SPAN: August 1978

SP -.AN" ALmER FROM THE PUBliSHER

1

We take pleasure in presenting in this issue color photographs of Prime Minister Morarji Desai's recent eight-day visit to the United States. Mr. Desai met a wide cross-section of the American leadership and the public, as did President Carter during his New Year-eve visit to India. A highlight of the Carter visit was his tour of a Haryana village; Prime Minister Desai went round a soybean farm in Nebraska. Both leadersenjoyed this exposure to rural India and the rural United States.

Newspapers in the two countries have remarked on the extraordinary rapport between President Carter and Prime Minister Desai, stemming from their common dedication to truth, democracy and human rights. It was dramatized by their warm references to each other, and by their unexpected night-time pilgrimage to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. The official talks between the two leaders covered a wide range-nuclear cooperation and nonproliferation, joint Indo-U.S. projects, economic exchange, free trade, human rights, world peace, disarmament, West Asia, Africa, North-South relations. These reflect the multifaceted character of Indo-U.S. relations and the pivotal role of the two countries in the developed and the developingworlds.

The talks yielded concrete results: America's Commerce Secretary, Mrs. Juanita Kreps, will be visiting India soon to discuss how America and India can do more business with each other-expand trade, increase American investment in India in areas where it is welcome, establishjoint ventures in third countries. To work out the mechanics of such ventures, a leading executive from the International Executive Service Corps will soon be deputed to India. Indian students are another beneficiary of the Desai visit-they will henceforth be issued four-year visas for study in the United States instead of the customary two-year visas.

Cooperation between the two countries is already taking diverse forms under the auspices of the Indo-U.S. Joint Commission and other forums. They cover solar energy, offshore oil exploration, space research, irrigation, grain storage, rural electrification, entomology, animal sciences, fertilizer usage. Thousands of people in India have viewed the American technology exhibit. while Americans have been admiring "India: The Ultimate Fantasy," a magnificent promotion of Indian goods sponsored by Bloomingdale's (see page 26), the famous American department store chain. In coming months, Indians and Americans will see more of each other's films, art shows, scholars and scientists.

The Carter and Morarji visits have indeed helped establish what the Indian' Prime Minister referred to as "a healthy, relaxed and cooperative relationship." Such a relationship permits the free airing of differences on complex issues-such as nuclear nonproliferationon which the two countries, by reason of their varying economic, geographic and cultural perspectives, fail to agree. But what matters is that the two countries find it possible to work together on many fronts, and to look forward to greater cooperation in future.

Many readers may find the most fascinating article of this issue to be the discussion between two leading American intellectuals, Isaac Asimov and Alvin Toffier. They are nothing if not stimulating as they talk about America's past, present and future, the industrial and the developing worlds, the egocentrism of man, tribalism and the transistor radio, the irrelevance of nationalism, the emergence of a new awareness of our planetary identity. What it all adds up to is a thought-provoking assessment by two highly cultivated and civilized minds of where man is today and where he is going, Particularly provocative is the last question tackled by Toffier and Asimov. Their concept of the fusion of individual happiness with the social good is something that President Carter, Prime Minister Desai and other forward-looking leaders of the world will enthusiastically back.

- Perry L. Peterson Acting Publisher

Augu" /978

Prime Minister Desai in America Redreaming the American Dream A conversation

with Isaac Asimov and Alvin To.ffler

10 13 18

20

San Antonio: New Life for an Old City

by Sharon Ojenstein

26 28

30

I Do Not Believe in the Good Old Days

by Steven Muller

34

37

38 42

William and Joseph's Cat and Mouse Tales

by Andre Martin

Front cover: Prime Minister Morarji Desai addresses a luncheon meeting of the National Press Club in Washington-a traditional forum for the world's celebrities-on June 14. This was one of the major engagements in the Prime Minister's event-packed June 8-15 visit to the United States. See pages 1-4 and 45-49.

Back cover: Prime Minister Desai, President Carter and Mrs. Rosalynn Carter wave to cheering crowds from a balcony on the south portico of the White House.

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

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

Editorial Staff: Krishan Gabrani, Aruna Dasgupta, Nirmal Sharma, Murari Saha, Rocque Fernandes. Art Director: Nand Katyal. Art Staff: Gopi Gajwani, B. Roy Choudhury, Kan ti Roy. Chief of Production: Awtar S. Marwaha. Photo Editor: Avinash Pasricha. Photographic Services: ICA Photo Lab. Published by the International Communication Agency, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001, on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the United States Government. Printed

by Aroon Purie at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Haryana.

Photographs: I-N.R. Shaw, Photo Division, Government of India. 5-Montage of photos by Carl Fischer and NASA. 6-Susanne Anderson. 10-1I-courtesy Peter Weyt. 20-25- Tony Kelly except 22 bottom by Blair Pittman.

28-Avinash Pasricha. 34-35-courtesy Bhartia Electric Steel Company except insets 34 top and center by Avinash Pasricha. 45 botlom (2) and 48 botlom- N. R. Shaw, Photo Division. GOI Use of SPAN articles in other publications is encourage-d. except when copyrighted. For permission. write to the Editor. Price of magazine: one year's subscription (12 issues), 18 rupees; single copy. 2 rupees 50 paise. For change of address, send an old address from a recent SPAN envelope along with new address to A.K. Mitra, Circulation Manager.

SPAN Magazine, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg. New Delhi 110001.

PRIME MINISTER DESAI IN AMERICA During his June 8-15 visit to the United States, Prime Minister Morarji Desai held talks with President Carter; conferred with American Congressmen, diplomats, businessmen and educators; addressed the United Nations in New York, the World Affairs Council of Northern California in San Francisco, the National Press Club in Washington; gave interviews to the print and electronic media; visited a farm in Nebraska, a Bloomingdale's department store in New York, the Gandhi Memorial Center in Maryland and other institutions; and met members of the Indian community. The areas and levels of his encounter with America were many and, wherever he went, he generated goodwill for India and appreciation for her achievements. Our cameras tried hard to keep pace with the Prime Minister: the results are seen on these pages.

Left: Prime Minister Desai is escorted by President Carter to the White House.

Above: Mr. Desai with Mr. Carter and the First Lady at the White House welcome ceremony.

PRIME MINISTER DESAI IN AMERICA

continued

Left: Prime Minister Desai responds to an official welcome at the imposing City Hall Rotunda of San Francisco at which Mayor George Mascone presented him with the key to the city. The Mayor praised the contribution Indian immigrants had made to California's prosperity. The Prime Minister said the elegant city of San Francisco "is not only blessed with the beauties of nature but has always been symbolic of a resurgent America. . .. Its cosmopolitan culture can serve as a model to many cities in the world."

He added: "I am convinced that even though our paths may sometimes be different, our ultimate goals will always be the same." In San Francisco, as elsewhere in the United States, Mr. Desai went

through a hectic schedule. He toured the Muir Woods forest and the Asian Museum of Art (photos on page 49). He visited the Gadar Memorial Hall (named after a group of expatriate Indians from the Punjab who espoused the cause of India's independence). He addressed a meeting sponsored by the World Affairs Council of Southern California and the Commonwealth Club; he was awarded a citation at the University of California in Berkeley. Below: The Prime Minister is welcomed on arrival in Washington by Secretary of State Cyrus Vance.

(More photographs on pages 45-49)

Far left: Prime Minister Desai exchanges pleasantries with Congressman Clement Zablocki (far left) and Senator John Sparkman, during a joint meeting' with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House International Relations Committee in Washington. Left, center: Conferring with U.N. Secretary General Kurt Waldheim in New York. Left: Being presented with the key to the nation's capital by Mayor Walter Washington and his wife.

QUESTION: We Americans think of ourselves as the most energetic people on earth, at work and at play-a nation with the happy experience of solving problems rather than despairing over them, a country with an ingrained optimism, and with an ability to roll up its sleeves to do a job. We cultivate vigor, an electric awareness of the now. We are always looking for something better, something newer, "getting with it!" In doing so, do we neglect the values of the past? Do we risk devaluing the future? Do we squander our resources, our traditions, our achievements, ourselves? The features that make America seem vigorous to some make it shallow to others; some long for the traditions that others are anxious to discard. With our strong national emphasis on all forms of education, do we appreciate the lessons of experience? Have our political mistakes made us wiser as a people? Ponce de Leon thought he had found the Fountain of Youth in America.

Certainly we have cultivated youth and still tend to see ourselves as "a young country," but the startling fact is that our form of government, in terms of continuity, is the oldest now on earth. With our innate exuberance, we still manage to act young, in spite of all, to pursue the new and improved. Yet with spectacular advances in medicine and health care, more and more of our population is elderly.

Most cultures have revered age as bringing wisdom. Is it time for America to settle down and draw upon the wisdom of agenow that we are 200 years old?

Mr. Toffier, do you think Americans neglect the values of the past?

TOFFLER: No, I don't think so. I think that they're bombarded with nostalgia, bombarded with rhetoric, and steeped in all sorts of mythologies about our past, which in fact I think we're going to have to rethink in the years ahead. I think that the values that are considered peculiarly American are in fact variants of the values of industrial society generally, and that one can understand America better, I think, by seeing it as part of the industrial world system rather than as an independent, autonomous nation.

The values that have been characteristic of America are essentially the values that all industrial societies, growing out of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, have shared. In America, they've taken some special forms because of the peculiar historical accident of location.

But basically, our values, I think, are not so frightfully different as we like to think.

They were relevant and workable and

Isaac Asimov is the world-famed writer of some 200 books on science as well as science fiction.

made sense for a traditional industrial society. The trouble is, as I see it, we're no longer a traditional industrial society.

QUESTION: Mr. Asimov, I recall your saying at one time that half of the hlame, or maybe more of it, for man's egocentrism is based upon the fact that once upon a time there was belief on this earth in the Ptolemaic Theory of the universe and certain references to man's enviable position in the Bible. Now, we have this curious paradox of a tremendous radio telescope at Arecibo, North Puerto Rico, constantly probing the universe, hoping to get back some intelligent messages from somewhere out there. If, in the pursuit of wisdom, this happens to come about, what kind of a shock do you think this would have on mankind?

ASIMOV: Well, it would be the same kind of shock that we've had at several times in the past. Every time the earth or man has been dethroned from his own special place, we have had to make up for that. It has always been very nice to suppose the earth was the center of the universe, that man was the master of the earth and the central figure in the drama of fall and redemption. And one has to realize now that this is not so, apparently, that we are, instead, the inconsiderable members of a small ecology on a dust speck of a planet lost in the infinity of space. And by the same token, Americans also may have to rethink their own opinion of themselves as somehow at the center of the earth's nations.

Our success in the past has been at least in part due to the fact that we have been able, through a series of historical and I

geographical accidents, to make use of a disproportionate share of the world's resources. Part of this was due to our own initiative, part to fortunate breaks. But whatever the case, it doesn't seem likely we'll be able to do this for very long. The shan~ that we are going to have in the future will be more nearly appropriate to the percentage of the population that we represent, which means that, like it or not, the standards of living are going to even out somewhat over the earth. And I think in order to do this with the least displacement, the least inhumanity, that we ought to manage this with a certain amount of forethought, with a realization that the present disproportion is not really very useful for much longer; that perhaps in the end we will have a world civilization in which we can all benefit, whereas, if we struggle uselessly and futilely to maintain our own special position, we may all lose.

TOFFLER: Isaac, wouldn't you say the same thing to Europe that you're saying to the United States?

ASIMOV: Well, I'm referring, I suppose, to the industrialized nations as a whole.

To the North, versus the South. I myself benefit from the disproportion, and I don't look forward with any great pleasure to having to share. But if it's necessary, it's necessary.

TOFFLER: I think one of the old perceptions, or one of the old values, that stands in the way of people understanding the new reality is precisely the nationalism that was characteristic of industrial civilization. We thought that nations were sovereign and that they could therefore act as autonomous actors in the world scene, just as we thought that individuals were autonomous individuals and we thought that atoms were autonomous, discrete particles. And we developed an entire philosophical, conceptual notion based on certain conceptions of matter itself, and we built political analogies on them. We developed political systems based on the idea of the discrete particle called the "vote"; on the notion that individuals could form political compounds by being massed in certain ways.

All of this was a way of looking at nature and reality, which we then translated into certain political institutions.

I believe that these political institutions are now increasingly obsolete, and I would argue that's not simply the case in the United States but is the case in Europe and is the case in the communist countries as well-the communist industrial countries. I make a distinction between the preindustrial or agricultural or non-

industrial world and the industrial world.

And for me the central crisis of our time is, essentially, the disintegration of industrial civilization, which I believe, for the reasons that you mentioned, can no longer survive.

It can no longer get the subsidy that it received in the past in the form of cheap energy, cheaper raw materials, and with that loss of subsidy will have to come radically altered ways of life.

ASIMOV: I think you will have to explain that when you talk about industrial civilization being obsolete, you don't mean a retreat into a preindustrial civilization.

TOFFLER: You know me well enough to know I don't mean that the future is a return to the past. I don't think for a minute that the human race is about to surrender technology or go back to a pretechnological condition. I think that people who talk about that very often are talking from a full belly andASIMOV: Exactly right.

TOFFLER: -that they are, themselves, comfortable, and they talk about getting rid of technology as though technology were a product of the West alone, as though it belonged to us rather than being a human heritage to which the Arabs contributed in mathematics and the Chinese contributed technologies centuries and millennia ago. Technology is not something that the West by itself developed and which the West has any moral right to dispose of as it wishes. I think, though, that we're now at an edge, a watershed, and that we will move forward into some kind of society which redefines technology, which combines very high-scale, sophisticated technologies with what are coming to be called intermediate or low-scale technologies in new mixes. And that we will begin to harness the technologies to our social purposes rather than allowing our social purposes to flow from a kind of unbalanced and irrational technological thrust.

ASIMOV: I hope.

TOFFLER: I hope that's what we do.

QUESTION: I think Mr. Asimov has brought out the point that the world cannot afford a serious setback in technology, because we don't have the materials with which to rebuild a world comparable to the one that we have been building up to this day and age.

TOFFLER: Yes. If, instead of moving forward to a new stage, we retreat to what was an old stage, we may in the process destroy the basis for returning to where we have been. It may be an irreversible process. Now, I think that what stands in the way of adjusting our economy to the

Alvin Tomer, author, lecturer and consultant, well known/or his book, Future Shock.

is

new realities, of adjusting our society, are precisely the old-fashioned concepts that are so hard to get rid of. Perhaps the most difficult thing to rid ourselves of is the as nations-the thought of ourselves thought of a particular political entity somehow having its own national security as superior to any other consideration on earth, that anything is justified in the name of national security, when no such thing really exists anymore, since we have reached the stage where competing nations can literally destroy the viability of the earth. So that there is no choice now but to consider mankind as a whole and to work through-what shall I call it? compromises? regionalism? international cooperation?

Anything but nationalism in the old-fashioned sense.

ASIMOV: I think a distinction has to be made here, though. After all, if we look at the United Nations, we see that in the so-called "developing world" - I think the term itself is a kind of patronizing one that the West and the industrial countries use- but if we look at the nonindustrial world, we see tremendous nationalism there, tremendous emphasis on the development of the nation-state; whereas {here is increasing talk in intellectual circles, particularly in Western Europe and in the United States, about the obsolescence of the nation. I think the nation is increasingly obsolete for the industrial nations now making the transition into what I would call a superindustrial stage.

The problems that we have to deal with-of resources, of energy, of the ecology, of economics-are now either

too big for the nation-state to handle or they are too small for the nation-state to be maneuverable enough to handle. So that for Europe and the United States and the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and those other parts of the world where you have industrial states beginning a transition into the new system, there the nation-state is a real obstacle. I think, however, that in the other parts of the world, the nonindustrial parts of the world, nationalism is part of a package and is seen as part of a package. And nationalism is necessary to industrialization. The question is whether those other nations, those other parts of the world, should be engaged in attempting to industrialize in the traditional sense of the word, whether they can try to follow the Western path. If they try to develop economically and technologically as the West did, pursuing industrialization, my own view is that. they're moving into a position of perpetual dependency.

I also think that they are stuck with the nation-state as a form because that goes with industrialization, the development of integrated national markets and so forth.

However, there are beginning to be alternatives to that strategy of development.

It seems to me no longer necessary for non-Western or nonindustrial nations to try to re-create the Manchester of 1870 or the Pittsburgh of 1930 as way stations on the path to some kind of decent life.

And so I don't think the issue of nationalism will disappear so long as you have countries attempting to follow the traditional industrial path. When we break out of that, when we in the rich countries begin to moderate our own positions and transform, we can begin to break free of the nation-state.

When the nonindustrial nations devise alternative strategies of development, they will break free of the nation-state, but not until then.

Just to sum up, it seems to me we're going to move into a period in which this is going to be very sharply reflected in the United Nations, for example, where the voting is by nation-state. And some of the states in that organization are finding the nation-state an embarrassment, a difficulty. It is holding back their own internal economic and cultural development. Other nations that are part of the United Nations are very much turned on to the issue of nationalism and must think in nationalist terms.

ASIMOV: Well, if the nations of the nonindustrial world come late to the notion of the nation-state, perhaps part of the reason they are now stuck with it is

'The one thing I'm willing to bet is that the present system of mental identifications, the tags that we put on ourselves"I'm an American," "I'm a Russian," "I'm a Frenchman"-those are going to be less important.'

that they have suffered several centuries of-shall I say repression, at the hands of successful nation-states. That is now a matter of pride, to be a nation-state of their own. Nevertheless, we don't have to assume that it will take them as long to pass through this stage as we did. If a nation without electronic communication adopts the radio, it need not wait the full 25 years before it gets television.

TOFFLER: Correct. And I think that, for one thing, the process of passing through this stage will be quicker. But it's also possible to skip a stage, to avoid moving step-by-step. One can imagine the formation of new kinds of political entities in parts of the world like Africa, where tribalism is really much more important than nationalism, where nationalism was imported and overlaid on the tribal structure of that society. One can imagine alternatives to the nation-state beginning to have political consequences.

ASIMOV: Well, you know, there's an interrelationship between technology and social forces. One of the ways I think that tribalism was brought up into the nationstate system was through the transistor radio, which made it possible for people within a larger region to be in contact with each other.

TOFFLER: Sure. Sure. To share imagery andASIMOV: Exactly. And as a matter of fact I am hoping that, with the continued advance of the technology of communication, the entire planet will be small enough so that it will seem ridiculous to all its inhabitants to break it up into arbitrary portions which we will then try to pit one against the other.

TOFFLER: Well, I would certainly agree with what I think is the moral end or the point of what you're saying, but my own view of the way things are likely to go is that I don't think we're moving toward a

homogeneous world culture o~ a homogeneous world race. I think rather that what we are going to do is move toward increased diversity, but some sort of symbiosis, some sort of harmonious diversity rather than a homogenization and increase in uniformity.

ASIMOV: Yes. Homogenization is not what I predict either, and not even what I want. I merely hope for a sense of planetary identity. In other words, just as in the United States we have considerable diversity of culture and yet there is a sense among most of us of being a member of an entity called "the United States," I would like to see all human beings, however they dress, whatever their appearance, whatever their language or culture, always think of themselves also, in addition to whatever they think of themselves, as earth men.

TOFFLER: You know, we could easily imagine a situation, and indeed I think it not unlikely, in which over the generations we may find people who no longer think of themselves as Frenchmen or Americans or Germans or even Russians, but think of themselves rather at one level as a member of a village or a city or a neighborhood with very strong interest in localism, local roots, and at the other end of the scale identify themselves in a planetary sense, see themselves as part of a larger global community, but really have lost a good bit of that traditional nation-oriented identification. There are some evidences, I think, of this around the world, particularly in the high technology countries where you see all sorts of movements for decentralization and regionalism and localism and so on along with a kind of transnational sense. And how that will be translated, or could be translated, into practical, political and economic machinery remains to be seen. The one thing I'm willing to bet is that the present system of mental identifications, the tags that we put on ourselves- "I'm an American," "I'm a Russian," "I'm a Frenchman"that those are going to be less important.

QUESTION: That development has to come fairly rapidly, hasn't it, if we can adapt this idea of anticipatory democracy of yours to the entire world? Or do you envision that the United States should lead the way?

TOFFLER: Well, I'm very modest and very cautious about any idea that the United States should lead the way. I think that with all the best intentions, at least sometimes with the best intentions in the world, we Americans have done too much attempting to tell other people

how to lead their lives. . .. And I think that we should have learned by now a lesson that the Russians and other countries are learning painfully also, that cultural and political revolutions are not easily transferable, exportable, and that every cultural group, every social group, has to develop and invent its own forms.

I think the United States is in a privileged position again-once again-to make the transition into the new stage or the next stage of society-which I call the superindustrial stage-for a number of reasons. First, because it does have a somewhat larger natural resource base than Europe does, at least as we now count resources. And that too will change.

Second, because we are somewhat less centralized in our political system than some of the other industrial states. And third, because we have a very significant edge, I think, in education. When I put together those three advantages, I see at least the possibility for the American people to do some political inventing, to come up with some new political forms which will be more appropriate to the kind of globe that Isaac and I are talking about. And I think that anticipatory democracy, which is perhaps another way of talking about long-range planning-a future consciousness, but one which is participated in by everybody, not just the high priests of science, business, or politics; it's an antielitist or nonelitist form of planning for the future- I think that that might more easily take root in the United States than in any other country.

QUESTION: Do you see a group of subplanetary entities sufficiently cooperating to be the equivalent of a world government?

TOFFLER: I think that it's going to be painful, long, and bitter getting there, and I don't think it's ever, in our lifetime, going to be smoothly functioning or adequate.

But one can see already building up on the face of the globe new forms of organization. For example, we have various transnational networks beginning to form up. We have the whole United Nations structure. We have the specialized agencies of the United Nations, like the Civil Aviation Organization, the International Telecommunication Union, the International Postal Union-these are doing housekeeping for the planet as a whole.

The necessity is not even political as such.

We couldn't run a modern economy without post offices, without civil aviation, without a variety of the services that have to be regulated and administered on a nonnational or transnational basis. And

so we have already very quietly created the mechanisms for doing that. And I think that we're going to see more and more such mechanisms coming into being, not necessarily as part of the U.N., not necessarily even global. They may very well be regional. During the middle of the New York City crisis, the financial crisis that the whole world read about in 1976, I wrote a piece talking about the possibility of the great cities of the world forming a transnational urban federation and becoming a new kind of political entity which is neither nation nor not nation.

QUESTION: There are many, many references in American periodicals to a deep sense of pessimism in the country today, a loss of faith in our institutions. I wonder, is that the precursor of what you have postulated as the adaptive breakdown?

TOFFLER: Well, I think we're witnessing adaptive breakdown all over the place.

I think that major systems in industrial societies simply don't work any more.

These range from sanitation systems, education systems, health delivery systems, governmental systems of one kind or another, whether we're talking about the centrally planned economies with their inability to produce grain or their inability to increase agricultural production, or whether we're talking about the laissezfaire, so-called "free market" economies of the West. In all of these countries there are profound breakdowns which represent not the work of subversives or revolutionaries but the incapacity of industrial systems designed to service an industrial society to carry out their functions in this totally new environment. And so I see adaptive breakdown around us already.

As for the pessimism, I think it is not universal. I think the pessimism, again, is felt in industrial countries, and that there are many nonindustrial countries which, for the first time in history, are feeling quite optimistic about their future and see potentials for themselves that were not evident a generation ago. I think this pessimism in industrial countries is perhaps uncalled for. The analogy that I use to dip into history also is to put overselves back 300 years. I feel as though, in one sense, we're living at the turn of the 17th century, just before the 17th century, where, in Europe, feudalism was beginning to die, to decay, and people could look around them and say, "My goodness, the civilization that has been with us for a thousand years is coming apart. It's distintegrating. Even the church is losing its grip. And landed power, the power of

the aristocracy, is being challenged. by upstarts in the cities-traders and merchants and businessmen and early industrialists-and it doesn't make sense any more. All of the old traditions are being challenged, the values are being challenged, and isn't it awful?" And one could, if one happened to be a feudal aristocrat, see ahead of one a very pessimistic future. But if one happened to be somebody other than a member of the elite in that society, one might take a quite different view of history.

And if one were living at the turn of the 17th century, one could look ahead to a tremendous increase in the standard of living, a tremendous increase in the length of life, a tremendous increase in the levels of education, and so on. And indeed there were people as early as 1765-now a generation or so after the point I talked about-who did realize that we were moving into a new civilization. And for them, the changes were positive and exciting rather than pessimistic. So I would simply say to those people who are walking around sunk in a pool of pessimism that the pains and agonies that we see around us today may very well be the birth pangs of a new society, and that, rather than allowing that mood to paralyze us, we should get on with our business of inventing those new institutions that we will need, new political institutions, new social and economic institutions, and to recognize that the institutions we have now are not God-given and are not eternal, but were the products of social and political inventors of 300 years ago whose work has served us well-at least some of us, very, very well-and now the time has come for us to invent a new civilization.

QUESTION: Well, our final question, gentlemen. I'll put it to you first, Mr. Toffier. What, in your opinion, is the American Dream today, and should this version be handed down to succeeding generations, or has it got to be modified to become compatible with present and future reality?

TOFFLER: I think that the American Dream as it is taught in American schoolbooks, the dream of each person carving out an independent future, is a product of the Enlightenment, is a product of the French Revolution as much as the American Revolution, and is a product of Descartes in the 17th century, and a product of Locke and so on. I think that was a liberating, revolutionary ideology, and it has served us well. I think, though, that we now are going to have to take a new

look at that. We're going to have to ask ourselves what we mean by the term "individual." The Americans have always been big on rhetoric on individualism. But I feel that we have often seen individual goals and the pursuit of individual happiness as higher than, separate from, and even in contradiction to the pursuit of social happiness. I think that this is a consequence of an either/or dichotomy that goes way, way back, encouraged by Aristotelian logic.

I think we're going to develop a new American Dream, which sees individual development at least partially in terms of social good as well. I think that we will, perhaps- I hope-come to regard that individual as most individualized who is also the person making the greatest social contribution, rather than seeing the social good and the individual good as opposed to one another and as logical contradictions or logically excluded from one another. That we will somehow fuse the ideal of individual pursuit of happiness with the ideal of the social good, which I now would define, as Isaac does, as a planetary good.

QUESTION: Mr. Asimov?

ASIMOV: Well, as I look over the traditional values of American civilization, the one I value most at the moment, and think might apply best to the world of the future, is the notion of federalism. We managed, in an admittedly imperfect way, but we managed to have on one hand the centralized government, and on the other hand to save a considerable amount of self-government for its constituent parts. I hope that in the future we will have a federalized world in which there will be some institutions or others that speak for the planet as a whole, while at the same time saving a great many powers, ways of life, for all kinds of subsidiary regions so as to avoid homogenization, which I would consider dreadful.

TOFFLER: Can I add one thing to that?

I'm sitting here thinking what some people may make of what we are saying, and I think that the question that will be on many people's minds is: federal institutions or other political institutions, but governed by whom? Controlled by whom?

And that's why I would simply add that, whatever institutions that we design to deal with this future that's racing toward us will have to be democratic institutions with the widest possible citizen participation.

ASIMOV: I'm afraid, as an American, I take that for granted. Perhaps I shouldn't.

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OPINION PROGRAM: "'Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech or of the press .... ' This is the Opinion Program, a nightly celebration of our constitutional right to free speech. You are invited tojoin in tonight's discussion. Call area code 716-454-5757.

Now, here's the Opinion moderator, Peter Weyl."

That's me, and that's how the program begins every week night at 11:20 on WHAM radio in Rochester, New York. For one hour and 40 minutes (with a quick break for news at midnight) WHAM's 50,000 watts of power are freely available to anyone who telephones in. It's called a telephone talk-show, and it can be highly controversial, outrageously funny, and sometimes teeth-gnashingly infuriating. It is truly people's radio.

There are literally hundreds of different telephone talkshows broadcast day and night on many of America's 8,342 large and small, commercial and educational, AM and FM radio stations. Some deal in controversy, the callers debating current issues with the program's moderator or other callers.

(The Opinion Program is one of these.) Others invite listeners to call in with noncontroversial topics: sports, folklore, recipes, anecdotes, jokes. One such "happy talk" program broadcast in Salt Lake City, Utah, attracted so many callers from around the Midwest that special telephone lines had to be installed to handle the nightly surge of long-distance calls. Still other talk-shows offer callers a chance to buy, sell or swap items, a free classified ad service. One talk-show in Chicago even offers its listeners an introduction to members of the opposite sex!

Whatever its subject matter, the talk-show format-first conceived in the early 1960s in the New York City area-has proven so successful that some radio stations now devote most of their broadcast day to telephone chatter. The idea has even had an impact on television: When guests appear on TV interview programs these days, it is not unusual for the moderator to solicit phone calls from local viewers. Perhaps with more success on that visual medium, other TV talk-show hosts now encourage their studio audiences to ask questions of their guests. Many broadcasters now believe that talk is the future of AM radio in the United States. FM radio, with its distortion-free signal, would then become the sole domain of music, from rock to classical.

Aside from the popular response to telephone talk-shows, broadcasters are happy with the format because it helps them satisfy new Federal Communications Commission (FCC) requirements that radio stations treat community issues and concerns on a regular basis. What better way to do this than to allow the community direct access to the airwaves? As host of WHAM's Opinion Program, I keep a nightly log of each call that comes in, what its main subject matter was and how long it lasted. These logs will be shown to FCC as proof of WHAM's interest in the Rochester community when the station's Federally regulated broadcast license comes up for renewal every three years.

Here's how the Opinion Program works: There are three telephone lines wired directly into WHAM's main control room, Studio A. The phone lines have a "rollover" capability; that is, a call placed to the advertised Opinion Program number (454-5757) will be automatically transferred to 454-5758 or 5759 if the first line is busy. Because the phone lines are "patched" right into Studio A's control board, I never have to lift the telephone receiver to speak with a caller. Instead, Ijust flip a numbered switch for each phone line to put a caller "on the air." I can hear the caller on the studio's big monitor speaker; the caller

hears my voice because the studio microphone is patched into the telephone line.

To guard against obscenities or slanderous statements about individuals or organizations (for which the radio station would be liable, if broadcast), the Opinion Program is broadcast on a "delayed" basis. A closed loop of tape called a tape cartridge records each conversation, then plays it back on the air 16 seconds later. That 16-second pause between what is actually said and what is broadcast gives me a little time to "bleep" or censor any grossly objectionable remark. Every talk-show is bound to encounter the apparent lunatic who delights in calling the program for the sheer thrill of shouting some scatological phrase and hanging up. The listeners will never hear it. As soon as the phrase leaves our loony's lips, I will (1) flip his switch off, thus clearing the phone line; (2) wait 16 seconds, then "bleep" the offending words; and then (3) calmly go on to the next caller. Callers are not screened before they go on the air; the delay system makes sure their remarks are. Another routine precaution WHAM takes is to tape-record the entire Opinion Program. While these tapes are not preserved longer than a week, it is felt that any question about what was actually said about this politician or that firm will surely be raised within seven days.

The fun of hosting a telephone talk-show (and, of course, listening to one) is that one never knows what will come next.

In the two years that I have hosted the Opinion Program, the listeners and I have discussed and debated such diverse topics as astrology, child abuse, the death penalty, the Kennedy and

PEOPLE'S RADIO States Senate's debate on ratification of the Panama Canal treaties, I asked for listener comment. (A slight majority favored the treaties.) When the New York State Legislature took up the question of decriminalizing the use and possession of small amounts of marijuana, Opinion polled its listeners. (They were against any change in the law by a two-to-one majority; the legislature reflected that conservative viewpoint, but changed its mind a few months later.) In January of this year, I asked the listeners to evaluate Jimmy Carter's first year in the White House. (Opinion was almost evenly divided, but a number of callers said they did not want to judge President Carter until his full four-year term had expired.)

About once a week, I invite a guest to appear on the Opinion Program. On these occasions, discussion is also kept to the subject at hand. Because of the program's essentially lively nature, I always try to bring on guests who are sure to inspire lots of questions and comments, both pro and con. Thus, recent guests have included New York's outspoken Secretary of State Mario Cuomo, arch-conservative Allan Stang, White House aide (and former Rochester Vice-Mayor) Midge Costanza. When his department was riddled with scandal, Rochester's sheriff William Lombard came on the Opinion Program to explain the situation.

On other occasions, I have devoted entire programs to specific social problems, inviting panels of experts in to discuss such issues as child abuse, crime and punishment, and the problems of the aged. But no matter who the guest may be, the listener is always a participating member of the discussion. Not only may the caller ask a question, but he or she may also comment on the guest's response. This often produces heated "give-and-take."

An example: Secretary of State Cuomo's recent exchange with an Opinion Program caller on the subject of capital punishment.

Above: Ready at the controls, Peter Weyl has a relaxed moment before the program begins and listeners start calling in on his telephone talk-show.

Below: New York Secretary of State Mario Cuomo (left) replies to a listener's query during his appearance on the Opinion Program. To his left is Monroe County legislator Louise Slaughter and,jacing him, Weyl.

King assassinations, the energy crisis, drug laws, foreign aid, the Carter Administration, flying saucers, F'fench versus American wines, the Panama Canal treaties, sex education, ecology, bureaucrats, snow removal from city streets, prostitution, human rights, careless drivers, prison reform, TV and radio programing, the neutron bomb, punk rock, Watergate, unemployment, modern art, homosexuality, the labor movement, the causes of crime, the CIA, pornography, health care, urban decay and development, the press, the high cost ofliving-and, of course, the Opinion Program itself. The three most popular topics continue to be government, crime, and taxes.

Most nights the program is open to any subject the caller wishes to bring up. But every now and then, I will try to focus attention on some topic of special interest. During the height of the United

CALLER (a woman): Why should we keep a murderer in prison at great expense to the taxpayer? I say kill him and be done!

CUOMO: What ifhe were insane? Should we kill him then?

CALLER: yes ....

CUOMO (interrupting): Well, then why not kill insane people before they commit a crime? We could' save money that way too. By the way, that was the philosophy of Nazi Germany.

CALLER: How dare you compare my beliefs with the Nazis?

CUOMO: Because, Madam, it's clear you don't know what you're talking about!

And so it went, a top-level government official engaged in heated debate with a fellow citizen, all totally unrehearsed and heard by thousands of others.

Some of the liveliest guest appearances on the Opinion Program have featured persons whose points of view might have gone largely unnoticed if they had not had an opportunity to be heard on WHAM. One such guest was Mitch Kurman, a Connecticut man whose son died in a tragic summer camp accident.

Since then, Kurman has waged a one-man battle to have a national summer camp safety law passed in the U.S. Congress.

Kurman's interview on the Opinion Program drew an overwhelming response from parents, many of whom said they had never realized there was no standard yet for youth camp safety.

The talk-show has also served as a forum for civil rights activists such as James McCuller of Rochester's Action for a Better Community organization, and spokespersons for the Mohawk Indian Nation, currently negotiating for their own

territory within New York State.

When there is a guest on the program, my role as moderator is generally limited to a short introductory interview, after which I simply keep the calls coming in to the guest. But most of the time, my job is a tricky tightrope walk between commitment and neutrality, advocacy and "devil's advocacy." My only instructions from WHAM's management have been to keep the program as lively and controversial as possible. To those basic instructions I have added my personal belief that everyone deserves a fair hearing. At the same time, I have my own opinions on current issues and have never shrunk from expressing them on the air. Of course, that helps add fuel to the fire when the topic is a "hot" one such as homosexual rights or the Panama Canal treaties (which have since been ratified). I will never "bleep" or cut off a caller whose views run counter to mine, but I confess that I have occasionally rung off persons I considered incapable of discussing an issue reasonably. Again-such instances are rare-but there have been calls from fanatics of the neo-Nazi or Ku Klux Klan ilk. Such callers usually don't wish to debate

WEYL: Good evening, you're on the air.

CALLER (a woman): Peter, I'm the mother of the young man who was murdered last week. And I'm just calling to say thank you to all his friends who stood by us during this tragedy. I want your listeners to know that the young people of today are wonderful. Oh, they may look rough, and use bad language, and maybe drink too much beer sometimes. But these young people have been just wonderful. They've stood by my son's family like it was their own.

WEYL: I can't tell you how moved I am that you called the program.

I just want to say that all Rochester shares your sorrow.

CALLER: I could have written a letter to the newspaper to thank all the people who have helped us. But I'm not such a good letter writer, so I wanted to call ....

CALLER (a woman): I have a complaint about the music you play on WHAM. It used to be such good music: Frank Sinatra, the big bands, music people could really enjoy. Nowadays, you're playing music we older people can't understand at all.

WEYL: The times have changed. Do you really think the music we play these days is all that bad?

CALLER: I just don't understand it at all ....

CALLER (a woman): The people on my street have a problem. All the street lights went out last weekend, and nothing has been done about it. We're worried about crime now that it's so dark here.

WEYL: Have you reported this to the city?

CALLER: Yes, they said they would take care of it, but it's been three days now, and nothing has happened.

WEYL: Call them again tomorrow morning. And in the meantime, call the police station and ask them to keep a watch on your street.

CALLER: Okay, Peter.

WEYL: And if you don't get some action soon, call the Mayor himself and tell him about it. Let us know what happens.

CALLER: Thank you, Peter.

their beliefs, preferring instead to rant on in abusive cliches.

Such calls will terminate rather abruptly.

When I get a caller whose views reflect my own, I will often play "devil's advocate," usually pleading the most persuasive arguments used against me in earlier broadcasts. After all, people should be able to defend their positions; and it wouldn't be much of an opinion program if only one opinion counted!

Sometimes, the Opinion Program serves as a public information center. Along with an up-to-date almanac and a growing collection of reference clippings, I keep a long list of addresses and telephone numbers that may help callers with specific problems. A man calls to discuss his wife's drinking problem: I can refer him to the local chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous.

A woman calls to complain about trash removal on her street:

I can give her the city's maintenance department service number.

On severai occasions, I have found myself unable to provide some specific bit of information. Within minutes, a caller will be on the line with that exact bit of knowledge. Sometimes, listeners have called to complain about some aspect of local government, only to get an immediate reply from a government official who happened to be listening. On one such occasion, a local doctor was driving home, listening to the program on his car radio when he heard a question raised about the hospital where he practices. He immediately pulled over to a highway telephone booth and called the Opinion Program to respond.

With 50,000 watts of broadcast power, WHAM is among the most powerful senders in the United States. At night, when the skies are clear and many small stations "sign off" the air, WHAM's signal (at 1180 on the AM band) can be picked up in as many as 38 states and parts of Canada. (It has even been heard by radio enthusiasts as far away as Sweden and Australia.)

This means that the Opinion Program may get a call from a rancher in Arizona, a coal miner in Kentucky or a university student in Toronto, along with its customary Rochester-area callers. These out-of-state calls are always a delightful surprise; imagine hearing another side of an argument from a person 2,500 kilometers distant!

Current ratings show an average nightly Opinion Program audience of 175,000 in the Rochester area. It would be impossible to estimate how many other people are listening in their homes or cars around the rest of the United States.

Of course, the Opinion Program has a complement of "regulars," callers who are addicted to the program and who telephone on a regular basis. While only first names are used by callers to identify themselves, some of the regulars have given themselves nicknames, and soon they become subjects of discussion themselves. For example, there's the gentleman known as the "Count," who enjoys reading poetry on the air; or "Dick," who relishes a good debate on the issue of property tax reform.

The regulars know they must limit themselves to one call a week: there must always be an opportunity for first-time callers to get a line in.

As a rule, conversations average about five minutes in length on the program, but I am not strict about time limits if there is some particularly lively debate in progress.

Now the sweep second hand on the big clock in Studio A is gliding closer to 11:19:44 (the time the program begins if its 16-second delay is to put us on the air precisely at 11:20). The delay cartridge is already whirring and the big master tape is revolving slowly on the Ampex recorder. I've checked my microphone's sound level on the control-board vumeter. The program log is signed and dated before me. The red "On the Air" sign in the corridor outside is winking. So are the three yellow lights on the telephone: all three lines are already engaged, the callers waiting with varying degrees of patience for their opportunity to speak out on President Carter's trip to Africa ... or on Rochester's $112 million school budget. .. or on the way those young people are dressing these days (shocking!). Some tried to call the program last night but couldn't get through. Tonight, they will reopen previous discussions on careless pet owners who let their dogs run free in residential neighborhoods ... or on the scandal in the sheriff's department. One caller is still seething with indignation over the "flippant" way I responded to another caller's comments last night. Tonight, he'll have his chance to "put me in my place." Another caller is a lonely, insomniac "night owl" who just wants to make some sort of human contact in the night.

It looks like it's going to be a lively program tonight ....

"Good evening, this is 'Opinion' and you're on the air."

It's another night of people's radio on WHAM. D

SCIENTIFIC WORLD OF FANTASY Beyond black holes, which have been discussed by scientists for years, may lie a wonderland of scientific fantasy about a mysterious reverse concept-white holes where things that have disappeared from our universe turn up again.

Above: Gravitational field of a large object (star) distorts space around it, represented here by the grid. Above, center: If the object is dense enough (a black hole), it distorts space so much that it disappears completely. Right: A hypothetical white hole in space viewed from the "other side." Here matter distorts the space around it as it enters the visible universe. Some astronomers think that matter lost in black holes may reappear here.

For some time now, scientists have been following rabbits down black holes, those pinholes in space and time left by collapsing superstars whose pull of gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. But, like Alice on her arrival in Wonderland, they have yet to find a way through the tiny door at the bottom to the garden beyond. They see no way to emerge from the adventure through that astronomical chimera, a white hole.

Black holes, these days, are positively respectable. Theories about their nature

have been fine-tuned, and astronomers believe they have detected at least one: an X-ray source in the northern sky known as Cygnus X-I. But white holes, those hypothetical points in space that nothing ever went into but from which energy and matter spew out, are still in the realm of speculation, as are the "wormholes" or cosmic subways that connect the two.

Many a theorist, including Albert Einstein, has toyed with the idea of matter and energy disappearing from one part of our universe through a black hole, only to reappear elsewhere through a white hole.

Today the idea is in some disrepute because seemingly unsolvable objections have been raised.

The concept of white holes has not been entirely abandoned, however. Astrophysicists and mathematicians on several continents have been caught up in the question of what lies beyond the black

hole. They argue that our understanding of white holes today is comparable to what we knew of black holes 10 or 20 years ago, and that the subject needs a lot more work. The last chapter has yet to be written.

The idea of white holes is so fascinating, with its implications of instantaneous travel through space and time, that it deserves reporting as one of the more remarkable leaps of Man's mind, even if we never find the real ones. As a vision of the unseeable and the unknowable, it is

The black holes postulated at the center of galaxies, including perhaps ours, manage to swallow and compress whole stars into a point smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. a phenomenon in its own right. Even if the naysayers turn out to be right, thinking about white holes is good scientific funand gives us an insight into the dreams of scientists, the same kinds of dreams that produce great music and art.

White holes and space tunnels have been part of our culture for half a century or more. Science-fiction writers have long invoked such devices, using names lik~ space warps and hyperspace, for their heroes to bounce around the galaxy at will. Cosmic subways subvert the equations that prove nothing can go faster than light, and thus a trip across the galaxy must take 100,000 years. Whole flotillas of spaceships have feft our universe by diving into hyperspace only to reappear instantly at their destination many megaparsecs away. For generations of readers, the scene is almost as familiar as the grim-jawed marshal facing the black-hatted desperado.

White holes do appear outside the pages of fantasy magazines, but in an equally ethereal way: they show up in the¡ same equations that tell us what we know about the apparently real black holes. Theorists ignore them because, as far as they can see, white holes could not survive in the universe we happen to inhabit. .

The problem with white holes, if in fact they do exist, is that they are "inordinate-

ly shy." It seems that a white hole would be rather quickly hidden from view by a black hole of its own creation. A spaceship emerging from the white hole would immediately find itself in a black hole and once again would disappear from the universe. Alice could never wake up.

These, at least, are the calculations of Douglas M. Eardley of Yale University and Ya. B. Zel'dovich and Igor D. Novikov of the Institute of Cosmic Research in Moscow. Charles W. Misner of the University of Maryland is equally pessimistic: "Black holes can be formed and then stay forever; white holes-by definitionhave been forever and then dissolve away.

Thus even a supergalactic civilization that is able to grow stars to order could not construct a white hole. If there are any white holes, they must be free gifts of the Creator, part of the initial condition of the universe, which is barely visible to modern man and certainly not yet under his intellectual control."

But if white holes are the stuff of fantasy, then black holes ought to be, too.

What we call' a black hole is a sphere several miles across; anything that goes into it never comes out. But the sphere is really the sphere of influence, the horizon, of a single, dimensionless point in space called a singularity-. And it is into this

point that matter and energy disappear. The large black holes postulated at the center of galaxies, including perhaps ours, manage to swallow and compress whole stars into a point smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. Curiouser and curiouser, indeed.

But what really goes on inside? Do black holes simply sit in space, gulping down whatever comes by like so many cosmic frogs, growing ever more massive?

That's the conventional view today, but some cosmologists have raised the question of what might lie beyond the black hole. Is it possible that "what goes in must come out," and that black holes are really the entrances to the cosmic subways our fictional starship captains have traversed for so long?

As long ago as 1935 Einstein and a colleague, Nathan Rosen, now at the Technion in Haifa, Israel, published a paper in which they discussed "bridges," interconnections of our univeFse by timeless passage. As recently as three )"ears ago, J.V. Narlikar, the Indian astrophysicist, said that studies of what might lie beyond the black hole-the white hole-were in a state "somewhat similar" to those of black holes 10 years earlier. Writing with a colleague, K.M.V. Apparao, now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he said: "We

feel that the evidence of exploding objects in the universe (including perhaps the universe itself if it started with a Big Bang) indicates the necessity of studying white holes ... in spite of any possible stability problem seen at present."

The universe is a pretty violent place, which presents a bit of a paradox. All our experience of gravity is as an attractive force, pulling things down and holding them together, culminating in that ultimate attractor, the black hole. But the most interesting objects we see in the universe are all expanding, even exploding, in outbursts of matter, radiation and energy.

Whole galaxies are visibly exploding and radio sources, including the enigmatic quasars, are best explained in terms of expansion, not collapse. Indeed, the universe itself is thought to be expanding with clusters of galaxies getting farther from one another. It looks very much as if the whole universe must have 9riginated in some great cosmic explosion, the so-called Big Bang, in a fashion that

Below, extreme left: This sphere is the size our earth would be if it were compressed to black-hole density. Below, center: If the earth shrinks to this size, then a star makes a black hole only afew miles across. Below and right: In these photographic concepts, gas, dust and solid matter (below) spiral in toward a black hole, trapped in its powerful gravitational field. The asteroid in right foreground is cracking under strain. A starship (right) hurtles toward black hole, now a dark ring, and the stars of another universe.

Even if we never find them, thinking about white holes is good scientific fun-it gives us an insight into the dreams of scientists, the same kind of dreams that produce great music and art.

sounds remarkably like the description of a white hole.

In some cases, true, gravity is triggering the violence, as in the collapse of a star until it explodes as a supernova, or when X-rays are emitted by matter spiraling into that black hole in Cygnus. But it is the preponderance of objects expanding blissfully away as if gravity did not exist that invites serious study of what lies beyond the black hole. Up to a point, we can explain what happens to matter inside a black hole. If enough matter is squeezed together in one place Gust how much is "enough" isn't quite clear, but it is a quantity expressed in multiples of the mass of our sun), nothing can stop the matter from collapsing indefinitely. The irresistible force of gravity must literally crush out of existence the molecules, atoms, electrons, protons and other particles of which matter is composed, squeezing everything down into a mathematical point, or singularity, where space, time and the laws of physics cease to exist.

Ever since astronomers realized that this was what the theory predicts, there has been a widespread feeling of frustration that, by definition, such a singularity could probably never be seen, since it could only occur inside a black hole, and no light could ever escape to be monitored in our telescopes.

Recently we have seen efforts to get around this in two ways. First, the theories have been refined to take into account the effects of rotation, and it turns out that in certain circumstances rotating singularities do not become entirely invisible, but keep a window open on the outside universe. This might make them visible, but it also raises other curious possibilities, of which more later. Secondly, however, some theorists have made a major step forward by asking: what does it really mean to say that matter is squeezed out of existence at a singularity? In exploding galaxies and the like, matter appears to be in a very dense state and conceivably could be being

squeezed into the visible universe. In the last decade several astronomers (including W. Biidich at the University of Gottingen, Robert Hjellming of the U.S. National Radio Astronomy Observatory; and Narlikar and Apparao) have had the same idea. These exploding sources, they said, might mark the sites of singularities where matter really is pouring out from a point source, perhaps even a point singularity connected, in some mysterious way, with a black hole which is busily swallowing up matter somewhere else.

This is where the cosmic subway or "space-time gateway" comes in-a concept even more speculative than white holes. For matter to get into a black hole and then out of a white hole without crossing the visible space in between would be no mean trick, and would have to mean that in some way it had "tunneled" through the intervening space.

In effect, the matter would take a shortcut, a subway, if you will, through some higher dimension or dimensions: a hyperspace. Science fiction readers will recognize here an old. familiar term. Those writers who have taken the trouble over the years to think about such things have always sought to explain space travel at velocities faster than the speed of light by invoking just this kind of cosmic shortcut.

Adrian Berry, a British science journalist, has proposed instead that the inhabitants of the solar system build a permanent entrance to the cosmic subway by constructing a black hole outside the orbit of Pluto, the farthest known planet in our solar system. Better, perhaps, to find a natural hole in space and dive right in. It might be difficult to decide "where" and "when" (let alone "how" or even "whether") to emerge again, because hyperspace really could be both timeless and spaceless, a region where "before" and "after" could be as meaningless as "above" and "below," "forward" or "backward." The best solution of all, in theory, would be to find a natural black hole already connected, through the cosmic subway, to a white hole somewhere else, and to use it in much the same way as we would a normal subway. But even this has its problematical aspect.

The problem, referred to earlier, is stability. John A. Wheeler, professor of physics at the University of Texas, says that even if there were such a "cosmic subway" connection, it has been recognized that any bridge between two universes-i.e., the Einstein-Rosen bridge-

or a wormhole connecting two different points in the same universe, would "pinch, melt, squeeze, slough off-or disconnectin a fantastically short time." Others have calculated the lifetime of a wormhole at 1/10,000 of a second.

Alan P. Lightman of Harvard University and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory compares the stability of this system or structure to sharpened pencils. Well-sharpened pencils are never found standing on their points, he says, because even though in theory they could precisely balance the forces acting on them, in actuality they come tumbling down under the slightest external perturbation.

Even before worrying about whether the tunnel will collapse, a space traveler would have to survive the sheer feat of entering the subway through a black hole. It may be that a collapsing object shaped like a football would be crushed into a long, thin, threadlike singularity, not a mathematical point. And this kind of rotating "hole" could be, as far as we know, free to interact with the outside universe, unlike a simple black hole.

It's as though the thread would provide a route for communication between the "inside" of a black hole and the outside Uillverse.

According to John G. Taylor, professor of mathematics at the University of London, rotating black holes can form a ring of singularity that could, in principle, be avoided by an expert navigator. Once past the ring, the spaceship would emerge not next door to the singularity in the space it had just left, but in new regions of space-and time.

The intrepid traveler would emerge in a different part of the universe, at a different time-and perhaps in a completely different universe, where the laws of physics themselves might be different from those we know and love. Even the journey would be a very strange experience, with time not necessarily flowing in the everyday sense. As Taylor puts it, "the psychological problems would be as great as the gravitational ones" and "it may not be a world you [would] want to live in."

Other theorists, however, have trouble with the whole idea. They argue that the invocation of rotating black holes requires a special mathematical technique rather than the plausible laws of physics to work. Moreover, Kip S. Thorne of the California Institute of Technology and James M. Bardeen of the University of Washington have calculated that black holes in realistic environments could not spin fast enough to create space-time

The classic way to explain the expansion of the universe is to consider dots on a balloon (above). As the balloon is blown up (right), each dot (representing a galaxy) gets farther from every other dot. But no dot (or galaxy) is really the center with all the others moving away .. all the dots are in motion.

gateways, anyway.

As yet, clearly, black holes and spacetime tunnels are of no use for cosmic travel so far as we are concerned. But these bizarre ideas do offer new and perhaps better ways of understanding the violently active phenomena that characterize the universe in which we live.

The most fundamental feature of the evolution of our universe is that it is expanding, and the problem of understanding this expansion is the basic problem in astronomy.

Most cosmologists today have very little doubt that this expansion probably started with the initial Big Bang, blasting outward from a singularity of just the same kind as has already been discussed here.

The standard way of explaining this universal expansion is to draw the analogy with a rubber balloon that is being inflated (see pictures above). If we imagine spots of paint marked on the surface of the balloon, it is easy to see that all the spots get farther apart from one another as the balloon expands, although no one spot can be picked out as the "center" of the expansion. The balloon's surface is two-dimensional, of course, wrapped around in a third dimension.

The universe we live in is three-dimensional, and the analogy would be complete if it were wrapped around in a fourth dimension to make some kind of hyperballoon. The present state of the observational art cannot tell us how accurate this analogy might be. But with the current speculation about black and white holes, and tunnels through space-time, it is at least possible now to make some educated guesses.

Suppose our balloon also had paint spots, corresponding to the galaxies in our expanding universe, on the inside

of its skin. Extending the analogy in this way is open to dispute, but if we do allow it we now find that we have two expanding universes inextricably linked by the expanding fabric of the balloon (equivalent to the fabric of space-time that forms the basis of our universe) but never in communication with one another. A black hole singularity would now correspond to a hole in the fabric of the balloon, tunneling through into the "other universe." From one side, the hole would be a black pit, swallowing matter up; from the other, it would appear as a singularity-a white hole-spewing matter out. Both universes could be continually gaining and losing matter through these space-time tunnels, so that the laws of mass and energy conservation would apply not just to one universe but to the two taken together. And, although there is no such simple physical analogy, in mathematical terms it is possible, by invoking higher dimensions, to consider more elaborately connected systems of several universes joined by space-time tunnels. This is why our space traveler would have to be intrepid indeed to dive into such a tunnel.

The possibility still remains that both ends of the tunnel could be in our own universe; perhaps the situation (at least for some tunnels) is more akin to that of a subway with stations all in the same city than to an intercontinental subway with entrances and exits scattered at random across the globe.

One insuperable difficulty with the cosmic subway concept may be that all the exits are sealed. Many cosmologists have accepted Eardley's argument that any white holes that may have existed in our universe have long since turned into black holes. The idea is that a white hole, just like a black hole, has great mass and would therefore also attract light and all forms of matter by force of gravity. Unlike the situation at a black hole, however, any light, radiation and cosmic debris that had fallen onto the perimeter of a white hole could not get into the white hole, but would have to float forever at the surface.

(An astronaut emerging into our universe through the white hole would have to pass through this layer of "fossil light," Eardley says, and as he did so would see "the entire past history of our universe flash before his eyes." Unfortunately the astronaut would have to wear several tons of lead because the gravity would have compressed the light so radically that he would see not just "a flash of light" but "a blast of extremely energetic X and gamma rays" as well.)

The accumulated radiation and matter would eventually produce enough gravity to form a new black hole surrounding the white hole. Now, in turn, that black hole might lead to another white hole ... and so on. But, Eardley concludes, the astronaut could not emerge into our universe from any such white hole because all white holes would have turned into black holes. And, if a black hole is an entrance to the cosmic subway, "then there is no exit."

In the eyes of many astronomers today, this must be the last word, leaving white holes and cosmic subways firmly in the realm of science fiction. "But yet," we might say, looking at the universe as a whole, "it does expand." If white holes must be "part of the initial condition of the universe," then study of these mysterious concepts must help us to understand the greatest puzzle of all, the origin of the universe itself. There is not yet sufficient proof to decide the issue either way, for or against the existence of white holes, and the enormous implications of the concept certainly justify further investigation. As Carl Sagan, the Cornell University astronomer, once put it, "Black holes may be entrances to Wonderlands. But are there Alices or white rabbits?"

D About the Author: John Gribbin American scientist, whose doctoral Cambridge was on the gravitational stars. Among his published works

is a noted research at collapse of are White Holes-Cosmic Gushers in the Universe and Galaxy Formations: A Personal View. His articles often appear in Science Digest, Astronomy and Natural History.

CHALLENGING MEDIA MONOPOLIES Monopolies of press-radio- TV complexes and the lack of representation of minority interests are under attack by citizen groups demanding greater freedom for the American press and more public control over the media.

18

By 1975, the Steinman family had gained a dominant hold over the news media in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Through the years, their holdings had grown to include the morning, evening and Sunday newspapers-the only three in Lancaster-television station WGAL, radio stations WGAL-AM and FM and 60 per cent of the city's cable television network. The Steinmans, clearly, had gained extensive power over the Lancaster community's understanding of itself and the outside world, but for many years, nobody seemed to care.

Then one day three years ago, the Steinmans woke up to find their dominant position under attack. A local group called Feminists for Media Rights had teamed up with a Washington, D.C., public-interest law firm called Citizens Communications Center to challenge WGAL-TV's right to renew its license, and they had brought their case to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The feminists charged that WGAL did not run enough programs on women's issues, and Citizens Communications argued that the Steinmans were abusing their multiple ownership by, for instance, promoting WGAL programing in the entertainment sections of their newspapers, to the disadvantage of other stations in the area.

A decade or so before, the FCC might have turned a deaf ear to such complaints, but as the Steinmans were to learn somewhat painfully, times have changed. The FCC scheduled a hearing in the case, but before it could be held, the Steinmans, fearing that "forced divestiture [was] close at hand," decided to break up their media complex. They sold their radio stations and agreed to dispose of the television station by 1981.

But that wasn't all. To satisfy the feminists, the Steinmans made a deal that may affect the programing on WGAL-TV for years to come. In return for withdrawal of the license challenge, they agreed to a long list of administrative and programing changes. These included: weekly half-hour programs on women's issues, increased coverage of women's sports, more investigative reports and news stories about women on the evening news, "free-speech messages" (30-'Of60-second appearances by persons wishing to speak out on community issues), a grant of $150,000 to set up a nonprofit women's news service. They agreed to try to find a buyer for the station who would continue these policies.

The Lancaster case, and the questions it implies about the rights of publishers and broadcasters to conduct their affairs as they please, is part of a trend that is shaking up the whole communications industry in the United States. Encouraged by new court decisions and impatient with what they see as the ineffectiveness of the Federal Communications Commission,

public-interest lawyers, often acting in concert with minority groups, have in recent y.ears brought hundreds of challenges to media ownership. Their principal objectives have been to break up media monopolies and to give the public a greater voice in the regulation of the airwaves.

On March 1, 1977, Citizens Communications Center, the tiny publi~-interest law firm that is in the vanguard of this "broadcast reform" movement, won its most far-reaching case. The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia decided that newspaper publishers may not own broadcasting facilities in the same city, and vice versa. To Citizens, as the Citizens Communications Center is popularly known, this was a heady victory which could affect 160 such combinations.

The broadcasting industry and the fraternity of newspaper publishers, along with the FCC, have asked the United States Supreme Court to review the case saying that the Court of Appeals decision could "compel a sweeping restructuring of the country's communications media."

This is, of course, exactly what Citizens wants. Its lawyers argue that democracy is based on the free expression of as many voices as possible. The fewer voices you have in the community, they say, the less the chance for dissent.

The Supreme Court has heard arguments on the appeal and a decision is expected soon. * Cross-ownership is a complex issue, and since it involves both newspapers and the broadcasting industry, it presents a perplexing dilemma: On the one hand, the U.S. Congress is constitutionally forbidden to regulate newspapers, while, on the other hand, it has been mandated by law to regulate the broadcasting industry.

In the case of newspapers, Congress and the courts have repeatedly said that the Government can in no way abridge freedom of the press as guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. And to tell a newspaper publisher that he cannot own a broadcast station is in direct violation of the First Amendment, according to proponents of cross-ownership.

But whereas Congress cannot regulate newspapers, the licensing of broadcasters has been justified under the First Amendment because of the physical limitations of the electromagnetic spectrum. Because the capacity of the airwaves is finite, someone must decide who will be allowed to use them and who will not. This is the function of the FCC as mandated by the Federal Communications Act. Behind the dramatic confrontation over cross-ownership lie some vexing questions of communications policy. For instance, the FCC is supposed to supervise broadcasting activities to see that they accord with the public interest. But what is the public interest? Who are the public? What criteria should determine who has access to the airwaves? To what extent should broadcasters be required to reflect the tastes and interests of their listeners?

A few years ago, Citizens represented a coalition of the listeners of radio station WNCN in New York City. The station had announced it would abandon its all-classical music format for rock-and-roll, and the listeners were up in arms. They won the case, but what about all the New Yorkers who would have preferred rock? Who is to say whose tastes and opinions should prevail? How should a station deal with all the various majorities and minorities with special cases to plead?

And on a more basic level, how much public regulation of the airwaves is consistent with free speech? Should a Government agency-or a court-really address itself to questions of what a broadcaster does or does not choose to put on the air?

To understand these questions fully, it is necessary to return to March 25, 1966, when the United States Court of Appeals for *The

u.s.

Supreme

radio or TV stations

Court has since upheld the FCC rules banning in the same city but allowed

future joint ownership

over 70 existing combinations

to continue.

of newspaper and

the District of Columbia handed down one of the most significant decisions in the history of broadcasting. The case involved WLBT, a television station in Jackson, Mississippi, whose population is 45 per cent black. Civil-rights groups had repeatedly accused WLBT of discriminating against blacks in its programing.

In March 1964, two civil-rights leaders and the United Church of Christ, which had become a persistent public advocate on such issues, went to the FCC and urged it not to renew WLBT's license. They brought their protest on behalf of themselves and as representatives of "all other television viewers in the State of Mississippi."

The FCC dismissed their petition, declaring that it could consider such an action only if an individual's legally protected rights had been invaded by the station or if the station had caused him direct injury. Viewers, whose individual rights had not been violated, had no standing to bring protests before it.

The petitioners took their case to the Court of Appeals, where Warren E. Burger, now Chief Justice of the United States, ruled that ".responsible representatives of the listening public" did indeed have the right to challenge the renewal of a broadcaster's license. He ordered the commission to hold a hearing on whether WLBT should have its license renewed. "We can see no reason," he stated, "to exclude those with such an obvious and acute concern as the listening audience."

By ruling that viewers and listeners could challenge a broadcaster's right to hold a license, the Burger ruling opened up a new area of communications law. It also gave the public-interest lawyers a new weapon to fight the communications industry.

Though it has consisted of no more than four or five lawyers at any time in its existence, Citizens Communications Center is considered the foremost of these firms, and its history is, in effect, a capsule history of the broadcast reform movement.

Since its creation nine years ago, Citizens has filed scores of license-renewal challenges on behalf of its clients. It has brought actions that have resulted in breaking up media monopolies, provided more employment opportunities for minorities in broadcasting and opened up the FCC to citizen involvement.

It has reached out-of-court settlements with broadcasters that have facilitated the public's access to the airwaves and resulted in more programing for minorities.

Citizens was founded in 1969 by Albert Kramer (below), who was concerned about the general lack of citizen participation in FCC proceedings and felt that there ought to be some kind of national law center for citizen groups that wanted to participate in the regulatory process.

He obtained a $25,000 grant from the Midas International Foundation and a desk and part-time secretarial help at the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Foundation.

Many of Citizens' early clients were black civilrights groups which complained that broadcasters were discriminating against blacks in programing or employment. The usual tactic was to ha ve volunteers monitor a particular station to accumulate enough evidence for Citizens to file a petition with the FCC

asking it to deny renewal of that station's licence on the grounds that in areas where much of t.he listening public is black, it is in the public interest to have at least some of the programs aimed at black audiences.

Once the petition was filed, Citizens would usually offer to withdraw it in return for certain concessions from the station.

"In the past," says Tracy Westen, director of the communications-law program at the University of California at Los Angeles, "the FCC was always right as long as it gave the broadcaster what it wanted. Then along came Citizens .... Through its litigation, Citizens has forced the FCC to clarify its standards. Its litigation has determined the very structure of the industry."

"My bottom line is that we never lost a case," says Frank Lloyd, who succeeded Kramer as executive director in 1973.

"It didn't matter that we won or lost. At the end, by the time two or three years of litigation had passed, the broadcasters had usually upgraded themselves out of lawsuits. While we may have technically lost, we had usually won most of what we wanted."

By 1971, Citizens had received its first Ford Foundation grant-$200,000 a year for two years-and was housed in the cheerful, four-story red-brick town house, within walking distance of the FCC, where it is still located.

There was a ragged appearance about the place and a spirit of camaraderie as the lawyers often worked 17 and 18 hours a day to meet filing deadlines. Kramer, who was wont to work in a T-shirt, work pants and socks and simply put his head down on the desk when he needed sleep, was the kind of person who inspired personal loyalty, and his staff was devoted to him. There were many bone-wearying days, but there was also a certain amount of conviviality, as when the staff would order pizza and make a salad in a big green bucket and then sit around eating and telling stories.

After Kramer's eight-year stewardship, Lloyd took over for three years, shifting the emphasis from a leadership and organizing role, to make Citizens more of a test-case firm.

The new director is Nolan Bowie, a 34-year-old graduate of the University of Michigan Law School who was an assistant special prosecutor in the Watergate prosecution force. Bowie is black, as are associate member Edwina Dowell and several other members ofthe staff, making Citizens a majority-black firm.

The staff is directly responsible to its board of directors, which is headed by Henry Geller, former general counsel at the FCC. It is clear that the door Chief Justice Burger opened back in 1966 when he said that listeners could challenge the practices of broadcasters is now wide open. The listening public, in effect, has been mobilized, and Citizens has become an accepted participant in the continuing process of regulating who controls the airwaves.

In one sense, this may be seen as a splendid example of democracy at work, a reaffirmation of the democratic dream that the have-nots of society can march into court, challenge the power structure and win.

On the other hand, democracy often pushes forward on clanking wheels, and few victories are free of nagging doubts.

There are many, within the communications industry and without, who are made nervous by the prospect of the courts' telling a Federal commission how it should conduct its business, however overprotective of broadcasters the FCC may have become. And they are made even more nervous by the prospect of increased public and Government control over the media. They fear, in the end, that the movement to break up cross-ownerships may yet turn out to be another wave of high-minded reform that turns out to have an unforeseen, destructive undertow.

0

Having launched an urban renaissance on its 250th birth anniversary 10 years ago, San Antonio is today America's 10th largest city, the industrial hub of Texas and an important medical and scientific research center . Yet, the city preserves the flavor of its colorful, rich past and its relaxed American-Mexican atmosphere.

My hosts in San Antonio were apologetic. "Spring isn't usually this cold here," they explained.

"We're sorry you have such bad weather for your visit." I looked at them and smiled. Back home, in Washington, D.C., it was cold and overcast. In San Antonio, a brilliant sun was warming the day to a balmy 22 degrees centigrade.

That night, I ate dinner on the balcony of a restaurant overlooking the San Antonio River.

Laughter and strains of Mexican /III/sic drifted on a gentle breeze, and lights danced on the water.

No one who lived here, I thought to myself, ever needed to apologize for the weather-or for anything else in this jewel of a city.

* * *

San Antonio, Texas, founded in 1718 by Spanish missionaries, is one of the oldest cities in America. It is situated on the northernmost edge of a hot coastal plain, about 240 kilometers from the Gulf of Mexico ; the cooler, semiarid hill country that the late President Lyndon B. Johnson called home rises just to the north. Today this centuries-old community hums with the youthful vigor of a boom town. It's the trade and financial hub of southwest Texas, a bustling center for light industry, tourism, scientific and medical research, and, with four Air Force bases in the vicinity, it is a military town as well. But it is also a city determined to prosper without sacrificing either its colorful, Mexican-Western

heritage, or its pleasant, semitropical atmosphere.

San Antonio launched an urban renaissance a decade ago with preparations for HemisFair '68, a world's fair commemorating the city's 250th birthday. HemisFair included pavilions and exhibits from 18 countries, and when people came to see the fair, they naturally took note of San Antonio, too.

Visitors were impressed by the climate and ethnic heritage; they also were impressed that the city could organize a world fair. Many of these admirers returned to San Antonio after HemisFair, some of them to live there permanently.

San Antonians were ecstatic at the response. They had been trying to rekindle the city's economy for years, and the spark finally had caught.

The theme of HemisFair was "The Confluence of Civilizations in the Americas."

In celebrating the ethnic diversity of the people who had settled in the area-26 different nationalities in all-the fair highlighted the city's often dramatic history.

For most of the 18th and 19th centuries, San Antonio had been a center of cultural, political and commercial activity, first as the seat of Spanish colonial government in Texas, later under Mexican and then U.S. hegemony. As recently as the 1920s, it was the largest city in Texas, but after that period it began to decline in comparison to other

areas of the state and the Southwest. Since there was little need to tear down old commercial structures and put up new ones, San Antonio today has a palpable historic charm.

San Antonio's best known landmark is an adobe fortress called the Alamo. It was immortalized during the Texas revolution (1835-36), when Texas settlers fought to free themselves from the Mexican rule that followed Spanish colonization.

In March of 1836, the Alamo's 187-man garrison fought to the death rather than surrender to the huge Mexican army besieging them. Less than six weeks later, the cry "Remember the Alamo" helped rally another Texan force to defeat the Mexicans at the Battle of San Jacinto and win Texas sovereignty. Nine years later, Texas became the 28th state of the Union.

Another San Antonio attraction is the Paseo del Rio (River Walk), where restaurants, night clubs, hotels and shops edge the canal-like San Antonio River as it flows through the city. The Walk began as a flood-control project after a disastrous flood in 1921. At that time, there was talk of covering the stream and building a street over it, but the people of the city were against the project, so a control plan was worked out and development of the Walk as an attractive urban amenity followed.

After flood control came landscaping. The city drew up a

master plan for commercial and residential development, with strict requirements that only indigenous building materials and motifs be used.

HemisFair also enhanced San Antonio industries. Cattle had been a major business since the early 1860s, even though the region around the city is too dry to raise grain for the fattening of steers. Area ranchers, however, find it profitable to maintain breeding stock and to raise calves, making San Antonio the heart of the largest cow-andcalf industry in America.

San Antonio's burgeoning medical, scientific and educational community is an example of how HemisFair encouraged the expansion of yet another aspect of the city's economy.

Two scientific institutions in the western partofthe city have been in operation since 1947. One, Southwest Foundation for Research and Education, specializes in basic biomedical studies, while the other, Southwest Research Institute, is engaged in research in the applied and engineering sciences. The activities of Southwest Research Institute are international in scope, and range from underwater engineering to electronics to automotive engineering. The institute pays Right: One of San Antonio's most picturesque sights is the Paseo del Rio (River Walk), where hotels, night clubs, restaurants and shops line the canal-like San Antonio River as itflows through the city.

its own way by doing research on contract for government agencies and private industries.

HemisFair demonstrated that San Antonians were ready to support even more ambitious projects than these. The University of Texas in Austin opened a branch campus in the city and located its new Health Science Center in San Antonio's just-emerging South Texas Medical Center. This latter is a 275-hectare complex northwest of town, which already includes . more than $205 million worth of facilities and employs some 8,500 persons. The arrival of the university's health sciences programs has given the Medical Center's growth a real boost.

Today the complex has five hospitals and two research and rehabilitation pavilions; this is in addition to the Health Science Center's schools of medicine, dentistry, biomedical sciences, and allied health sciences. With these facilities added to others in the San Antonio area, the total is 20 hospitals and more than 150support agencies.

"Every year, more and more high-quality health experts are leaving other parts of the country and coming to work here," says Dr. Alexis Shele.kov, who worked at the U.S. Nati-onal Institutes of Health 'near Washington, D.C., before becoming chairman of the Health Science Center's microbiology department. "Our facilities are getting a national, even international, reputation," says Dr. Shelekov who is doing his part to encourage that reputation.

San Antonio's medical and scientific research facilities flourish at least partly because of the civic support that was generated by HemisFair, but it was the city's tourist and convention business that got the greatest impetus from the fair.

San Antonio now attracts more than six million visitors a year, most of them tourists. They stay in hotel rooms built for HemisFair and gather in the giant HemisFair Civic Center complex for their meetings.

More and more businessmen,

impressed by the city's facilities and atmosphere, are moving their company headquarters to San Antonio. Office-building construction is booming.

Some 50 buildings were built on a 36-hectare site for HemisFair. Most of them have been adapted since to other purposes.

San Antonio's cultural and entertainment life has especially benefited from this trend. The city's symphony/opera company now performs in the Civic Center's Theater for the Performing Arts, as does one of San Antonio's four ballet companies. (Three of the city's eight theater groups are located elsewhere on HemisFair grounds.) And because HemisFair's Civic Center also includes a large sports arena, San Antonio has been able to support a professional basketball team.

"San Antonio had the talent," says San Antonio Arts Council director Robert Canon. "HemisFair gave us the facilities we needed to showcase it. We've hosted the Joffrey Ballet, the American Ballet Theater, even the Bolshoi. People all over south Texas now drive for hours to come to performances in San Antonio."

A few HemisFair buildings still house their original functions. One is the Institute of Texan Cultures.

"Even for Texas, San Antonio has an unusually strong SpanishMexican flavor," says Jack Maguire, its director. "But Texas in general, and San Antonio in particular, were created with the help of many other nationalities as well.

People had long felt the need for some sort of place where the influence of different national groups could be presented. Then came the plans for HemisFair, and the institute was built as part of it."

The institute is basically a museum with exhibits of historic artifacts such as pioneer wagons and early clothing. It owns very few of the items it displaysAbout the Author: Sharon Of enstein is SPAN's

Washington

correspondent.

Above: An aerial view of glittering San Antonio at night.

Above right: The 230-meter Tower of the Americas was built for HemisFair, which was held in 1968 to commemorate the city's 250th birth anniversary. Below: Texas' Lone Star flag in neon light at San Antonio's Institute of Texan Cultures, a museum which houses exhibits of historic artifacts such as the city's pioneer wagons and early clothing.

Above: Elder citizens exercise outside their apartment building.

Left: Dr. Alexis Shelekov heads the microbiology department of San Antonio'sfamous Health Science Center. Left middle: The hyperbaric oxygen chamber at Brooks Air Force base is another of the city's important medical research facilities.

almost everything is borrowedand the institute changes its exhibits' frequently. More than 40 shows a year tour the state.

The institute also celebrates the diversity of cultures in Texas with a Folklife Festival every August. "We have all the ethnic crafts, foods, dances and music, right here on the institute's 6-hectare grounds," says Maguire.

While San Antonio owes its character to a variety of nationalities, Spanish-Mexican influence predominates. Much of the city's architecture reflects the Spanish hacienda style; Mexican restaurants abound.

Many signs and other instructions are printed in both English and Spanish. About 53 per cent of the population is MexicanAmerica)1, most of them descended from Mexicans who migrated to San Antonio early this century in search of jobs.

"San Antonio's been a good home for me and for a lot of Mexican-Americans," says Mexican-American electrical contractor Jesus Villarreal. "If a person here is determined to succeed, he can. There are a large number of secondo, thirdand fourth-generation MexicanAmericans who have done just that. Our problems are not solved, but they're improving."

Dr. Harold Hitt, superintendent of the city's 90 public elementary and secondary schools, underscores the contribution made by the MexicanAmerican community.

"Superficially," he says, "we have all the problems of other big center-city school districtsaging buildings, a declining proportion of Anglo (English speaking) pupils, and so forth.

But there's an unusual amount of vitality here, which makes it possible to do something about our deficits. The people of San Antonio really care about their schools.

"This is what makes me optimistic about the future of San Antonio. So what if many Anglos have moved to the suburbs? It doesn't matter, because the Mexican-Americans are taking their place, not just

physically but economically and pol-itically, too. Here in San Antonio we have a leading example of national minorities moving into places of influence."

Perhaps the most vivid example of how the consciousness of its Mexican heritage pervades San Antonio life is the Fiesta, I0 days each April, which features parades, Mexican and Western food, dancing, concerts, art shows, old-time pageantry, plus a stock-car race. The celebration is capped with a pilgrimage to the Alamo to lay flowers, since the Fiesta commemorates the Battle of San Jacinto.

"San Antonio still has a smalltown atmosphere," says Jack Harmon, who helps stage the Wild West portion of the Fiesta every year. "Not because it's a small town, but because it's so easy for people to get involved in the various activities. Everyone gets to know everyone else, and this creates a very real sense of community. "

* * *

I spent my last morning in San Antonio walking around the city.

The rush-hour traffic was barely noticeable. Sunlight poured down on the low, Spanish-style buildings. Birds twittered in the gardens around the Alamo; down a/(Jngthe 'River Walk, the air was cool and still. Here was an old city-by American standardsthat had forged a bright future for itself without sacrificing its past. Yes, I thought, San Antonio is a very nice town indeed.

0 Right: Fiesta crowds throng La Villita, one of San Antonio's oldest neighborhoods, rebuilt along the lines of the 18th-century original.

Right center " Another of the restored 19th-century buildings.

Top (left): Though William Green still spends his day on his cattle ranch like the traditional cowboy, he admits that times have changed: "Instead of riding out to round up my cattle, I have them trained to come when I toot the horn of my pickup truck." Top (right): Father Lambert Liken, pastor of the city's 250-yearold San Jose Mission, says: "The congregation is a living example of how different cultural groups have merged to form today's San Antonio." Far right: The annual rodeo festival attracts both MexiCffl'tand American-style cowboys.

b rnmingdoles

Recently Bloomingdale's, one of America's most prestigious department stores, organized in New York and Washington a month-long program of special events that highlighted the richness and pageantry of India's folk culture and its handicrafts.

India's consumer goods recently had what has been de- buyers in more than 100 buying trips to India. Blue pottery, scribed as their biggest showing abroad at Bloomingdale's miniature paintings, traditional puppets and toys, wickerII stores in New York and Washington. The well-known work, durries and rugs, giftware, leatherware and, of course, U.S. department store chain had been carrying Indian a massive range of textiles brought the sensations of a products for more than a decade, with sales running at mini-India to Americans. Designers Kenzo, Donna Karan, about $1 million, but decided to expand the market this Willie Smith and others of their reputation helped shape spring with an $8 million import and a six-week promotion Indian textiles into ready-to-wear garments for America's in association with Air-India, called "India: The Ultimate fashion market. The promotion featured top American Fantasy." Thirteen new boutiques inside the New York models photographed for weeks in a variety of situations store on Lexington Avenue were set up to look like mini- all over India. Designed by Richard Knapple, the room bazaars, and featured a display of products gathered by 60 decor at the Lexington store was based on Indian city

themes-the Udaipur room was an exercise in white, the Delhi room had navy blue walls dominated by a large bronze Shiva. An Indian calendar of events presented Mrinalini and Mallika Sarabhai, Vilayat Khan, pichwai and miniature work artists, potters and puppeteers, an astrologer, a palmist and a kite-flying champion. Restaurants served special Indian cuisine. The object of the whole exercise was, in the words of Marvin S. Traub, president of Bloomingdale's, "to show the world what India can do ....

The time was appropriate because of the interest in the U.S. in India and the improved capacity ofIndia."

Facing page: Visitors to a Bloomingdale's store watch a demonstration of the Indian art offloor painting. Center panel, top: An American model goes modishly rustic in a Jaipur handprinted cotton dress. Below: A caparisoned horse and a mannequin display the colors and handiwork of India. Top: The Thieves Market section in this Bloomingdale's store

presents a wide range of Indian covers, bedspreads, cushions, pillows and household furnishings ... "enough to steal your heart away," said the blurb.

Above, left: Models in bridal attire from different states of India. Above: The sari was, as always, a major attraction, and there were Indian ladies around to help the many interested customers into them.

TBECOTTON CO CTiON America is a major buyer of Indian handloom readymades. The American Maid of Cotton's annual visit to India highlights the other side of the two-way cotton relationship: India's major imports of long-stapled raw cotton are from the United States.

COTTON IS COOL. That age-old truism has gotten a new lease oflife in the America of the '70s. For "cool" no longer means only something "that does not retain or admit heat" (Webster), but also something "in," that is, fashionable.

Ruth Harman (facing page) brought along an elegant wardrobe to present cotton in all its fashionable, cool splendor during her recent visit as Maid of Cotton 1978 to various countries, including India, that buy cotton from the United States.

Ruth was selected from among 200 applicants from the cotton belt of America-the 19 cotton-producing states-in an annual ritual which is one of the many promotional programs ofthe Cotton Council International (CCI), the overseas operation serviceof the National Cotton Council of America (NCC).

"Mine is a goodwill promotion tour," said Ruth, who had already been to Canada, London and Germany before arriving in Delhi, whence she was to proceed to the Philippines, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan and Taiwan. India is a regular part of the Maid of Cotton's itinerary every year, said Vicki Hall, the young, efficiency-exuding tour manager ofCCI who accompanied Ruth.

The cotton connection between India and America, Vicki revealed, goes beyond the generally known fact that America is a major buyer of readymade garments made of Indian cotton.

India also imports a lot of cotton for its indigenous needs1.15 million bales in 1976-77, an increase of over 400 per cent from the previous year-and the United States is a major supplier. Figures available for five months through December 1977indicate the wide margin by which America tops the list: Of the 425,025 bales imported by India, America supplied 196,650,well ahead of second supplier Afghanistan's 46,500 bales.

While to Americans the appeal of Indian cotton lies in its bandmade, handloomed quality-virtually all American cotton is machine-made, whereas India has both varieties- to the Indian cotton market American cotton is valuable because it is "longer" than the indigenous species. Ruth explained that the quality of cotton is commonly measured in terms of length, and there is a universal quest to produce long-fibered cotton. While 90-95per cent of American cotton is i to It inches, 60-65 per cent ofIndian cotton is less than i inches. However, India is trying to produce more of the longer cotton by replacing the Asiatic species with varieties adapted from America and Egypt (Egyptian cotton is It inches or longer).

Ruth Harman, America's Maid of Cotton 1978, models a cool, summer creation during her New Delhi visit earlier this year.

Ruth, a mechanical engineering student back home (North Carolina), can rattle off the technicalities of cotton; and no wonder, because the selected Maid of Cotton goes through an orientation program which includes not just learning the facts of cotton but also visits to the cotton belt, farms and factories.

The Maid also receives many cotton dresses which, says Ruth, "wear well, feel good and look even better."

Millions of Americans have made the same discovery over the last few years: the cotton comeback years. The rebirth of this age-old natural fiber is partly seen by experts as being related to the "back to nature" phenomenon of the '70s. The previous decade of the' synthetic years had seen an abundance of the convenient manmade fabrics. Then suddenly, America's young, in a reaction against the machine age and the chemical environment they had grown up in, wanted to be "natural." This led to a new culture that determined lifestyles, food, hobbies, homes and clothes.

India seemed the logical answer, the ultimate destination, for many of the quests: those were the days of yoga, meditation, the sitar-and India's cotton readymades which started the made-in-India, worn-in-America trend in handloom garments.

India and America are major partners in the century-old story of cotton. If the first traces of cotton were found in Indiacotton yarns were found in the Mohenjodaro ruins of 3000 B.c.

-it was America that made rapid and far-reaching developments in the mechanization of cotton. A couple of other interesting sidelights on the early days of cotton: a Hindu Rigveda hymn dating back to 15 centuries before Christ tells how the patient hands of the women of India plucked lint from seeds, carded it and spun yarn for weaving on their crude handlooms. And, another story goes, when Christopher Columbus landed in the West Indies in 1492, the natives brought skeins of cotton yarn to his ship for barter.

The earliest record of a mechanical device for separating lint from seed is from India: a primitive "cllarkha" gin. It was Eli Whitney in America who revolutionized the cotton industry with his invention of mechanical gins in 1794.

Today the United States is one of the biggest producers, consumers and exporters of cotton in the world. A few years ago, as demand for American cotton snowballed both at home and abroad, America seemed to be harking back to those days when cotton was king. Demand has since leveled off; cotton seems to have settled into a comfortable secure place. Comfort, in fact, is what cotton is all about.

0

I Do Not Believe in the odOld Days

'If we now distrust and fear the tools we have devised, the better choice is not to abandon them but to regain our control over them.'

In this lies the answer to pessimists who see progress as an all-devouring demon to be cast aside for a return to the past.

The thought that technology is now the enemy of humankind has become so common as to require no further explanation. We fear that the tools we have devised are destroying us, that at worst our very lives and at best our humanity are in deadly danger. We feel that we have lost control. Worse yet, we distrust and fear those who claim to be in control. If their motives are not suspect, their judgment is. Our collective self-image is that of the sorcerer's apprentice, about to drown at the hands of an uncontrolled magic he has let loose. Like that apprentice, many of us want to scream, Stop! Enough! No more reactors, no more new weapons, no more sensors or computers, no more research-let us please go back to the good old days.

Even those of us who do not join in such a cri de coeur do share the feeling that things cannot go on as they are, that something must be done. But what, and by whom?

My reaction to these thoughts is in essence all too simple and not at all original. To use the words of Shakespeare, the fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves. And therein, I believe, lies our hope. If we now distrust and fear the tools we have devised, the better choice is not to abandon them but to regain our control over them. We seem to be suffering a crisis of uncontrolled technology, but the deeper reality may be a crisis of our human self-confidence.

It is the human fate to be an animal capable of reason. This fate has ordained for man the unceasing quest for order and purpose. The human animal organism flowers and decays biologically, responds profoundly to its animal senses and organic needs, and is extremely vulnerable to biological disease, injury and mortal accident. The human mind or spirit transcends this animal existence, pursuing

concepts of permanence, security, tranquillity, and predictability which> are abstract and not present in the tangible world in which the human organism functions. The religions of mankind represent the effort to reconcile humanity's animal nature with humanity's mental capacity. They attempt to give meaning and purpose to the life of the human organism, to place it in the context of a larger, abstract order, and to make it subject to abstract rules of conduct.

The intent and effect of these rules is to impose a purposeful order on the collective human organism; to free man's mental capacity from bopdage to the animal senses; and to eliminate violence of human against human-all as much as possible. Human life is in endless tension between the functioning of the animal organism and these abstractions. The uniquely human concept of guilt is invoked when the animal organism betrays the rules of abstract order conceived by the human mind.

There is reason to restate these fundamentals, for to re-examine them in the age of technology may give better perspective on the reality of our human and social problems. They remind us, for one thing, of the fact that man, in attempting to control his own animal nature, has also always imposed himself on his natural environment. Man the hunter may have interacted with the natural environment no more than do other animals. But man the cultivator began the process of attempting to tame nature to his purposes. Between the first clearing seeded in deliberate expectation of harvest, and today's agricultural technology, there is no difference in principle. In principle, nothing separates those who denuded the forests of the Mediterranean littoral for lumber, from those today who change the face of nature in search of sources of energy or other bounty.

Differences are those of degree and, though these are vast, so is humanity's current capacity to repair devastation-to create bodies of water, reclaim land from the sea, and cleanse away pollution. To maintain the environment in satisfactory repair in the age of technology is primarily a matter of cost. To hold the state of nature sacred is to deny the human condition; the human creature whose mental capacity produces the effort to transcend the animal state cannot refrain from the effort to tame its environment as well.

It is also useful to recognize how pro-

foundly the human organism can rebel against the attempted control by the human mind. For instance, the instinct for physical self-preservation is so compelling as to seem to justify exceptions to established rules. Bodily appetites demand satisfaction, and the effort to govern them produces unceasing tension. It may be possible to define the human condition precisely in terms of this tension-the struggle to discipline the appetites. But even if so, humankind also consistently seeks relief from such strains. There are countless ways of diverting the mind or putting it at rest, of which one of the most attractive is to provide it with stimuli that call for a minimum of conscious response. Not only have alcohol and drugs always been used for this purpose, but it may even be argued that the same end is served by all the human arts, which transform the creative discipline of the few into the mental diversion of the many.

The point is to remind ourselves that the richness of contemporary technology has vastly enlarged man's capacity to divert the mind. When we speak of the age of technology we might, in fact, speak almost as descriptively of the age of entertainment.

In our technological society music is omnipresent. So is the printed word. Cheap mass-produced stimulants abound-alcohol, tobacco, and a myriad of drugs. Television provides constant theater. The offering of erotic stimuli has become an industry. Competitive sport has become mass theater.

Our minds are assaulted by diversionary stimuli to a degree that tends to numb our senses-which may represent precisely the relief from our human tension that we seek. Technology abets this relief.

(In this context, it may be of interest to reflect on the erosion suffered by the traditional religions, and to speculate on the relationship between the human mind so abundantly diverted from the tensions of discipline, and the perceived reduction in relevance of the strictures of religion.)

On the one hand technology has given us tools with which we can command nature ever more effectively. It enables us to impose a human order on the environment by the application of human science.

In reducing toil and increasing comfort and physical securjty within. nature, it has also given us the time and the means to escape some of the rigors of the human condition by extensive stimulation of our sensations. On the other hand, some

Some of the historic inequalities among men have been overcome ... technology has had the effect of making humans more nearly equal, and control of the many by the few much more difficult. of the tools produced by technology greatly enlarge our individual and collective capacity to damage each other. The effort needed to control the technological order which we are capable of imposing on the environment becomes ever greater as the scope of our capacity widens. And because the sensory distractions which technology permits allow us to relax our mental discipline and our concentration on the abstractions of order and meaning, these essential abstractions may be endangered.

The impact of technology increases human population. The economies of technology cluster populations together in large aggregations. Large interdependent populations require a high degree of abstract order to serve all their members; but at the same time they create individual conditions of anonymity which tend to corrupt order. The more impersonal rules are, the less compelling they seem to the individual. The more anonymous one feels, the more one is tempted to break rules, because the risk of discovery and its consequences appears reduced. The genius of religion is to personalize the abstract rules of human order and meaning, so that they become self-induced more than socially enforced. When the discipline of religion slips, human society attempts to maintain meaningful order for practical reasons, but the effort to do so may well become more difficult in direct proportion to the mass of the human society involved.

At this point the observation is unavoidable that the level of human participation in technology itself, and also in the striving for human order and meaning, is extremely uneven. Advanced technology is still largely available to less than half the world's human population. Its scope is worldwide, to be sure, not only potentially but actually. This scope, however, only guarantees its global impact, not an even remotely uniform level of global participation. To achieve such a level of participation would require human effort of an unprecedented scale and scope.

Failing that, past history indicates that nonparticipating societies will probably acquire enough technology only to destroy rather than to build; or that the effort to construct will exhaust itself in the most

advanced societies, and collapse. Accordingly the unevenness of human participation in advanced technology represents both a huge challenge and a major threat.

Even more significant may be the unevenness of human participation within technologically advanced society itself.

Throughout history, the governing abstractions have consistently been devised, developed and administered by the few, for the many to live by. The many expended their energies primarily on physical survival, and lacked either the leisure or the skills to do much more than respond to the abstract ideas developed by the more privileged minority. Now, however, in reducing the need for manual labor, technology has made a degree of leisure available to almost the whole population of advanced societies. Not only is there waking time away from work, but work itself tends to be less exhausting.

Books and other forms of instruction are no longer luxuries. When leisure and literacy are no longer privileges for the few, and when mass industrialization and mass production make food, clothing, housing and transportation almost universally available, some of the most durable historic inequalities among men have been overcome. The many are no longer preoccupied or ignorant and, by virtue of mass communication, they are also aware of the governing few in novel ways. Thus technology has had the effect of making humans much more nearly equal, and it makes control of the many by the few much more difficult.

The many therefore have, in advanced societies, become potential or actual participants in full within their societies. For such a phenomenon there is no precedent in human history, nor has any advanced society yet fully realized it. Old customs and habits have muted the potential of new equality. The newly released time and energy of the many has been more preoccupied by technological distractions than by disciplined attainments. In many of the advanced societies the few, in fact, still rule and the many still barely participate; but this condition now requires total and unrelenting repression. The alternative is a society founded upon an unprecedented evenness of human participation, for which the requisite discipline

may be lacking.

These thoughts bring us to the point of asking whether so very basic a perspective as we have been pursuing on the human person and technology can produce suggestions as to how to better the relationship between the two. I believe such suggestions do offer themselves. And because my own life has been spent in education, I believe that perhaps the greatest promise lies in a new approach to education in the age of technology.

Advanced societies already make it not only possible but obligatory for children to attend schools for at least 10 or 12years; and opportunities for higher education have also been greatly enlarged. However, the new potential of mass education in the age of technology has as yet scarcely been realized.

In general, one may observe that mass education has so far succeeded less in raising the standards of all, than in lowering standards to accommodate larger numbers of those who are not deemed intellectually gifted. Both the opportunity and the need exist to wipe out this dilemma. Except for a handicapped few, the mental capacity to receive education exists in all human beings. Some are more intellectually gifted than others, but in fact learning capacity is not primarily a question of native ability, but rather of motivation, discipline, and-above allthe quality of instruction.

It is indeed the quality of instruction that has been the biggest problem in mass education, because so great a burden is placed on human instructors to provide motivation, discipline, and also teaching geared to the differing capacities of numbers of students. Today, however, it is possible to supplement human instruction by technological means. The human instructor remains necessary, but his or her role and burden are different. By using teaching machines or computerized instruction, individual students can work at their own speed to acquire specific knowledge, while their progress can be sustained with a patience, and objectivity beyond human capacity, yet also in a completely personalized manner. This use of technology also provides a new discipline, because the machine will allow progress toward completion of a lesson only as each step is

performed satisfactorily. Even more important, experiments in urban schools have shown that computerized instruction contains new motivation, insofar as its use appears to be a game which the student plays on the machine (but which is, in fact, a competition with himself).

Quite simply, technology can merge with human instruction so as to put a very high standard of achievement within reach of almost everyone. That has already been proven. The know-how is there.

What is missing is the purpose and will to apply it so as to produce whole populations of which each member commands a high standard of general education. I am, of course, suggesting precisely this objective, and more. For it is not enough simply to teach everyone more. The crucial question is what will be taught.

Two thoughts appear to be paramount.

If we were correct in our earlier speculations that humankind has been too ready to escape from the tensions of the human condition into the distractions which technology makes possible, then we may ask whether the educational system can do more to restore some necessary discipline to society. Huge and complex as this question is, the simple and basic perspective we are pursuing indicates that it can be answered affirmatively, and should be.

That means nothing less than education in social ethics, which has historically been seen as the role of the family and the church rather than of the school. Unless a major religious revival occurs in the world, however, it now seems necessary for a lay public institution to teach public morality.

Lay public schools cannot teach religion. But they can-and should-teach humanism. Unless they do, self-indulgence will continue to eat away at the discipline of the human mind. The result might be a metaphorical planet of the apes-of human organisms that continue to play with vestigial technology only to gratify animal appetites and to lull mind and senses. The teaching of humanism means the teaching of public morality- primarily the virtue and need for human selfdiscipline-as well as basic human skills and knowledge.

My second thought in this connection is that humanity must continue to command the self-confidence that makes achievement possible, and on which selfrespect rests. In part, self-confidence can be nurtured by the acquisition of traditional skills and knowledge-literacy, numeracy, a sense of history, a grasp of the

rational analysis we call science. But in the age of technology it may be necessary to make applied technology itself a fundamental ingredient of education. Human tools are becoming so complex that more and more citizens of advanced societies use them knowing only what they do but not how they work. To be dependent on applied technology whose operations constitute a mystery is alienating and ultimately frightening; and it is fear that is the great enemy of self-confidence. For these reasons the teaching of applied technology may be vital, to give the human being enough familiarity with the tools of everyday life that self-confidence is not sacrificed by their very application.

At least for me, the perspective we have been following means that the anxiety now besetting advanced societies may mark not the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning. We cannot reject rational science and its technological consequences without rejecting also the questing nature of our humanity. What has begun, but only begun, is the human effort to achieve the full potential of a new and better society which technology makes possible.

One challenge is to create a system of education that can produce new generations able to achieve a new civilization, one based on greater equality among people but still capable of individual and social discipline. A similar educational process must reach adult populations in the less advanced societies if they are to participate in what should be a civilization not only new, but worldwide in scope.

The beginning that is ending was perhaps the attempt to master technology in society by relying on structures and institutions that will no longer serve. The beginning to come may therefore consist of a more rational reordering of our social institutions.

The nation-state, for example, which was the major vehicle for early industrialization, appears more and more anachronistic. On the one hand it is too confining for a civilization that is beginning to consume resources and to market products on a global basis. On the other hand, it is too large and ill-shaped to accommodate the human need for social units that are both manageable and knowable. We may already be witnessing trends toward new patterns.

One such may be development of the historic region as a distinctive locality (in preference to the nation-state), which may encourage the rational growth of new

metropolitan concentrations on a regional basis. Another may be the emphasis on the neighborhood within metropolitan agglomerations that have themselves become too large to be either knowable or governable. Yet another may be the movement of peoples across the historic frontiers of nation-states, a process which has created new Latin populations in the United States, for example, as well as Middle Eastern, North African, and Southern European populations in northwestern Europe. With the advantage of hindsight, this shift may appear as the most significant social phenomenon of the second half of the 20th century . Yet another trend may be the decreasing tolerance for traditional styles of social leadership in advanced societies-styles that evolved when most of the population was more ignorant and passive, less mobile and less endowed with leisure time.

It would be vain to pretend that the nature of a new civilization is already visible. But it may help to realize that it is not only needed, but possible. And it would be ludicrous to misperceive its growing pains as the death-throes of technological societies.

I do not believe in the good old days.

Life may possibly have been simpler, but it was also shorter and harder, and for centuries it denied to most people the capacity to participate in the full potential of the human spirit. Ifwe as human beings can re-emphasize our most basic human pursuit of meaning and order, and can muster the necessary discipline and energy, the technological tools are now in our hands to achieve much more fully and justly the potential dignity of humanity.

In any case, we cannot reverse history.

The choice I see before us is essentially this: We can misuse technology to saturate our sensations, and to reduce the human condition to a passive self-indulgence that cannot long sustain social order; or we can rationally apply technology in society to build a new civilization. My trust in the better choice derives not from mere hope nor a special vision, but from my faith in the nature of the human being. The human energy and potential liberated by technology will not long be content to gratify merely the physical and sensory appetites. The human destiny to seek order and purpose will prevail.

D About the Author: Steven Muller is president of the Johns Hopkins University and author of Documents on European Government.

K

irandul .and Kottavalasa sound like spices from South India, but aren't. Kirandul is located on the Bailadila iron .ore complex of Madhya Pradesh; Kottavalasa is a small town a few kilometers from Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh. The two are linked by a 400ckilometer rail track carved out of hill . and rock which snakes through 30 tunnels and has as its high point what is described as one of the world's highest broad-gauge railway stations-Araku on the southeastern section of the Indian Railways.

This track took several years to build, and helps transport iron ore from Bailadila to steel mills in Japan. Every day, some 20,000 tons of iron ore go by freight trains from Kirandul to Kottavalasa, then by conveyor belt to t~e Visakhapatnam harbor, and from there by ship to Japan.

The export of iron ore to Japan is one of India's big foreign exchange earners aild Bhartia Electric Steel Company, Calcutta, is associated with it. The ore is loaded on "Gondola" wagons fitted with cast-steel bogies specially designed to transport heavy loads at high speed and to stand rough use. More than half of these bogies are supplied to the Indian Railways by Bhartia: they are made in collaboration with Amsted Industries International of Chicago.

The Amsted bogies are symbolic of many things: the progress of Bhartia, its assimilation of American technology, its association with the Indian Railways. The interaction between American technology, Bhartia Electric Steel and the Indian Railways has benefited other developing countries to whom the Indian product is being exported.

Now 57 years old, the Bhartia Electric Steel Company was born in 1921 as the Hukam Chand Electrical Steel Company.

The firm changed hands in 1940 and was given its present name.

In 1960 the Tantias, a Calcutta business group, took over the company and ushered in a rapid phase of modernization and expansion with the help of American technology.

Today Bhartia Steel's three factories-at Ballygunje and Baruipur, both in West Bengal, and Faridabad in Haryanaturn out 8,000 tons of steel castings every year, one-tenth of India's output. More than 50 kinds of castings are supplied to the Railways alone, and every conceivable type of steel casting is supplied to Indian industry to help turn out products ranging from sugar and fertilizer to haulage trailers to power generators.

Bhartia's annual turnover is nearly Rs. 10 crores; it has so far earned foreign exchange worth about Rs. 2.5 crores through the direct export of its products, and has saved exchange worth severallakhs of rupees through import substitution.

Bhartia has bought technology from three American companies. It makes automatic couplers for the Indian Railways . with know-how from Amsted Industries International and Cardwell Westinghouse, both of Chicago. It makes cast-steel bogies with the help of Amsted. And it has just begun using the world-famous Shaw process of Avnett Incorporated, New York, to make a variety of high~precision industrial castings. "We try to use the latest processes so that we can deliver quality products," says B.L. Tantia, managing director of Bhartia.

* * '"

Way back in 1959, the Indian Railways decided to modernize its fleet by introducing automatic coupling systems for its broadgauge freight¡ wagons. These would replace the traditional "screw couplings," for which a mechanic gets between two wagons and manually shunts or joins them. Automatic couplers, Left : Molten metal being poured into an electric arc furnace at the Ballygunje (Calcutta) plant of Bhartia Steel. Above,far left: The "Tup hammer," a quality control instrument at the company's Faridabad plant, one of the few of its kind in the world. It contains a 27,OOO-pound weight which is dropped on the\draft gear, a vital component of the automatic coupler, to test its shock-absorbing capacity.

35

~ ---- 'WEDDED

TO THE RAILWAYS' continued

which have been in use in the United States for more than a century, enable wagons to interlock as soon as they strike each other; they are safer and more durable than screw couplings; they permit haulage of heavier loads and speed up the coupling and uncoupling of wagons in marshaling yards.

Bhartia was one of the three foundries interested in a Railway contract for the supply of automatic couplers, and approached the English Steel Casting Corporation for a collaboration. But an English Steel team that toured Bhartia's Ballygunje foundry concluded that couplers could not be made there. Bhartia then turned to American Steel Foundries (now known as Amsted Industries International), which happened to be a licensor of English Steel. American Steel's president, Ed Dierks, and then vice-president Bill Casey came down to Calcutta and met with Bhartia's executives. They were impressed with the company's willingness and dedication, despite its limited capability.

The capability was passed on to Bhartia by Amsted. The partnership between the two companies began in 1960, with American Steel sending two ace engineers-Charles Rohlkoetter and James Morrison-to India. Morrison, who had planned some of America's best foundries, redesigned Bhartia's Ballygunje plant, whose growth till then had been haphazard. Rohlkoetter trained a group of eight Bhartia experts-metallurgists, foundrymen, mechanical engineers-in the latest concepts in the manufacture of steel castings.

firm. The hammer was built in India by Guest Keen Williams Ltd. from designs provided by Westinghouse. It took three years to build, was completed in 1976, and cost Rs. 16 lakhs.

How are draft gears tested by the hammer? The 27,000 lb. weight is dropped on the draft gear fixed at the bottom of the structure. The gear is pushed down, and its displacement is measured. Multiply the weight by the total fall of the Tup, and you get the gear's shock-absorbing capacity. The sill pressure or reaction force on the gear is measured by the Visicorder, a remotecontrol electronic device.

If automatic couplers brought Bhartia and the Railways closer, cast-steel bogies strengthened the partnership. "The 1960s were the coupler era for the foundry industry-the 1970s will be the bogie era," says O.P. Tantia. He adds: "The caststeel bogie, with 20-odd cast elements, has many advantages over the traditional fabricated bogie which has 1,200 fabricated elements: it can carry loads almost twice as heavy, and is easier to maintain."

Bhartia's collaboration with Amsted on cast-steel bogies began in 1972. Bhartia now supplies 70 to 100 bogies every month to the Railways. These are used, as mentioned earlier, to transport Japan-bound iron ore from the Bailadila iron ore complex to Visakhapatnam. Other types of Bhartia cast-steel bogies are used in steel and defense-vehicle plants. And the Railways may soon use cast-steel bogies to transport ballast, to carry container traffic, to move coal from mine to factory.

'As a foundry we employ more talent than we need,' says a director of Bhartia Steel. 'But this is deliberate. It is wise to invest in mental capital; dividends will follow.'

An important aspect of Bhartia's American collaborationboth for automatic couplers and cast-steel bogies-is that it is allowed to export them. "On couplers alone, Bhartia has earned more than twice the foreign exchange it spent as royalty," says Tantia. "The country has therefore been a net gainer in foreign exchange because of this collaboration."

Bhartia has so far exported couplers or draft gears to Taiwan, Egypt, Indonesia, Thailand and Sudan. The Egyptian Railway, which first received Bhartia couplers in 1969-70, doesn't take the trouble of inviting international tenders any more; it just sends Bhartia a telegram for more couplers. "This relationship is extraordinary for supply of a product from a private agency to a government," says executive director J.P. Chowdhary.

Cast-steel bogies have been exported by Bhartia to Uganda and Vietnam. The company is exploring exports of bogies to Sudan, Bangladesh, Thailand and East Europe.

Says Chowdhary: "In 1972, an Indian official told Argentina's Transport Minister that India would like to bid for cast-steel bogies. The Minister was skeptical, and quipped: 'This tender is for railway bogies and not for elephants.' That attitude is changing. We take great pains to break customer resistance, to attack the notion that Indian industry can't make sophisticated goods."

"The main reason for our growth," says Tantia, "is that we have tried to specialize. During the recession years 1970-74, when most steel foundries were in a bad way and curtailed production, we kept afloat because we specialized. We would like to go in for even more specialized products, such as highpressure valves and high-abrasion resistance castings."

Bhartia's three plants with a staff of about 2,000 are managed by a group of 20 executive directors, general managers and deputy general managers and more than 80 technicians. Their average age is 40. "As a foundry we employ more talent than we need," says Tantia, "and also more management than we need.

But this is deliberate; it's wise to invest in mental capital; dividends will follow."

0

Initially, Bhartia supplied 25 to 30 per cent of the Railways' couplers; the percentage is now about 60. "Thanks to Amsted technology, we make couplers very economically," says O.P. Tantia, a director of the company. Bhartia makes about 10,000 couplers a year, on order. Some 70,000 railway wagons in India have now been fitted with automatic couplers. Freight traffic carried by the Railways has increased during the past 18 years from 100 million tons to 220 million tons, an increase Tantia attributes partly to the introduction of automatic couplers.

Talking about Cardwell Westinghouse, Bhartia's second collaborator for automatic couplers, product standards manager Balasubramanyan says: "One of the most vital components of the coupler is the draft gear. This is a device that bears the impact of shock when two wagons couple. You can get an idea of this shock if you visit the Mughalsarai railway yard; every few hours you hear a thunderous sound and you wonder whether there has been an earthquake. It is only the sound of wagons coupling.

"Bhartia uses Westinghouse technology to make draft gears.

Westinghouse has also helped us build in our Faridabad plant a facility to test the durability and shock-absorbing capacity of draft gears. This is called the Tup hammer, and there are only four or five of its kind all over the world."

The Tup hammer is enclosed in a fortresslike structure with a massive steel door: it's called a hammer house. The hammer itself towers 27 feet high [see photo]. It contains a 27,000 lb. pneumatically operated falling weight; an electronic device called Visicorder made by another American firm, Honeywell; some intermediate electronic equipment provided by a Madras

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE

I'JJJtIDN

J o

"Why can't we just read him bedside stories like other parents do?"

RECONSIDERATIONS

H.L.MENC

N

ANTI ALL KINDS OF BLAH H.L. Mencken was the last of an early breed of American reporters that included men as famous as Benjamin Franklin and Mark Twain. The roles of newsmen, men of letters and statesmen were not sharply differentiated in the beginning time of American journalism. Specialization came later, with organization, in the first quarter of the twentieth century. In the course of his career, Henry Louis Mencken saw the reporter transformed into a foot-loose, wideranging and hard-riding gatherer of factual news in a worldwide roundup. He became an informer more than an entertainer, a tough professional with a strong humane consciousness, to whose courage and enterprise a monument was put up in Seoul, the capital of South Korea, several years ago.

Mencken's own ambit did not extend much beyond his home town of Baltimore, though New York became important during the twenties and he made an occasional visit to Washington or a political convention.

He was solidly based in Baltimore and preferred it that way. In those days, an easy relationship existed between factual writing as reportage and fictional writing as belleslettres. Mencken embellished fact for the delectation of his readers light-heartedly, inventing, among other things, a wild man in the woods. His spoofing was as inveterate as his skepticism but in his later days he acquired a reputation for the accuracy of his work, notably in his masterful The American Language.

This informal relationship between fact and fiction made the emergence of realist writing in America a natural development. A considerable literature of the kind that, in the Old World, is called proletarian existed in America as early as 1910. Mencken acclaimed writers like Frank Norris, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, Eugene O'Neill and Sinclair Lewis. His friendship with Dreiser was noteworthy although Mencken criticized Dreiser later for succumbing to the charms of Greenwich Village.

Mencken's own literary efforts began with a translation from Henrik Ibsen. His first school was a German school and his family was of German extraction. Henrik Ibsen,

GOP/

GAJWANI

In the twenties he achieved the triple distinction of being the best known newspaperman in the United States, the best known writer in the country and the most influential editor as well.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Darwin, American assumption was that everybody Thomas Huxley and George Bernard Shaw he dealt with was to be treated as an equal. were the shapers of his mind. So was William Abstract ideas made no appeal to him. He G. Sumner. From Huxley Mencken learned was a hardheaded, working journalist who that stupid, ignorant and tyrannical au- judged by results, not by plausibility. He thority is to be put down. This he proceeded was not interested in socialism or anything that played down the individual. to do with gusto and wit, mocking, joshing, teasing and caricaturing public men and Mencken's choice of career was made movements with good-natured exuberance. early, with a small hand press, but he did Many of those he attacked later became not apply for a newspaper job until after and remained his friends. From Darwin his father's death in 1898. His mother Mencken learned that a fit man survives raised no objections. Whatever frustrations his circumstances. This reinforced his in- or rebellious impulses Mencken may have born American faith in individual enter- had were channeled into journalism so prise and initiative. Sumner taught Mencken smoothly that no overt conflict took place. that if every person is prudent, industrious He acquired the habit of reading widely and wise, poverty can be abolished. And and deeply as a boy and slowly built up an Mencken acquired a firm belief in the extensive library. His reading made him pre-eminence of willpower from Nietzsche. knowledgeable on many subjects, and he Though Mencken's chief mentors were did not feel the lack of a college education, European, his concerns were exclusively acquiring a Mark Twain attitude to American. By birth he belonged to the academia. This antiacademic bias may have staid conservative world of the Southern been the unacknowledged reason for the democrat. He was born in Baltimore on coarseness he showed in his manner to September 12, 1880, and lived in the family Charles Angoff years later. Angoff was a house on Hollins Street for seventy years, cultivated Harvard man engaged to assist returning to it after his brief but happy him on The American Mercury who was, five-year marriage ended with his wife's as Mencken knew he would be, revolted by death. No alterations were made in the an omission of polish. But there were other house, and even an occasional change in differences between the two men. To Angoff furnishings was regretted. His father was the twenties were "a state of mind and being an affluent and substantial merchant, a both satisfying. That it was unreal and manufacturer of cigars. Mencken went to ephemeral made no difference." To Angoff work in the factory when he decided against Mencken was one of the muckrakers who going to college. The stability of his home could operate safely because "it was an era world was never questioned. It was a' world in which political justice had triumphed and the denizens of which were completely the world been made safe for democracy." reliable and could be trusted. Family ties Mencken blasted the twenties. He saw were strong and enduring. Mencken was that the dominant philosophies were innever a confessional writer and his placid congruous when regarded from the point private life was kept inviolate. Public life of view of practical living. What he did not and the turmoil of politics were excluded. see was that when these philosophies beMencken showed no repugnance to the came obsolete in the age of bread lines milieu that bred him. He cherished and and soup kitchens, gas chambers and atom defended it. He never felt the urge to go bombs, his kind of criticism would also slumming among the so-called lower classes become obsolete. He was a pillar of the that W.H. Auden and his generation did. structure that collapsed in 1929. The new He never became a Leftist, an anti-Fascist, problems were not local. World issues began or a Ku Klux Klanner. He was a moderate to intrude on the domestic scene as the by disposition. Excess of all kinds was dis- Depression deepened. Little by little they tasteful to him. His instinctive and very penetrated to the very heart of America.

This was a development that disconcerted Mencken. He had helped several generations to thread their way through the thickets of confused sentiment and thorny thinking that adorned the intellectual gardens of the pre-Depression period. To Mencken the universe was an un fated place in which the individual's voluntary service of good and evil was of consequence. The Wall Street crash of 1929 released forces so overwhelming that the individual counted less and less. The only dignity left was defiance, and the defiant went under with the weak.

No distinction was made. Mencken was puzzled and confused. Whenever he saw an individual rise out of the chaos by force of will, he applauded. His defense of Hitler was instinctive rather than reasoned, but he drew the opprobrium of the world down on his head.

Mencken was stubborn. In the twenties he was the best known newspaperman in the United States, the best known writer in the country and the most influential editor as well. The dexterity with which he had achieved this triple distinction is a measure of his drive and genius. He was at the peak of his authority, and he insisted upon carrying into the thirties unaltered the views that had brought him to eminence.

The times were changing, but he refused to change with them. When Mencken attacked the New Deal, Franklin D. Roosevelt, in a famous meeting with the press, demolished him with quotations from his own writings.

Mencken resigned from the editorship of The American Mercury, which he had made the most prestigious journal in American intellectual circles. The publisher, Alfred Knopf, immediately announced that the coverage of the magazine would henceforth be worldwide. The tremendous social, economic and political problems arising out of the world crisis would receive the attention demanded by the present day.

The gathering and transmission of news About the Author: Lila Ray has published 24 books, and more than 600 articles for periodicals.

She is the wife of the distinguished Bengali novelist, Annada Shankar Ray.

With the Depression, humor departed from life, and Mencken had always relied upon humor to do his work had become a global activity. Pressmen were organizing. Radio and television workers joined them in the twenties. Joseph Pulitzer founded modern news chains in 1878. By 1900 there were eight of them.

The American Newspaper Guild was founded in 1933. A society of newspaper editors was founded and a course in journalism opened by Columbia University in 1922.

During World War II some 2,000 roving correspondents were dashing from country to country and were characterized by a restlessness Mencken had never known.

Mencken ceased to be a newsman when he ceased to be an editor. His work became nonpolitical. With the radicalization of the electorate by the Depression, he found himself more and more on the defensive.

His character and his upbringing had a classic American quality, and he became

a spokesman for the old order that had produced them. His dissidence was compulsive, and he did not hesitate to defend conservatism when conservatism became an unpopular cause. The order he loved had been replaced by confusion. Humor departed from life, and Mencken had always relied upon humor to do his work for him. He regarded the world with an amused air of incredulity, but the circus turned into a holocaust he could not comprehend.

Mencken was not personally too much troubled by the Depression and the rise of the Nazis, even though his shares in The American Mercury, like Knopfs, turned into wastepaper. By the time the crash came, Mencken was that rare phenomenon, a wealthy author. He could and did withdraw into private life, devoting himself to the completion of the greatest of his

works, The American Language, which established his status as a scholar. He wrote his autobiography and memoirs of the various phases of his career as a public man. These appeared in The New Yorker, the last of the three famous journals with which he was associated. The first was The Smart Set, which he edited with George G. Nathan, and the Mercury was the second.

Mencken remained a literary man, and his advice continued to be sought in matters relating to writers. The inaugural issue of The American Mercury contained Eugene O'Neill's play All God's Chillun Got Wings.

That was in 1924. His opinion continued to be influential in the fates of many aspiring young writers. The poet William Carlos Williams was one of those whom he recommended, but the Mercury's poetry editor Louis Untermeyer turned Williams down.

A MENCKEN SAMPLER From 'Charles J. Bonaparte, A Useful Citizen' Few men who have not had actual personal experience in combating a corrupt ring can even remotely understand the difficulties and discouragements of the task. Politicians are not ignorant brigands, easily ensnared. Many of them, in truth, are men of remarkable intelligence and resource, whose ethical deficiencies seem to be counterbalanced by cunning ingenuity and dogged perseverance. To men of this sort Mr. Bonaparte in his big battle was a foeman worth fighting. He had ingenuity that made theirs look puny, and he had persistence too.

Once upon a time the Baltimore Reform League of which he was then president undertook an investigation of the official doings of a prominent Federal office-holder.

Mr. Bonaparte, who did most of the investigating, discovered what he regarded as a long series of deliberate violations of the civil service rules. He drew up a report accordingly and proposed to submit it for the approval of the association at its next annual meeting. Meanwhile the friends of the official in question in the association-for, like every other organization, it has its hypocrites-secretly decided to "pack" the meeting and vote the report

down. They arrived bright and early and waited for the roll call. But Mr. Bonaparte was not to be so easily overcome. After listening attentively to the formal and specious arguments against the report he arose and made a speech of half an hour's length, bitterly arraigning the official in the limelight. Then, seeing that the latter's friends still remained by their guns, he began the same speech all over again. When it was done once more he began it another time-and so he talked, on and on, over and over, six, seven, eight, ten timesuntil it was nearly dawn and the last friend of the official was asleep. Then he and his faithful followers adopted the report.

He had taken care to send copies of it to the morning papers beforehand. He knew what the result would be.

-- ...•• -~·.·11 •-•-~The newspapers of Baltimore, knowing Mr. Bonaparte's absolute accuracy, print any charges he makes against public officials, secure in the knowledge that no damage suits will follow. He never accuses until he is certain-and then he doesn't spare his victim. Having a million or more in good securities, he would be an easy

target for shyster lawyers were it not for the fact that no shyster lawyer would oppose him in court for any fee less than a billion ....

Very naturally, Mr. Bonaparte has many enemies among his fellow Marylanders.

The Republicans hate him as fervently as do the Democrats, for his favors have been impartially distributed and his fatal smile has beamed upon all. But he is one of those men who seem to thrive upon opposition ....

Since he left the Harvard Law College at the age of 23, Mr. Bonaparte has fought the grafters and, incidently, been their mark. They have accused him of every crime on the calendar-from simple hypocrisy to grafting itself. But the mere fact that all of these charges have been confined to generalities shows how ridiculously baseless they have been .... Unlike Roosevelt, he (Bonaparte) is not a popular idol. He never appeals to the gallery because the gallery to him is an undiscovered country. He does not think it worth appealing to. And his brutal frankness and deliberate disregard for things established-for tradition, for party "regularity"-have made him a pariah among leaders.

for him. He regarded the world with an amused air of incredulity, but the circus turned into a holocaust.

In 1930 Mencken married a lovely and languishing Southern belle, Sara Haardt, who had been given only a few years to live by her doctors. She too was an accomplished writer, and the marriage was ideally happy. Mencken was over fifty, and his mother had been dead several years. His new home, like the old, had a distinctly Victorian atmosphere. He respected his wife's feelings in all things, and though he was himself an agnostic who left instructions that no holy rites be performed at his funeral, he did not interfere with her religious affiliations. As a private person he was affable and friendly, a lover of music and a good second pianist whose favorite composer was Bach. He took pleasure in convivial company, but his home was the neutral zone in which he could operate most effectively. He wrote assiduously to the end of his days, dictating when he could no longer manage for himself. In 1948 he suffered a massive stroke from which he never fully recovered. When asked what kind of a man headmired most, Mencken answered: "What I admire most in any man is a serene spirit, a steady freedom from moral indignation, an all-embracing tolerance."

Mencken's record as a journalist and man of affairs is a proud and honorable one.

He was an archetypal figure to whom the freedom of the press and freedom of opinion, even in wartime, were dogmatic principles.

He refused, as he said, to be anybody's stooge, and his enemies never knew where to have him. He was anti-excess, anticant and anti all kinds of blah. Radicals and bankers, communists and plutocrats, the American Legion and the Republicans were all his targets. In the Scopes trial he was on the side of Darwin, in the Hatrack case on the side of humanity. * When a Red Hunt was initiated by the Attorney General with the blessings of President Woodrow Wilson, he rushed to the defense of human decency. And he described the activities of the Ku Klux Klan as buffoonery.

Through it all he remained, as Alistaire Cooke describes him, a Baltimore burgher who looked like a plumber.

0 -The Scopes trial, which took place in Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925, involved the right of a science teacher, John T. Scopes, to teach students the theory of evolution. Scopes was convicted for violating a Tennessee law that forbade any teaching that ran counter to the story of the direct creation of man as laid down in the Bible. The Harrack case concerned an angular small-town prostitute nicknamed UHatrack" who wanted to reform and he accepted by the congregation but was refused.

The proverbial philosophy of the American people: set a cop to catch a cop.

Remorse: regret that one waited so long to do it.

Conscience: the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.

Courtroom: a place in which Jesus Christ and Judas Iscariot would be equals, with the odds in favor of Judas.

Optimist: the sort of man who marries his sister's best friend.

(3) to tell the truth.

Civilization is man's efforts to remedy the blunders and check the practical joking of the creator.

Happiness is peace after strife, the overcoming, of difficulties, the feeling of security and well-being. The only really happy people are married women and single men.

After all, why be good? How many will actually believe it of us?

Politician: any c1t1zen with influence enough to get his old mother a job as The moment everyone begins to believe¡ charwoman in the City Hall. a thing, it ceases to be true. For example, the notion that the homeliest girl in the As for the great masses of the plain people, party is the safest. whose rectitude and acumen are so much lauded, they may be divided into two The penalty for laughing in the courtroom classes: those to whom thinking is painful is six months in jail. If it were not for this and those to whom it is impossible. penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

One may cherish, perhaps, a profound respect for the Beatitudes but surely not No form of liberty is worth a darn which for the man who believes in them. doesn't give us the right to do wrong now and then.

The majority always has its way in the end. So does the undertaker. But neither The father of liars took the first shower gains in pleasantness by the fact. bath.

A prohibitionist is the sort of man one A great nation is any mob of people which wouldn't care to drink with-even if he produces at least one honest man a century. drank.

The most popular man under a democracy The chief argument against prohibition is not the most democratic man, but the is that it doesn't prohibit. This is also most despotic man. The common folk dethe chief argument in favor of it. , light in the exactions of such a man. They like him to boss them. Their natural gait is Love at first sight: a labor-saving device. the goosestep.

Archbishop: a Christian ecclesiastic of a The surest way to get a reputation as a liar rank superior to that attained by Christ. is to pretend to be very good. The next It is a sin to .believe evil of others but it surest way is to pretend to be very wicked. is seldom a mistake.

How little it takes to make life unbearable! A pebble in the shoe, a cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman's laugh.

The vice crusade: an effort to fill up the ocean by throwing sailors overboard.

A poet is usually a bad critic of his own work. And a critic is often even worse.

To an enbalmer there are no good men and bad men. There are only dead men and The three most dangerous enterprises in live men. the world: (l) to interfere between a man and wife Happiness is a china shop; love 1S the (2) to recommend a doctor bull.

Williamand JosepWs Catand Mouse Tales

by ANDRE MARTIN (Translated/rom the French by Leela Naidu Moraes)

Drawing laughs for 40 years now, cartoonists William Hanna and Joseph Barbera have emerged as the most durable,_ creative team in the history of animation films in the United States. They are the ones who brought to life Tom and Jerry: a cat and a mouse who have won the applause of three generations. Thanks to these two creatures, Hanna and Barbera were selected for the Academy Award

19 times and won seven Oscars.

When the era of television arrived, Hanna and Barbera not only managed to survive, but turned animation into a winner in the highly competitive and demanding world of electronic transmission.

William Hanna started his career painting on celluloid for film animation. He then became a scriptwriter and, at times, composed musical scores for

short films that were part of the "Looney Tunes" and "Merrie Melodies" series produced by the Warner Brothers studios.

In 1934, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), the last of the major film companies without its own animation studio, asked Hugh Herman and Rudolph Ising to set one up. Hanna, who followed his employers in this new enterprise, made a few films for their new series, "Happy

Harmonies" and "Captain and the Kids."

Meanwhile at the other end of the United States, Joseph Barbera, who was born in New York and had a commercial education, was working for a bank in Wall Street. Bored with his work, he dreamed of making cartoon films. After many attempts, he ended up joining the Van Beuren studios as scriptwriter and gagman. He ani-

mated characters in a popular cartoon strip "The Toonerville Folks."

But New York was slowly beginning to lose its monopoly of animation films to the new studios on the West Coast. So Barbera decided to take the leap; he became a scriptwriter for MGM's animation studio in Culver City where he met Hanna.

This was in 1937, when Hollywood's grand parade of animated cartoons was in full swing and it was not easy to break into the circle of colorful characters that Walt Disney, Hugh Herman, Rudolph Ising and Walter Lantz had created, turning musical cartoons into a form of universally appreciated entertainment.

However, after its first two years, the studio at MGM was expected to reach its cruising speed and increase its monthly production.

So the producers asked Hanna and Barbera to collaborate on a sixminute cartoon. They chose as their theme one of those quarrels in the animal world that was typical of the lively animated cartoons of the 1940s.

Hanna and Barbera first thought of pitching a dog against a fox, then opted for a cat against a mouse and made Puss Gets the Boot in 1940.

Their next two cartoons starred other animal heroes: The Goose Goes South and Officer

Pooch (1941). But the audience wanted the little duo of Puss Gets the Boot back. Without taking a breather, Hanna and Barbera did The Midnight Snack, the second film of the series. For the next 20 years, sitting at desks facing each other, they went on to weave 127 short films around Tom and Jerry.

In the process, they brought the episodes of wild pursuit, typical of cartoons of the '40s and '50s, to a level of musicality and perfection difficult to beat.

In a feat of sustained production, Hanna and Barbera managed to ring an endless variety of changes on their subjects. Each film guarantees its audience the pleasant certainty that in exactly seven minutes the mischievous Jerry will knock out Tom, the cat, after a battle fought to the beat of the metronome. Occasionally, there are some radical changes in the theme. In Trap Happy, Tom, giving up the idea that he can get rid of Jerry on his own, hires another cat which specializes in exterminating mice; and the audience gets a superb battle of two against one. In Nitwitty Kitty, Tom, after a blow on the head, believes that he is a mouse, which hilariously alters the usual relationship between the characters. And to everyone's surprise you even get Tom simply dying

at the end of The Duck Doctor.

In the first year of this series, the contests between Tom and Jerry took place in the watercolor sets and fairy tale atmosphere of the musical cartoons of the 1930s, as established by Disney, Herman and Ising. But over the years animation increased its impact and its special effects acquired the precision of a chopper, denting, flattening and bludgeoning the protagonists.

At times the violence between the two contestants reached a peak (Kitty Foiled, 1948, Cruisecat, 1952) which serves to remind us that in this series one must not try to find elements in the

script that belong to stage or opera traditions. All those slaps, thumps, falls and bumps on the head bring us back to the traditional excesses of folk comedy. When those howling masks burst on the screen in closeups, when a home is shattered, at times literally to pieces (Old Rockin' Chair Tom or Mouse Cleaning), these excesses are not an' attack on human rights. They are the invigorating fury and slapstick that go back to the classic Italian commedia dell'arte.

Art director Robert Gentle paints a familiar world, but always at the eye level of a cat or a mouse, where the huge

These stills from some Tom and Jerry shows give a glimpse of the escapades of the cat-and-mouse team which has brought worldwide fame to cartoonists William Hanna and Joseph Barbera.

Introduced in 1940, Tom and Jerry's battle of wits and Tom's eternally frustrated pursuit of the indomitable Jerry have proved equally popular on cinema and television. -

legs of an armchair turn the entrance to Tom and Jerry's tiny home into a triumphal arch. The clear story lines and meticulous script call for a classical precision in the editing and the angles and variety of shots.

The opening sequences start these films off at a hell-bent pace.

Puss Gets the Boot (1940) begins with Jerry running as hard as he can without being able to budge an inch. As the camera pulls back we see a laughing Tom holding Jerry by the tail with a casual forefinger.

The musical score for "Tom and Jerry," with its recurrent themes and characters, initially created problems for William Hanna, who was specially responsible for the musical montage, and for Scott Bradley, the musical director of the series. With the sharpness of a Schuman, they replaced the musical medley typical of the first decade of animation films with captivating scores that have established new norms for musical cartoons.

The combination of all these elements-music, art, scriptmakes Tom and Jerry imperishable. There are regular festivals of their old hits on various networks in America and elsewhere.

In the 1950s when television became popular as a new film medium, the cartoonists turned to the small screen. In 1957 Hanna and Barbera left MGM to start a studio specially created for television films. Their "Huckleberry Hound" was the first cartoon series specially conceived for TV. It is a show in three segments that constitutes

Tom and Jerry have bridged all generation gaps. They are as popular today as they were in the fifties. a package: one episode dealing with the adventures of the Dog with the Beautiful Ears; another with Yogi Bear; the third, the mice Pixie and Dixie.

For TV, the visualizers had to produce shorter cartoons than they did for cinema. TV cartoon series were based on sound tracks with lots of dialogue backing up resourceful scripts. The young TV viewers responded enthusiastically to this new entertainment and the programs multiplied.

In the 1960s on the three channels of American TV, Saturday morning was exclusively set aside for this kind of program to cater to children viewers. But for such productions to become a real success in the very special world of

television, they had to be shown during those valuable peak hours in the evening that draw a faithful audience and the profits from advertisements. With Hanna and Barbera's "The Flintstones," launched toward the end of the 1960-61 season, animation entered the world of adult popular entertainment. Regular viewing of these programs became a national ritual.

This was followed by a spate of productions. In 1967 alone, the Hanna and Barbera team produced for CBS Moby Dick, Frankenstein Junior, Space Ghost,. for NBC Space Kidettes ,. for ABC The Fantastic Four.

Then there were 156 films starring Abbot and Costello, the "Harlem Globe Trotters Show," and many others.

For the cinema, Hanna and Barbera produced two cartoon feature films for Columbia Pictures: Hey There, It's Yogi Bear (1963) and The Flintstones (1968). They modified their animation by having characters wear and perform zany pantomimes; in addition they speeded

up sequences of their burlesque series, "Banana Splits Hour."

They produced many "special" programs in animation: Alice in Wonderland (1966), Jack and the Beanstalk (1967), which had Gene Kelly dancing with animation characters, The New Adventures of Huck Finn (1968), The Last of the Curlews (1971), Charlotte's Web (1973), Cyrano and Crazy Comedy Concert (1974) and Heidi's Song (1977).

Through all these films and years, Hanna and Barbera have coped admirably with production problems, new trends, the rigors of competitive programing and all the mind-boggling limitations imposed by the heads of leading TV networks-the anxiety-provoking milieu once described as Heart Attack City.

Hanna and Barbera have now started an animation school which will enable its trainees to rediscover some of the old secrets of making animation films that had to be abandoned for a while in the rush for quantity but which may be of use again, with American TV demanding more quality.

Meanwhile William Hanna and Joseph Barbera continue to bring laughs and surprises for the world - frame by frame. 0 About the Author: Andre

Following the Disney tradition, Hanna and Barbera have chosen animals as the heroes of many of their cartoon series.

Among the duo's most popular creations are the burlesque team in "Banana Splits" (above) and "Huckleberry Hound" (left), which was the first cartoon series especially conceived for American TV.

Martin, himself a director of animation films, is also a TV producer-director, movie historian and critic for leading French journals, chief researcher at the National Audio- Visual Institute in Paris and the Canadian Radio-TV Council. Martin founded the first international animated film festival in Annecy, France.

PRIME MINISTER DESAI IN AMERICA .

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"I have learned to know and respect and even love the Prime Minister of India," said President Carter at a White House dinner. ",He represents a country of greatness in many respects, and he is indeed a unique man himself.. .. Prime Minister Desai sets an example for all those who serve in positions of leadership." Mr. Desai responded: "You have overwhelmed me with gracious words, attributing to me qualities I am struggling to possess but have not fully attained." Mr. Desai later told the Voice of America: "Both of us have faith in truth.

We share common human values. I believe no one will be able to create any differences between us. Indo-U.S. relations are already very good, and will go on improving. And I believe they will improve so much that there will be no misunderstanding."

Photographs here show Prime Minister Desai and President Carter at informal moments.

Below, left: Mr. C:arter admires !VIr.Desai's achkan. Below, nght: At the dmner table.

Bottom: The two leaders at the White House Oval Office before official talks began.

PRIME MINISTER DESAI IN AMERICA continued

Below: The Prime Minister meets American pressmen for an interview televised nationwide at the studios of National Broadcasting Company (NBC) in New York. The pressmen are, from right: Bill Monroe of NBC; Don Shannon of the Los Angeles Times; Joseph Lelyveld of The New York Times; and Lawrence E. Spivak of NBC. Right: On the White House lawns.

Cameramen click away as Prime Minister Desai, accompanied by President Carter, greets crowds. Later, replying

to a welcome speech by the President, Mr. Desai said: "There is a vast fund of goodwill that binds us, an un shakeable commitment to the dignity of the individual, to the vitality of the democratic way of life.... We are blessed with a great variety of shared interests." Bottom row, left: Between visits to New York and San Francisco, the Prime Minister had a glimpse of rural America; he toured the 700acre soybean farm of Dave Stock, a young ex-Peace Corps volunteer, near Murdock, Nebraska. "Mr. Desai seemed to know a lot about soybeans," said the Governor of Nebraska, James Exon, who

accompanied him. The Prime Minister also expressed interest in the fact that Dave belongs t9 the fifth generation • of the family that owns the land. Bottom row, center: Dave Stock and Mr. Desai examine a wheat stalk from the farm.

Bottom row, right: At the Gandhi Memorial Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

Mr. Desai and Shrimati Kamala, director of the center, view a bronze statue of Mahatma Gandhi. The Prime Minister was earlier welcomed by 60 mem bers of the center; two soloists rendered Hari Tumharo and Vaishnava lana, Gandhiji's favorite hymns.

Above: The Prime Minister is greeted with flowers on arrival at San Francisco international airport by an Indian family. Above right: Mr. Desai is shown round the Muir Woods redwood forest in San Francisco. To his right is India's Ambassador to the United StatesN.A. Palkhiwala.

Far right: The Prime Minister and Minister for External Affairs Atal Behari Vajpayee examine an Indian artifact at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. Right: From San Francisco, the Prime Minister flew to the Offutt airbase in Nebraska for a visit to a soybean farm (see page 46). He is greeted by children at the airbase.

PRIME MINISTER DESAI WITH PRESIDENT CARTER AND THE FIRST LADY AT THE WHITE HOUSE