a difference between memorized knowledge and the ability to solve problems. If an actor doesn't have that, he'll never be a great actor."

Although he is soft-spoken to the point of being inaudible at times, Strasberg becomes animated and forceful without notice. He answers any question willingly, but somehow, no matter what the question, the answers always lead back to his favorite topics: the impossibility of writing a textbook on acting, the need for a national theater company in the United States, and the widespread misinterpretation of his Method.

"Because he is a philosopher of acting one would think he'd be difficult to work With," said Martin Brest, the 27-year-old writer and director of Going in Style. "But just the opposite is true. He's receptive to suggestions and very malleable."

Baruch Meyer Strasberg, accompanied by his oldest son and daughter, arrived in New York shortly after the turn of the century. He found work as a presser in the garment district and saved his money for the day when he could afford to bring his wife and youngest son over from Austria-Hungary to join him.

Lee Strasberg was seven when he arrived with his mother at _ Ellis Island in 1908. His first memory is of waiting while some doctors examined his eyes and marked his coat with a cross.

The doctors feared he might have glaucoma.

Strasberg spent the next 10 years living in a Jewish ghetto on the Lower East Side. Although he did not decide to become an actor until he was 20, he joined a Yiddish theater group in his teens. "It was more for social reasons than anything else," said Strasberg. "It was there that I met my first wife [Nora Krecaun]. It was a good thing I wasn't interested in theater at that time because I had a traumatic experience on stage.

"We had very incomplete rehearsals back then and on opening night I was supposed to come out and light a lamp .

When I got out there I realized I had never seen the lamp before.

It was an old-fashioned one with a chimney. The match was , did and some nights it didn't. On the other hand, actors trained on already lit in my hand, so I put it in the only opening I could find. the Stanislavski method walked out with a greater degree of It exploded. I blacked out and don't even remember how I got confidence. Instead of holding up their hands, they were reaching off-stage. All I remember is the impression that a thousand eyes for the light. "The Method," maintains Strasberg, "is really a were coming in at me." summation of what actors have always done unconsciously By 1925 Strasberg had become an intense intellectual who whenever they acted well." talked incessantly about acting, a subject he concentrated on, Today acting students cannot sit down to discuss a scene said Harold Clurman, "like a jeweler over the inner mechanisms without immediately asking the question "What are my real of a watch." Clurman met Strasberg during a Theater Guild motivations?" In most cases the answer is not found in the text, produetion on Broadway called the Garrick Gaieties. Strasberg but underneath it in what actors call the subtext.

There were many other students studying the Method at was an actor in the show and Clurman was the stage manager.

They became friends and often held long talks about the future the Laboratory Theater together with Strasberg, including of the theater. Both agreed the Theater Guild was not a theater Clurman's future wife Stella Adler, but no one absorbed it as in the true sense of the word. They shared an idealistic vision thoroughly as Strasberg. His almost fanatical quest for new of a greater theater- one that could forge a common language insights into acting is evident in a parody of him written by a and point of reference for their generation. member of the Group Theater in the early thirties. In one scene, One day Clurman came to Strasberg and announced his the parody has Strasberg declaring: intention of traveling to Paris.

"What for?" asked Strasberg.

The great thing in Shakespeare is not to know what you're saying but to know "Well, there's not much happening here," replied Clurman. what you're not saying. You must not only read between the lines, you must read between the words. And you must not only read between the words, you "You'll go to Paris, stay there, then come back here. I don't must read between the punctuation marks. And it would be still better if there understand," said Strasberg. "You're going to come back in were no words on the page, then you would begin to get the true greatness ... exactly the same position you are now. What's the point of going?"

"If there was a reason to stay, I'd stay."

"If you want a reason," said Strasberg, "you have to make The Group Theater lasted only 10 years, but its impact is one." Four years later, in 1931, they made a reason. They founded still felt today. Improvisational rehearsals, the concept of the the Group Theater. acting ensemble, and modern acting techniques were all introClurman was fascinated by Strasberg, mainly because of duced to the United States by the Group. Its dissolution was his directing prowess. He could reach actors in a way Clurman caused by personality conflicts between the founders, lack of had never before witnessed. Strasberg spoke his own vocabulary money, and the outbreak of World War II. The Group Theater and had a seemingly endless bag of tricks for developing raw was probably the most exciting experiment in the history of talent. Once while watching a director rehearse a scene from American stage, and the likes of it will never be seen again.

Racine's Esther, they noticed the actress was having difficulty.

Strasberg is sitting on the couch in his book-lined, New "I could get it out of her," said Strasberg confidently. The York apartment wearing the same green shirt he had on two remark angered Clurman. How could this 25-year-old know days ago. He holds a gold pen in his hand that he occasionally more about acting than professionals who had been on the wields like a baton. The apartment is filled with Oriental artifacts, stage before he was born? theatrical memorabilia, and books-thousands of books. They Strasberg's secret knowledge came from two sources: the are jammed on every available shelf and stuffed in every available endless supply of theater books he devoured every week and, closet. The titles are in English, Russian, German, French, and more important, his training at the American Laboratory Italian. "Each book here has a definite purpose," says Strasberg.

Theater. The teachers at the school, Richard Boleslavski and "Most of them are not readily available. I'm working on four Maria Ouspenskaya, had studied with a then-unknown acting books myself and I use these for research. Everyone who writes teacher from Russia named Konstantin Stanislavski. about acting and directing writes only about his own ideas.

Stanislavski was the first man to seek a systematic discovery I don't write about my ideas. If they're mine, they can't possibly of what an actor does when he acts well. In its simplest terms, be good. My book on directing assumes that directing can only acting is a matter of make-believe. Before an actor can convince be learned from the masters: Stanislavski, Vakhtangov, Meyeran audience he is the King of England, he must convince himself. hold, Reinhardt. I've seen the great directors and on that basis He must be able to walk on stage without a trace of self-con- I've tried to draw conclusions on what a good director does." sciousness. The problem for many actors was not how to susStrasberg maintains a rigorous daily schedule. He and his pend their disbelief, but how to do it in the same role, night third wife, Anna, split their time between a Central Park West after night, without appearing mechanical. In order to play apartment and a home in Brentwood, California. He teaches six a scene truthfully, Stanislavski said an actor must reduce it months in New York and six months in Hollywood. Somehow, to its basic units. He called these units "beats, " and for each in the midst of all this, he finds time to appear in movies. beat the character must have a different objective. Keeping the "I'd received nebulous offers before The Godfather," says objective in mind at all times proved to be the key to realistic Strasberg. "I would never say no, because I make it a rule never to say no at first. I thought The Godfather would be a good test to see acting.

"Stanislavski gives a very good example," says Strasberg. if it was worth it. The part seemed small enough so it wouldn't "If you say, 'Hold your hand up in the air. .. ' I hold up my arm, be noticed either way. If it was good, it would encourage me to but I don't know what to do with it. If you say, 'Reach for that get another role. If it wasn't so good well, so what. My getting light!' well, then everything falls into place because I have a the part was really AI's [Pacino] doing." purpose for holding my-hand up."

Strasberg's performance in The Godfather as an underworld Before Stanislavski, most actors did little to prepare internally baron modeled after Meyer Lansky not only brought him a for a part. They memorized their lines and hoped that when they flock of movie offers, but also created a fan club of sorts. The walked onto the stage inspiration would come. Some nights it first indication of its existence came when his wife went shopping 00.

Lee Strasberg (center) stars with George Burns and Art Carney in Going in Style, a serio-comedy written and directed by Martin Brest.

for a new car. She went to a dealer and made arrangements to have a car delivered. But when it arrived, it was not the car Mrs. Strasberg had picked out. "It was a silver car, a block long with blue fur inside," says Strasberg. "My wife looked at it and said, 'We have to return it.'" Word reached the Strasbergs that the car had been intended as a gift. "Certain people" felt he had handled his role as a Mafia chieftain "with dignity."

For many years the Actors Studio took up most ofStrasberg's time. Established shortly after the breakup of the Group, the Studio is a workshop for professional actors, a place where they can practice their craft free from the demands of commercial theater. Auditions for the Studio are held each year and acceptance is a badge of considerable honor in the acting community.

Strasberg has been director of the Actors Studio since 1949.

Many actors feel that fame, not talent, is the major prerequisite for acceptance. "I could never get beyond the first audition," says Dustin Hoffman. "I was always angry with them because I thought they were too star-conscious. Suddenly, I get an Obie [an Off-Broadway theater award, which he won for his performance in Journey of the Fifth Horse]. I do an audition for another person; they flunk him and take me-only because I got the award." Hoffman did not attend the Studio after that, but he has taken Strasberg's private classes. "I learned a tremendous amount from him," admits Hoffman. "I think he was really one of the great teachers and probably is today. Just to listen to him -even if I never got up to work-was an event."

Most acting teachers employ a method similar to Strasberg's (almost all are derived from the writings of Stanislavski), but Strasberg's classes differ from many in their use of affective memory. Affective memory has caused more confusion and disagreement among actors than any other aspect of the Method.

It is used to create intense emotions on stage and involves a past event in the actor's life.

Suppose, for example, a character in a play is jilted by his girl friend. The actor playing the role would be asked to recall a similar experience of his own and list every detail he could remember: the exact time of day he found out, what the girl was wearing at the time, the look on her face, etc. Rather than concentrate on an emotion, the actor looks for a physical detail that is psychologically linked to the emotion. Once he finds the detail, he needs only to recall it the moment he needs it

in the play. Some teachers feel that an overemphasis on affective memory can be dangerous and destructive if the actor is forced to uncover hidden traumas. "What results is hysteria or worse, and is, in my opinion, antiart," writes Uta Hagen in her book Respectfor Acting. "We are not pursuing psychotherapy."

"If Uta did the things she is afraid of doing she would be a great actress," replies Strasberg quietly. "She is very intelligent, and a lovely actress who has given some beautiful performances; but I think she could be better, much richer. I belieye people have more in them than they are giving and certain procedures can stimulate the imagination. Most people settle for less."

Strasberg has also been accused of departing from the tenets of Stanislavski. Stella Adler, the leading actress of the Group, went to Paris in the thirties and met with Stanislavski daily for six weeks. When she returned, Adler announced that Strasberg was misusing the system. According to an eyewitness, Stasberg "hit the roof' when Adler made the announcement.

"At the time Stella met with him," says Strasberg, "Stanislavski was emphasizing a different aspect of his work. He was emphasizing physical actions." This approach worked for Adler, asserts Strasberg, because she was always an emotional actress.

Today Strasberg and Adler maintain separate acting schools in New York, and their paths seldom cross. Even though they speak harshly of each other at times, it is obvious they have great respect for each other's contributions to the theater.

What about the future?

After finishing his books, Strasberg wants to preserve the Method forever by videotaping his classes. In the next five years, he hopes to see the Actors Studio re-establish itself as a repertory company. (It tried in 1963, produced four plays and closed due to lack of support: both critical and financial.)

Beyond that, Strasberg has one dream-to playa great role.

"If there is any quality I am after in my acting," he maintains, "it is to show the greatness in simple people and the humanity in great people. I would like to play an Einstein or a Freudsomeone who looked deeply in some area and came up with a major contribution."

0 About the Author: Steven Hager is a New York-basedfree-lance specializes in writing about the theater.

writer who

Appalachian Kentucky, long one of the least prosperous areas in America, is receiving renewed national notice for the success of a government-backed program to create long-term employment in stable businesses.

Since 1972, the Federally sponsored Kentucky Highlands Investment Corporation has supplied advice, loans and direct investments to 11 small, lowtechnology, labor-intensive businesses. Some of them have succeeded extremely well; all 11 still are operating, and 400 permanent jobs have been created.

Kentucky Highlands draws most of its budget from the Federal Community Services Administration. The attempt to encourage privately owned business represents a radical departure from earlier antipoverty efforts, which concentrated on rai.sing welfare benefit levels, improving housing and experimenting with alternative forms of ownership, like cooperatives and worker-managed firms.

Those solutions did not provide many long-term jobs for the region. Unemployment estimates for Kentucky Highlands' nine-county region run as high as 21.9 percent. The median family income for the counties in a recent year was $5,878, compared with $11,200 in the state of Kentucky and $14,900 in the United States.

"The government has_ spent millions here, and the same number of people are still on food stamps," said Charles House, editor of the Manchester Herald. "Kentucky Highlands represents the kind of approach that can get people into the mainstream of society."

Policymakers from economically depressed regions are particularly interested in Kentucky Highlands' success because pioneering research by economist (Text continued on page 24)

R

cr-IN I APPA _JiJ HIA

Appalachia's Outdoor Venture Corporation (OVC), pictured on these pages, produces tents, sleeping bags, other camping gear-and jobs.

Aided by the Federally sponsored Kentucky Highlands Investment Corporation (see accompanying story), oVC has helped revitalize the economy of Appalachia, which has long been a victim of chronic unemployment.

It has been called one of the least prosperous areas in the United States.

Facing page: Stacks of canvas await sewing.

Inset: The material is spread out to be cut to sizefor avC's 25 types of tents.

Above: ave president J.e. Egnew (left) and sales manager Pete Kragh look over some of the firm's tent models.

CREATING JOBS IN

APPALACHIA

continued

Top: A worker reaches one of the final stages in the making of a tent-stitching stake hoops. Above: In a random check, a tent is removed from the production line, put up and tested. Right: Canvas swirling around them, workers stitch tent walls. avc, which started with 36 employees, today has almost 200, thanks mainly to the support given to it by the Kentucky Highlands Investment Corporation.

CREATING

JOBS IN

APPALACHIA

continued

David L. Birch of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has shown that two-thirds of all new jobs are in companies employing fewer than 20 persons.

Birch also concluded that the difference between growing and declining area~ of the country can be explained almost entirely by the rate at which new or expanding businesses provide jobs.

Thomas F. Miller, a 33-yearold certified public accountant who is pfesident of Kentucky Highlands, says that he wanted to diversify eastern Kentucky's economy, which depends heavily on coal, an industry that has become highly mechanized and subject to Federal regulation, and on tobacco, which is threatened by antismoking campaigns all over the United States. Kentucky Highlands was established as a community development corporation to spin off businesses that would make products that could be sold in the region or nationally.

Its first venture was Possum Trot Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary that manufactures toys. But every local county wanted a piece of action for itself, and Possum Trot developed into a nearly unmanageable enterprise that was scattered among several counties.

When Miller took over Kentucky Highlands in 1972, he redirected its Federal antipoverty dollars into venture capitalism (i.e., investment at considerable risk of loss for potentially high profit), investing in independently owned private businesses and providing business advice, but leaving day-to-day management in the hands of their owners. "The venture capital strategy was interesting," Miller said, "because you could find someone who could run a company and then you could devote your energy to starting another one."

Miller imported a staff of business professionals from other states to search all over the United States for entrepreneurs who needed capital to start low-technology, labor4 intensive businesses. He figured

"There is only one thing in this country that creates jobs, and that's profits."

With that belief, a Federally sponsored corporation in Kentucky has directed all its antipoverty employment -generating efforts toward helping small businesses. that the business ideas would have to come from outside eastern Kentucky, because the region's low educational levels, poorly developed technological base and stagnant economy would produce few forwardlooking entrepreneurs.

Miller and his staff believe that the decision to emphasize the care and feeding of entrepreneurs, rather than the hiring of managers who do not own their own businesses, is the reason for their success.

Fred Beste III, director of business development, explained it this way: "There's no replacement for someone who is there on holidays, who, whenever things start to go badly, just redoubles his efforts."

Kentucky Highlands has invested $3.09 million in the companies that it has brought to the region or helped to expand. Its investments range from a $ I,250 loan guarantee for one company to a purchase of $10,000 'worth of stock (ownership shares) in another to a $60,000 loan to a third.

The assets of the 11 ventures total some $10 million. Kentucky Highlands receives an annual $492,000 operating budget from the Community Services Administration, and its staff estimates the annual cost of providing advice at about $ 10,000 per business.

Its star performer is Outdoor Venture Corporation (see pages 20-23), a producer of family camping equipment, which had sales of $ 8. I million in 1977

and has grown from 36 employees before Kentucky Highlands began helping it in 1973 to 180 now.

To Beste, Outdoor Venture proves that "there is only one thing in this country that creates jobs, and that's profit."

The other 10 small companies that Kentucky Highlands has aided produce goods as varied as kayaks and truck body accessories. They range from a hog fattening to a quarrying operation.

Kentucky Highlands developed its broad array of corporate beneficiaries by spreading the word to entrepreneurs that eastern Kentucky has an available pool of investment capital and a support system to help small business.

The community development corporation receives inquiries annually from 400 entrepreneurs. It invites the few dozen individuals whom it judges to be serious to attend weekend workshops conducted by its own staff and Venture Founders, a firm in Belmont, Massachusetts, that specializes in helping entrepreneurs and potential investors figure out whether their business ventures are likely to succeed.

Each entrepreneur is required to draw up a business plan that is analyzed by Kentucky Highlands management staff. Once Kentucky Highlands approves the plan, it applies to the Community Services Administration for the money to make the investment.

In exchange for its investment, Kentucky Highlands sometimes demands a seat on the board of directors and always insists upon reviewing financial statements several times a year.

Kentucky Highlands' management staff helps the entrepreneur think through additional capital needs, design a personnel system and analyze peculiar marketing problems. The staff also provides introductions to local banks and financial institutions and officials of the state government.

Kentucky Highlands also provides psychological support. The community development corporation acts as a friend to

newly arrived, often lonely, entrepreneurs struggling with the rigors of starting new businesses and getting settled in a remote region that usually distrusts strangers.

The reaction of local businessmen and workers to Kentucky Highlands' approach appears to be overwhelmingly positive, according to newspaper publisher Charles House.

Kentucky Highlands also has invested in an industrial park in Mt. Vernon, Kentucky, and is scouting for entrepreneurs to go into business there. In addition, the organization has made small loans at one percent interest to community groups that want to create parks and construct community facilities.

While jobs in Kentucky Highlands' ventures pay low wages

by American standards-an average of $3.75 an hour at Possum Trot and $4.50, including all fringe benefits, at Phoenix Products-some notices of job openings have generated hundreds of applications, some from eastern Kentucky natives who had moved to cities such as Detroit and Cincinnati to find work. Many of these persons have been driving back to eastern Kentucky on weekends for years and are willing to accept lower wages for jobs back home.

It appears easier and cheaper to do business in eastern Kentucky than in cities. There is a large supply of cheap open land, and the cost of living is lower.

Miller frequently points out that Kentucky Highlands, despite its success, has taken only one small step toward improving the economy of eastern Kentucky. But that success naturally appeals to any region, no matter how different, where people cannot find work.

"In the past, if people wanted to work, they had to leave east. ern Kentucky," notes William W. James, vice-president of a Kentucky bank. "If they want work, they should have a choice.

People who left long ago say that it's great to keep youth here." 0 Neal R. Peirce and Jerry Hagstrom are contributing editors to National Journal.

About the Authors:

A OD

Move

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TEXT BY GRIFFIN SMITH JR. PHOTOGRAPHS BY STEPHANIE MAZE

Some 7.5 million Americans of Mexican origin live in the United States.

Although their median family income is well below the U.S. average, they are fast moving upward economically and are becoming politically powerful.

In Houston, back in 1973, Ninfa Laurenzo put 10 tables in her failing tortilla shop and began serving tacos at carbon and other "real, first-class Mexican food, not Tex-Mex." Today she rings up sales of more than $10 million a year. A widow, gracious and self-assured, she showed me about the grand dining room of her newest restaurant. "People became aware of our culture and our food," she said. In the United States, it's the in thing to be Chicano.

Among the 7.3 million Mexican Americans are a number whose success ranks with Ninfa's. And there are the border crossers, who dash across from Mexico for work, for a better life, perhaps hoping someday to become Mexican J\mericans themselves.

Mexican Americans are as diverse as America. Their median family income is $12,570 a year-well under the U.S. average of $17,640-and about 20 percent fall below the governmentdrawn poverty line. Most live in cities instead of on farms, as commonly thought. On the whole they come from larger families and have higher birthrates and less education than Caucasians or blacks.

Although nine out of ten Mexican Americans live in the four southwestern border states, regional differences there are vivid. Texas sustains a deeper, older, more homogeneous Mexican-American culture than California. In Arizona the American Indian presence is strongly felt; tribes like the mysteri-

ous Yaqui exist on the periphery of Mexican-American life. In New Mexico a growing Chicano consciousness is making inroads even among the aloof descendants of Spanish colonial settlers who have preserved a separate existence for centuries in the mountains north of Santa Fe. Too little known, Mexican Americans also are too often misunderstood. But that is changing. In a decade they have become a phenomenon to be reckoned with. As their numbers swell and their ethnic awareness grows, they are transforming much of the U.S. Southwest into Mexico U.S.A. Who are the Mexican Americans? During a meandering 11,000-kilcmeter journey from Houston to San Jose, I got many answers. Julian Nava, U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, put it this way; "A Mexican American is a citizen of the United States whose family originated in Mexico. Beyond that, it's a state of mind."

Carlos Ovando, a California educator, told me this: "The central fact is a feeling of straddling two different worlds. There is a duality of heritage and experience." To Carlos, Mexican Americans "tend to share a sense of being controlled by external forces, of being on the margin of society as a powerless nether class .... a symbolic bond of brotherhood forged by suffering and a perception of injustice."

Most Mexican Americans would agree that the Roman Catholic religion, the Spanish language, and a close family

life are basic. Some say the Mexican-American family is a sanctuary against the world. It is undoubtedly a circle of deep affection-within a rigid order. The father is the unchallenged master, the mother is guide and nurturer of the children.

Sometimes that paternal authority can be astonishing to other Americans. I once listened in amazement as a man considered whether he would permit his 25-year-old daughter, who was about to graduate from law school, to accept a job in a faraway city he disliked.

Mexican Americans are a people in transition. They are concerned not only with upward mobility and economic success, but also with the acceptance of their ancestral language and traditions in an America that has not always received them gladly. They are energetically surveying their distinctive contributions to American life and embarking on a quest for self-definition. The days of being slightly ashamed of things Mexican are past. For those who had submerged their heritage in order to blend into the larger American society, there is a feeling of joyful rediscovery.

Mexican Americans stand together in their cultural pride.

But on almost any other subject-even what they should be called -individuality reigns. Over a cup of coffee in an East Los Angeles cafe I found myself listening to a Chicano-his own labelschool-board candidate discuss this subject.

"There are about 10 different terms," he said. "There's Mexican American and Chicano, of course; and there's Latino, and Latin American, and Spanish American, and Mexican.

Plus," he continued, tapping one index finger to the other, "there's Spanish surnamed, Hispanic, Mexicano, and brown.

There's also La Raza-The Race. That's eleven."

Which tag comes closest to being right? "That depends," a Houston community leader later told me, "on age, background, and perhaps on the degree of militancy."

When the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the war between Mexico and the United States in 1848, some 75,000 Mexican citizens were living in the vast southwestern area that became United States territory. The Ametican settlers who claimed the plains and deserts all the way to California were joined occasionally by Mexican pioneers. The latter, however, were the exception until 1910, when revol~tionary fervor in Mexico produced a wave of refugees seeking asylum.

In 1924 the number of immigrants rose to 100,000. After World War II far greater numbers came seeking jobs and opportunity. The 1970s experienced a torrent of illegal immigrants that shows no sign of abating.

For Mexican Americans the recent influx has been both a problem and a source of pride. Unlike the much earlier tide of emigrants from many European countries.; the new arrivals from Mexico did not separate themselves by an ocean from their old homeland. Mexico was still just across a river or a line in the desert. The proximity of friends and family helped preserve a bond that emigrants from more distant places lost.

I glimpsed that bond one Sunday morning as I walked toward a red-brick church with San Antonio city Councilman Henry Cisneros. "This parish," he told me, "hasn't changed

Both Pedro and Eloisa Soriano were born in the United States, yet both are very Mexican. They live in San Antonio, Texas, where the two cultures often clash, cooperate, and merge. In this photograph, part of their clan, which includes 40 grandchildren, gathers in the Soriano backyard.

"The Mexican American is finally finding his place in the sun." much in 60 years. What you're seeing is just like a little town in If estimates of illegal aliens in the United States-from Mexico." We passed a sidewalk table where three women were under five to twelve million, mostly Mexicans-are anywhere selling plastic bags of nopales, slices of cactus pads that make near correct, about a tenth of Mexico's citizenry are clandestine a popular stew. Inside the sanctuary Jesuit Father Edmundo residents of the United States.

Rodriguez celebrated a Spanish-language Mass, while weathered Illegal aliens, says the law, are foreigners who have entered and wise-looking old men played fiddles and strummed guitars the United States without being processed by an immigration in the rhythms of Mexico. officer, or who have entered legally and then overstayed visas Then Councilman Cisneros and I visited a small fiesta in the or taken jobs. The United States admits 20,000 legal immigrants asphalt lot behind the church. Parishioners munched hamburgers from Mexico annually. But those who apply often must wait and tacolike chalupas, venturing over to shake hands respect- years; those who cross illegally immigrate in hours-or minutes. fully with their young political leader. Teen-agel's wearing the They and others like them are propelled by Mexico's poverty colorful costumes of a dozen Mexican states performed folk and its birthrat.e, one of the highest in the world. The rewards dances to the music of scratchy amplified recordings. Spirits offered in the United States are great. were high.

Border patrolman Oscar Tejeda, a Mexican American Just over half of San Antonio's population is Mexican himself, is sensitive to the dilemma that illegal immigration poses American, concentrated on the west side. The vast barrio is for a Mexican worker. "If a man has II kids who've got nothing far from an impersonal place. Small shops are the rule, and to eat, he's got a moral obligation to come to the United States life is neighborly. Most homes are modest; many show care and and find work. But it's my job to stop him. He's got to live, but pride-flowers, gardens, an occasional religious shrine. There the United States cannot continue to support two countries." also is poverty, convincingly etched in the statistics, and etched, At a detention center, the faces I saw reflected forlorn spirits too, in the lives of people. and broken hopes. They were earnest, salt-of-the-earth people Most of the 11,000 people who reside within Guadalupe driven by a pitiable need. parish-a square mile-are Catholics. The church sees a steady They and millions of others are making a profound impact day-long flow of activity: children coming to class, old people on the United States. Texas school districts along the border gathering in the social hall for comradeship and a hot lunch, cannot build new schools fast enough to accommodate alien aspiring young mariachis (members of street bands) practicing children. Housing, health, and crime problems have intensified trumpets and guitars in the afternoons while their mothers in Mexican-American neighborhoods that are steadily more watch approvingly, a basketball court in constant use. crowded with new arrivals.

I asked Father Rodriguez what accounted for the vitality of Despite the problems there is an epic aspect to what is the Catholic Church among Mexican Americans. happening along the Line. Mexican Americans proudly recall "For one thing," he began, "it's not only a religion; it's that their presence here antedates the 17th-century Mayflower. a culture, with a very expressive tradition. For another, people Now, as the 20th century wanes, some feel that the ancient lands look to the priest to help them deal with their various problems. of their people are being reclaimed in another of history's great They often can't afford other kinds of help." migrations.

So varied are the lives of Mexican Americans that at times In Los Angeles the most desirable neighborhoods lie toI felt as if I were opening a succession of doors to separate ward the west, where coastal breezes brush away the smog. worlds. San Antonio's west side was one such world. The world East Los Angeles, hedged by bleak factories and warehouses, stitched by freeways, stands apart. Poverty lies close to the of the farm worker was another-was, in fact, several others.

Some workers are trapped in the endless cycle of migrant surface in these few square kilometers, which are the heart of Los labor, following the crops by season to half a dozen states. Angeles County's Mexican-American community. Most of its Others stay in the same locale year round. Some live in abject families lead hard, useful lives and measure success not in the poverty, in jerry-built cubicles of concrete blocks that lack size of a paycheck but in the warmth of home and family and running water; others live in $80,000 homes on pleasant suburban personal relationships. Of all the different worlds of Mexicanstreets. Some-particularly in California-are politically active American life, East Los Angeles is the most urban and intense. and unionized, members of the Teamsters or Cesar Chavez's Across the freeway one day, East Los Angeles seemed far United Farm Workers (UFW). Others-especially in Texasaway to me. At a cocktail reception in a sophisticated downtown are loners, signing on with a contractor at the packers' piece rate. business club, influential Mexican Americans gathered to meet The U.S.-Mexican border is the most crossed international a new city official. Among them were lawyers, funeral-home boundary on earth. Even Laredo, Texas, population only 70,000, . directors, certified public accountants, and corporate presidents. registers more than 12million lawful crossings every year.

Most had risen from childhood poverty en route to California.

The border, for nearly all its 3,000 kilometers, follows river "Our fathers and uncles would never have believed we'd contours or slashes across open desert and has few fences or be here at the Athletic Club," said Al Juarez, chairman of the other man-made barriers. It is easy to slip across; last year as Los Angeles Board of Civil Service Commissioners and an many as three'million may have done so. Of the million who administrator of a law firm, as he welcomed guests. "But what were apprehended, half were caught near the two biggest border really impresses me is this: Ten years ago, we'd have been running cities, El Paso and San Diego.

Federal programs. Now we're in the private sector."

With help from a student, Georgianne Matthews teaches anatomy to Mexican-American children in Holtville, California. Hers is a classroom on wheels, a trailer she uses to follow the drift of migrant farm workers.

"In California there is so much prosperity all around you, so much opportunity," he told me, "that in spite of the barriers, people are making it."

In San Diego, a similar outlook was expressed by Bernie A. Hernandez, Jr., an accounting supervisor of the local utility company. "You find the world of business just waiting for you."

Hernandez is one of the 530 veterans who belong to the Don Diego VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars) Post in Logan Barrio. Ninety-five percent are Mexican Americans. "We want to keep the United States strong militarily, so that if anything threatens it, we'll be ready," Hernandez said. "You could call me a flag-waving conservative. I feel strongly about what this country means. I believe in the family, the church, the Constitution, the colors. People say that's old-fashioned.

But when I'm in the Fourth of July parade and they play the national anthem, my hair stands on end."

I visited many public schools in Mexico U.S.A. during my long journey. They have always been a medium for Americanizing newcomers, promoting assimilation by rigid insistence on English in the classroom. But the recent rapid growth of bilingual and bicultural education has made Spanish a medium in thousands of schools.

One-quarter of Houston's 190,000 public school children are Mexican American. Most speak Spanish at home. At the David G. Burnet Elementary School, about 45 percent are

enrolled in bilingual education. They study for much of the day in Spanish, acquaint themselves with Mesoamerican Indian artifacts, and learn about the lives of ''famosos Mexicanos Americanos."

These developments were reflected in one thought I heard time and time again: "The Mexican American is finally finding his place in the sun." I recall the words of Councilman Henry Cisneros, whom I met in San Antonio.

"America," he said, "has a dominant culture because it has dealt with ethnic differences for so long. Its tenet is that people will come together. Do you remember Archibald MacLeish's 'American Letter'?" Slowly he recited the lines from memory: ... we that ... have had Neither the old walls nor the voices around us, This is our land, this is our ancient groundThe raw earth, the mixed bloods and the strangers, The different eyes, the wind, and the heart's change.

These we will not leave though the old call us.

This is our country-earth, our blood, our kind.

"I can read that poem," he continued, "and get a standing ovation at Cinco de Mayo or any other Mexican holiday. That is what people believe. Those lines tell me that what we are going through is something America has lived through before."

D

BOW ITBIIC GBOUPS IlrLUIICB rOBIIGI POLICY The televised panel discussionfrom which thefollowing excerpts are drawn was sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based private organization that conducts research on public issues and seeks to foster public discussion of them.

The participants are: Hyman Bookbinder, Washington representative of the American, Jewish Committee Lee H. Hamilton, U.S. Congressman from Indiana Jesse Jackson, president of People United to Save Humanity (PUSH), a black self-help and civil rights organization Eugene T. Rossides, chairman of the American Hellenic Institute, representing Greek-Americans John Charles Daly, a former American Broadcasting Company television news executive, the moderator Daly: In the United States and elsewhere, economic, class, ethnic, peace movement, environmental and other specialinterest groupings look at foreign policy issues from different perspectives. They now employ their experiences and skill, gained in applying pressure on the administration and the Congress in domestic matters, to foreign policy issues.

In this climate, bloc voting, important campaign contributions and influence in labor unions, in the business community, in the church, in the media-all available in one degree or another to the ethnic groupings-must inevitably increase their ability and their wish to influence U.S. foreign policy.

Is this United States a pot of vegetable soup and no longer a melting pot? Are we so pluralistic that it has become agonizing to define the national interests? And, if we cannot do that, what is to give continuity to our foreign policy?

Rossides: One of the roles the ethnic community has to play is to correct the overbalance of the vast foreign affairs bureaucracy and its monopoly on the facts and the headlines on foreign policy issues. I think the community can playa very important rok in helping the Congress in this area.

Daly: For more than a century, certainly since the 1860s when Irish-Americans influenced attitudes toward Great Britain, ethnic pressures have influenced U.S. foreign policy to one degree or another. Since then, we have had the China lobby, Jewish support for Israel, Greek activity in the Cyprus issue, black American support of African liberation movements, the affirmative animosity of U.s. Cubans toward Castro, more recently black American intervention in the Middle East. Has this long record of participation in the formulation or influencing offoreign policy done any violence to the foreign policy of the United States over the years?

Hamilton: I think not, probably. I think in many instances the ethnic contribution has been very positive to the conduct of American foreign policy. Let me give some quick examples.

Black Americans have surely brought to the attention of the Congress and to the president the problems in Africa. When I first came to the Congress, we couldn't get anybody to serve on the Afr:ican affairs subcommittee. It was..considered to be an out-of-tile-way subcommittee. Now that is probably the most popular subcommittee.

I think blacks in America have sensitized the Congress to the problems of Africa. Other groups have also participated,

but that is an important contribution. Our American-Eastern European friends have certainly helped us understand better the problems of human rights in the Eastern European countries.

Our Jewish-American friends have certainly emphasized Israeli security concerns to us, perhaps more than we would otherwise have been sensitive to. And you can just go down the list and see where the input has been helpful.

Now, at the same time, I think it is fair to say that sometimes these contributions have been on the negative side and have not been helpful to us. I think, for example, of the Cuban exiles with their demand that we invade Cuba. I am not sure that has been a helpful contribution to the formulation and conduct of American foreign policy.

The ultimate responsibility rests with the Congress and the president, and we must accept that responsibility.

I do want to point out, however, that an effective ethnic group can play upon the weaknesses of the Congress in its role of developing American foreign policy. A great many Congressmen, for example, tend to look at foreign policy questions as an extension of domestic politics, not on the basis of what is in the national interests of the country, but of what some constituents in their district or state think.

Bookbinder: But why is that kind of influence different from the influence that an oil company might apply or an agricultural bloc? It's the same principle.

Hamilton: It's the same principle, that's correct. But the point I am making is that effective ethnic groups can often play upon the weaknesses of the Congress in persuading the Congress to act.

Bookbinder: Then don't be so weak.

Hamilton: I agree with that wholeheartedly, Mr. Bookbinder, but groups are very effective at this, and there are many weaknesses the Congress has in the conduct of foreign policy. I have just mentioned one of them.

The leadership of the Congress is not primarily interested in foreign affairs. It's simply that the press of daily business makes it quite impossible for the congressional leaders to really focus on American foreign policy questions. We have a very decentralized leadership structure in the House of Representatives, and effective groups can assert their iriterests and play upon these weaknesses. That doesn't mean that they are wrong nor does it mean that we should evade any responsibility for it.

Rossides: I don't think it is so much the weakness of the Congress.

It may be more the inadequacies of many ethnic groups in presenting their positions properly, with the sole test being what is best for the United States. I submit that if we had a million Vietnamese-Americans in this country in the early 1960s, we would never have gotten involved in Vietnam.

Daly: There is a volume, Ethnicity and U.S. Foreign Policy [edited by Abdul Aziz Said, professor of international relations at the American University in Washington, D.C.], which is a collection of papers on the general problem of ethnicity and U. S. foreign policy, and one of them is a paper on GreekAmericans and congressional voting patterns across a set of .the issues that pertain to the Turkish arms embargo during the Cyprus dispute.

The results of these preliminary investigations, the volume . says, "would seem to indicate that Greek-American attempts to influence members of the Senate and the House on the issue of aid to Turkey were not very effective. at least in correlating

In a nation of immigrants ethnic groups have to balance two equally precious things: emotional ties to the country from which they came, and loyalty to the country to which they now belong.

Despite the melange of cultural and ideological pressures they have to cope with, when faced with a choice, ethnic groups in the United States do place the national interest above the sectarian.

the numbers of Greek-American constituents and congressional voting patterns." The volume does note that there are other types of possible influence.

Now, Mr. Rossides, you were involved in that whole Cyprus issue. Do you feel that Greek-Americans, in their turn, played a major role in passing the Turkish arms embargo?

Rossides: In passing it, yes. The first year, they played a substantial role based on the rule of law. We brought to the attention of each and every Congressman that a fundamental law of the United States, namely, that our weapons could not be used for aggression, had been violated. The embargo was put on six months later after about eight votes in the House and eight votes in the Senate, and that embargo was continued for about another six months. Thereafter, it was diluted very quickly, and in the years since the community has not been as effective.

Jackson: It seems to me the ethnic influence is relative to its domestic political power. It still falls upon the executive branch to enforce the law and be consistent: Is it politically expedient for a given executive to enforce a given law? The law is no better than its enforcement.

Another point is how the press will project a given issue.

Oftentimes the press helps to determine our mindset with distorted or deleted news, because often our free press in these instances does not become a fair press, and that affects the public view.

Bookbinder: I just want to make the point that when we use the word "lobby" and we talk about ethnic influence, we ought not to think of it in the narrow sense of trying to persuade members of the Congress. When it is a legislative matter, that is the ultimate step, but what we are talking about is influencing public.opinion.

Jackson: The fruits of superior organization and the fruits of superior persistence are reflected in the conduct of the Congress, and that seems to me to be perfectly legal and logical.

Daly: Going back to what was said previously about the heavy involvement of ethnic groups domestically-and I think it is growing in the foreign affairs area-to what extent do you think that issues contained in foreign policy debates are, in reality, a proxy for conflicts over domestic issues and the distribution of domestic benefits?

Jackson: I just think that the first reason we ought to be involved in the affairs of America's foreign policy is that we are American citizens and must determine what represents enhancement to our security and what is a threat. Therefore, I think our foreign affairs participation should not be limited to our ethnic concerns, because sometimes there are also economic concerns, moral concerns, issues of war and peace. ÂĽ,'e should not limit ourselves to areas that are directly traceable to our inheritance, because I think it weakens the position that you're doing it because it's in the national interest; it becomes clearly your own selfish interest, not just self-interest, but selfish interest.

Bookbinder: It's a mistake to think that ethnic groups- I know I can speak on behalf of the Jewish community here, but it's true of other communities too- that our foreign policy interests are limited¡to what are considered parochial ethnic interests.

I've spent a lot of time in recent weeks on the whole issue of the Southeast Asian refugee situation, food poograms for the starving millions. We are keenly involved, but these are not narrow, parochial interests-we're trying to use whatever

influence we might have, the ability to educate the American people to things that are clearly in the national interest.

Rossides: That may be, Mr. Bookbinder, but not that many of the ethnic groups use it as their prime issue.

I think the genius of this country is pluralism, in that we are all descendents from somewhere, and that ethnic groups have a special interest to spend more time and effort regarding the relationships between our country and the countries from which their forefathers came.

Daly: Reverend Jackson, do you think the tradition of America as a melting pot has been supplanted, and that finding the national interest as a governing factor in foreign policy is becoming increasingly difficult?

Jackson: I think it always was more realistic to talk about vegetable soup as an analogy than melting pot. We have common interest in war and peace, we have common interest in a viable economy, we have common interest in protecting our political system as one that we desire over another system. I think that there's been a kind of re-ethnicizing of America, particularly in the last 12 or 15 years, where there's tremendous fervor for Columbus Day and African Liberation Day and Jewish holidays and Irish holidays. We saw this tremendous welling of pride, in Polish-Americans in particular and among other Catholic Americans, when the Pope visited the United States.

Hamilton: The question was, "Is finding the national interest becoming more difficult?" My answer is clearly yes. I don't have much doubt about that. I think the issues before us are extraordinarily complex, much more complex than they were in another day. This is a much bigger country, and it's much harder to find a consensus on any policy, foreign or domestic.

We are also in a day when special interests are very prominent in our political life. I think the consensus-building process in the pluralistic community or the nation has become extraordinarily difficult. Political leadership today is a very unenviable task.

Bookbinder: We're touching now on what I think is, perhaps, one of the greatest challenges facing our society. How we can blend two equally precious things: on the one hand, cultural and ethnic pluralism and ideologies of various kinds; on the other hand, the common culture, the basic American system.

How can we blend these two things, define the national interest, carry it out, get consensus for it, at the same time recognizing there are differences? It's not easy.

And I'd say to my good friends here, who represent other ethnic communities, we'd better face a very, very real, simple fact of life: We cannot have all of our respective wishes enacted at the same time, because there are conflicts among us. We have to adjust to that fact. Not everything I seek on behalf of my particular group is achievable.

Bookbinder: Nobody has expressed this situation better than Gerald Ford did when he was Vice President. Let me read a short quotation from lJ.im: "Rather than question in any way those who feel deep emotional ties to other countries, whether it be Israel or Ireland or Italy or Africa, we should salute this as a manifestation of the genius of our nation. It is one of the things that makes both Israel and America unique in the world."

We ought to understand that one can continue to have emotional ties, family ties, to another country and still put the welfare of America on top.

D

TWO

SCHOLARS DEBATE

1":S. ELIOT'S

THE WASTE LAND

THE WASTE LAND REVISITED Now that the mystery of the mlssmg manuscript of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land has been solved and Ezra Pound's "maieutic skill" is in full view, the responsibility for the poem may not be wholly Eliot's. More than half a century after its publication (1922), it should be possible to look at the object as it is, at least to avoid the'extremes of partisan reviews, which have been its lot almost throughout. "Who shall parse the broken measures of The Waste Land?" cried a young poet in desperation. He was not the only one. Already armies whole have sunk in the attempt. As the Times Literary Supplement recently observed, there is no conclusive agreement as to what sort of poem it is or was meant to be.

"A resounding and popular success," "simply one triumph after another," "with Mr. Eliot we were restored to a living world of poetry," "did most to prevent a panic," say the enthusiasts. "The great catastrophe of our letters," "a spurious verbal algebra," "a poet who cannot write poetry," cried the angry voices. For all the il:mbiguity of its techniques and response, The Waste Land, an elegy on the decline of the West, has long

imposed itself as the symbol and compressed epic of a fragmented culture: "a heap of broken images." It set the vogue for a new poetic and allied strategies before which the avant-garde, on both sides of the Atlantic, did not fail to kowtow in ritual obeisance.

But how long would the luck hold, the fashion last? Already the wind has changed; even if, today, few will perhaps be as blunt as the London bookseller who, on being asked for a copy of F.L. Matthiessen's The Achievement ofT.S. Eliot is reported to have riposted: "What achievement?"

If, as Eliot himself held, a poem should be able to communicate before it is understood, The Waste Land had little to fear. Years later he told a reporter: "In The Waste Land I wasn't even bothering whether I understood what I was saying." An undoubted, if unexpected, hit, suitably shocking, the poet as an international hero, a connoisseur of irony, nostalgia and self-pity, drew a large and admiring readership. Spender found it "rhythmically exciting ... the handwriting of his sensibility ... the indefinable quality of his being." Its language, rhythm, image and evocation of Weltschmerz took every one, especially the elite, by storm. Even the calculated dissonances and incoherence did not lack defenders. As one of them put it, only those who are victimized by logical compulsiveness judge the poem as nonsense.

Meant to browbeat opposition, this wasn't of course the whole truth. Other components of Eliot's craftsmanship have not escaped censure. A pastiche and a parody ("April is the cruellest month," "When lovely woman ~ stoops to folly"), the poem revels in borrowings, reminiscences ("You who were with me in the ships at Mylae," "The chair she sat in," "Good night, sweet ladies," "Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song," "burning burning burning burning," "London bridge is falling down falling down falling down") and reverberations. One can sympathize with Richard Aldington's tart remark: The poem's best lines are written by other hands! When, in his criticism, Eliot canvassed that one of the surest ways of judging a poet is the way in which he borrows, he was no doubt engaged in s_elf-defense.

Are the echoes and borrowings so very helpful? That the method easily slips into mannerism is obvious, the poet's own voice lost among many voices. As for the basic technique, of manipulated parallelism and contrast, it is (pace Cleanth Brooks) simplistic rather than complex. As for the implied irony, it cuts both ways. Of this more later.

The poem's other strategies appear no less vulnerable. The frequent flashbacks or fadeouts ("instant transportation"), aided by the Stravinsky effect, give it, as Lawrence Durrell hinted, the sense of a radio play

The poem's best lines are written by other hands! for many voices. From Pound came, perhaps, the urban, cinematographic slant.

Still, in spite of the variety of its moods, tone, times and situations the poem is" hardly dramatic. Why? With neither plot, action nor character-who its hero or antihero is is anybody's guess-it is really the nondramatic monologue of a sensitive, overeducated lost soul. Slightly generous, Maurice Bowra equates its variety of voices, tone and style with dramatic quality. The heroic quest or renewal, the heart of the mythic matter, is just not there. The Fisher King exists in the professorial notes rather than in the body of the poem. The frequent attempts at audience participation - "Y ou! hypocrite lecteur!-mon sembi able -mon frere!" and "Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you" -cannot prevent the poem from hanging in the air.

The divergent details fail to give it a local habitation and a name, except what someone has called the "inclusive consciousness."

Even so, the consciousness remains disembodied, discontinuous. There is no person in whose mind these _assorted experiences could conceivably coexist, "no one present in whose mind they can occur." Only a frightfu~self-consciousness without a self.

The overuse of irony creates other difficulties. On the one hand, it relies on ambivalence; on the other, it hamstrings the action, if any. Even a champion like Leavis has to admit that the poem does not progress, and ends where it begar:.. Helen Gardner concedes that it has no solution or conclusion worth the name. One does not expect a poet to "solve the universe," but what bogs one down is that the ironic mask, at once easy and modish, provides no mature approach to history or to human experience.

The mixture of levity and seriousness, the mark of the metaphysical poets, whom Eliot admired and helped to rehabilitate, is not without its risk. The uninhibited use of irony and parallelism reduces the poem almost into a piece of "creative satire," a ventriloquist's exercise. Eliot's own later view of irony seems more acceptable: "It is the use of irony to give the appearance of a philosophy that leaves us now indifferent" (Criterion, April 1935).

A simple way of looking at The Waste Land would be as a crisscross of dialogues and descriptions. It is revealing

that the evocations, dubious and/or decorative, of the past are less effective than those dealing with the present. The Sybil is less real than Madame Sosostris. The past was meaningful, suggests the poem. In the context of the poem, however, this timeless reality does not come alive and "the presentness of the past," for which the poet has often pleaded, is only a phrase. The best of Eliot is in the female voices: whether it is the virginal Hyacinth Girl, the neurotic lady in her boudoir, the low-class creature in the pub, the typist girl or the Thames daughters whose fate resembles that of the Rhine daughters.

To believe Allen Tate, the episode of the typist girl is perhaps the most profound vision that we have of the modern world.

But this overlooks its romantic undertones: "violet hour" (Sappho), "sailor home from sea" (Stevenson) and Keats ("magic casements ... perilous seas in faery lands forlorn"). It is an elaborate context for a denouement brutally barren and loveless.

B

ycontrast, how spare the confessions of the three Thames daughters, three-in-one! A marvel of humility, contrition and compassion, these call for no sophisticated source-hunting outside themselves. No trick is necessary to span the pathos of these lost women, damaged priestesses of the waste land ora permissive society: On Margate Sands.

I can connect Nothing with nothing The broken fingernails of dirty hands.

My people humble people who expect Nothing.

How genuine compared to the ersatz agony elsewhere! By the side of its living voice how remote the all-comprehending ineffective Tiresias! This is, perhaps, where Eliot trips most heavily. Seeking for a putative container for his multilingual Anatomy of Assorted Melancholy, Eliot fiXes on Tiresias a near-impossible role. What Tiresias sees, is the substance of the poem, says Eliot in an effort to guide or misguide.

But how much does, or can, Tiresias see?

Plainly an outsider in the Upanishadic milieu as well as in the Grail legend, the

avatar is hardly credible. A spiritual eunuch, at best a cameraman, he can do nothing. His strong point is passive suffering: "And I Tiresias have foresuffered all."

More dangerous than the androgynous avatar is the use of the wrong myth or the wrong use of myths. The primitive, medieval and ascetic elements do not cohere. Except for the contrast through irony and nostalgia, the Eliotian use of myths shows little or no focus, no ordering of experience, such as he had himself suggested in a well-known essay on Joyce ("Ulysses, Order and Myth"): "a method which others must pursue after him ... a way of controlling, of ordering, or giving shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary histor"y." Eliot's historic vision, of history as disaster, must be a matter of debate, and take us far.

In any case, Frazer of The Golden Bough was a friend neither of poetry nor of faith.

The grateful reference to him was but a salaam a la mode. Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance was, or could be, more germinal. In the notes to the poem Eliot has paid a handsome tribute to her: "Indeed, so deeply am I indebted, Miss Weston's book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do."

That the tribute has been paid in the reverse has escaped most readers who, like Ezra Pound, have never read the book.

Simply, Eliot has used the material in defiance of Miss Weston's argument. The quest, the pilgrim sacrifice (adhvarasyapesah), as the Veda puts it, which could exorcise the curse hanging on the waste land, fails to be enacted. The dead do not rise, Vritra is not slain, the waters do not flow. The "great passage" discovered by the Ancients is not recovered. The Thunder-little more than a stage property-does not speak.

Or even if it had spoken, in the past, it is now unheard. All told the quest is in vacuo. Unreal city, unreal poem.

Another problem arises from the introduction of the Buddha and St. Augustine.

The collocation of these two, the Notes tell us, is not an accident. Maybe; but what Eliot overlooks is that the collocation creates a crisis of symbols in which the double initiation-of eros as well as its sublimation and its rejection-is apt to get confused.

The pagan and vegetation myths were not

hitched to New England Puritanism or the ascetic neti or world negation. And yet asceticism is not all that there is in the poem. Elsewhere, as the Tristram-Isolde story will show, the poet "regrets the transience of the romantic moment more than its spiritual unworthiness."

The truth, as Lucas and Myers have underlined it, is that Eliot is wanting to have it both ways, "able to enjoy at one and the same time the pleasures of indulgence and the dignity of disapproval." The questor after the Holy Grail is equally drawn to "'Jug Jug' to dirty ears" and a ribald wartime ballad on "Mrs. Porter/ And her daughter/They wash their feet in soda water" and doesn't mind quoting, or misquoting, the Upanishad.

Sandwiched between lust and inhibition, the profane and the sacred, the attempt to cosmicize the sickness of a secular society without sanctions ends in anarchy and delirium. Irony blended with nostalgia and the amazing dependence on the nonexistent finally demand their price. Haunted by the lost dimensions of culture, The Waste Land is virtually a ghost poem. No wonder Eliot has been called, by Hugh Kenner, the Invisible Poet. It is instructive that in archaic or traditional societies the New Year ceremonials include a ghost dance, as prelude to a paradisical earth. In Eliot's heartbreak house there are only the ghosts dancing, "mixing memory and desire." Deus absconditus ("God is fled").

In the end, after the Thunder-albeit, as we have seen, a stage thunder-has spoken, what happens? A complete collapse.

The climax is also an anticlimax: London Bridge isfalling falling down

downfalling

down

Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina Quando' fiam uti chelidon-O swallow swallow

Le Prince d'Aquitaine

a la tour abolie

These fragments J have shored against my ruins Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe.

Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

Shantih shantih shantih

Who is the speaker and what has happened really? The foreign-language quotations provide, according to Fowler, the abracadabra

element. Eliot himself called it "a sprawling chaotic poem." In the words of a more outspoken critic: "And what is one to say of the last eight lines of The Waste Land, which are composed, as nearly as I can determine with the aid of the notes, of unaltered passages from seven sources?

A sequence of such quotations cannot by any stretch of imagination achieve unity."

It is not easy to combat this commonsensical view unless we opt for an elite aesthetics.

Since in the tradition of the new, incoherence, discontinuity and the absurd are recognized values, and nothing perhaps more sacred than the poet's disorganized mind, these must be endowed with a meaning of their own. So at least Paul Tillich and others have held.

An unflattering analogy with Whitman forces itself: the same tendency, differently expressed, of a submission to multiplicity.

But while Whitman is naive and wild, Eliot is sophisticated and bottomlessly sad.

Which is more affected, who shall say?

Both great in their own way, contain multitudes, though their ways of containing are utterly different. Also both poets dared to write poetry in an age which had made the writing of poetry difficult, if not impossible.

O

n the basic question: Is it a poem, or is the poem a unity? opinion is bound to be divided.

While Yvor Winters insists that "you need to be clearly in control of the confusion you wish to express," Collingwood is convinced that "the remedy is the poem itself, the community's medicine for the worst disease, the corruption of consciousness." LA. Richards defended or described it as a "music of ideas," which mayor may not be true of the poet's own intention. To a detached observer, the multiple allusions, the continued use of irony and contrast, of antithetical myths and symbols and the center of gravity for ever changing get in the way of the poem's unity and meaning. A different reading of its artifice of Angst is of course possible. Technique is not enough or everything.

Looking back, the poem's overpraised skill, imposing facade, "the only style for

the confused issues of the age," as Bowra said, reveals limitations that can no longer be denied. The system of contrast-between life and death, fertility and sterility, past and present-can be called complex only by courtesy. Though the poem commutes freely between the past and the present, it has no sense of the future. A lei recherche du temps perdu, there is plenty of flashback or hindsight, but very little foresight. The poem celebrates a stasis or simultaneous "happening," in which different times, places and persons play bo-peep or change into each other. This partly supports Eliot's elucidation that "just as the one-eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so all the women are one woman."

All the same the "inclusive" Tiresias fails to include, since he is not really real.

In the words of Roy Harvey Pearce, "he is not at the center of the history which the poem epitomizes, he has not the power to be at the center of anything." In fact, whether due to him or not, it seems impossible to locate the poem or its action, that is nonaction: this cross-cultural, eroded worldtheater, where the drama does not happen.

We do not know to whom and where it all happens, though we can guess why.

Not hope but hopelessness, a paralysis of will and hesitancy are the poem's forte.

Here is no Blakean "mental fight," but only at best shadow-fighting, the literary revanche of "Hieronymo's mad againe." Hesitating between the diagnostic and the descriptive, The Waste Land, "perhaps the most clinical picture of the modern poet's sickness," is wanting in the unity and wholeness that we expect from a major work.

Also, a poem does not become mythic just because it uses mythic material. Leavis' special pleading that a poem that is to contain all myths cannot construct itself upon one is futile. The fact is, Eliot did not have the mythic imagination. Like other modern artists, he too is playing with myths, what the Germans call Mythspiele.

He laments rather than revitalizes. Speaking of traditional values in a modern idiom.

The Waste Land, a dirge for disinherited minds, is about the passing away of the archaic world, and whether, as Richards

held, it effects a total severance between Lyrical Ballads or Dover Beach, to mention poetry and belief is another matter. two contrasted types of greatness that hold In retrospect the prestigious poem, the their ground.

Though Ash Wednesday and Four Quarmodern poem seems to be a victim of the fallacy of the imitative form. Successful tets are works of a superior order, and he in creating among a few the illusion of never wrote in the same manner, Eliot being disillusioned, Eliot himself seems to continues to be known as "the poet of The be suffering from the delusion that he Waste Land." Across the corridors of history is judging when he is merely exhibiting. the voice of the lonely, polyglot prophet Or surrendering. The various authors and in a corrupt city, "the death-rattle of a dying civilization," the marvelous minitraditions that the poem evokes-Buddha, Baudelaire, the Upanishads, Dante, the Bible epic seems to have lost its erstwhile impor-might condemn the poem as a piece of tance. Eliot himself tended to dismiss it brilliant brizante, too full of ad lib. The as "only the relief of a personal and wholly agony may be authentic ("There is no insignificant grouse against life ... just a water but only rock"), but the total design piece of rhythmical grumbling." Yet who and not is indisputably deliberate, almost a calcu- can deny that many-eminent found in the 18.tedcollapse. Passages arbitrarily yoked to- so eminent moderns-have gether or torn out of context-he misquotes poem a moving portrait of a Gotterdamthe Brihadaranyaka Upanishad and misuses merung milieu, mood and moment! Who the Tarot ("I regret having sent so many that was young could be untouched? Who inquirers on a wild goose chase")-lo'se else had spoken in like manner of the fear their original charisma. In some ways a and thirst ("A pool among the rock .... piece of superb shamming, the strategy If there were sound of water only") of the is closer to satire. A strange fate for a self- exile or self-exile? styled classicist.

It is impossible not to admire in this poem of romantic agony and ennui, "the strange deadly poem" of a young poet time passes, the overly cerebral on the verge of nervous breakdown, measurand celebrated poem's cryptic ing immeasurable, invisible losses, the sheer condensation and its extremely honesty of experience, and sense of shared limited public, a generation guilt; it is these that would not allow either for whom the loss of world view, "the any slick solution or an elegiac sic transit horror of the completely negative," itself gloria mundi ("so passes the glory of theheld a positive value, may reach its point world"). Haunted and haunting, the antiof exhaustion. The "immensity of the amount modern modern poem, The Waste Land, of conscious labor" ("conscious carpentry") represents, as perhaps no other work of that has gone to its making may be viewed its period, the journey of the living dead in a less flattering light. Virtuosity and across the waste land which is another obliquity are stuff that may not endure; name for the contemporary human situit must be the same with "bogus scholar- ation, a journey we all have to undertake. ship," which Eliot confessed. A straight "The waste land is my life," wrote a substatement, as in the Talmud, "God has urban housewife to Theodore Roszak, the three keys, of rain, birth and raising author of Where the Wasteland Ends. Even of the dead" has more power, reality and if its adoration is largely part of the chaos resonance than all the contrived subtleties we all serve, "the ride on the Witchesand indirections of the epigone who can Sabbath to the Dark Tower is where we only shore fragments against his ruin and meet ourselves, ourselves, ourselves." Saying the ruin of the world. For all its profundity farewell to the poem of one's .youth is and pyrotechnic, the already "half forgotten" not easy.

0 poem sounds superficial. The echoes often appear hollow, unnatural. A literary curi- About the Author: Sisirkumar Ghose is professor of osity, both as poem and poetry, The Waste English at Santiniketan, He has also taug~t qbroad Land now looks less significant than the and contributed to the ~.ncyclopaedia Britannica.

A

Dayadhvam.

friena, m)' friena I have heard the key

Turn in the door, once and once only.

We think of the key, each in his prison, Thinking of the key, each ~/confirms

a prison.

rumours

Only at nightfall, aetherial mtH'ffittf'S Revive the spirits of ~IRestere the fer 0 !flement a broken Coriolanus, for a moment

DA

Damyata. the wina "os fair, ona the boat responded

~

Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and wheeh oar. would have The sea was calm, 1lft<! your heart responded obedient Gaily, when in "ited, beating res~ensi Ie Ye" e'¡er en the shere To controlling hands. I left "ithe,,[ ye" There I leo Ie )'e" Clos~ing em~t) honas Isit/sat upon the/a shore the arid plain Fishing, with the:o aeselote s"nset behind me Gtn/Shall I at least set my 6Wft landsWhieh ne" 1lt-Ias-t my/the kingaem in order?

The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts, Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound. Edited by Valerie Eliot. 1971.

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

THE WASTE LAND

VINDICATED I owe this reply to the kindness of the editor of SPAN who asked me if I would, engage myself in "a literary polemic" with Dc Sisirkumar Ghose on The Waste Land.

While the editor believes in the old saw that "contention among scholars increases learning," I confess I have no claims to scholarship but pretend to have read the poem reasonably well in the attempt to teach it-for donkey's years. Each time I taught it, mercifully to a new batch of students, it was a satisfying experience, because I thought I saw a little more of the poem and so have never tired of talking about it.

But to enter into a debate with a friend of 30 years' standing? Precisely there I saw an advantage: I didn't run the risk of carrying any personal animus into a literary debate; if anything, it made it easier to deal with the issues objectively. Also, I thought it worth exploring how far friends can go in articulating their differences without either hurting friendship or vitiating the climate of criticism, therefore of culture. I have long held that in a society where criticism is stifled culture suffersthe first casualty; it goes underground, surfaces as gossip and poisons human relationships. .

Presently I felt fortified, besides, by the nostalgic tone of Dr. Ghose's concluding sentence: "Saying farewell to the poem of one's youth is not easy." Which suggests it might well have been the favorite of his youthful years. The title of his essay "The Waste Land Revisited" confirmed my hunch, for I take it that the word "visit" in literary matters means: to have a fair view of the general lie of the land-that is, enter the life of the poem and get a feel of it so as to be able to talk about it intelligently.

But I fear there is no clue anywhere in the essay as to how the poem may have affected Dr. Ghose in his earlier readings; the essay merely registers The Waste Land's unqualified success on both sides of the Atlantic. What, then, was the incentive or the provocation for "revisiting" the poem unless possibly that

solitary reference to the "recent" observation of the Times Literary Supplement (TLS), that great arbiter of metropolitan tests in the Indian subcon tinen t? What did TLS say, after all? "There is no conclusive agreement as to what sort of poem it is or was meant to be."

Isn't it naIve of TLS to think that in matters of literary appreciation, there can be any "conclusive agreement"? Couldn't TLS, if only to live up to its appellation, "literary," vary the shop-soiled phrase a little? For, I should have thought, the proper thing to do in matters of art and literature is to seek some kind of corroboration or consensus from the truly involved. Did Dr. Ghose need to defer to the august weekly and inflate its selfimportance when it had nothing to say? In any case, one hopes this trite observation of TLS wasn't the stimulus behind Dr. Ghose's "revisit," nor indeed any of the 40 or so critical props he summons to his aid, since presumably most, if not all of them, were available to English honors students when he and I graduated from the university, almost four decades ago-if not in backward Mysore, surely in Bengal, where T.S. Eliot was the rage among writers of verse and intellectuals.

And why does Dc Ghose quote Eliot against himself so earnestly when it is widely known that Eliot was in the habit of "discomfiting an opponent with a sudden profession of ignorance" (as Eliot said of F.H. Bradley)?

Dr. Ghose hasn't cared to point to the big change in the poetic scene beyond asserting "the winds have changed." How? When?

Where? There is no explanation. But such, he sees, is the fickleness of literary tastes: "How long will the luck hold? the fashion last?" Dc Ghose gives no details of the bad currency which has driven out the good. As for me, I have settled my scores with the few critics of The Waste Land I could manage to read over the years in books and periodicals and learned to live at peace with the poem for many years now, though I should be glad to receive the light from anyone who has anything new to say about it. Even so the opportunity is too good to lose -namely, to restate the things that may have been missed, ignored or distorted and possibly forgotten about the poem of my youth which has happily passed into my adult life with my estimate of it greatly enhanced.

Let me take up Dr. Ghose's remarks page by page-that is, so far as he is amenable to my simple approach, for it is hard to keep track of his arguments with his habit (like a Bengal football player) of mystifying and confounding the unwary by sudden shifts of focus and scholarly citations from celebrities.

Consider first of all, the question which he brings up again and again in various forms: Are the echoes and borrowings so very helpful? I shall readily concede there is an excess of this practice in the poem which makes it look modish. Eliot is obviously not like Keats, who wished to "load every rift with ore." The poets, their readers and both of them together could for long assume in England a shared European tradition, an aristocratic sensibility and the English countryside. But the romantic poet looked upon himself as the "idle singer of an empty day," would "look before and after and pine for what is not." It was clear to Eliot that if poetry had ceased to matter in the Western world it was because of the kind of poet for whom poetry had become a dilettante business. Even as an undergraduate at Harvard, Eliot had realized that with Swinburne the poets had come to a dead end. What was a young man with ambitions of writing verse to do? Turn where? Nowhere, Eliot despaired.

T

hat is why Eliot did two things: he went back to the sources of his own culture; he also looked for a stimulus to the French Symbolists and, because he had learned Sanskrit and Pali, to the wisdom of the East.

Tradition became "the means by which the' vitality of the past enriched the life of the present." But it was not enough merely to state that "the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order." Eliot felt called upon to exemplify this simultaneity in his own poetry.

He genuinely believed that no individual poet was more important than the tradition he belonged to; he was in it as it was in him. The poet's business; he intimates in Four Quartets, was only to recover what had been discovered once or twice and lost and found again, by men who knew better-an attitude which

Eliot was in the habit of "discomfiting an opponent with a sudden profession of reinforced his profoundly felt humility.

But religion and poetry had seldom come so close in any poem in living memory as here.

Look at the first line of The Waste Land.

The word "April" summons before us the m,emorable first line in Chaucer's Prologue to the Canterbury Tales celebrating the cyclical processes of nature generating expansiveness in everyone and a sense of belonging to each other and to God - the pilgrimage to Canterbury was precisely that.

April is also the time of Easter, celebrating the resurrection of Christ. Eliot sees both man and nature as governed by the same rhythm: life, death and life again. Not so in the waste land. Thus, by the choice of a crucial word, April, Eliot at once forged the linh with that source of good sense, Chaucer, and suggested a current flowing through centuries of poetry through greenery and "stony rubbish." If a poet's business is, put simply, to present the actual, and suggest the hiatus between the actual and the ideal, Eliot couldn't have done better. As in a Shakespearean play the opening line here also strikes the keynote of the whole poem.

H

nce the "Unreal City." Dr. Ghose could not have failed to see how loaded are the two words; the City, once the mothe~ to the ancient Greek, then the "City of God" to St.Augustine (with its Hindu equivalent in Devanagari), had for Baudelaire, become "Unreal." Eliot, like Baudelaire, could see its unreality and suffer: "0 City, city" in that it had "undone so many" because, even in a crowd "each man fixed his eyes before his feet" and was content to "flow" over London Bridge, no better than the water flowing below. Unlike Baudelaire, however, who could only "study" suffering, Eliot could "transcend" the present predicament, with the help of the past. We see how he could direct his eye to "where St. Mary Woolnoth kept the hours" with a dead sound on the final stroke of nine. The sight induced introspection in him and helped him to see that his present business as a Christian was to find correctives to our sorry state and to re-enact in his own life, the life of Christ and the manner of his death. Now read the line "keep the Dog far hence that's friend to man."

What was in Webster a simple statement of fact with a one-to-one meaning, "keep the woolf far thence that's foe to man,"

has undergone by the alchemy of Eliot's art a sea change- the gift of a great poet to man and society, both in the grip of a terrible curse. "Woolf" replaced by "Dog," with D capital, comes to stand for a whole way of life, Humanism, which, seemingly satisfying to giver and receiver, in the long run, does damage to both because it erects the primacy of the human oV,er the supernatural. The simple substitution of I"friend" for "foe" is again the work of one who dared a great deal, for the paradox of rejecting the Dog, because he is friend to man, teases us to ponder the harm of what seems good. With his familiarity with the inner mazes of Patanjali, Eliot realized how pitifully inadequate were the categories of Good and Evil.

How can Dr. Ghose, no stranger to these rarefied regions, dismiss "echoes and borrowings" as mere pastiche? deplore that "for all its variety of tone, mood, times and situations the poem is hardly dramatic"? Doesn't he see that The Waste Land is the most dramatic of all Eliot's poems? It is disturbing that Dr. Ghose should comment on the absence of "plot, action and character" in poetry as if it were a work in the Aristotelian mode, with a beginning, middle and end. The myth controls the design of the whole poem; indeed, the poem is the re-enactment of the myth in terms of the present, which should answer to his requirement of "action."

Dr. Ghose deplores the lack of a "local habitation and a name." To the contrary, the poem has its locale in London and the various places are explicitly there for him to see on the tourist's Map of Greater London: the River Thames with its upper bank, the Lower Thames Street where fishermen lounge, next to Magnus Martyr, St. Mary Woolnoth, King William Street, Queen Victoria Street, Greenwich, Kew, the Strand, Richmond, Moorgate, Cannon Street Hotel, the Metropole and the pubs patronized by the cockney women. It's amazing how with its London base the poem radiates in time and space to Greek, Roman, Phoenician, Egyptian and Indian civilizations and from there to the cosmic heights where once gods, demons and men heard what the Thunder said and their progeny must now hear in their deep heart's core-if they have followed the poem ....

There are in Dr. Ghose's essay interesting bits of observation which, if retrieved from layers of' quotations, and witty pairs of consciously coined opposites abounding in

his style, should help to look at the poem "as it is." For example, Dr. Ghose says: "One simple way of looking at the poem would be as a crisscross of dialogues and descriptions." I seized on this observation and started registering this crisscross in section after section. But Dr. Ghose would drop the point in favor of another which his eye catches for the nonce: "The evocations of the past" are less effective than those dealing with the present. (Earlier he had changed an absence of "action"!) Pleased with Dr. Ghose's concession that something was "effective" in The Waste Land, I waited for an elaboration. But no, Dr. Ghose moved unpredictably to reveal another hidden gift: "The best of Eliot is in female voices."

But this revelation is doomed to recede to the background, for he has decided on blasting Eliot's Tiresias: Far from being a prophet, Tiresias is a "spiritual eunuch." It is true Tiresias doesn't come to life, and if Eliot hadn't drawn our attention to his role in the Notes we would have passed him by, because he has faded into a figure of no consequence.

Even so, as he ruminates: "I haveforesuffered all" or "I too expected the awaited guest," Eliot uses the opportunity to pose a devastating, if implicit, question: Is it the fate of all wise men to be passive spectators of base actions? "The best lack all conviction," as Yeats said. But Eliot does have a point in assigning this invisible, central role to Tiresias. His very ineffectiveness, because it is an inescapable part of the total design of the poem, acquires a negative importance: thought without action is abortive, as suffering without action is sterile. Eliot seems to suggest a comparison of the suffering that leads to action in the Philomel passage ("there the nightingale filled all the desert with inviolable voice") with that of Tiresias which, because it is passive, is of no consequence to anyone.

Dr. Ghose directs his attention against Eliot's wrong use of myths. One would wish he had named the myths, and at least hinted at their "wrong use." He does mention Frazer and Jessie Weston, but to no purpose. However, when it comes to Thunder he permits himself an unequivocal accusation that one can come to grips with.

He charges: The great passage, discovered by the ancients is not "recovered." I shall reserve comment on it to the last and shall first take up for consideration his other charge that the collocation of Buddha and Augus-

tine "creates a CrISISor' symbols." Why does Dr. Ghose think they are "apt to be confused"? Because the quester wants "to have it both ways-the pleasure of indulgence" and the dignity of disapproval. While I hope Dr. Ghose will one day liberate himself from the clutches of critics and take a good second look at it, I should presently invite him to appreciate Eliot's appropriate placing (he says so in his Notes) of the "burning" image at the end of that terrible section given to pervasive lust, from the pollution of "Sweet Thames" with "other testimony of summer nights" and the coming of Sweeney to "Mrs. Porter and her daughter," to Eugenides spending a weekend at the Metropole and the assault of the typist by the small house agent's clerk. If the Buddha asked the Bhikkhus to "burn" desire and lust, St. Augustine had recourse to another kind of burning: repent for his sins. And Eliot adroitly places the short informal sentences, Ajier the event He wept. He promised a 'new start' I made no comment. What should I resent? just before the "burning" lines, thereby suggesting the value he attaches to the other kind of "burning." St. Augustine exemplifies in himself the need for what the Buddha preaches.

O

ne has come to the right understanding oflife's ways byobservation, fasting, prayer and infinite compassion, the other through experience, not the less, perhaps the more, valuable for it. While both the East and the West have understanding of both, Eliot takes the two types of asceticism one from each, both because of their supreme exemplars and because, between the two, they complement each other and complete the truth by reinforcing each other-the world is in need of both. Far from creating a confusion or crisis of symbols, Dr. Ghose will see, therefore, how each illuminates the other-the simple word "burning" achieving its fullness of intensity, the intensity of incantation by sheer repetition of a single word which is the verbal equivalent of long, sustained effort in each case-with it are associated both cleansing (sacrifice) and igniting, each making for greater selfawareness. So seen, one is constrained to observe Dr. Ghose is less than fair to

Eliot when he endorses that frivolous remark on "both ways." Neither the poem's design nor the poet's total work warrants such a reading.

Now to the "misquoting" of the Upanishad. I hope to persuade Dr. Ghose to see why it had to be "misquoted." While in Brihadaranyaka Upanishad gods, men and demons appear in that order for Brahma's message, it is remarked in a later work that "gods and demons their promise kept/only men forgot." The priority thus falls on man. Because of this he must uphold the virtue of giving, even more than sympathizing and controlling. Dr. Ghose needs no telling that the milestones of civilization are marked by men and women who have "given."

And then, consider for a poet, the sheer sound value of the Sanskrit words in the order in which they appear in the poem: Da Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata, starting with the shorter monosyllable, having a mouthful of each of the three words and tapering off with the open vowel (instead of with the consonant of Dayadhvam which comes last in the Upanishad)-like the voice of thunder itself.

Scholars speak of influences on poets. To borrow as Eliot does is a sure sign of genius, for what one borrows is less important than what one does with the borrowing.

Would Dr. Ghose still insist that Eliot has misquoted the Upanishad? that the thunder is a stage thunder? and not heard today?

Would he still add his voice of protest to those of many who have long been vexed about the last eight lines of the poem?-who protest that the lines are ironic, they represent no progression, and the last line which has no marks of punctuation, is there against the sage advice of the poet's mentor, Ezra Pound? Let it be said at once it is the reference to Hierony which helps to impaft a realistic touch to the poem.

"Shall I at least set my lands in order?" is the residual response of the indomitable spirit of man thrown on an extremity, worn out by the ordeals of the quest. Such is the climax of a poem which starts on the ominous note "April is the cruellest month," with the "Unreal City" for its locale; the protagonist ruminating "I was neither living nor dead and I knew nothing"; while "crowds of people (were) going round in a ring." Add to these all those sources

of a senSItIve man's sorrow for the moral responsibility he must share for the human condition: Madame Sosostris, the fortune teller, Stetson, that nobody's son who fights all wars, the neurotic upper class women, the cockney women, the typist and the small house agent's clerk, and Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant asking him to spend a weekend at the Metropole, not to speak of the shades of their counterparts in legend and history haunting his memory, alternately causing hope, frustration, annoyance, despair, but always motivating the forward march ("March on, March on, 0 ye traveller" as the Upanishad enjoins) and finally bringing him round to receive the intimation of the Upanishad. Such is the potency of grace that it works its way to his heart, because all experiences enter into the crucible of his soul, where the poem finds its unity.

Now he is face to face with the supreme challenge, not to him personally but to his civilization on the point of collapse-in "London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down" to which he responds on a personal level (the only one left to him) and in the idiom of a skeptic of our scientific age: Shall I at least set my lands in order?

And the wisdom of an old civilization completes the rest (the commas would have been an impertinent interruption to the full-throated benediction of Shantih Shantih Shantih ("Mayall be well, may all manner of things be well").

I am not sure in my own mind that Dr. Ghose will let himself be persuaded by anything I have tried to say. At times he lashes out at the poem and the poet without telling us why; at other times he calls it a great poem, but great in a different way from the Lyrical Ballads. He considers it unflattering to compare Eliot with Whitman, but is too lazy to stand up to the demands of comparison; choosing the primrose path, he abdicates responsibility as critic.

The conclusion: "Which is more affected, who shall say? Both great in their own way" neutralizes all attempt at criticism.

Why Dr. Ghose chose to "revisit" The 0 Waste Land remains an enigma.

About the Author: Professor C.D. Narasimhaiah, formerly head of the department of literature at the University of Mysore, has now set up the Literary Criterion Centre in Mysore.

\ REClAMI\TION.

DODD DD DDDD fOlD

10/OD-

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE

"Another advantage to being a magician is that I . never have to do the dishes."

THB TALLOIBBS DBCLABlTIOI

Press Freedom Is a Basic HmnanBigbt At a recent meeting at Talloires in France, some 60 leading international media agencies called on UNESCO and other intergovernmental organizations "to abandon attempts to regulate news content and formulate rules for the press."

Instead, the declaration said, efforts should be made to help the Third World media by "improving technological progress, increasing professional interchanges and equipment transfers, reducing communication tariffs, producing cheaper newsprint and eliminating other barriers to the development of news media capabilities." Below are excerpts from the Talloires declaration.

W

e journalists from many parts of the world, reporters, editors, photographers, publishers and broadcasters, linked by our mutual dedication to a free press, meeting in Talloires, France, to consider means of improving the free flow of information worldwide, and to demonstrate our resolve to resist any encroachment on this free flow.

Determined to uphold the objectives of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. which in Article 19 states, "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers."

Mindful of the commitment of the constitution of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization to "promote the free flow of ideas by word and image."

Recalling moreover that the signatories of the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe concluded in 1975 in Helsinki, Finland, pledged themselves to foster "freer flow and wider dissemination of information of all kinds," declared that: I. We affirm our commitment to these principles and call upon all international bodies and nations to adhere faithfully to them.

2. We believe that the free flow of information and ideas is essential for ml!tual understanding and world peace. We consider restraints on the movement of news and information to be contrary to the interests of international understanding.

3. We support the universal human right to be fully informed, which right requires the free circulation of news and opinion.

4. We insist that free access, by the people and the press, to all sources of information, both official and unofficial, must be assured and reinforced. Denying freedom of the press denies all freedom of the individual.

5. We are aware that governments frequently constrain or otherwise discourage the reporting of information they consider detrimental or embarrassing; and that governments usually invoke the national interest to justify these constraints. We believe, however, that the people's interests, and therefore the interests of the nation, are better served by free and open reporting.

6. We believe in any society that the public interest is best served by a variety of independen t news media.

7. We acknowledge the importance of advertising as a consumer service and in providing financial support for a strong and self-sustaining press. Without financial independence, the press cannot be independent.

8. We recognize that new technologies have greatly facilitated the international flow of information and that the news media in many countries have not sufficiently benefited from this progress. We support all efforts by international organizations and other public and private bodies to correct this imbalance and to make this technology available to promote the worldwide advancement of the press and broadcast media and the journalistic profession.

9. We believe that the debate on news and information in modern society that has taken place in UNESCO and other international bodies should now be put to constructive purposes. We reaffirm our views on several specific questions that have arisen in the course of this debate, being convinced that: • Censorship and other forms of arbitrary control of information and opinion should be eliminated; the people's right to news information must not be abridged.

• Access by journalists to diverse sources of news and opinion, official or unofficial, should be without restriction.

• There can be no international code of journalistic ethics; the plurality of views makes this impossible. Codes of journalistic ethics, if adopted within a country, should be formulated by the press itself and should be voluntary

in their application.

• Members of the press should enjoy the full protection of national and international law.

We seek no special protection or any special status and oppose any proposals that would control journalists in the name of protecting them.

• There should be no restriction on any person's freedom to practice journalism.

• Licensing of journalists by national or international bodies should not be sanctioned, nor should special requirements be demanded of journalists in lieu of licensing them.

• The press' professional responsibility is the pursuit of truth. To legislate or otherwise mandate responsibilities for the press is to destroy its independence.

• All journalistic freedoms should apply equally to the print and broadcast media. Since the broadcast media are the primary purveyors of news and information in many countries, there is particular need for nations to keep their broadcast channels open to the free transmission of news and opinion.

10. We pledge cooperation in all genuine efforts to expand the free flow of information worldwide. We believe the time has come within UNESCO and other intergovernmental bodies to abandon attempts to regulate news content and formulate rules for the press. Efforts should be directed instead to finding practical solutions to the problems before us, such as improving technological progress, increasing professional interchanges and equipment transfers, reducing communication tariffs, producing cheaper newsprint and eliminating other barriers to the development of news media capabilities.

Our interests as members ofthe press, whether from the developed or developing countries, are essentially the same; ours is a joint dedication to the freest, most accurate and impartial information that is within our professional capability to produce and distribute.

We are deeply concerned by a growing tendency in many countries and in international bodies to put government interests above those of the individual, particularly in regard to information. We believe that the ultimate definition of a free press lies not in the actions of governments or international bodies, but rather in the professionalism, vigor and courage of individual journalists.

Press freedom is a basic human right. We pledge ourselves to concerted action to uphold this right.

0

rOBI181 liD-STILL VITAL The United States will meet its commitments to multilateral development banks, emphasizes Question: Mr. Secretary, President Reagan, through his economic policies, promises a new beginning for the American economy; how will that impact upon other lands and other peoples?

Answer: Well, the president's program, which is designed to make a fundamental policy shift in America's domestic economy, will restore real economic growth in the United States; accordingly, it will have a very favorable impact on the economies of the rest of the world. By bringing our interest rates down we will improve the real economic growth in both developing and lesser developed countries of the world.

Question: Trade, of course, is one very important aspect of economic relations between nations. Foreign aid-especially where the United States is concerned-is another. The United States, which once was the world's leader in foreign aid, now ranks quite low among other industrial powers in percentage of gross national product given to poorer countries.

In the administration of President Jimmy Carter, there was an effort to shift foreign aid more from bilateral arrangements to the multilateral lending agencies.

Will the Reagan Administration change that policy?

Answer: Well, we have the entire question of foreign aid-both bilateral and multilateral-under study at the present time. As you know, the Reagan Administration has been in office a little more than 100 days at this point in time; our focus has been on the domestic economy.

There are a number of foreign policy areas and a number of other international areas where we have yet to formulate our policies.

But I think there's a couple of points that should be made. We clearly recognize that there is a role for multilateral aid. There are many cost-effective ways to use it. There are opportunities for an international organization to suggest reforms that it would be improper for the United States to suggest.

So, we do support the concept of multilateral aid, and I'd be very surprised if we would abandon that concept. We may want to change the way we do it, but I don't think we'd be abandoning the concept.

Bilateral aid, on the other hand, has the distinct advantage of providing a very targeted, narrow, controlled response to a specific situation in a country, where we in fact can move in quickly with assistance, and can use it~along with the multilateral aid-to promote U.S. interests.

Question: Now, of course, Mr. Reagan's Administration inherits a number of commitments which the United States Government has made together with other donor nations in giving to the multilateral lending agencies such as the World Bank.

Will the Reagan Administration honor those commitments?

Answer: Yes, it will honor those commitments. We have an interesting situation, as you know, with our freedom of the press. When someone leaked some very preliminary staff reports urging that we not honor the commitment to IDA-VI [International Development Association-sixth replenishment] and to the World Bank and so on, that story had a great deal of play in the press; I know the story was also picked up by a number of international agencies.

Those were, in fact, staff reports that had not gone to anyone at a policy level.

When the policy-level people-including myself-met on these, we said, "No, that is not the kind of shift we're proposing to make at all." And we rejected abandoning those commitments by the previous administration. We are concerned about consistency.

Question: But will they be stretched out? I think of the sixth replenishment to the International Developmen.t Association, the so-called "soft loan window" of the World Bank. I believe that the Reagan Administration plans to stretch out the U. S. contributions.

Answer; What we intend to do is to fund them in a stairstep fashion, with greater funding in the out years than in the early years. That's correct. That is consistent with the agreement as negotiated, which did not specify level annual funding at all.

And one of the reasons that we want to do it in this fashion is because we think that U.S interest rates will be lower during the third year, for example, and we'll be able to borrow that money

domestically much less expensively than we can today.

Question: You have spoken of the great play in the press given to Mr. Reagan's foreign aid policies. Now there is also an impression, which is bolstered by the fiscal 1982 budget that the president has sent up to the U.S. Congress, that the total of foreign aid will be less than it had been.

Is this correct? If there is going to be less money devoted altogether to foreign aid, then who loses out and where?

Answer: Well, I think if you compare the fiscal year 1981 budget of the United States, which will currently end, with our proposals-there will be more money in those aid packages than this year. It is less money than was proposed in the Carter budget at the time that President Carter was leaving office. That's the difference. In fact, the absolute amount will be up-not cut.

Question: In the last two or three years, the World Bank, pointing to the enormous debt problems of many nonoil-producing developing countries, has said that a fine way to lessen that debt burden would be to help these nations search for and produce indigenous sources of energy.

Has the Reagan Administration withdrawn U. S. support from that proposal?

Answer: What you're talking about is the specific proposal for a so-called World Bank affiliate that would be an energy affiliate designed to try and find ways to produce energy-at least that's one characterization of it.

Frankly, we haven't seen i persuasive argument that a separate international organization is needed. We think the existing development banks can serve that function very, very well to the extent the function should be served.

We also think that the countries that have the greatest need could, frankly, be of assistance to themselves by permitting more foreign exploration and development of their own petroleum resources, or of other projects to produce hydroelectricity and so on.

We think that the private capital markets of the world and the energy companies of the world can go a long way toward making those countries more selfsufficient. To the extent that there's a

TO U. S. POLICY the

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Secretary of the Treasury.

window there, or a gap, we think the existing multilateral agencies can be very helpful in filling that, particularly through an extension of the terms for repayment.

Question: Let's continue with this question of debt for a moment. Some governments-such as the Scandinavians and Britain, I believe; perhaps Canada, to some extent-have written off the official debts of a number of the poorest countries. Will the United States do the same?

Answer: I don't think so, no. I don't think that that would be consistent with the kind of policies we've pursued in the past.

As the largest lender both privately and officially, we would be concerned that that would set a precedent we would not want to encourage.

It would be highly improbable that we would do that.

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Question: What sort of approach would you advocate, or would the Reagan Administration advocate, toward helping the poorest countries reschedule their debts?

Answer: We would be very much in favor of exploring opportunities to reschedule by stretching out the maturities. We see this problem principally as one of cash flow for those countries, and to the extent that we can extend the terms of the debt-that is, instead of being repaid in 10 years, it might be repaid in 20 or 30-and to the extent that we can get our domestic interest rates down, that would lessen the annual cash flow or payment that those less developed countries have to make in hard currency to us.

We think that that's the type of program that serves their interests best, maintains the financial integrity of the international markets, and suits our foreign policy purposes.

Question: The U.S. Export-Import

Bank was created to help American exporters

compete on more equal terms with foreign corporations, particularly in guaranteeing loans in developing countries or countries with poor credit worthiness when the American exporter cannot get a loan from a private bank. As I understand it, the Reagan Administration would reduce funding for the Export-Import Bank.

Why? Answer: We should be very clear on this, because we don't want to confuse what we've done on the short term versus the long term.

In the short term, we did reduce the funding for the Export-Import Bank this year. There were several reasons for that.

One, frankly, we were not satisfied with how it was being run, and we think that it needed a reorienration in terms of the kinds of loans it was making. Too high a proportion of its loans was going to about three companies, particularly the Boeing aircraft company. It had gotten to be a subsidy for Boeing. Now, I don't really think that the Boeing Corporation needs a subsidy from the average taxpayer in America.

The second reason we cut it was that we want to reorient the Bank. We want to change some of its policies to take advantage of the tremendous long-term markets we have in America, and the advantage that gives our exporters. We're going to need a year or so to do that.

The third reason that we cut it was to make sure that we had balance in the budget-cutting program that we were submitting to the Congress. We were cutting domestic aid, we were cutting foreign aid, and this was one of the business subsidies that we wanted to cut.

Now, that's in the short term, with our spending packages down in the Congress.

For the longer term-by longer term, I mean the fiscal year 1983 budget-we're working very hard on this particular question right now, because we're quite concerned that with the situation in the world today being what it is an export credit subsidy war might break out, and that would lead to a trade war.

We don't want to see that happen in the long term. We're afraid that some of our trading partners have misinterpreted what we have done in the short term as a withdrawal from export credit subsidies-and they think that we have left

the market open to them.

What we have done is to invite them to join us in reducing these kinds of subsidies-because these are an economic deadweight loss. Essentially, what you're doing is you're taxing the average taxpayer-whether it's in France, whether it's in Japan, whether it's in the United States, or wherever. That average taxpayer is paying his dollar or her deutsche mark or whatever to the federal government; that government is taking it and is splitting it, half to the country that is purchasing the product-a lesser developed country-and half to the aftertax profits that the corporation is making.

Now, I don't really think that the typical office worker, schoolteacher or factory worker in any of the developed countries of the world really wants to subsidize the profits of his nation's companies. I just don't think that makes economic sense.

We don't want to do it. But if other people are going to do it, we will do it. If we do get into an export credit war, we have a very deep pocket, and we're prepared to go as deep as it needs to be, to put a stop to this practice, because it's a pernicious one. The answer is to eliminate the practice. That's the answer.

Question: I'd like to sum up by going back

where we started-and to ask you in different words, perhaps, from the beginning -why should other peoples in other countries want the Reagan Administra¡ tion's policies to succeed?

Answer: They should want our policies to succeed because endemic, worldwide inflation is something that we simply cannot live with if we're going to promote democratic institutions and free market enterprises throughout the world. We have to find a way to bring our domestic inflation rate do~n so that we can import more from other countries, provide them exports at cheaper prices. Because our interest rates will be lower and it will cost us less to manufacture them. Because then we will be able to extend foreign aid, whether it's done bilaterally or multilaterally, to the lesser developed countries in a way that will foster their economic growth at the least cost.

And that's the real interest they have in seeing our program succeed.

0

.World Citizens Tribanafs Verdict on Afghanistan "The People's Permanent Tribunal," consisting of judges from 11 nations, including India, has condemned the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In a judgment delivered on May 5, the Tribunal judged the Soviet Union guilty of aggression in Afghanistan and also deplored its "attack on the fundamental national rights of the Afghan people."

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the unsuccessful suppression of national Afghan fighters were the matters judged in Stockholm by the People's Permanent Tribunal, successor organization to the international tribunals held in the name of the late Bertrand Russell, British philosopher and mathematician. These tribunals attracted widespread attention in past years.

The Tribunal's jury of judges convened on May 1 for three days of hearings. conducted on the lines of court trials. The 14 judges came from North and South America, Europe, Asia and North Africa.

They included an Algerian judge in international law, a Mexican archbishop, a former foreign minister of Portugal, an Indian journalist and an American Nobel Prize biologist. There were 17 Afghan witnesses.

The Tribunal jury considered these two questions: â&#x20AC;˘ "Does the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan constitute an aggression in the sense of international law against the sovereignty, the territorial integrity or the political independence of the Afghan state and an attack on the fundamental national rights of the Afghan people?" â&#x20AC;˘ "Is there on the part of the Soviet forces in Afghanistan violation of the rules for humanitarian rights during war, especially insofar as concerns the fate of civilian populations?"

On the first question, the Tribunal had no doubt. Regarding the second one, the Tribunal established a "special inquiry commission" to collect further information. The commission's findings could result in another session of the jury.

After closed sessions following the open hearings, the jury's judgment was announced on May 5. A Tribunal press release summarized the judgment in this way: "It [the Tribunal] has judged the Soviet Union guilty ot'aggression prohibited by

Article II, Paragraph Four of the Charter of the United Nations, the justifications invoked by the Soviet Government being neither established nor relevant. The Tribunal has stated particularly that the consent given by the Government of the' Democratic Republic of Afghanistan to the massive presence of Soviet troops in Afghan territory has been established as not existing before the time of the invasion; consequently it lacks all value since it is nullified by armed threat.

"The Tribunal has also heard witnesses who have described serious violations of the laws and conventions for the conduct of war, particularly bombing attacks against the civilian population, the execution of prisoners, the use of methods of

war that indiscriminatingly harm both the fighting resistance as well as civilians, and the destruction of foodstuffs. The Tribunal has decided' that the information collected is serious in nature and has decided to establish an investigating commission with the responsibility of collecting in Afghanistan and other places all possible additional information about the violations by the Soviet forces of the rules governing human activity during war times. " The Tribunal thus has condemned the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan, as have the United Nations Security Council and General Assembly and the Conference of Islamic States. No cre_dence has been given to Moscow's explanation that it was "invited" in, as President Leonid Brezhnev claimed in a cable to President Jimmy Carter on December 28, 1979, four days after the airlift invasion began. The man who alleg<;;dlyinvited the Soviet Union was Afghan President Hafizullah Amin, who was killed three days later. The new president, Babrak Karmal, who had been in exile in East Germany and Czechoslovakia after his pro-Moscow faction had been purged, was promptly imported to Kabul and installed in Amin's place.

The careful legal phrasing employed by the People's Permanent Tribunal in rendering its judgment could not convey the anguish and misery of the Afghan people. This could be expressed only by one of the victims. One such who testified at the hearings was Mohammed Gafour Youssefazi, leader of a nationalist guerrilla group in Farkhan province. According to the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, the Afghan fighter told the panel of judges: "They are shooting at us from helicopters, they are burning our crops, they are killing our cattle. When the Russians . discover anyone who has helped the resistance, he will be dragged on the ground behind a tank.

"Our children pick up things they believe are toys, but they prove to be mines ....

"We are not fighting against communism, socialism or atheism, but against the Russian invasion of our country ~We have always fought against those who have tried to colonize us, and we are doing it now, too."

0

A Dialogue With Clay Peter Voulkos, considered as one of the major artists working in clay in this century, is largely responsible for raising what is traditionally regarded as a craft to the status of an art. Three decades of his unconventional forms, both in ceramic sculpture and in the making of plates and vases, are forcing critics round the world to reconsider the traditional art-craft hierarchies.

This grouping demonstrates the progression of Peter Voulkos'style: (from left) a simple decorative work from 1952, a vase done in 1970, and a more complex pot completed in 1976.

eter Voulkos. Many don't even know the name, yet he has been called one of the most important artists in the United States today. "I would consider him a hero, like a Picasso," says Paul J. Smith, director of the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York.

"What he did was a little like what Jackson Pollock did. His influence is worldwide, and in terms of that influence, he is one of the major artists working in clay in our century." Clay is the difficult word; in most vocabularies it means craft rather than art, and therefore hasn't a high-class sound.

Voulkos has been instrumental in battering down the art-craft class distinction.

Voulkos earned a place in history when he sparked a revolution in ceramics.

In the mid-1950s, when he first found his own style, a lot of people were questioning and exploring; the rebellious impulse spread like a forest fire. Today some of his early pieces look datedpartly because the aesthetic he brought to ceramics depends heavily on better known arts, and partly because his potent influence stamped that aesthetic on ceramics some time ago, and some of his students and peers have gone on to newer modes.

Voulkos liberated ceramics from its .traditional forms and uses by throwing pots with wobbly shapes that squatted awkwardly atop each other, and by making vases that were asymmetrical.

He added slabs of clay that cut across wheel-thrown elements or stuck out at odd angles. Whereas the surface decoration of vases had always been integral but secondary to overall form, Voulkos' paint has a life of its own, rushing across shapes without much respect for their individual integrity. In 1958 he began making abstract ceramic sculpture on a nearly unprecedented scale, starting with a piece that stood almost two meters tall. His style was inspired by abstract expressionism, and like that movement, abandoned European and Oriental traditions.

His earliest work stayed well within the classical framework but was already exceptional; while he was still in college in Montana he was winning national prizes. He taught at Black Mountain College in 1953, and went immediately afterward to New York, where he met Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and others who changed his life, his eye, his art. In Los

P

Angeles the next year he founded the ceramics department at the Otis Art Institute, and created the style that would open the way to a movement. He was soon making container forms that were not containers: vases with holes cut in the sides, plates with erratic shapes and jagged rims, and by the 1960s, huge pots that were gouged and slashed with the holes stopped up from behind with porcelain or clay, as if some race of giants had slapped them together in driving haste. (He said later that his pots grew so large because he didn't know much about ceramics and misread the scale of photographs.) Voulkos' work has a startling immediacy that photographs do not convey. Some look as if volcanoes had thrown them and others as if glaciers had ridden them, but all convey a sense that whoever or whatever made them had done so at top speed and set them down just a few minutes ago.

The works were controversial. Traditional potters canceled their subscriptions to Craft Horizons magazine when Voulkos' work was first published. The pots were, and are, crude (though not in manufacture), and the energy in them dominant. The brightly colored, epoxypainted pieces look slightly vulgar even

today. His cantilevered conglomerations of forms are sometimes merely bulbous, ungainly versions of contemporary sculpture, but the best pieces harness his stampeding energy. The dark sculpture of the late 1950s, with surfaces that looked charred, offers up its insides through deep mouths or jaws gaping along its length-Voulkos says he pokes holes in them to let the dark out. Voulkos also painted for years, and in the 1960s did enormous bronzes that are playful and intelligent, if largely derivative.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s he consolidated all his gains in ceramics and did a series of clay works that, though neither so revolutionary nor so abstract expressionist as before, carried a new beauty and authority. Vases darkly glazed with iron, or clear-glazed, radiate the dignity and quiet power of primitive utensils for ritual use. A sequence of plates he began in 1972 and thinks of as drawings, are so powerful and assured that they hold in equilibrium slashes and holes, half-torn rims and small plugs of porcelain, and achieve a tranquil lyricism. The liberation of clay that Voulkos in large part inspired tÂĽas one element in a general craft revolution in the 1950s.

F or years Voulkos has carried the

Voulkos (shown at work at left) continues to set the pace in innovative ceramics.

Above: Red River, stoneware, 1960,94 em.

Right: Gallas Rock, stoneware, 1959-61,244 em.

tidings. on ceramics across the United States, teaching in workshops and giving demonstrations. He is said to have taught over 10,000 students, and his influence long ago spread to Europe and has even helped turn Japanese ceramics in new directions. Yet it is only quite recently that the art press began paying him any attention.

Voulkos is one of those artists who are forcing us to reconsider the art-craft hierarchies. A Voulkos sculpture is manifestly a sculpture, whether cast in bronze or fired in a kiln, and his plates and vases defy arbitrary distinctions. Artists in the Renaissance fought hard to be separated from and elevated above craftsmen; now certain craftsmen are quietly bidding to be united with artists again.

Voulkos himself claims to have done a little to bring the decorative and the fine arts closer together. His bold, uneven work substantiates that claim.

0 About the Author: Vicki Goldberg is an art historian and contributing editor of American Photographer and Saturday .Review.

Ceramics as IDstory

Sbiva: In and Beyond Manifestation A mammoth, highly successful exhibition currently touring the United States gives Americans fascinating glimpses of the many forms of one of India's most widely worshipped deities. Shiva is seen as depicted in 2,000 years of sculpture, bronze and painting.

Inventive, innovative America lives on in laboratories where top scientists are at work on subjects of global interest-from birth control to nuclearfusion.

The Power of Small Dams Small dams represent a cheap and environmentally safe potential for electrical energy. Two articles explore recent developments in India and the United States.

What Are the Dolphins Saying?

Or are they saying anything at all? Does the large size of their brains indicate a super intelligence? Conflicting research keeps the issue-and the dolphins' tricks-alive.

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For the first time, a major show of American ceramic art has been drawn together to offer audiences a comprehensive, historic review of this multifaceted, divergent art form. The show, "A Century of Ceramics in the United States 18781978," was conceived and produced by two leading authorities-Garth Clark, an art historian, critic and author, and Margie Hughto, ceramic artist in her own right and curator of the Emerson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York. The exhibit spans the crucial period in which American ceramists broke free from the constraints of European influence and burst forth with originality.

The show is a unique one for it deals with a society that had, in the words of Bernard Leach, "no ceramic taproot."

The indigenous Indian pottery was archaic and resulted from a protected, tribal culture. The Europeans who settled the United States found little inspiration in this magnificent tradition. Instead they became caught up in an attempt to

Facing page, clockwise from top: Glazed stoneware lidded jar, 63.7 em. high, by Peter Voulkos, 1956; raku bottle, 22.5 em. high, by Paul Soldner, 1964 •.slab-built stoneware pot, 21.8 em. high, by David Weinrib, 1956; glazed stoneware lidded jar, 22.5 em. high, by Kenneth Price, 1957 •.glazed stoneware cups, 6.2 em. high, saucers and pot, 20.6 em. high, by Karen Karnes, 1957; stoneware bottle, 23 em. high, by Robert Turner, 1951; glazed earthenware bowl, 30 em. diameter, by Gertrud and Otto Natzler, 1956; glazed stoneware shallow bowl, 33.7 em. diameter, by Toshiko Takezu, 1962-all part of the collection of the Everson Museum of Art, except Price jar, collection of Irving Blum.

emulate the styles, processes and tastes of their European origins.

American pottery therefore grew out of myriad concerns and influences, some of the dominant being the German saltglazed wares, the Dutch slipwares, the creamwares of Staffordshire, and later the porcelains of Germany, France and England. Interestingly, the strongest American character can be found in the humbler wares, the Pennsylvania German pottery crocks and plates. As ceramics became more sophisticated and the concept of artwares was introduced, the styles became patently imitative.

The breakthrough came in the mid1950s; the liberating energies came from abstract expressionism and Japanese folk pottery. These two influences produced a synergistic marriage of the traditional sensitivity to materials and processes and the potent, gestural force of contemporary painting. In the 1960s, funk appeared-a dadaesque inversion of pop art with its lowbrow humor, hobbycraft aesthetic and visceral figurative imagery.

These movements and subsequent achievements thrust American ceramics into the forefront of world ceramics, and it has maintained this leadership.

The journey of self-discovery and purpose that is surveyed in this exhibition is an extraordinary one. It takes the ceramic medium in the United States from an imitative, exploratory stance in the late 19th century to a vanguardist role in the 1950s and beyond. The achievement is twofold. On the one hand, the American ceramists had established a beachhead for a traditional craft medium in the fine arts, redefining the vessel aesthetic and presenting ceramic sculpture as an intimate and meaningful alternative to the cerebral quality of postwar metal sculpture. More broadly, however, it reflects the triumph of a nation that has been able to achieve a cultural voice and identity through the ceramic arts in the brief space of 100 years.

D Reprinted from A Century of Ceramics in the U.S. J878-J978 by Garth Clark and Margie Hughto. Copyright © 1979 by Garth Clark and Everson Museum of Art. By permission

of the publisher,

E. P. Dutton.

Left, clockwise from top: Stoneware plate with glazes and slips, 50 em. diameter, by John Glick, Plum Tree Pottery, 1975, collection of Everson Museum of Art; "Grey Sand Basin," raku with glazes, 41.9 em. high, by Wayne Higby, 1977, collection of Mark Graham; stoneware tureen, 22.5 em. high, by Warren MacKenzie, 1975, collection of Helen Drutt; stoneware jar, 25 em. high, by Robert Turner, 1976; "Form," porcelain, 10 em. high, by Ruth Duckworth, 1978, collection of Helen Drutt; porcelain bottle, 27.5 em. high, by Donald Pilcher, 1978, collection of Mr. and Mrs. Dennis Rowan •. porcelain bowl, 13.7 em. high, by Rudolph Staffel, 1977, collection of Dr. and Mrs. Parry Ottenberg; stoneware basket, 32.5 em. high, by Kenneth Ferguson, 1978.