October 1981

~

A Long Way From Broadway Regional theaters-far Jrom the Broadway marquee-are infusing the American stage with a new vitality. Many of them ultimately end up stealing the limelight at Broadway too.

One of· the better known groups, Trinity Square Repertory of Providence, Rhode Island, is currently in India, performing plays in Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta, Jamshedpur arid Ma~ras.

AmOlJg the little-known plays that Trinity Square Repertory theater in Providence, Rhode Island, discovered was Nikolai Erdman's The Suicide, banned 50 years ago· in the Soviet Union by Stalin. At left, George Martin, played by Richard Jenkins, delivers a

tirade. as the leader of the intelligentsia. Trinity judiciously mixes classics with discoveries·' and stages them with vigor and finish. Its professionalism is evident in the excellence of its sets such as the one aboveEugene Lfe'S interior for the Ibsen classic Rosmersholm.

I

nthe Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Me and Juliet, a delicious song spoofs two opposing views of theater. One choral group, wringing hands, sings "The theater is dying, the theater is practically dead." A second group, singing in counterpoint and finally triumphing, happily shouts that the theater is living.

In the last 60 years the obituary of American theater has been written at least four times and has always proved premature. The enemy supposedly dealing the lethal blow has been, successively, movies in the Twenties, the Depression in the Thirties, television in the Fifties, and inflation in the Seventies.

While some-unemployed actors especially-mourn that theater in America is dead, drama critic Edwin Wilson declares that it is alive and healthy, and playwright Edward Albee claims that it is thriving as never before.

A survey of the rich variety of regional theaters now performing from Maine to Hawaii, from Alaska to Florida, seems to side definitely with Messrs. Wilson, Albee, and Rodgers and Hammerstein. Ignoring blizzards and blustering March winds, faithful audiences trooped to plays last winter in Minneapolis, Minnesota; Portland, Maine; Anchorage, Alaska; and countless other snowbelt towns. Under balmier' skies they fill sunbelt theaters from Sarasota to Honolulu.

Broadway is being revitalized by theaters maturing in what used to be regarded as the American hinterlands. Nowadays marquees in New York City often shine with plays that made it first at the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., the Alley in Houston, the Tyrone Guthrie in Minneapolis, the Goodman in Chicago, and other houses where talented directors, actors, and playwrights are finding the freedom and encouragement to strike out in new directions.

Talley's Folly, last year's Pulitzer Prize winner in drama, was born in regional theater. So were Da, The Gin Game, The Shadow Box, Children of a Lesser God, Ain't Misbehavin', and two recent Broadway entries, The Suicide and Fifth of July.

The core of what is new and imaginative in American theater lies in about 200 independent, nonprofit, professional companies that have sprung up-all but a handful in the last 15 years-in rejuvenated downtowns, on college campuses, and along the suburban corridors of both coasts. Some stick pretty much to Shakespeare and the classics, others concentrate on new plays.

Some are consistently polished, others are

spotty to mediocre. Most aim to serve their community first, and let national recognition take care of itself.

A flow of funds from foundations and national and state councils of the arts, beginning in the Sixties, has nourished companies of Hispanics, blacks, and women, as well as the major institutions. To examine how these function, consider three theaters that are widely separated by geography: Trinity Square Repertory in Providence, Rhode Island, the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, and the Indiana Repertory in Indianapolis. Each one is unique. So are their founders and their guiding lights, who have had considerable impact both locally and nationally for one reason or another.

The oldest, at a mere 17 years, is Trinity Rep, currently on a performing tour of major Indian cities. It is the beloved brain child of Adrian Hall, an audacious innovator who is sometimes considered the doyen

Regional theater in the United States is becoming a cultural force, often bringing excellent drama, old and new, to communities far from New York City at prices even young people can afford.

of institutional theater. With dogged "devotion he has fashioned, in an unlikely location, a resident theater company producing plays that have usually fascinated, sometimes repelled, first a local, then a national audience. The Suicide, a sardonic Russian comedy about taking one's life as a political statement, was first produced by Hall at Trinity Square nearly 50 years after it was written j;)yNikolai Erdman and banned in the Soviet Union.

Building the ensemble has not been easy.

"There has been blood all over the floor a few times," he admits, mostly because the local establishment couldn't always understand his views of artistic integrity. "Look," he says, "a board of directors at a hospital doesn't tell the doctor how to conduct an operation or what medicine to give. When my board in the mid-Seventies said, 'You're fired,' I said, 'What do you mean, I'm fired?

You are fired.'"

Truth to tell, the board had some reason

to be uneasy. Trinity Rep had been serving some heady fare. There was a play about [convicted murderer] Charles Manson that had local people asking, "Why must you honor such a crumbum?" Hall's reply was, "Shakespeare was not honoring Macbeth."

At any rate, the play was poorly attended.

Such offerings caused an uproar, but, at the same time, Hall was giving Providence healthy servings of the classics, from Shakespeare and Moliere to Arthur Miller and Edward Albee.

Today Trinity Rep has achieved an uneasy peace with its community. Loyal subscribers filled the house last year to 80 percent of capacity. Local business is beginning to see the theater as a community resource, worthy of support, perhaps because its fame has spread nationally through its TV performances and its profitable tours in Washington, Boston, and New York. To Adrian Hall, who was told only a couple of years ago by an Internal Revenue Service agent that "they'd take my house, car, even my clothes" for debts owed by Trinity Rep, the new concord is most welcome.

Compared with Trinity Rep's struggle for identity and support, the Indiana Repertory Theater has a Cinderella history. In the early Seventies, when city fathers were thinking about rejuvenating downtown Indianapolis, a trio of students at Indiana University were thinking about creating a professional theater company. They wrote letters to 99 cities. Four replies, from Rochester, Tulsa, Portland, and Indianapolis, were encouraging. Money and geography being unavoidable considerations, they went to Indianapolis, armed with a study showing that the ideal catalyst for reviving Indianapolis would be a professional theater.

Richard Lugar, then mayor and now a U.S. senator, was receptive. So were wellheeled civic leaders, who donated funds. So were local boosters, who purchased 5,000 season tickets before a single performance was given. For eight years the company performed a moderate mix of classic and modern plays in an old German social hall designed by the grandfather of novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. who is from Indiana.

The company was successful and needed more space; the city core was blooming with new hotels and a convention center. When the old Indiana Theater adjacent to the capitol and the Hyatt Regency was in danger of becoming a parking lot, the corporate community acted. Something over a million dollars apiece was donated by

Lilly Endowment, Inc. and the Krannert Charitable Trust to Indiana Rep to buy and renovate the old movie house.

Gifts of such size are rare, almost unheard of, for most regional theaters, where scrounging for funds is a way of life.

Tom Haas, graduate of the famed Yale Drama School, where he directed such performers as Henry Winkler and Meryl Streep, and founder of another regional theater in Chapel HilI, North Carolina, has a clear view of his role at Indiana Rep: "We are a Midwestern theater. Our mission is first to serve our constituency and second the national theater scene. I don't sense any limitation by our board but doubt if they'd let me concentrate on only avant-garde plays."

The main contribution Indiana Rep has made, so far, to the American theater scene is financial know-how. Ben Mordecai, one of the young founders of the group, is a kind of theatrical wunderkind. Fresh out of Indiana University, he pioneered a new theater, directed six plays, established a firm financial base, and finds himself now much in demand as a management consultant to theaters across the country. Whether or not his own theater will come to national prominence aesthetically remains to be seen. But Amy Van Nostrand and Richard Kneeland in Trinity Rep's production of Buried Child.

so far Tom Haas and Ben Mordec'ai are Shadow Box, a 1977 landmark, won two pleasing their constituency.

Tonys-for best play and for best directing.

Segue now to the Far West to another Five productions from the 1979-80 seasonregional theater which has had a major among them Children of a Lesser Godinfluence on the current American cultural wound up on Broadway and won a slew of scene. It is the Mark Taper Forum, rising awards. The plays which have given Davidlike an impressionistic white souffle between son the most pleasure and pride are two he a symphonic hall and a commercial theater. introduced in the late Sixties, In the Matter The three comprise the Los Angeles Music of J. Robert Oppenheimer and The Trial of Center. Attending a play at the Mark Taper the Catonsville Nine. "I think they said is glamorous, not because Hollywood is next important things about this country's politi¡ door, but because the play you see there cal attitudes at the time." His taste was not today may be a Broadway sensation next universally shared; many saw them, and month. other Mark Taper docudramas, as too leftist Such is the reputation that Gordon in philosophy. But Davidson is committed Davidson, another remarkable man of mod- to challenging his audience, to making them ern American theater, has built almost think in new ways about their lives and single-handedly. A nine-page list of awards, attitudes. ranging from Tonys and abies to distinEncouraging new playwrights and new guished service citations, summarizes the dramatic concepts has been one of David¡ outpouring of plays, television works, and son's steady goals. He has been so successful special community programs originating at that nearly 1,500 new scripts are thrust at the Mark Taper. him every year. "And so few are good. The The seemingly mild-mannered Davidson problem with producing new plays regularly is actually a dynamo. Within a week he is finding enough that are worth doing." could be in New York, supervising a BroadHe is often offered alluring new positions way opening of a Mark Taper play, in in New York, but in his own eyes he has Washington consulting with former col- "the best of two worlds"~the challenge of leagues at the National Endowment for the taking plays east while helping build Los Arts, in Florida shepherding a road tour, Angeles into a theatrical center that could and back in Los Angeles directing a new rival London, with all its topflight resident Neil Simon play. theater companies. "After all, we have the From among Davidson's plays The acting talent of Hollywood, plus a core of producers, directors, and a theater-minded audience."

Edwin Wilson, drama critic of The Wall Street Journal, who regularly covers both Broadway and regional theater, is pleased that regional theater is becoming a cultural force, often bringing excellent drama, old and new, to communities far from New York City at prices even young people can afford. .

But he has some reservations. One is that, in the fever to present new plays, quantity can crowd out quality. He regards some avant-garde works as a retreat from intelligence, and he urges critics, producers, foundation officials, and audiences to "call dIrectors and writers to account." Without some experimental work a theater can be dull, he' acknowledges, but insistence on doing only wild experiments ignores the bill payers.

He also deplores the tendency of some directors always to be looking over their shoulders at Broadway. "It's a very seductive temptation," he says, "but it can become a case of the tail wagging the dog, with local support taking second place to national attention. "

Theater provides a spontaneity and electricity between performer and audience that can't be matched by TV or film.

Still, Wilson sees all the ferment as healthy. "The experience of live entertainment, of the kind that regional theater is now reviving, is irreplaceable. It provides a spontaneity and electricity between performer and audience that can't be matched by TV or film."

In 1964 the late, eminent director Harold Clurman wrote of the then new trend to decentralize theaters, "We must not expect miracles overnight. Time is required to mature all concerned .... These new theaters must not be as good as or better than Broadway but altogether different."

Perhaps regional theater is not yet mature, or altogether different.

But, as Rodgers and Hammerstein said, it certainly is alive.

0 About the Author: Joan Melloan is a New Jersey-based free-lancer who writes primarily about theater, economics and travel.

The Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, (above) has a habit of launching plays that later become hits on Broadway. The latest example o/this is Children of a Lesser God. Phyllis Frelich as the deaf student and John Rubinstein as the. teacher with whom she falls in love, both won Tony A wards for their performance on Broadway.

Right: Ford Rainey (left) and Richard Kneeland in Trinity Square Repertory's production of Sam Shepard's Buried Child, which won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize. Trinity Repertory's current Indian tour features performances of this play. It will also stage John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men.

SPAN 1

A Long Way From Broadway

by Joan Melloan

6 Myth and Reality: U.S. Foreign Policy

by Jeane Kirkpatrick

8 Understanding Each Other's Perceptions Rashid Talib Interviews Jeane Kirkpatrick

9

Seven Who Care

13

More Power to the States

by Thomas J. Foley

16

A Talk With Tom Stop pard

by Mal Oettinger

18

And Now: A Solar-Powered Radio Station

by Leslie Ware

20

Fanciful Art of Plain Folk

by Sandy Greenberg

25

Rural Art in India

by Pupul Jayakar

30

Indian Cooking in American Kitchens

by Nasreen S. Madni

32

The Truly Free Media

by Elie Abel

34 The Journey of Margaret Fuller

by Chirantan Kulshrestha

37

The Body Electric

by Kathleen McAuliffe

41

The Neutron Bomb: The Safer Alternative

by Casper W. Weinberger

42

Ray Retrospective in New York

by Chidananda Das Gupta

45

Letting Nature Take Its Course

by Bit Gilbert

48

California Wine Comes of Age

Acting Editor Managing Editor Assistant Managing Editor

Editorial Assistant

Jacob Sloan Chidananda Das Gupla Krishan Gabrani

Rocque Fernandes

Photo Editor

Avinash Pasricha

An Director

Nand Katyal

Associate Art Director

Kanti Roy

Assistant Art Director

Bimanesh Roy Choudhury

Photographs: Front cover-courtesy Jay Johnson's America's Folk Heritage Gallery. Inside 'front cover, 1-4-courtesy Trinity Square Repertory Company. 5 top-R.K. Sharma; bottom-David Gahr.

7-R.N. Khanna. 9~ Tony KorodY/Sygma. 10-12 People weekly © 1981 Time Inc.: 10-Dale Wittner; II-David Nance; Evelyn Floret; 12-G. Robert BishopjPhotographics-Camera 5.17-The New York Times. 21, 22, 23 top left, 24-courtesy of Jay Johnson's America's Folk Heritage Gallery.

23 top right-Carol Hightower. 23 center right, bottom left and right-Collection of the Museum of International Folk Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Purchased with the aid of funds from the National Endowment for the Arts and International Folk Art Foundation. Photos courtesy of the Museum. 25-R.N. Khanna. 26-27 courtesy Pupul Jayakar. 31-Keith Maki. 38-© Leonard Speier 1979. 39-courtesy Dr. Robert O. Becker.

44-R.K. Sharma. 45-© Robert Frerck: 48 top-Edward Pieratt. 4849-Charles Moore, Black Star; inset top to bottom-courtesy Joseph Phelps Vineyards (2), courtesy Sebastiani Vineyards, courtesy Sterling Vineyards. 49 top-Richard Gross. Back cover-Mike Mitchell.

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 H.K. Mehta at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Haryana.

Use of SPAN articles in other publications is encouraged. except when copyrighted. For permission, write to the Editor.

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Front cover: In 1he Le.aves

by Mattie Lou O'Kelly is typical of American folk art. O'Kelly, 73, one of the most noted folk artists in the United States today, is self-taught. painting what she sees and remembers. See also pages 20-27.

Back cover: The new toast of wine connoisseursa glass of California wine, which is now considered mature enough to compete with world famous European varieties. See also pages 48-49.

New

A LETTER FROM THE PUBLISHER Jeane Kirkpatrick, the Permanent Representative of the United States at the United Nations, made a strong impression with her openness and candor during her recent visit to India. Pointing out the historic and continuing ties between India and the United States, both multiethnic democracies, she took up and rebutted various myths about the Reagan administration in a speech delivered to a notable audience at the India International Centre in New Delhi (p. 6). This administration, she affirmed, does care about human rights and democracy; does care about the developing countries, and plans to help them; and does not view the world exclusively.from the perspective of EastWest conflict.

In a televised interview with Rashid Talib of India Today (p. 8), Ambassador Kirkpatrick explained that the arms the United States is planning to supply to Pakistan are for defensive purposes only, in view of the threat posed to that country by 85,000 Soviet troops stationed in neighboring Afghanistan.

However, underlining the importance of keeping the lines of communication between the United States and India open, she undertook to relay the intense Indian feelings on this matter to the highest levels of the U . S. government. Ambassador Kirkpatrick left this country with considerable Indian appreciation for her forthrightnes s and ability to listen to opinions that differ from her own.

A unique talent ....

This issue contains a splendid example of genuine (nonpolitical) rapport between Indians and Americans: an article on Indian cooking in American kitchens (p. 30). Nasreen S. Madni, an Indian lady settled in the United States, describes the paraphernalia Indian cooks find in kitchens in the United States, and how they use them to good advantage in preparing those flavorsome Indian dishes. Mrs. Madni also tells us what Indian condiments are available in the Indian stores in her neighborhood in Queens, New York. Lewis Mumford (right) argues in his fascinating book, Technics and Civilization, that the really important inventions in the history of mankind have been the domestic ones (not the industrial)-including the growing and preparation of food. After reading Mrs. Madni' s article, one must agree with Mumford.

(Incidentally, SPAN plans to continue to publish articles on various aspects of the lives of Indians in the United States.)

Currently touring India is the Trinity Repertory Theater of Providence, Rhode Island, one of the most innovative of the regional dramatic groups in the United States. An article in this issue (p.l) tells about the work of that group's director, Adrian Hall; it also profiles outstanding regional theater troupes in Los Angeles, California, and Indianapolis, Indiana.

Meanwhile, the FilmIndia selection of outstanding films by Indian directors continues to tour the United States. Chidananda Das Gupta, who took part in the first phase of that tour (the Satyajit Ray retrospective), sets down his firsthand impressions (p. 42). According to all accounts, Americans continue to be fascinated and impressed by contemporary Indian culture.

- - M.P.

MYTH AND REALITY

U. S. Foreign Policy "You are going to like our policies better than you probably think you will." With that declaration, Jeane Kirkpatrick, U.S. Permanent Repr~sentative at the United Nations, explained the realities behind the myths about the Reagan Administration's foreign policy in her recent address at the India International Centre in New Delhi, excerpted below.

•

This is the third time in three years that I have visited your country. t bring to this visit, as well as to the previous ones, an intense personal interest-indeed, a fascination---:-withIndia's incredibly rich and complex civilization .... I could not imagine passing up an opportunity to visit India. But I'm not here this time only in order to indulge my own personal fascination in India, though I think that's reason enough to come. I'm also here as a kind of symbol of the fact that my Government is not indifferent to this region; and my trip is an expression of our interest and concern and determination to listen and talk and begin a new chapter in the ongoing dialogue with India and with other countries in South Asia. . .. I propose to describe some American perspectives on the world and to learn something more about Indian perspectives. Such exchanges will contribute almost surely, if entered in good faith, to a better mutual understanding even if they do not result in complete agreement.

I have discovered in past visits that India and the United States start from a good many common experiences that facilitate mutual understanding ....

Moreover, we have, as I am sure you know, a large and growing number of American citizens and residents from India. All these recent immigrants, as well as the older immigrants-we are a nation of immigrants of course-exert a very important influence on U.S. policies and perspectives on the Third World.

In the United States we have entered a new period whose chief challenge for blacks, Asians, women, and other minorities is to use newly available legal and political rights to win an ever larger share-a fair share, we might say-of wealth, power, skills, status and the other good things our society has to offer. In the developing world we have entered a new period in which the less developed nations, now freed of the last vestiges of the old colonialism, confront the task of using their independence to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number of their citizens. I believe'this new period

offers the prospect of a closer and more cooperative relationship between the U.S. and many of the nations of what has come to be called the Third World. Such a relationship is now possible because there is a new appreciation in both the industrialized countries and the developing world of their mutual interest in economic cooperation.

I believe that the orientation and policies of the Reagan Administration are peculiarly well-suited for this new phase in our relations with less developed nations. Once the thicket of misunderstanding that separates our new Administration from many of the less developed nations has been cleared away, you will find that our goals are entirely compatible with yours, and that our methods are acceptable to you. You are going to like our policies better than you probably think you will.

First, however, it is necessary to dispel three misconceptions about the Reagan Administration's foreign policy that have taken root and flourished in the past eight months: • One is the myth that the United States does not care about human rights and democracy; • Another is the myth that the United States does not care about the less developed countries and does not intend to help them; • And the third is the myth that the United States Government views the world exclusively from the perspective of East -West conflict.

These myths misrepresent the goals, perspectives and plans of the Reagan Administration; they create distrust, disapproval and embarrassment. They inhibit our capacity to be effective in the world.

First, the question of human rights: I desire to say simply that protecting, expanding and enhancing human freedom, democracy and the rule of law is a central commitment of this Administration in its foreign policy. We believe that the enjoyment of human rights is inextricably bound to the enhancement of our own national interest, and that the safety

of and the enjoyment of a rule of law and constitutional democracy, free speech, free press, freedom of opposition, freedom of assembly-all those freedoms which are basic to us-are in fact among the many interdependent aspects of experience in our times.

All of us involved in making, securing, and implementing the Reagan Administration's foreign policy believe that human rights should be, must be, and will be taken into account.

I can assure you for this Administration that we are firmly opposed to arbitrary arrest and detention, torture, restraints on free speech, press, religion.

We believe in democratic government based on free, periodic, competitive elections and we are convinced that that is the best government. We plan to encourage democracy and the rule of law wherever we have the opportunity by our actions to leave peoples more free and governments more lawful. We propose to undertake those efforts wherever we do with prudence and a determination to follow the first rule of the Hippocratic oath-at least do no harm.

The second myth that affects and undermines understanding of the Reagan Administration's foreign policy is that we do not care about· the less developed countries (LDCs) or mean to help them.

The notion abroad is that we in this Administration don't really care about the less developed nations because we are traumatized by East-West relations or overcome by a new isolationism and concerned only with our own "national security-narrowly conceived-or because relative affluence has rendered us callous and indifferent to the hardship of others. But, of course, none of these propositions is true.

We care about the development of the less developed nations for both rational and moral reasons: we care because our economic, social and political well-being are inextricably bound together with theirs; and we also care because, as in the past, the American people respond with empathy and concern for the problems and misery of others.

During her visit to India Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick met Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, and others in the Indian,Government.

The reason the theme of "interdependence" has increasingly come to dominate discussions in the United States of the world economy and of America's role in it, is that the U.S. economy today is more than ever before intertwined with the economies of other nations. A little look at the facts here dramatizes this interdependence in some very concrete ways.

Since 1960, the combined annual exportimport trade of the United States has expanded from $35 billion to $473 billion, making us today the world's largest trading nation. Millions of American jobs depend upon our exports to the rest of the world.

Moreover, our trade with the LDCs has expanded most rapidly of all-to the point where our exports [to them] now account for over 35 percent of the U.S. total product. Today, we sell as many manufactured goods to the LDCs as we do to Europe, Japan and the communist countries combined. Conversely, the importance to the United States of imports from the developing countries-of oil and other vital raw materials, of foodstuffs and manufactured goods as wellhardly needs restating.

In 1979, 45 percent of total U.S. imports, with a value of $95 billion, came from LDCs, and less than half of this total amount was spent for energy costs.

During the last five years the LDCs have consistently provided more than 30 percent of U.S food imports. It is significant, too, that the United States is a major source of capital and credit for the developing countries.

Interdependence-quite literally, mutual dependence on each other-is a fact of the contemporary world; so too are

continuing poverty, malnutrition, dis- ideologies of development which have ease, and illiteracy, in many of the governed our thinking-all of our thinking-in recent decades. societies that we call "developing."

The old development ideology mainThe interaction and interdependence tains that underdevelopment was the reof the United States and the developing countries are not only economic. Re- sult of exploitative policies pursued by the industrialized countries, particularly the fugees from war, revolution, population United States. And it assumes that the pressures, natural disasters, and just plain poverty produce their impact also strategy for development centered on the need for a political struggle against the on our country and our government. so-called neocolonialist West, which was The new United States Government called upon to transfer massive amounts not only cares about the less developed or resources to the Third World. The old areas; we are also ready to help.

We are already giving direct aid, development ideology, in short, pits the bilaterally, regionally, through multimost industrialized countries against the least industrialized countries and sees the lateral institutions. I might say that here relationship between them as a kind of is another myth concerning our Administration-that we are slashing our aid to zero-sum game in which the more for the one means the less for the other. Demultilateral institutions, and our bilateral assistance for developing countries. In velopment is also thought to require comfact, although it is seriously committed to mand economies in which an all-powerful state bureaucracy imposes sacrifices upon controlling inflation, cutting expenditures an usually unwilling population. Freeand balancing the budget, the Reagan dom, it is frequently held, is a luxury Administration has recommended to the which the poor in the less developed U.S. Congress support for all of the United Nations development agencies at countries cannot afford. Freedom would, approximately their current levels or therefore, have to be denied, at least for the present, in order to achieve above. We've also recommended support equality. for developing nations in this part of the The countries that have taken the world at above their current levels. In our course recommended by the old developbudget, our contributions to the U.N. ment model-generally speaking, the system and to development assistance aid countries that were part of the Soviet bloc in this and many other parts of the world or those which practice radical socialwere exempt from the budget cuts to ism-have stagnated economically. which most parts of the budget were subjected. In a democracy this takes Moreover, we believe that it is demonquite a bit of political courage since when strable that their failure cannot be attributed to the absence of resource transfers you are cutting domestic social services many of your domestic constituents do from the West, since during this very not think well of continuing expenditures period the developing world accumulated at the current or higher levels for foreign debts to the highly industrialized nations in the West totaling some $500 billionpeoples.

One of the ways which we are commita figure above and beyond the monies ted to facilitating development is by given to developing countries in the form opening our markets and eschewing eco- of grant aid.

But at the same time, there have been nomic protectionism. The Reagan Administration can and will open U.S. markets in the developing world a number of to the goods of the less developed counsuccess stories, dramatic success stories: Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong tries. We are committed to lowering Kong have progressed so rapidly that protectionist trade barriers wherever and they compete today very effectively with whenever we can persuade our Congress to collaborate-as I'm sure you also the economies of the West. know, in the United States the executive These successes were accomplished in department is never omnipotent; we are defiance of the conventional wisdom dependent on the acquiescence of our about development. Instead of fighting Congress for whatever we do, and our against the industrialized West, these Congress frequently has ideas of their countries which have experienced the own. We are also committed to providing most dramatic growth and have achieved the LDCs with access to our capital mar- self-sustaining growth, cooperated with kets and otherwise working to stimulate the industrialized West and sought a parttrade and development opportunities. nership based on close cooperation and Now, there's another way in which we mutual advantage. Rather than imposing think we can help stimulate development. command economies on captive peoples, We think that there's a powerful case to they have emphasized market forces, free be made for a/new, more realistic ideolotrade, and individual initiative. Where (Text continued on page 44) gy of deve\opment than many of the

In her typically forthright style, U.S. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick answers India Today executive editor Rashid Talib's frank questions on the American policy toward India and Pakistan.

RASHID TALIB: Welcome to India, Ambassador. I remember you were here over two years ago [see SPAN June 1979] and you have since been going places! . Could you tell us what brings you here?

What is the primary objective of your mission through South Asia?

JEANE KIRKPATRICK: The primary objective of my visit is to listen, talk. a bit, to discuss questions of mutual intetestboth concerning the upcoming General Assembly at the United Nations (UNGA)-for which I have special responsibility, of course-and also bilateral relations, just generally. It is customary for U.S. officials to make pre-UNGA calls on nations of particular concern in areas of particular concern. We felt that it was very important to get started on a dialogue which might lead to closer consultation and collaboration.

Q: How did your meetings with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and Foreign Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao go?

A: I think they went very well. In both cases we talked about regional problems, Indo-U.S. relations. The Foreign Minister and I also discussed some of the issues which are likely to come before the General Assembly, for example Afghanistan, Kampuchea, Namibia and the Indian Ocean zone of peace. We talked about U.S.-Pakistan relations and their relevance to India-or their irrelevance to India. In both cases I assured the Foreign Minister and the Prime Minister of the firm intentions of our Government to have as good relations with India as they would permit.

Q: We in India are particularly worked up by your upgrading and updating of arms aid to Pakistan. Our experience is that though the new weaponry supplied to t~e Pakistanis was in the past to fight communism and is on this occasion to take care of the Afghan situation, we find that it is usually turned against us.

A: Actually, I was somewhat surprised to find the strength and universality of these views among the Indians with whom I

have spoken. We know that our arms sale to Pakistan is in no sense aimed at endangering India. We have thought that India has herself undertaken such a very large military buildup and expansion since the last Indo-Pakistan war that she is today invincible from threats from Pakistan. We therefore feel quite surprised to discover that Indians frequently do conceive that Pakistan armed in certain ways still has the possibility of threatening Indian security.

Q: I don't think we are worried about losing a war with Pakistan but we do feel very strongly about not having to join an arms race when the tasks are developmental in this area. No.body wants a war.

A: Well, India today has already engaged in a military buildup. You know one nation's military buildup is another nation's arms race. India today has the fourth largest military establishment in the world and some very sophisticated weapons.

Q: As good as your F-16s?

A: Well, I don't know. I don't know that much about your weapons. I understand you are about 80 percent dependent for your weapons on the Soviet Union.

Q: Who are behind you ...

A: Well, not necessarily. I'm not sure that there's anything that we are providing, or considering providing to Pakistan, which in fact outstrips the sophisticated weapons already in the Indian arsenal.

Q: One time the American policy used to be to supply them defensive equipment.

Many of the items that the Pakistanis are asking for are offensive weaponry.

A: Let me say that I am not a weapons expert, by any means. I do note, however, that there is a great deal of dispute among people about which weapons are defensive and which weapons are offensive-and that frequently what seems to one nation to be defensive, seems to the potential adversary to be offensive. Now we see that all the time ourselves. We certainly do not desire to provide any weapons to anyone which could be used offensively against India. That's certain.

Q: Although it is not for India to say so, American policy has gone wrong in the past-notably in Iran during the Shah's days-in backing regimes that are less than popular or are not willing to submit

themselves to popular elections. We find that the Americans under President Reagan are about to make the same mistake. Would. you like to dispel our misgivings on that?

A: Like India we have relations with a good many governments that are not democratic. The reason we do is that most nations in the world are not democratic; we wish they were democratic. We think democratic government is much the best, but we do also think it is often important to have normal relations with a wide range of governments. Now, you know India today recognizes the Vietnamese client state in Kampuchea. We don't. We may have closer relations than India does with some other governments that are not democratic. I think that in both cases those are testimonies to the force of circumstance.

Q: Let me take you on to a broader plane.

Why is it that these two countries of yours and ours which have so much in common, which are both electoral democracies, frequently have such a mismatch of perceptions?

A: That's a question I've been asking myself a lot lately .... I guess the answer is, first of all, that our situations are very different. We have many things in common, beginning with the fact that we were both British colonies, we are both multiethnic nations and we are both democracies. We are both relatively new nations. But our situations in the world are different, geographically first of all.

Obviously your situation in South Asia, as a close neighbor of the Soviet Union and of China, gives you one perspective on geopolitical strategic questions in the world. Our economic situations are quite different. So I think we have to work harder to understand each other's perceptions. I don't think we've been working hard enough, by the way.. We frequently understand very well that you don't either agree or approve of our policies, and quite frankly we frequently don't agree with or approve of your policies either. I think to work as closely together as we should, given our common ideals and so many aspects of our common heritage, we are just going to have to try harder to talk more often, to listen more carefully to each other and be more empathetic .

TALIB: Well, I hope your visit is a prelude to that.

D

What' can one person do? Seven Americans have found the rewards of volunteering by working in their own communities. Young and old, famous (like television star Henry Winkler, seen here with a young friend) and ordinary, all have found a unique way of showing that they care.

Early this year TV actor Henry Winkler was in his office not far from the set of ABC's popular series, "Happy Days," reciting lines into a tape recorder. "Hey, Ricky, I hear you like the Fonz r the character played by Winkler in the TV series]," Winkler began, "and you like to sing and laugh and joke. I want you to clap for yourself like I'm clapping for you. I love you, Ricky." But this tape was not for his TV show. Winkler was recording it for an audience of one: an 18-year-old autistic boy in Northridge, California.

That was only one of many requests carried out by Winkler, 35, who has quietly emerged as one of Hollywood's most inde-

fatigable samaritans. He recently cohosted a telethon for United Cerebral Palsy and has raised money and made appearances for the Epilepsy Foundation of America, the Rainbow Cancer Foundation (for children), UNICEF, the Los Angeles Children's Museum (of which he is a founder), Aid to Adoption of Special Kids, City of Hope, juvenile courts and a group to help abused children, among others. "Children knock my socks off," he explains. "If you give a little confidence, a little support, you can wa tch a kid fly like a bird."

Winkler began working with children as a student at McBurney High School in New York and continued after creating Fonzie on "Happy Days." "I can use Fonz as a tool," he observes, "because he has a language kids understand. But after that it's me."

Winkler works tirelessly for his causes, but carefully avoids publicizing his contribution.

"This is not scim~thing highfalutin I do," he cautions. "I can't tell other people how to get involved. I can tell them where to go and what they might experience. I'm having a wonderful and very full life. You have to give back that energy or you'll explode."

EMMA ENDRES-KOUNTZ In 1966, spurred by a psychologist friend who challenged her argument that music could prevent violence, concert pianist Emma Endres-Kountz founded an 80-voice children's choir in Chicago's low-income Robert Taylor housing project. "I found six children with absolute pitch," she remembers. "Those children weren't allowed to be prodigies. Their talents were wasted." Never again, decided Endres-Kountz. At 65, she is the director of MERIT (Music Education Reaching Instrumental Talents), a program giving tuition-free musical instruction to 180 disadvantaged children. "Without music and art you can't teach the whole child," she reasons. "The imagination is stifled and the joy is pressed out of them."

She was, herself, a child prodigy.

In 1957, after her 15-year-old son died of a heart attack, she and her husband, Frederick, "faced a choice of grieving for the rest of our lives or giving ourselves to 10

SPAN OCTOBER

1981

young people," she explains. She gave up the concert circuit and now devotes 40 hours a week to teaching and administration.

Endres-Kountz's students, who attend Saturday classes in rooms borrowed from Roosevelt University, are expelled for more than two unexcused absences. Yet there is a long waiting list for admittance, andthanks to an annual budget of $120,000 from local and state governments, corporations and private donors-13 teachers give 35 different classes on everything from flute to French horn. "You can't get this kind of instruction elsewhere even if you want to pay for it," says Emma. Last year 54 percent of her graduates entered colleges with music scholarships. "So many children are victims of an education that lets them get by with their least efforts," says Endres-Kountz.

"With us they cannot."

ROSA CAMPBELL When Rosa Campbell was working as Playboy editor-publisher Hugh Hefner's social secretary a few years ago in Los Angeles, she was surrounded by wealth and glamor but felt "a void in my life. I had a gut feeling that¡ there was something else I should be doing." So she moved back to her hometown of St. Louis to become president of Aunts and Uncles, Inc., a private charity-started by her brother in 1966-that

last year gave away 14,000 pairs of new shoes to needy children and adults in the area. "Shoes mean dignity," she explains.

"You ought to watch their little faces light up when they see them. Some kids as old as 12 have never had a new pair of shoes."

Aunts and Uncles was started in 1966 by Rosa's brother, Lawrence Albert, who mortgaged his dry-cleaning business to get it going. But 11 years later, beset by poor health and a fire that destroyed his warehouse and 15,000 pairs of shoes, he called on Rosa to help. Campbell persuaded manufacturers to donate shoes, and other firms helped her buy more.

Campbell, 45, who remembers the pain of being teased as a child for wearing her brother's shoes on Easter Sunday, has been credited by a school official for lowering dropout rates. "Shoes are not only important for your physical well-being but for your psychological well-being," she says.

"It's hard to go to school and concentrate when you're trying to hide your feet."

Why does she do it? "There's much more involved than just giving a pair of shoes," she says. "It's knowing that every day I live I'm going to get up and help somebody. I may not have a lot now," she notes, "but you don't get as much happiness out of having as you do out of sharing."

GEORGE HARVEY

The ways of caring are as many as the people who care. Emma Endres-Kountz (top, left) teaches music to 180 disadvantaged children.

Rosa Campbell (top) collects and gives out new shoes-and with them, dignity-to the poor.

George Harvey (above) runs weekly book discussion groups for slum teenagers.

"If you see a problem and don't address it, you become part of that problem," declares George Harvey, 49, a New York City Department of Transportation engineer. For the past 17 years his book discussion group has kindled a passion for reading and higher education among teenagers from the mean streets of his native Brooklyn. On Wednesday nights in the basement of his home, 12 to 20 regulars rap among themselves or with guest speakers about weekly assignments that range from Baldwin to Brecht to Bellow. "I want to show the kids there's more to life than the immediate world in which they live," says Harvey, a graduate of New York's Cooper Union whose love of literature came from his West Indian parents. With the help of a chemist neighbor who fills in, Harvey keeps the sessions going 44 weeks a year. In 1969 he took on another of the Three R's. On Saturday mornings, with former students and others lending a hand, 20 to 30 kids tackle math exercises, ~hen play chess as a reward. "I like reading and chess," Harvey shrugs, "so I'm helping where best I can."

Harvey's financial support is minimal.

Parents and corporations have made donations, an engineering association contributes $30 monthly for paperbacks and the State

In 1977 the two-term Democrat started North Carolina's innovative Gov.ernor's ELLEN FREAS Office of Citizen Affairs, thought tobe the For many of the 24,094,000 elderly Amerlargest, most successful state-encouraged icans, isolation remains one of their deepest volunteer program in the United States. fears and dangers. To combat it, schoolWorking through county committees, Hunt teacher Ellen Freas, 51, volunteered a year has provided training, publicity and recruitago to head up Reassurance Contact, a ing assistance. He has personally honored Mercer County, New Jersey, telephone volunteers, whose services range from service that makes daily calls at a preMeals' on Wheels to translating books into arranged time to check the well-being of Braille, with certificates and receptions. elderly citizens living alone. "It's so simple; Hunt also encourages volunteers to work anyone can do this from home," she emphain government offices themselves. His sizes. "You're only spending three to five Citizens' Advocate Office relies on only four minutes a day on each call, and you could paid staffers plus 12 part-time volunteers, save a life." One of those served is an many of them local businessmen, to handle . 81-year-old man who had previously lain 14,000 inquiries a year. The results are helpless for 18 hours in his home after astounding. Hunt estimates that in the past muggers knocked away his walker. Freastwo years volunteers working for the s.tate who has two grown children-spends up to have performed over 400,000 "tasks" that 25 hours a week working for the program, ¡JIM HUNT would otherwise have needed 14,500 full- which has quadrupled to 37 callers under Budget cuts are forcing many state and time employees and cost the taxpayers $170 her direction (it is part of a nationwide local governments in the United States to million. organization run by the nonsectarian ConHunt's wife, Carolyn, a longtime volun- tact Teleministries USA). "This is a way of abandon social programs, but North Caroliteer, first interested him in voluntarism. na's Governor Jim Hunt thinks he has found giving the elderly the security to live alone," a way to maintain what he calls the "work of Their children, Baxter, 17, and Rachel, 15, says Freas. She now recruits in nursing compassion." Every Monday morning, after work with the blind. "Good citizens ought homes to find callers among the elderly his weekly cabinet meeting, Hunt, 43, drops to do three things," declares the governor. themselves. "They like to be on the giving "They should pay their taxes. They should end too," she explains. Even on a small state business and hurries across downtown Raleigh to Broughton High School. There contribute to the charity or church of their scale, she adds, "Voluntarism is stimulated he spends an hour tutoring a student in math choice. But money's no substitute for get- by just a little success. Everything you do is to prepare for the statewide high school ting involved with your nands and heart. We appreciated. " competency test that Hunt himself initiate<;l. have 226 million people in this country," RUBEN GOMEZ "Everyone should give up some time to help says Hunt. "If we get them all volunteering, DESIRE, AMBITION , STAMINA, why, we could change the face of America." someone else," believes Hunt.

VICTORY are the watchwords painted on the walls of the Lordsburg (New Mexico) By running a gym for youngsters in his town, milk-delivery truckdriver Ruben Gomez hopes to Boxing Club and Gym. Its founder, Ruben discipline them. Police credit him with helping to lower the juvenile crime rate.

Gomez, 23, has reckoned their value in his life and is eager to pass them on to the 50 boys who frequent his makeshift ring in the small (pop. 4,200) southwestern town. Every workday, after a nine-hour shift driving a milk-delivery truck, Go~ez runs five kilometers with his novice boxers, then coaches them for bouts he has arranged with nearby clubs. He hopes the discipline will keep the youths out of trouble, and police credit him with helping to lower the juvenile crime rate. "I don't w:tnt these k,ids to be like I was, so I give them a straighter line to walk," says Ruben, who at 13 was snatching purses. Though he starred in high school sports, nothing so inspired him as the movie Rocky. He taught himself boxing and talked a landlord into letting him turn an ex-dancehall into a gym. Gomez then collected $3,000 from the town and county for new speed bags, mouthpieces and gloves. "1 want to get more kids interested in what they can do for themselves," he says. "Once that happens, there's no way they can tltrn' back." , '0

University of New York at Stony Brook provided chess sets and calculators. But over the years Harvey has taught hundreds of students-some for as long as four years.

An astonishing 80 percent of them go on to college. His alumni sometimes return, and a few of them have started book circles of their own. "A lot of us went to college solely because of George," says Janet Tucker, 32, now a customer service representative with a firm. "He gave us an excitement over books we never got in school." .

Harvey believes that the only requirement for starting this kind of program is enthusiasm. "Volunteer in something you really like to do," he advises. "If you"like theater, start a theatrical group, and don't wait for someone else to do what you' can do."

MORE POWER TO THE

STATES

For the first time in many decades, a serious attempt is under way in the United States to reduce the role of the Federal Government in the affairs of state and local bodies. The states' struggle to regain their lost power has been helped by President Reagan's determination to "renew the concept of federalism ... and enrich the power and purpose of states and local communities." He has called his budget proposals the first phase in this process.

, After decades of bucking society's problems up to the federal level, officials of American states say they are finding new-and in many cases better-ways of delivering services to the public on their own.

Gone are the days when all the offices of most states could be housed in the capitol building itself. Now state leaders deal with multibillion-dollar budgets, rely on the expertise of highly professional staffs housed in shiny new buildings and boast that they are where the action is, As recently as 1961, a majority of state legislatures in the United States met only every other year. Today, only seven states stick with biennial sessions, and lawmakers in many of the larger states stay in session nearly as long as the U,S. Congress.

Sheer size of state governments has shot up rapidly.

In 1955 the American states' combined payrolls totaled fewer than 1.2 million persons. Now the number is around 3.7 million. All state revenue added up to less than $19,000 million in 1954, compared with some $300,000 million today.

Observes Democrat Fred Heard, president of the Oregon Senate: "As opposed to the snail's pace of Congress, anything is possible at the state level. We can see the problems, make inquiries and bring about change.

We're manageable."

Above: Flowers liven up the proceedings at the opening of a session of the Florida legislature in Tallahassee, Most American state legislatures now meet oftener than before, an indication of their increased workload and responsibility.

Why the big change in status of state governments?

Experts cite two major reasons.

One main factor was the U.S. Supreme Court's Baker v. Carr decision of 1962, which decreed that one person's vote should not be worth more than another's. Since most state legislatures were dominated by overrepresented rural areas, nearly every state was ordered to reapportion its lawmaking branch. That then led to an influx of younger and activist-minded legislators, along with replacement of politically appointed aides by professional staffs.

The other major force in revitalizing state governments was the huge infusion of federal money to states from the Great Society programs of the 1960s. Many of these efforts required American states to match a certain ,percentage of the federal funds in order to receive , them-often getting states involved in areas they had not dealt with before, But with these new programs-aid to schools, Medicaid, mass transit, child nutrition and others-came binding federal regulations spelling out precisely how the aid was to be administered. It was part of the price the states had to pay.

This situation was just the opposite of what the nation's Founding Fathers had in mind. Drafters of the U.S. Constitution carefully set out what the federal powers would be and then, in the 10th Amendment, said all other powers "are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people." In The Federalist papers, compiled to explain the intent of writers of the Constitution, James Madison said: "The powers reserved to the several states will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement and prosperity of the states."

For a century and a half, the states flourished as the primary source of political power. They built the highways, laid down education standards, administered nearly all civil and criminal laws, regulated utilities, promoted industry and chartered the banks, Until the unified National Guard was formed in 1903, the states maintained their own armed forces, known as militias.

States took the lead, too, in social progress. North Dakota enacted one of the country's first child-labor laws just after World War I. Wyoming gave the vote to women in 1896-24 years before it was adopted nationally.

Wisconsin has had workers' compensation, providing recompense for job-related injuries and illness, for 70 years.

Even before the 17th Amendment to the Constitution was adopted in 1913, some states elected their U .S, senators by popular vote, The Constitution originally called for state legislatures to elect senators.

It was no coincidence that U.S. presidential candidates usually came from state government, most often from the ranks of governors. Five of the eight presidents who served in this century prior to World War 11William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge and Franklin Roosevelt-had been governors.

Students in Oklahoma take part in an art program sponsored by the state university, public schools and a city foundation.

Under President Reagan's proposals, states will have freedom and maneuverability in using federal funds and grants.

State governments began to go into decline in 1933 when Franklin Roosevelt came to Washington with a mandate to bring the country out of a deep depression, States by themselves had proven unable to solve the huge economic problems the country faced, and Roosevelt launched a series of national programs to try to right the situation. World War II, Korea and Vietnam kept the center of interest on Washington while state government stagnated, State officials in both parties today agree that Washington has been overreaching itself.

Republican Governor Richard Snelling of Vermont says: "The federal system has reached a crossroads. The role of the states has been eroded to the point that the authors of the Constitution would not recognize the intergovernmental relationships they crafted so carefully in 1789."

Democratic Governor Bruce Babbitt of Arizona adds: "It is long past time to dust off The Federalist papers and to renew the debate commenced by Hamilton, Madison and Jefferson. They would ask not only whether a proposal is a good program but also 'Is this a federal function?' "

Oregon's Governor Victor Atiyeh, a Republican, attributes the comeback of the states to a "default in action" by the Federal Government. He cites energy policy as an example. Oregon developed its own program two years ago, Atiyeh says, because the Carter Administration failed to come up with a national policy.

Democratic Governor George Busbee of Georgia, chairman of the National Governors' Association, sees the states' relationship with Washington in a transition phase. He observes: "What we are now trying to do is to begin the sorting-out process to see which of those programs can best be administered by the Federal Government and which programs can be best administered by the states."

President Ronald Reagan favors turning over power to states and local governments wherever possible. He has ordered an inventory of federal lands and buildings to determine which can be returned to state control or to private ownership. He also has appointed a "federalism task force" to study ways to reduce Washington's influence over state and local affairs.

The tangle of regulations surrounding the various federal programs is clearly the biggest complaint of most state leaders. Comments Republican Fred Anderson, president of the Colorado Senate: "The state legislature has been reduced from a deliberative body to an administrative agency. Our sole function is to place our signature on federal dictates."

Says Republican Governor William Clements of Texas: "I find every time you go diddling around with the lion-in this case the Federal Government-you get bitten.

We have to reverse this trend, or we'll get eaten up."

Most state officials welcome President Reagan's proposal to substitute block grants for the more restrictive categorical grants that the U.S. Congress enacted to insure that aid money is spent precisely for the single purpose that Washington had in mind. With block grants, backers argue, states could concentrate the federal funds on the programs in greatest need.

James F. McAvoy, director of Ohio's environmental protection program, supports block grants in contending: "The federal role should be to say, 'This is the program, these are the goals, this is the amount of money you have to do it, and if you don't accomplish these goals we'll cut of your funds.'"

Oklahoma Governor George Nigh, a Democrat, echoes the views of several state executives when he says he could live with President Reagan's budget cuts, if the states were allowed to spend the money the way they want.

"We tell them we can do better with less," declares Nigh.

In some ways, the states have surged ahead of Washington in innovative government in recent years.

California enacted a clean-air act in the 1960s that was tougher than the federal measure passed years later.

First Colorado in 1978 and then eight other states passed laws to index taxes, thus keeping inflation from forcing taxpayers into higher tax brackets. The Federal Government has just adopted such a statute.

Colorado also passed a sunset law that automatically terminates state programs not reviewed and approved

within seven years-a proposal that the Congress has been wrestling with for several years but has yet to pass.

Pennsylvania approved a tough strip-mining reclamation law in 1968, 10 years before the Congress approved its national statute.

Just as states complain about harsh treatment by federal authorities, local government officials protest what they say are undue restrictions imposed by the states. The friction, however, seldom gets as rough as in federal-state relations. Furthermore, many states now are allowing cities and other local governments more power over their own affairs.

Says James Duerk, director of the Ohio Department of Economic and Community Development: "We believe that governments should make their own decisions, as long as those are within the law. Local governments have been frustrated in the past by the state's sometimes highhanded approach. That's changing."

Example: A decade ago, Vermont passed a law to regulate rapidly accelerating land development. The law set up nine administrative districts with environmental commissions made up of local citizens to review permits and minimize the impact on small towns.

When Californians in 1978 approved Proposition 13, that drastically reduced property taxes-the prime source for funding county operations-the state legislature approved bailing out county governments by transferring billions of dollars from the state surplus to continue financing county services.

March Fong Eu, California secretary of state, notes: "In the final analysis, the person who pays the bill is the one who holds the power. If local governments are forced to pick up the tab, we're going to have to give them the power to use their money as they see fit."

Burton Barr, Republican leader of the Arizona House of Representatives, predicts that local government will turn to state capitols when it sees the Federal Government clo~ing its purse strings. "Instead of our mayors and members of county boards flying off to Washington, they will just get into their cars and come to see us," says Barr.

Yet urban-rural splits remain in such states as Michigan, where the issue of aid to Detroit permeated the 1980 legislative races outside the city itself.

Recalls State Representative William A. Ryan of Detroit: "Anyone who voted for a subway in Detroit or a school-aid formula to help Detroit schools had a very difficult time of it."

Ryan fears that continuing hostility will lead to a legislature lacking a statewide view.

Whether the outlook is optimistic or pessimistic, it is clear that the role of states is in transition.

As Vermont's Governor Snelling expresses it: "We can have an accountable and efficient federal system-but only if we learn to focus on results rather than processes, on needs rather than regulations and on people rather than programs."

D About the Author: Thomas 1. Foley is an associate editor with the U.S. News & World Report, Washington, D.C.

ATALK WITH

Tom Stoppard Flying to his post in New Delhi SPAN editor Mal Oettinger discovers that his seatmate is none other than British playwright Tom Stoppard, many of whose plays have had long runs on Broadway. In an instant interview Stoppard discusses some of his ideas on theater and reminisces on his boyhood years in India.

BERNARD: Americans are a very modern people, of course. They are a very open people, too. They wear their hearts on their sleeves. They don't stand on ceremony. They take people as they are.

They make no distinction about a man's background, his parentage, his education.

They say what they mean, and there is a vivid muscularity about the way they say it. They admire everything about them without reserve or pretense of scholarship.

They are always the first to put their hands in their pockets. They press you to visit them in their own homes the moment they meet you, and are irrepressibly goodhumored, ambitious, and brimming with self-confidence in any company. Apart from all that I've got nothIng against them.

-New-Found

Land by Tom Stoppard

Five in the morning, I'm logy as a toad, been flying more than 10 hours and trying to catch a little sleep in London's Heathrow Airport. When I board the Londonto-Vienna flight and look carefully at my seatmate, I figure I must be hallucinating.

He's dressed in an elegant, almost Edwardian striped suit with a waistcoat, looks a bit like an actor in The Importance of Being Earnest. Of course! That's the connection-he must be Tom Stoppard, the brilliant playwright who used Wilde's comedy as the framework for a hilarious improvisation on the Zurich sojourns of James Joyce, V.1. Lenin and the Dada poet Tristan Tzara, Travesties.

Politely I ascertain that my seatmate is indeed the redoubtable Stoppard and tell him I'm a great admirer of his work. The words almost catch in my throat: I've read the many bitter complaints of celebrities besieged and cornered. But Stoppard cheerfully launches into conversation and after learning of my connection with SPAN, says: "Understand that I hate publicity; it's the last thing I would

seek. But I spent part of my boyhood in India and I have very fond memories of it. I've also had considerable experience with the American theater. So, if you like, I'll give you a short interview."

Stoppard's first play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, has toured India, he noted. In this 1965 work that established his international reputation, Stoppard imagined how the lurid and complex goings-on in Shakespeare's Hamlet must have seemed from the point of view of the prince's two fulsome '(and ill-fated) schoolmates.

"I got a letter from Bombay asking me for the 'secret of my technique.' I wrote back that there's no 'secret' and no 'technique.' 'I just sit down and work and don't think about what my technique is," Stoppard told me. (In an interview in Newsweek four years ago, he had commented, "My feeling is that in theater the emotions should be gratified as well as the intellect. Theater is an event, not a text. I respond to spectacle. Ambushing the audience is what theater is all about."

He also noted that writing is "a strange race between two separate instincts. You can't begin writing until you know what's going to happen-but what happens is dictated by what has already been written.")

Stoppard compared working in the theater in the United States and in England. "I've never enjoyed having a play on in New York. The difference is money, worrying about the box office and the critics. There's too much riding on it.

Some of my plays have been successfully received in New York, some have not, but even with a success I find that in New York I have a 'London audience' for a few weeks, then I run out of them." He paused. "A culture gap develops."

On the other hand, "American actors are a joy to work with," and regional

theaters, such as American Conservatory Theater (ACT) in San Francisco and the Arena Stage in Washington, present "the kind of theater I believe in-ensemble playing, high standards." He said he regrets that he's seldom been in America without a play to worry about. "It seems I'm always in a hotel room or a theater."

He did get a chance to take two of his four children to Disneyland-"We all adored it."

ARTHUR: The Silver Chief is rolling through vineyards and orchards, a sunbathed Canaan decked with peach and apricot, apples, plums, citrus fruit and pomegranates, which grow to the very walls of pink and yellow bungalows to the very edge of swimming pools where nearnaked goddesses with honey-brown skins rub oil into their long downy limbs. Could this be paradise?-or is it after all, purgatory?-for look!-there, where picture places rise from the plain, searchlights and letters of fire light up the sky, and a screaming hydra-headed mob surges, fighting and weeping around an unseen idol-golden calf or Cadillac, we do not stop to see-for now beyond the city, beyond America, beyond all, nothing lies before us but an endless expanse of blue, flecked with cheerful whitecaps. With wondering eyes we stare at the Pacific, and all of us look at each other with a wild surmise-silent"I think of my Indian time as a halcyon period of my life," Stoppard said to me, recalling the tragedy that had led him to India. He was born Tomas Traussler in Zlin, Czechoslovakia, in 1937. When he was 18 months old, his family moved to Singapore, where his father worked as a physician for the Bata shoe company.

When war broke out, young Tom, his mother and brother were evacuated to Darjeeling, where she was named manager of a Bata shoe shop. His father remained in Singapore as a medical officer in the British Army and later died in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. For four years, Tom and his brother attended an American international school called Mount Herman.

"I've never been back. I often dream about it," he said. "In a play I did for radio, Where Are They Now?, a character remembers complete happiness, running his finger along the wall of a school. That was me at Mount Herman. The college was down an unmade road. My brother and I would sit on a bench and look down

the dusty road for my mother. We lived on a street down from the Mount Everest Hotel."

For a while the family lived in Kanpur, then in Lahore. "I remember the heat and the smells, which weren't at all unpleasant," Stoppard said. "We lived near a towpath, and I would watch the camels going by. I was never part of the pukka sahib India."

In late 1945 his mother married an English army officer, Major Kenneth Stoppard. Tom spent some time in Delhi.

Then his stepfather took the family to England. "We arrived in Southampton one winter day, and that was it."

When his own children get a bit older, Stoppard said, he would like to visit India again. His wife, Miriam, is a physician and a writer and producer of television documentaries.

Stoppard has written for television, radio and the screen in addition to doing numerous plays. "I don't like to think about my film career," he said wryly, referring to adaptations of Graham Greene's The Human Factor, directed by Otto Preminger (who is notoriously difficult for writers to work with), and Desire, from a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, directed by Germany's Rainer Fass-

I

binder. Of the three TV shows Stoppard has written, Pr,ofessional Poul is "the first one I was happy with." A remarkably witty and suspenseful play, it deals with an apolitical British don who agrees to participate in an academic forum in a totalitarian country, mainly because it will give him a chance to see the British team play World Cup football there. He un~illingly becomes involved in the problems of a former student who has written a scholarly paper that the authorities will not permit him to publish. The professor experiences the country's repression firsthand in trying to deliver parts of his own lecture that were disapproved, and bravely and cleverly manages to smuggle his student's manuscript out of the country for publication in England.

Stoppard's work has become increasingly political. Having made his reputation with wizardry of language and playful sophistry, he had turned to crusading for freedom of expression. ("If you are writing about moral absolutes, they can be set almost anywhere and in any context," he once said to critic Peter Rosenwald.)

An example of how Stoppard blends his antic streak with his deep-felt sense of responsibility is Every Good Boy De-

serves Favour, which in fact accounted for his taking the flight to Vienna on which I met him. He explained that he had become friendly with American composer-conductor Andre Previn, who suggested it might be fun to have a play in which a symphony orchestra would be a central character. "That was his idea, and he left the details up to me,". Stoppard said. Stoppard's play concerned two men in a Soviet mental institution, one of whom imagined himself to be a conductor complete with hallucinatory orchestra, the other of whom was a political dissident. The play was successful in London, New York and Washington, and was about to be produced in Vienna. Previn was flying from Pittsburgh, where he is musical director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, to join Stoppard there.

"We're meeting in Vienna to discuss what's bothering the director about the ending and try to fix it," Stoppard said with a modesty that not every world-class playwright displays.

While EGBDF (that's right, the title is based on the notes of the Western scale) comes as close to polemic as Stoppard permits himself, his delightful paradox and irony is still evident. Consider this speech from the doctor who runs the asylum to the dissident: The idea that all people locked up in mental hospitals are sane while the people walking about outside are all mad is merely a literary conceit, put about by people who should be locked up. I assure you there's not much in it. Taken as a whole, the sane are out there, and the sick¡ are in here. For example, you are here because you have delusions that sane people are put in mental hospitals.

As our interview was drawing to a close, I asked Stoppard if he had met Vladimir Nabokov, whose work he had arranged for the screen and whom I knew he admired. "When I was in Moscow on a visit, I found some matchboxes with different Pushkin characters on them and sent them to him. They arrived just a week or so before he died. His wife Vera sent me a note." What did it say? "Just that the matches got there and it was nice," he said simply. "Once I was in Montreux (Switzerland) and I stood looking at the grand hotel where he lived. I was too shy to go and try to introduce myself. I wish I had met him." Of all his literary brothers, I believe, Stoppard is one that Nabokov would have enjoyed talking with. I certainly did.

0

AND NOW

I Solar-Powered ladio Statio Rolling along through the flat, checkered Ohio farmland west of Toledo, near Bryan, Dolly Parton wails over the car radio: "You're the only one/You're the only one/Take me back to where we started from."

The words she sings from the album Great Balls of Fire have been transmitted from countless country music stations in the United States, but they are peculiarly suited to the one that plays them often in this northwest corner of Ohio. For in WBNO, the city of Bryan has the one and only radio station powered by that greatest ball of fire, the sun.

There are other attributes of which Bryan is proud. Signs on the road into town from Montpelier proclaim that Bryan has "excellent shops, restaurants, recreation," and that it is called the Fountain City because of its artesian wells. Ohio Art, maker of Etch-a-Sketch and other toys, occupies 93,000 square meters in the city, and Spangler Candy turns out three million Dum-Dum Lollipops a day. Bryan has even been promised a station stop on the train route from Chicago to New York City.

But nothing has given this city of 8,000 quite the exposure that WBNO did after it "went solar" on August 29, 1979.

This kind of attention was unknown in Bryan three years ago, when the U.S. Department of Energy contracted with Lincoln Laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to set up a small, commercial project using photovoltaic cells. These cells-different from the blackened solar collectors that use the sun's rays to warm houses or heat water-are semiconductors that convert sunlight directly into electricity.

The laboratory, operated by MIT for the Federal Government, already was conducting a project at the University of Nebraska's Mead Experiment Station in which the sun was used sporadically to run an irrigation pump in summer and to dry out grain in winter, but it needed another project, one that would use sunlight for one purpose constantly and during specific daylight hours.

"We dreamed up the idea of the radio station," said Burt Nichols, the engineer in charge of the project at Lincoln Laboratory. "We thought a daytime radio station was a good idea because stations are only up from sunrise to sunset and are usually in an open space with unused land-it's clear and good for the sun. Also, at the lab, we've been in the radio and radar business for 25 years."

The lab people could have looked for a station in predictably sunny Arizona or Southern California, but they wanted one in a section of the country that was both heavily populated and near MIT, so the northeast quarter of the country was selected. Besides, if the system succeeded in cloudy climes, it might succeed almost anywhere. So MIT sent form letters to about 750 daytime AM stations in New England, the mId-Atlantic states, and the upper Midwest to find out if any of them was interested in setting up a solar-powered station.

At WBNO, general manager Luke Thaman thought the idea sounded interesting: "We immediately called MIT, and they told us photovoltaics was a way to produce electric energy and that tbey were searching for a daytime radio station that

Bryan, a small city in Ohio, operates the first U.S. solar radio station. An array of 33,600 photovoltaic cells (above) generates 15 kilowatts of electricity from sunlight. would go along with the project. So we answered the letter and said we were interested." WBNO-FM was not involved.

About two months later, WBNO was one of 105 stations to receive a letter asking how much each would contribute toward the project. Thaman offered the land-one-tenth of a hectare was needed for the equipment-and also agreed to build a room to store the batteries that serve as backup to the system, and a fence around the site. He also promised to buy an inverter, to change the direct current produced by the solar cells to alternating current for broadcast, and a new solid state transmitter, which the station had needed anyway. Total cost to WBNo.: about $50,000. Total cost to the Energy Depar:tment and MIT, which provided most of the equipment needed: about $250,000.

Of the eight stations that sent proposals to MIT, WBNO was "head and shoulders above the rest," MIT's' Nichols said.

It's true that 500-watt WBNO-with 10 employees and a listening area of about 80 kilometers-is not the biggest of stations. But Bryan has one thing that most urban areas couldn't offer-land.

A look at the system that runs WBNO requires a flight into Toledo Airport and an hour's drive to Bryan.

The low brick building housing the 500-watt WBNO station is inconspicuous, but the sign by the flagpole is hard to miss. It is gray and White, with a jagged yellow sun emerging from the top: "Number One In The Sun, Nation's First Solar-Powered Radio Station, WBNO-Sunsational Radio."

Luke Thaman, a tall man with neatly combed white hair

absorbed light are separated and swept out into an external cfrcuit, where they produce electricity.

The direct current, collected in thin wires visible through each disk, passes through larger wires leading from each rack into the controller, a tall white box covered with buttons and lights. Included are alarms that go off when anything malfunctions. The controller monitors the electricity coming into it and keeps track of the backup power supply. From here, electricity goes into the inverter, a blue box-in still another room-that changes the direct current to alternating current sent to the transmitter.

Since each blue disk produces about half a watt of electricity on a sunny day, the whole array can supply about 15 kilowatts-after allowing for the loss of some electricity as it passes through the wires. This is much more than the average of four kilowatts per hour the station uses. Some of the rest is stored in four 540-kilogram lead-acid batteries that line one wall of the controller room. When these are charged at 90 percent of capacity, any electricity the transmitter can't use will light the station and heat a studio. If excess electricity still is being produced, the controller begins to shut off racks. But sports director Rod Harrington remembers one day when he and a and a schoolteacher's habit of asking questions to make sure coworker couldn't do enough to use up electricity. the listener has understood what he's said, paces around a "One day we only had two panels on-we couldn't get rid gravel-covered clearing behind the station. On it sit 100 of enough energy. The alarms went off. We didn't know what to 1.2-by-2.4-meter glassy¡slabs propped up at a 50-degree angle do! We had the AM station, all the lights turned on, andwe had and supported by spindly metal legs resting on cinder blocks .. the typewriter turned on on purpose, when it wasn't even being Thaman brushes some rain off one panel and gives another a used, to get rid of the extra energy." That day, the station had swift kick in the legs to show it is made of expensive material. one of its few problems with the system-a condenser in the inverter couldn't handle the load and overheated.

The panel shivers. He grins. Despite their flimsy appearance, If there is more than enough electricity generated on a the panels have withstood winds of more than 160 kilometers sunny day, what about a day when clouds cover the sun and the per hour in laboratory tests. solar cells are wet with rain? Surprisingly, the controller still The slabs are arranged in seven rows spread' far enough apart so they don't shade each other. Each is made up of eight registers some electricity from the array, and a light bulb squares covered by 7.60-centimeter dots in varying shades of hooked up to a lone rack of modules glows dimly. But on blue. These squares are called modules, and the modules form cloudy days, and just after sunrise and before sunset, the sun the glassy slabs, or racks, that make up the whole system, called can't supply all the power needed, so batteries must give up some of their stored electricity. WBNO can rely on batteries for an array.

The blue dots, 33,600 of them in WBNO's array, are made a day to a day and a half, Thaman says. "If it's real cloudy, of silicon, which after oxygen is the most abundant element in when we have absolutely no sunshine at all, a deep overcast, of the earth's crust. More specifically, they are made of silicon course it'll only last us for about a day. But since we've been on, crystal, composed of. atoms in a regular, latticelike pattern, we haven't had any day that we haven't generated a little bit of Each atom is bound to four equidistant neighboring atoms and electricity." They will have to wait and see, Thaman says, whether snow will cover up the array or melt off and let the has four electrons, called valence electrons, in its outermost electron orbit. These are shared with neighboring atoms in panels accept extra'iight reflected from snow on the ground. covalent bonds, which hold the crystal together.

When the battery storage drops to 25 percent of capacity, But when packets of light energy, or photons, hit a silicon Toledo Edison Company supplies any electricity needed. In disk, they break the bonds holding valence electrons. Once a September 1980, the sun provided 98 percent of the station's bond is broken, the electron moves away, leaving a "hole" into power. In October, a cloudier month, it produced only 75 which another electron may move. If hole and electron are not percent. separated quickly, they will recombine, and no current will "Our experience so far indicates that the array will supply flow. Separation is accomplished by introducing impurities into 70 to 90 percent of the electric power needed by the transmitter each side of the silicon disk. Two regions are created. One is over. the course of a year," says Thaman. "And that's more than rich in holes (p-type silicon), the other in electrons (n-type our expectations."

0 silicon). Between these regions is the p-n junction, the heart of the solar cell. It is here that electrons and holes produced by

¡

Fanciful of Plain Folk

Often thought of as something that stopped with the onset of the 20th century and mass production, folk art is alive and well in today's America.

It is found in isolat~d rural homes and posh city galleries too. It has been the subject of magazine articles and prestigious museum shows, and it is the active pursuit of avid collectors. People from octogenarians to youngsters in.their teens are trying it. And there are as many definitions of it as there are people involved.

Carving, sculpture, painting; pottery, quilts, constructions, needle work~the works produced encompass many varied media, often combining Iseveral techniques as the creative vision of the artist. dictates. Remembered, religious, utilitarian, fanciful, realistic-the interpretations are as individual as the myriad people doing them.

But just what is folk art? According to Robert Baron, folk arts coordinator for the National Endowment for the Arts, "Some people look on it as the unique creation of the individual. Others see it as a part of the shared tradition rooted in a community aesthetic.

But one thing is universally accepted-that folk art is learned outside of formal means of instruction and worked on outside of academic tradition." It has been called "the work of people untrained m traditional artistic skills and unaware of those who are."

"Outsider art" is actually the term preferred by many proponents of contemporary folk art. One of the early supporters of the current folk art vogue, Jeff Camp, collector and dealer from Tappahanock, Virginia, thinks the art is a product of untrained artists reacting to an emotional experience such as "the loss of a loved one, a religious conversion, retirement, illness." Camp says the artists are different from their neighbors, often tending to live outside society. As he puts it, "American culture is rapidly losing its ritual, we've homogeAbout the Author: Sandy Greenberg, who has worked as a free-lance

photographer, is a picture story editor for SPAN in Washington, D.C.

nized the soul out of it. Outsider art is raw-the equivalent of tribal art in our society. When folk artists m'ake art, they're following their heart, soul and mind."

By his own admission, Camp's definition of folk art is much narrower than many. Herbert W. Hemphill, collector, author, and one of the founders of the Museum of American Folk Art in New York City, gives a much broader scope to what comprises folk art.

Citing the tradition of cigar store signs and shop advertising from earlier centuries, Hemphill feels even "industrial items such as neon are OK as long as they are handwrought."

One of those instrumental in fostering the ever-growing interest in 20th-century American folk art, Hemphill's prime concern is for the emotional content and artistic quality of any given work, and for what he feels is the reflection of the artist's personal vision.

For many of those seriously interested in folk art, part of the fun is being able to meet the artists face to face, visiting and seeing where they live, listening and talking to them, learning the stories behind their various creations, finding out what motivates them.

And motivated they are. From the Bible-inspired Reverend Howard Finster, self-styled "Man of Vision," to fanciful wood carver Miles Carpenter to quiltmaker Pecolia Warner to unknowns from city and country alike, untrained artists are creating works out of their own experience, intuition, eccentricities and even obsession. As Jeff Camp says, "They have to do it. There's a need to communicate. " And as Hemphill puts it, "What's exciting about 20th-century folk art is that you are surrounded by it .... " Judging by the exhibits, books, avid collectors-and the prodigious output of the artists-Americans would agree.

0 Facing page: In Street Singer 90-year-old Bill Roseman of Brooklyn, New York, recalls the simple city life of his earlier days. He also paints scenes relating to contemporary senior citizens and their activities.

FANCIFUL ART OF PLAIN FOLK continued

The Apple Harvest is typical of the paintings of Janis Price of Newark, Ohio, who started to paint in earnest only after her children had grown up. Price paints by instinct, without a complete mental image of thefinished product.

Her influences stem from ta,lestold her by her grandmother and great grandmother when she was a child.

The sharp-edged, unfussy clarity of Return of Three Black Horses is visible in all of retired nurse Anroinette Schwab's landscapes and cityscapes. Her late husband, a formally trained artist, encouraged her to start painting after seeing the attractive figures she used to make out of leftover pastry dough.

Her inspiration is her memory-many of her paintings recall her North Dakota childhood-or her favorite surroundings, including her New York neighborhood.

Working only with sugar pine and a penknife, John Cross produces "woodcarving in the finest folk art tradition. " Most of his works, such as Strong Man, are of men engaged in athletics

Elijah Pierce of Columbus, Ohio, started carving as a hobby while he was a barber.

Now 90 and retired, he carves reliefs and wood

or everyday activities.

A writer, Cross carries small pieces of wood around with him and whittles whenever and wherever-on planes, bank queueshe finds the time.

sculptures of Bible stories, animals and sports heroes. This piece, St. John in the Wilderness, was done around 1960.

When Miles Carpenter of Waverly, Virginia, opened an ice house and fruit stand in the mid-Fiftie5, he carved a trade sign on a watermelon slice.

A later expression of the idea produced The Kids (below).

Horacio Valdez of New Mexico, carved this death cart (center) inspired by those made by santeros (saint makers) of his state. The originals feature life-size wooden skeletons, but instead of a scythe, the rieter holds a bow and arrow.

Felipe Archuleta of Tesuque, New Mexico, was a carpenter until the mid-1950s. When work became scarce, he found a new vocation in

carving animal forms -some very small, others life sizedsuch as this'armadillo.

He has also carved full-sizrui human figures.

SPAN

OCTOBER

19M)

23

Rural Art in India

Ganesh, schematized icon carved in wood, Tamil Nadu, 19th century. A much-loved god, Ganesh is considered a remover of obstacles, and worshipped before the commencement of any ritual to make it auspicious.

It is in a fusion of the culture of the tribe, the nomad and the dweller of the settled village, in integration of ritual, myth, magic and technology, that rural art finds expression.

By its very nature demanding a total anonymity, rural art of India reflects the familiar unchanging form of village life, its simple needs, its joys, its fears, its links with tradition and ritual.

New elements introduced into the rural environment are translated by the craftsman into a visual vocabulary. There has been a plasticity latent in craft technology, a plasticity of soft materialsclay, wood, the use of the lost-wax process of casting metal objects-and a plasticity of form which is free of the Brahmanic imperatives of proportion and attributes.

The anthropomorphic form, the cult image, is

Clay horse, Bastar, Madhya Pradesh, 20th century.

Fired in earthen ovens, the body of the horse is wheel turned, the head hand molded. To the tribal and village dweller, the horse symbolizes the free, heroic, untrammeled spirit. Offered in groves, the horse is regarded as the guardian of the trees in the fields and forests.

by PUPUL JAYAKAR

the product of the artisan of the little tradition: the rural potter (kumbhara), the metal worker (ghassia), the carpenter (suthar), the goldsmith (sunar). In tribal society, the artisan structure is absent, and the functional needs of the tribe-for pots, jewelry, cloth, agricultural tools and ritual objects-are provided by craftsmen rooted in the traditions of settled village societies.

A delight in color, a living participation in the loves and wild adventures of the gods and an overwhelming concern with fecundity are visible ' in paintings with which, wherever possible, the Indian villager surrounds himself. The walls of the hut, the street, and the marketplace become the picture gallery, the canvas on which the records of the race, the exploits of gods and heroes are maintained. But the paintings are

Miniature metal horse, Chanda, Maharashtra, third century A.D. This piece has been cast by metalsmiths using archaic metal technology of the lost-wax process. . Metal casting has ancient origins. The Vedas refer to the asuras, smelters of metal, as demons who-..were proficient in magic and who possessed mastery of fire.

Above: Horse-headed figure, painting on pdper, Rajasthan, 18th century. This drawing of an astra (weapon) in the form of a man with a horse's head was used in rituals of magic and sorcery.

Right: Maithil Brahmin performing his rituals before a wall painting of the goddess, Madhubani district, Bihar, 20th century.

transitory and anonymous. They appear on the walls, fade, are whitewashed over and reappear with the cyclic movement aT the seasons and related rituals.

Paper was introduced into tndia in the 15th century, at a time when the emergence of the vernaculars had led to a great revival of storytelling in a people's language that could be understood in the countryside. Illustrated manuscripts rich in vernacular distortions and imagery appeared recording early oral and visual traditions. Art became transportable. It moved from walls, to scrolls, to folios and to the traveling patuas, the itinerant painter bards. Paintings

which had as their canvas the clay walls of village huts and the plastered walls of palaces or which existed in the ateliers of monasteries, where illuminated bark-leaf manuscripts had been known from very early times, suddenly found mobility. Icons of the Puranic gods a~d goddesses started being painted on paper and cloth at centers of pilgrimage, and were carried back by pilgrims to be installed in the shrines of the griha-devata, the household god. Villages of painters (chitrakaras) clustered around pilgrimage towns catering to the needs of the pilgrims.

(These chitrakaras also painted the stone, wood and stucco imctges on the temple walls, and the

clay icons sold at religious fairs.) The icons of Puri, Nathdvara, Tanjore, Mithila, Kalighat, painted in pure primary vegetable or earth colors, were carried across the country, weaving a tapestry and identity of common symbol, icon and story.

0

About the Author: Pupul fayakar is adviser, handloom and handicrafts, Ministry of Commerce, and chairman, advisory committee, 1982 Festival of India in U.K. Winner of the Padma Bhushan for social work, she is the author of two books on Indian art and craft.

Above: Dasa Mahavidyas, Batohi fha, tantrik, Mithila, Bihar, 20th century.

This depicts the 10 shaktis of tantra with their Puranic counterparts: the 10 avataras or incarnations of Vishnu.

Above: Warli tribal pictograph, Jivya Soma, Maharashtra, 20th century. Three dancers leap into space as part of a ritual dance. Their headdresses are a symbol of. emergent life-sheafs of corn (left), animal heads (center) and dancing human figures (right).

27

I am having the outside of my house painted. The wood will be white and the bricks will be taupe. White is a color I am familiar with, but taupe is a color invented, I think, last year when it suddenly became the rage and was mentioned at several parties I attended. I pretended to know what the color was. I thought it was something like light gray. It's not, and neither now is my house.

It is instead something like a light brown. I did not know this for a long time. In fact, I did not know it all the time my wife was pointing to houses painted taupe and asking me how I liked it. I would scan the street for a gray house, usually find one, and say, "fine." Sometimes I would not see a gray house, but I would still say "fine." Life is easier this way.

My father, I think, is color blind. I'm not sure if that is the case, but it would explain the way he dresses and the fact that he is the only person of Eastern European ancestry to ever buy peach-colored slacks. I' am not color blind. I am merely uninformed about color, my world having been formed back in grade school when I had to make do with the single-row box of crayons while the other kids, mostly rich girls, had the multi tiered box.

This is the point where lives were changed. I am convinced that if you had the big box, you would now know of taupe and cerise and ecru and the difference between navy and dark blue and how all of that is different, at 10 paces, from

ONTH

black. This box not only had that most bigoted of all colors, flesh, it also had gold and silver and, of course, that color of all colors, burnt sienna.

I have always been fascinated with burnt sienna. In school I thought it marked the difference between social classes. Not homes. Not country clubs. No, burnt sienna. Some people had it and some people didn't. Later on, they were the same people who went away to camp and still later on they spent their junior year abroad. I spent my junior year abroad at home. It was cheaper that way.

When I grew older, though, I realized that burnt sienna was a metaphor for school itself. It was something like geometry-something totally useless that you learned in school for the rest of your and which you never-but never-used life-no matter how long you live-and about which you can now remember almost zip [zero in New York].

Burnt sienna is the same. Never once in a rather full and somewhat bizarre life have I ever heard anyone describe anything as burnt sienna. No one ever said we're the third house on the right-the burnt sienna one. No one drives a burnt sienna car or wears a burnt sienna tie. Burnt sienna, I am convinced, does not exist in real life. It is just a color in a crayon box-like violet, lilac and lavender, which are all purple putting on airs. I know this now, but I did not know it when it counted-when I was in school. It was for the lack of burnt sienna that I dropped out of colors. I paid no attention. I came

LIGHTER SIDE

from a family, anyway, where brown was considered a "neutral color" which could be worn with anything. We believed in the basics. We knew about red and blue and green and yellow. We knew about black and white and gray. There was purple and there was maroon, which was the color of my uncle's Buick and which, until he drove it home, wa~.a color that did not exist.

Now I know the names of lots of colors. I know the names, but I do not know the'colors. People mention the color and I nod, but all I do is imagine burnt sienna. It has become my all-purpose silly color, the color that decorators talk about, the color with which to make "a statement." Burnt sienna is cerise, aubergine, Persian melon, lemon mist, chartreuse, mocha, teal, ecru, and greige, none of which I would know if! saw them, and I am told I have.

So now the painters are working on my house, making it impossible for me to describe it to people. I cannot imagine telling another man that my house is the taupe one on the right.

(I can imagine my entire high school class laughing themselves sick.) The painter calls it brown and his assistant who can hardly speak English calls it "nice, yes, nice," but it is really pretty close to how I remember burnt sienna. This is an American success story. First I couldn't afford the crayon; and now I live in the house.

It's enough to make you puce.

0

Indian Cooki~ Americali Kitchens Gone are the days of degchis, karahis and tavas for the Indian immigrants in the United States. With clever improvisation, they can use a host of versatile gadgets, pots and pans to prepare an authentic Indian meal-ranging from simple chapatis to delicate curries.

In the 1940s, when the first waves of Indians walked off the ship after their long and tiring journey to the United States, they carried with them their pickles and spices.

Although the Statue of Liberty that greeted them as they approached New York harbor said: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free," she did not promise a hot, spicy, tongue-tantalizing Indian meal. This was a price the early Indian immigrants had to pay for a dream of affluence they were out to fulfill. Today the scene in Queens (one of New York's better residential boroughs) is very different. Main Street in Queens looks as if it were imported from India along with the groceries and other merchandise. Innumerable Indian restaurants have sprung up in most big cities all over the countryeven fast-food Indian restaurants that serve .food on disposable plates.

There are significant socioeconomic differences in the conditions that the average Indian immigrant of today faces as compared to his counterpart of yesteryear. The approximately 362,000 Indians now in the United States have achieved, in a span of about 40 years, a level of affluence that is the envy of many a Third World immigrant community. Due to the high level of demand for Indian cooking ingredients, p10st metropolises have grocery stores that stock a considerable variety of Indian spices and breads. Some stores carry chapatis and tandoori rotis too. The best quality Basmati rice can also be purchased at these stores. Besides, a number of Indian foods are common to other Asian cuisines; for example, the Syrian bread sold in American grocery stores is very similar to the Indian naan, while the Chinese egg-roll skin doubles as samosa covering!

How does the average Indian housewife (or even bachelor) cope with cooking in a foreign land? To begin with, there are vast differences between the kitchens in the United States and those in India. The progress at American technology in the field of household appliances has been advantageous to the preparation of Indian dishes. Kitchens in American apartments are small but well equipped. Most apartments provide a refrigerator and cooking range, and some even a dishwasher. Kitchens

in houses are more spacious, and most of them can accommodate a small dining table and four chairs. A number of houses have separate freezers and trash compactors in addition to the usual refrigerators, ranges, and dishwashers.

The dishwasher is a great boon to housewives, but perhaps one of the greatest conveniences of our times is the microwave oven which cooks food by the application of high-frequency radio waves rather than direct heat. Radio waves generated within the oven penetrate to the center of the food and are absorbed evenly throughout. Cooking times in these ovens are very short, being measured in minutes or even seconds, and though the food becomes hot and is properly cooked, there is a complete absence of heat within the oven proper. What a difference from the regular ovens that make a kitchen impossibly hot on a summer afternoon!

Also very useful for the traditional slow cooking that is required to perfect certain Indian dishes, such as curries, is the crockpot. The crockpot is lined with thick stoneware and the heat is all around the sides of the pot. No heat is concentrated in the base of the pot. The food cooks very slowly and is done in six to eight hours. The advantage of such a gadget is that a working housewife can start the family's evening meal in the morning and when she returns in the evening, the food is ready to be served.

Another tool of vital importance to the Indian housewife in America is the blender. In it cooks can grind garlic, ginger and coriander to a paste which can be stored in

The free availability of Indian spices in several stores all over the United States, and the convenience of the most modern kitchen gadgets-like the dishwasher and microwave oven shown in the bottom picture-make Indian cooking in an American kitchen an easy and delicious proposition.

small jars in the refrigerator. The toaster oven also comes in handy in heating naans or broiling kabaabs.

Gone are the days of degchis, karahis and lavas for the average Indian immigrant. Degchis are replaced by stainless steel or enamel Dutch ovens and pots with handles. There was a time when stainless steel pots and pans were very popular, but when I interviewed some Indians prior to writing this article, I was surprised to find that enamel-coated pots are now more favored. As Mrs. K. Tulsiani of Houston put it: "With enamel pots I don't need to spend hours scrubbing off burnt food as I used to do with the stainless steel pots." The Chinese woks replace the karahi beautifully. The only difference between the two is that the wok has sloping sides and a curved bottom (unlike the karahi, which has a curved bottom and upright sides). This provides more space for cooking. Tavas are replaced by nonstick fry pans that require very little shortening. While one cannot roast chapalis or phulkas on a nonstick fry pan, the Indian stores sell pre roasted chapalis that only need heating and greasing.

"I delight in making a curry for dinner and freezing the leftovers, using them for a pulao (pilaf) the day after," says Mrs. Adila Hussaini of Chicago. Due to the fact that a large number of Indian housewives work outside the home, cooking and freezing go hand in hand. It is a very common practice for housewives to cook on weekends and freeze the food in airtight containers (no, proper freezing does not affect the taste). The frozen food is then removed from the freezer on weekday mornings and left out to thaw, ready for warming up by diilher time. On special occasions like Id, Diwali and Navroz, the American kitchen with all its amenities comes alive, and soon the house is filled with the aroma of the choicest delicacies of India. Although we are far from our country, we still manage to appease our palates with the cuisine we are accustomed to and enjoy.

0

THE TRULY FREE MEDIA

A lIatter of 'Aecess ".

writing freely of what they see and feel." No mu§t choose among candidates and parties, Visible and invisible c~ntrols programs and policies, is the citizen's need such formal right exists, of course, in international law. Sovereign states do not necesh' th . -. . ·to-,make informed choices. More particularC am . e press m very m~y,,' . ly; it !heans the right of the journalist to sarily admit all who seek to enter; many countrieS; true freedom eXIsts;",'; collect· and distribute the information countries tend to be harder on journalists only in a few. Should world; ':':needed by that informed citizen. In fact, the than on tourists or businesspeople. As for bodies therefore compromise~onrlght of a~cess to the halls of Congress, the "writing freely," that is a theoretical right to • • state legIslatures, the courts and gov- which the constitutions of most countries defimtIons of press freedom? .ernmental departments has seldom been pay lip service but it is not everywhere a reality. tampered with in the modern era.

In the opening chapter of his classic study The latest report by Freedom House in Yet in the early days of the American Public Opinion, the late Walter Lippmann, New York, which audits press and broadRepublic it was not uncommon for national a prominent American journalist, tells of an and state legislatures to meet behind closed casting around the world, country by counisland where a handful of British, French doors. In fact, the Continental Congress try, shows that truly free media exists in and German citizens lived together peace- (1774-1789) met in senet, excluding the comparatively few countries. Of 161 counably. The mail arrived by steamer, once in press and public. A trend toward increasing tries audited, 52 are classified as having free 60 days. There was no cable linking the openness in press-government relations de- newspapers, 36 as partly free and 66 as not island to the mainland, and radio had yet to veloped through the 19th century and into free. Among broadcast organizations in the become a working reality. Then in mid- the 20th, in spite of occasional setbacks. same countries, 37 are rated as free, 34 as September 1914, the islanders assembled on Even at the height of World War II, for partly free and 83 as not free. the quay to await the mail boat with the example, the United States never imposed Access itself is sometimes difficult enough latest news from Europe. The captain in- prepublication censorship on the press or to assure in contemporary circumstances. formed them that Britain and France had radio. The United States media, unlike But for journalists the concept of access is been at war with Germany since the first those in Europe, operated under a system of incomplete unless it also includes assured days of August. "For six weeks," Lippmann self-censorship. They held back voluntarily access to sources of information within the wrote, "they had acted as if they were from the circulation of news classified as host country-that is, access not solely to friends, when in fact they were enemies." being "of aid or comfort to the enemy." information and propaganda disseminated There are greater deprivations, it must be It was not, of course, a straight-line by official organs but also access to ordinary conceded, than not being sure which of progression. The new tensions of the nu- citizens, critics, opposition politicians and one's neighbors to hate. But Lippmann was clear age and the cold war led government dissidents. This is a novel concept in intermaking a more important point: that the officials at one time or another to overuse national relations. The principle, contested behavior of men and women is governed by the "top secret" stamp. An assistant secre- only by the representative of the Soviet what he called the picture of reality that is tary of defense insisted after the Cuban Union, was written into the final report of inside their heads, a picture that is likely to missile, crisis of 1962 that government had a UNESCO's International Commission for be incomplete or-as in this case-out of right and a need to "manage the news," the Study of Communication Problems in date, distorted, or in other respects false. including the right to withhold information 1980. It reads: He worried about the effect of stereotypes or to disseminate falsehoods. in his country and did much over a long The pendulum swung sharply in the oppo- All countries should take steps to assure admittance of career in journalism to help create an site direction as the highly unpopular unde- foreign correspondents and facilitate their collection informed public opinion in the United clared war in Vietnam began to raise serious and transmission of news. Special obligations in this regard, undertaken by the signatories to the Final Act States. questions in the public mind about the of the Helsinki Conference, should be honored and, . Lippmann wanted that picture in the wisdom of Washington policymakers. By indeed, liberally applied. Free access to news sources minds of his readers to be as close to reality 1966 Congress had adopted a Freedom of by journalists is an indispensable requirement for as he could make it. He believed that only Information Act designed to restrict the accurate, faithful and balanced reporting. This neces, an informed public could arrive at informed authority of federal agencies to bottle up sarily involves access to unofficial, as well as official sources of informatIOn-that is, access to the entire decisions, that American journalism had a information. In 1974, over a presidential spectrum of opinion within any country. large responsibility to make those informed veto, the Congress further extended the From the journalist's point of view this choices possible by gathering and publishing Freedom of Information Act to broaden the lapguage marks a considerable advance over information freely, without asking permis- area of press and public access to governsion from government or the party in power. . the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. ment records. The unhampered right of Freedom to gather ;)ews necessarily pre- access to news became an article of faith approved in 1948, which defines the right of all people "to hold opinions without intersupposes a right of access for journalists, a with American journalists. right that seems to be taken for granted in Translated into international terms, it ference and to seek, receive and impart contemporary interpretations of the First meant (according to the late Kent Cooper, information and ideas through any medium Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Its who was general manager of the Associated and regardless of frontiers." The MacBride justification in a country where the people Press) a "right to roam the world at will, Report, presented at the UNESCO meet-

ing, is a great deal more specific about the rights of journalists and the obligations of states. The crucial point it makes is that without assurance of access to all shades of opinion within a given country, journalists cannot report accurately on conditions in that country. The report, with 82 recommendations, was drafted under direction of former Irish Foreign Minister Sean MacBride.

The journalist, regardless of political persuasion, will insist that he writes only "what he sees and feels," to paraphrase Kent Cooper slightly. But seeing, feeling and writing a dispatch do not end the matter. To reach the reporter's home office the dispatch, whether written or spoken, must be sent out through a channel controlled by the host government-whether in the form of a telephone line, a radio transmission, a telex link or conventional telegraphic service. In most countries these services are operated by a government ministry, which is seldom less than correct in its dealings with foreign correspondents. Ministry personnel will not as a rule refuse to transmit a dispatch on the ground that it is politically objectionable to the host government. But they are capable of devising elaborate excuses for delaying transmission: technical problems on the line, sunspots or other meteorological conditions, unexpectedly heavy traffic or whatever. In June 1974, during a visit to Moscow

by President Gerald Ford, the U.S. television networks found that Soviet technicians had simply "pulled the plug" when network correspondents tried to transmit stories about the Soviet dissident movement.

Outright censorship is less widely practiced than it was 25 years ago. The Soviet Union, for example, no longer requires that correspondents submit their dispatches for

scrutiny before the telegraph office moves a word-the ironclad rule in the Stalin era that extended well into the time of Nikita Khrushchev.

In the years leading up to World War II, censorship of this type was the rule in authoritarian countries.

Russia, China, Spain, Portugal, Germany under Hitler, Italy under Mussolini, Japan and a number of Latin American countries openly practiced deletion and suppression, though they did not practice it in the same way, as the Hutchins Commission on Freedom of the Press reported in 1946. Reporters assigned to Moscow in the prewar period were summoned to discuss cuts and suppressions with the censor who had made them. On rare occasions they were able to persuade the censor to restore a fact or passage that he had blue-penciled earlier. In Italy, the Hutchins researchers found, the foreign reporter often had no idea what might have been deleted from his dispatch unless he later compared notes with his home office.

In many countries under military rule today, the censors claim to be concerned not only with preserving national security but also with uplifting public morals. Brazil, for example, does not censor dispatches of foreign correspondents but it does keep tight check on the domestic media. The regulations bar publication of material that: • contains anything offensive to public decorum; • contains scenes of violence or is capable of encouraging criminal acts; • gives rise to, or induces, evil habits; • is capable of provoking incitement_ against the existing regime, public order, the authorities, or their agents; • might prejudice cordial relations with other countries;

• is offensive to any community or religion; • in any way prejudices national dignity or interests; • brings the armed forces into disrepute.

Even where formal censorship has been abolished, however, freedom of the press can be undermined, or effectively nullified, in ways that are far more subtle. Several Latin American countries, for example, have instituted legal procedures for licensing of journalists. In Panama, no one may practice journalism who has not been granted a license. Details of the licensing procedure vary from country to country, but the effect, beyond question, is to restrict entry into what has been regarded traditionally as an open profession. Although the licensing trend is depicted in certain countries as a measure designed to raise professional standards among journalists, it calls for no great leap of the imagination to see in it another, less commendable motive: tightened political control of the media, quite simply through the device of refusing licenses to journalists whose loyalty to the regime may be suspect, or whose political views offend the ruling group.

There are so many more ways in which a determined government can interfere with press freedom that I cannot list all of them here. In Guyana, to give one example, an opposition newspaper has been forced to restrict circulation because the government barred its importation of newsprint.

The would-be controllers of the press, like the Tudor Kings of England before them, look upon printing and broadcasting as natural instruments of subversion. They want obedient, not truth-telling, media. If they find it more difficult today than it was a generation back to impose the apparatus of political censorship, they have demonstrated considerable ingenuity in devising new and less obtrusive ways· to keep the media under control.

In the rising international debate over a new world order of information, many journalists (including significant numbers who work in the Third World) see a potential threat to strengthen the hands of the controllers.

They fear that UNESCO will define the new world order concept in terms that confer international sanction upon repressive systems. They see no gain for mutual understanding among nations, only loss, in measures that attempt to freeze the picture of reality inside people's heads by cutting people off, as Lippmann's islanders were cut off, from the worldwide flow of information.

0 About the Author: Elie Abel, a professor of communication at Stanford University, California, was a delegate to the 1980 UNESCO conference at Belgrade:

INTELLECTUAL FEMINIST ACTIVIST:

The Journey of

Margaret Fuller "I now know all the people worth knowing in America and I find no intellect comparable to my own." Did the woman who offered that proud self-assessment in an era of Emerson and Thoreau come close to justifying it?

He could have been sculpted by Rodin, this man with dark replied: "No, in the first place Margaret Fuller is not fool brown hair, large overhanging brows, earnest deep-set blue enough to marry me; and second, I am not fool enough to eyes, aquiline nose, and pursed lips as he sat atop a prominent marry her." He had been gallant toward her, as gallant as a rock on the Fire Island shore and gazed intently at the crash and young man can be toward a woman seven years his senior, and flow of waves. At a distance, in the sea, a few stray ships stood had even taken her rowing in the Walden Pond on a moonlit in anchor; on the shore, and around the rock, there were signs night in 1841. Evidently, the excursion had stirred Fuller, for of sporadic activity as seamen and idlers recovered the articles she had written her brother about that radiant evening, the song of clothing or luggage washed ashore by the waves and piled of the whippoorwills, and the pervasive fragrance of apple them on the ground. A week ago, on July 19, 1850, an ill-fated blossoms. ship named Elizabeth had been wrecked in a storm on Fire But, as editor of The Dial, the journal of the TranscendenIsland, just off Long Island, leaving few survivors. The talist Club, she had dealt with Thoreau abrasively, delaying disarrayed heaps of personal belongings represented touching decision on his poems and essays and applying to them memorabilia of the toll the sea had taken. mercilessly exact standards. His essay on the "Brave" or As the evening mellowed the glare of the sun into a "Spheral" man was returned with the remark that his thoughts chiaroscuro of orange and gold on the waters, the man sitting were so "out of their natural order" that they could not be read on the rock seemed to lose some of his concentration. He without pain. "I never once feel myself in a stream of thought," looked around, noted the flagging activity of retrieval with a added Fuller as an afterthought, "but seem to hear the grating sigh, and rose to leave. There was nothing more for him to of tools on the mosaic .... " find-beyond the little he had found in the last few days: a silk But Thoreau was more tolerant toward Fuller than many fringed patterned cloth, a nightgown, a ripped-off button, a of his contemporaries. They saw in her an arrogant-and coat, some letters, and such things. His had been a frustrating inconvenient-bluestocking; her search for an independent mission, painful and tiring, inconclusive like the career of the intellectual identity appeared to many of them quixotic, erratic woman who had drowned in the sea with her husband perhaps unnecessary, in a time when a woman's proper domain and child. Her return home from Italy, after a sojourn of was widely believed to be home. Stories abound of instances several years in Europe, was being looked forward to by where Fuller's "mountainous me" spun off at a complete friends; her marriage to an Italian nobleman several years her tangent from her rational sense. Emerson recounts Fuller junior had set tongues wagging in Boston. There was also some telling him, solemnly: "I now know all the people worth talk of a manuscript, a firsthand account of the Italian knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my revolution of 1848-49 in which she had been involved with her own." We also have the terse anecdote of Fuller declaring husband. The book, if found, might have provided a lasting before Thomas Carlyle in 1846, "I accept the universe," and testimony to the finesse of a mind that had worked only fitfully Carlyle retorting, "By Gad, she'd better!" Far worse, in The and laboriously in youth.

Blithedale Romance, there is Nathaniel Hawthorne's caricature Or so thought Henry David Thoreau, who had come to of her as a conceited and loud-mouthed feminist with "a mind New York from Concord on the urgings of his mentor 'and full of weeds." In a journal-entry made after Fuller's death, he friend Ralph Waldo Emerson to find the last effects of went on to say that "It was an awful joke, that she should have Margaret Fuller, fellow transcendentalist, educator, editor, resolved to make herself the greatest, wisest, best woman of journalist, and feminist. Thoreau had undertaken the journey the age She took credit to herself for having been her own out of a sense of duty to Emerson; his own attitude to Margaret Redeemer, if not her own Creator .... " was at best ambivalent. Both had met often at Emerson's Fuller herself would have been appalled at the idea of house, but each was far too individualistic to develop a smooth i'redemption" through willful misrepresentation. "I wish to be relationship with the other. Once, when someone approached seen as I am .... " She was given to insisting, "I never promised him to verify the gossip that he was to marry Margaret, he had anyone patience or gentleness, for those beautiful traits are not

her, their own consciousness." These "connatural to me." Reconciled early to the fate versations," Arthur W. Brown points out, of being ugly but bright, she often made proved to be more than the isolated a poor first impression with her plain looks, nasal voice, and disagreeable habit' of exertions of an enterprising individual: They eventually created new avenues constantly opening and shutting her of enlightenment for American women eyes. Her formidable learning, perand made way for a situation in which sonal dynamism, and penchant for the burning issues of feminism could argument drew attention everywhere, be analyzed in appropriate contexts. inhibiting men and probably arousing their latent fears of an engulfing feFuller could not have asked for more. minity. But she was hardly the bookish Alongside these seminars, Fuller and pedantic bore her detractors made also undertook, at Emerson's instance, her out to be. Emerson attests that she the editorship of the transcendentalist jourwas a "joyous companion" and a witty connal The Dial. But the assignment proved versationalist: "with her broad web of relawearying and she relinquished it in 1842; two tions to so many fine friends, [she] seemed like years later, she left for New York to work for Horthe queen of some parliament of love." Friends ace Greeley's Tribune. The change of residence always found her warm, tender, and sympathetand job significantly renewed Fuller's sense of her ic, and were quick to notice how, during an engagMargaret Fuller vocation and brought her a breadth and range of outingchat, her discordant features were totally subdued bythe aura of her personality. Elizabeth Hoar and Emerson, two look she had missed in New England. She wrote prolifically and suchfriends, agreed that "her heart, which few knew, was as great produced incisive revaluations of well-known poets such as as her mind, which all knew," and that she was "the largest Longfellow, Lowell, and Poe. In addition, she continued to formulate her views on the rights of women and, in 1845, woman; and not a woman who wished to be a man."

Fuller's upbringing may have contributed substantially to completed the one major work on which her reputation rests, the her sense of herself as a solitary, perhaps a superior, figure. luminous treatise on what she had elsewhere called "The Great versus Men; Woman versus Women."

Born on May 23, 1810, at Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, she Lawsuit-Man Woman in the Nineteenth Century is clearly the first grew up on a staple diet of the classics under the eagle eye of her father, a fiercely independent lawyer and politician who carefully meditated summation of sexual politics by an American. A literary and sociophilosophical tour de force, it considered mediocrity to be a mere synonym of obscurity. Her study of Goethe, whose conversations with Eckermann she anticipates the rhetoric of future feminists in its assertion that the plight of women and blacks is comparable and makes a translated in 1839, made her conscious of the intellectual ringing plea for a legal armor around personal and property imperative of living by "some engrossing object of pursuit." rights. The book's center of consciousness is Miranda, a symbol Emerson's friendship was to reinforce her conviction-via of realized womanhood and plainly Fuller's idealized double: transcendentalism-that the self must nurture itself on intuitions of what is enduring and of substance in a society menaced by a "She had taken a course of her own, and no man stood in her welter of distractions. Fuller once acknowledged that it was way. Many of her acts had been unusual, but excited no uproar.

Few helped, but none checked her. ... " Miranda's confident Emerson who first awakened her to the nuances of "an inward life. That the mind is its own place, was a dead phrase to me, till sobriety sets the tone for Fuller's argument that women, though different from men, are not inferior in mind or body. The he cast light upon my mind." feminine principle, which differentiates the sexes, is "electrical The death of Fuller's father in 1837 forced her to support herself as a schoolteacher, but the job tired her and she set her in movement, intuitive in function, (and) spiritual in tendency"; sights on a project befitting her natural talent for pedagogy and yet human sexuality cannot be compartmentalized and resides in a kind of psychological androgyny. Thus: "It is no more the conversation. In 1839 she arranged a series of "open seminars" to help the ladies of Boston determine for themselves "what order of nature that the masculine energy should exist unmingled with it in any form .... There is no wholly masculine pursuits are best suited to us, in our time, and state of society, . and how we may make best use of our means for building up the man, no purely feminine woman."

Placing her trust in the transcendentalist creed of selflife of thought upon the life of action." Spread over four years, the gatherings proved immensely popular and attracted partici- culture, Fuller contends that a cohesive society cannot be built pants from the leading families of Boston. The discussions, when artificial separations exist between its essential compobased on the Socratic method, revolved around topics ranging nents. Since a woman has a right to the same privileges as a man, she should "lay aside all tn.ought, such as she habitually -frommythology, fine arts, and ethics to daemonology, creeds, cherishes, of being led by men." Since incompatible alliances and ideals. Fuller's modus operandi as a moderator would have are as degrading as legalized prostitution, marriage and done credit to any modern study circle; she would invite motherhood must 'wait until a woman achieves intellectual and comments from all present after raising the issues central to a given topic; sometimes she would ask the group to jot down emotional stability through education and contemplation: their ideas, then read these "skarts of pen and ink" aloud to "What woman needs is not as a woman to act or rule, but as a nature to grow, as an intellect to discern, as a soul to live freely generate an extended debate. We have it from a contemporary account that Fuller's own performance on such occasions was and unimpeded, to unfold such powers as were given her when "free from pettiness, direct, and vigorous: By the vivid we left our common home."

Fuller'saw the United States as the messianic land where intensity of her conceptions, she brought out in those around

"In an environment like mine, what may have seemed too lofty or ambitious in my character was absolutely necessary to keep the heart from breaking and enthusiasm from extinction." firm foundations would be laid for the emancipation of women: The country, with its sunny belief in freedom and equality, was "destined to elucidate a great moral law, as Europe was to promote the mental culture of man." Abolitionism was the first step in the fulfillment of this historical role; feminism, Fuller believed, would have to be the logical second.

The' publication of Woman in the Nineteenth Century brought Fuller to the forefront of public discussion. The book was an overnight sensation.

"The country," her biographer Margaret Bell records, "was divided into two camps, the one friendly to the point of hysteria, the other equally hostile. The first edition was exhausted in a week and Margaret received a check for 85 dollars!" Her fame preceded her visit to England and France in 1846 where she met such literary and cultural luminaries as Wordsworth, Carlyle, George Eliot, George Sand, Chopin, and the exiled Polish poet Mickiewicz. But her most edifying contact in London was with the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini, whose patriotic zeal for the Italian independence struggle against the Austrians profoundly influenced her own thinking on the subject. Convinced that the affirmation of this cause was a necessary exercise of political conscience, she reminded her Tribune readers back home that the issue at stake concerned human rights and could not be divorced from the larger commitments of the United States: "The cause is OURS, above all others," \ she declared, "we ought to show that we feel it to be so."

Meanwhile, in Italy, she met Marchese Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, a young nobleman and a follower of Mazzini, and married him after a brief courtship-and pregnancy.

Her decision to marry Ossoli has been the subject of so much speculation that any fresh guesswork can only be repetitive. A man of meager intellectual endowments, Ossoli must have impressed Fuller with his simplicity and devotion; the contrast between his family background and his ardor for the cause of Roman liberty might also have given him the appearance of an irresistible emissary from the mists of romantic legends. In any case, they made a touching pair, with Fuller forever apprehensive about what her friends in Boston and New York would make of Ossoli. There is no record that Ossoli himself entertained any worries on this score.

Marriage did not in any way curtail Fuller's political activism; in fact, the initial success. of the revolution aroused her to be its witness and chronicler. On April 30, 1849, when Napoleon's troops had laid siege on Rome, she was named regolatrice of the Hospital of Bene Fratelli. Her dispatches to Tribune during this period indicate the almost cathartic effect of the assignment on her. Her haughty temper appears in check; so does her habit of carping on the follies of others. In her new role, Fuller had proved the truth of Emerson's maxim that the scholar must be the instrument of significant action.

The failure of the revolution and the ensuing hardships hastened Fuller's decision to leave Italy with her husband and child. They sailed for the United States on May 17, 1850, but lost their lives in shipwreck on July 19 at Fire Island, barely 50 yards from the shore. The bodies of Fuller and Ossoli were never found, though the corpse of the child was recovered

immediately after the disaster. Years later, there circulated a rumor that, unknown to Thoreau, who had searched in vain for Fuller's last remains, the bodies of a man and a woman were washed up days after the wreck and ignominiously cremated on Coney Island by the man who found them. Unsupported by evidence and potentially unverifiable, the story was obviously a crude attempt to add a final touch of mystery to the career of a much maligned Margaret Fuller.

The record is yet to be set straight. Fuller's was a life buried before it reached its full promise; much of her work accordingly shows an inevitable blurring around the margins.

By no means a first-rate stylist, she wrote awkwardly but boldly, and lapsed occasionally into hyperbole.

Still, as Papers on Literature and Art and At Home and Abroad show, her literary and sociological judgments were basically sound. Summer on the Lakes, her picture of Western life, has long been suspected of being a shadowy model for Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Her use of dramatized narratives with personae that double for the author, in Summer on the Lakes and Woman in the Nineteenth Century, may be said to have anticipated, to a limited extent, the nonfiction novel in America. But this is as far as her literary influence extends.

Fuller's contemporaries thought her vain, arrogant, and ambitious.

The truth, as she saw it, was different.

"In an environment like mine," she wrote, "what may have seemed too lofty or ambitious in my character was absolutely necessary to keep the heart from breaking and enthusiasm from extinction." The continuous expansion of intellectual interests in her career suggests that her real problem was to survive as an authentic person. Starting out as a solipsistic idealist who preferred self to society, she opted for the role of a realist who m'et the world on its own terms as a journalist writing on the inmates of Sing Sing as well as the knotty problen:s of the day.

The realist was finally subsumed by the activist who pleaded for political and sexual liberation and was involuntarily drawn to a theater where human fate and rights seemed embattled. In this metaphorical journey, one also notices a marked shift from eternal verities to time and history, from the mental and the abstract to the actual and the concrete. As one who had made the journey in the dark night of the soul, Fuller wo'uld have been concerned less with what others thought of her than with what she really was-a restless and groping person of extraordinary intelligence who had to fight for the acceptence of women as equals in a society which valued them more as benign and inspiring presences than as agents of social change. "You might not always have been sympathetic with her," remarked Eleanor Roosevelt, "but you could not help recognizing the bigness and high striving that sometimes lay behind the sharp tongue and bitter words. To the weak and the suffering she was always gentle; those she loved she never failed-what more can be asked of any human being?"

0 About the Author: Chirantan Kulshrestha, a frequent contributor to SP AN, is a Reader in English at the University of Hyderabad. He is the

author of a critical study of Saul Bellow's novels.

'magineif we could speak to cells" instructing them to grow more'qui,ckly or slowly, change their shape and function, or organize themselves into new tissues to replace damaged ones. Without lifting a scalpel to flesh or injecting a chemical _ into the bloodstream, scientists in the United States are doing just that. They have discovered a way to tap into the body's internal communication network and transmit messages in a language that cells understand. That language consists of electrical signals-the universal code by which living organisms regulate growth, development, and repair.

We all wear an invisible garment, an electromagnetic cloak that shields us from head to toe. From the moment of conception, electrical currents begin to flow in the tiny embryo, guiding the incredibly intricate process that culminates in birth. When a salamander regrows a limb, similar currents flow along ,the injured extremity as if re-enacting a crucial step of embryogenesis. Once the new organism-or limb-is fully formed, the currents abate. Yet we all retain an electromagnetic halo as a birthday suit that we carry throughout life. Disturbances in these fields portend illness. In fact, this is the basis for acupuncture diagnosis. Whenever bodily injury is sustained, our primordial currents flow strong until the wound heals over.

Bioelectricity is nothing new. As far back as the 18th century, Luigi Galvani discovered this source of energy in the twitching of a frog's leg strung between two pieces of metal. Only recently, however, have we realized just how pervasive a role electricity plays in governing vital cellular functions. Doctors are seeking to alter our internal currents with external ones. By applying electricity to the body, they believe, it will one day be possible fo grow back the amputee's limb, repair the paraplegic's severed spinal cord, and stop the uncontrolled proliferation of cancer .cells.

"Electricity will become as ubiquitous in medical practice as surgery or drugs; in many instances it will supplant them," says Dr. Andrew Bassett, of ColumbiaPresbyterian Medical Center, in New York City. An orthopedic surgeon, he was one of the first to use electricity to mend bone fractures that had stubbornly resisted all other treatments. Dr. Bassett's technique is to position electric coils around the injury so that a pulsating electromagnetic field induces tiny currents in the bone.

I

Copyright Š 1980 by Omni Publications International, Ltd" and reprinted from Omni with permission of the copyright owner.

"The patients love it," Bassett says, "because they don't have to go under the knife." They don't even have to be hospitalized. Once the coils, given out only by prescription, have been specially fitted, they can be taken home in a lightweight case. If they' are worn 12 hours a day, the fracture usually mends within four to six months. And the therapy is totally painless.

So far, bone healing is 'the only use of his electrical coils approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, but Bassett is anxious to see the applications spread beyond the orthopedic wards.

From his animal studies, for example, Bassett discovered that electricity will consistently double or triple the growth rate of peripheral nerves-those found in the limbs.

"If peripheral nerves are severed," says Bassett, "they rarely repair themselves. If an individual ruptures his sciatic nerve in a head-on collision or puts his hand through glass and cuts his median nerve, years of therapy may be required before he regains even a fraction of the normal motor control."

Although only two human patients have been tested up until now, Bassett is greatly encouraged by the results: The electromagnetic field promoted the same beneficial nerve growth seen in laboratory animals. "It's still too soon to say whether this is the panacea for peripheral nerve injuries or not," he cautions. "Time will tell. But I think we have the upper edge."

It is clear, Bassett believes, that electricity will also give medical science the "upper edge" in repairing damage to the central nervous system. A solution to this problem might benefit more than six million people in the United State~ alone, ranging from paraplegics to stroke victims.

How does electricity produce these startling effects? Cells respond to artificially induced currents just as well as to the body's own.

Earlier in this century several investigators began to study the electrical currents produced by a variety of living organisms-from embryonic seaweed to tadpoles. Working after World War II, Dr. Robert O. Becker, of the Veterans Administration Hospital in Syracuse, New York, had one distinct advantage over his predecessors: the growth of sophisticated electronic technology. "The kinds of tools available to me right off the shelf were much more sensitive," Dr.

.., .,.,fl, ,{

"Electricity will become as ubiquitous in medical practice as surgery or drugs."

Becker said. Many of his colleagues see him as the supreme catalyst in the field"the man in modern times who asked the right questions at the right moment."

Becker's involvement in electrical therapy began with a pioneering study of injury currents. Immediately after an organism is wounded, damaged cells become leaky. Charged atoms, called ions, pour out of the cells, forming a current.

By measuring voltages generated at injury sites, Becker uncovered clues to one of nature's most baffling inequities: why the lowly salamander can regenerate as much as one-third of its total body mass, while man can scarcely endure damage to a single vital organ. Moreover, his findings suggested that currents of only a few billionths of an ampere might be the key to rectifying this gross imbalance of the evolutionary scale. Using an implanted electrode, Becker stimulated a rat to regrow its amputated foreleg down to the elbow joint. The portion regrown was not perfect, but there was clear evidence of multitissue organization, including new muscle, bone, cartilage, and nerve.

Then a researcher at the University of Kentucky Medical School, Dr. Stephen Smith, applied the same technique to regenerating the legs of frogs. A more highly evolved species than the salamander, the frog cannot normally grow back an amputated extremity. But Dr. Smith modified Becker's procedure in one important way. Electricity was introduced through an electrode that migrated down the limb as new tissue grew back. "In one

in~tance," he reported, "a new leg formed in complete anatomical precision right down to the individual digits of the frog's webbed feet."

For over 20 years Becker has doggedly pursued an unorthodox theory: Higher animals-whether frog, rat, or mandon't naturally regenerate limbs because they produce too little electricity to trigger the formation of a limb bud. Becker has long suspected that, given the appropriate electrical environment, the cells in our body-like those in the salamander-could still be made to differentiate into new tissues.

"It is time the medical establishment accepted the concept that a considerable amount of regenerative growth could be restored to the human," he states in his characteristically forthright manner.

"This applies to almost every tissue in the body, from the brain through the spinal cord to peripheral nerves, fingers, whole limbs, and organs. If we can identify the mechanisms that stimulate and control regeneration in the salamander, I see no innate reason why man cannot be stimulated to do the same thing."

Until Becker's experiment on the rat in 1973, many doctors considered his ideas heretical. That weak currents could transform an amputee's stump into a limb seemed more akin to witchcraft than to medicine. Furthermore, Becker's theory assumed that mammalian cells were capable of extraordinary feats, for the process of regeneration is, in its very essence, a rebirth.

When a salamander regrows a limb or an organ, red blood cells at the injury site lose their specialized function. They return to a primitive, almost prenatal state, ready to be molded anew.' In fact, this cluster of amorphous cells is called a blastema, a term sometimes applied to embryonic cells. As the blastema grows in size, the undifferentiated cells become specialized again, regrouping themselves into all the complex tissues of the body part that they are to replace.

No one ever dreamed that mammalian cells could undergo such a dramatic metamorphosis. For a start, our red blood cells, unlike those of the amphibian, have no nuclei and thus do not contain genetic material. Yet when minute electrical currents were applied to the rat's forearm, a blastema formed.

Dr. Robert Becker's detective work soon solved this mystery. In mammals, the blastema appears to be derived from

nucleated cells in the bone marrow.

The implications were far-reaching: We have retained our ancient ancestors' capacity to regenerate!

It is only the controlling factor that has been lost over the course of evolution. All the evidence pointed to electricity as the controlling factor, but a central enigma remained: Why do some organisms generate more than others? What drives the injury current?

Acupuncturists have long been aware of electromagnetic fields surrounding the body. Eastern practitioners today commonly monitor variations in these fields to diagnose underlying disease. In his effort to track down the "organic battery" that powers the injury current, Becker . began to investigate these natural fields.

Over a five-year period he measured stable voltages on the skin of organisms ranging from salamander to man. In all instances the fields roughly paralleled the major pathways of the nervous system.

This gave Becker an important lead, for a mysterious link between nerves and regeneration had been known since the early 1950s. Dr. Marcus Singer, at Case Western Reserve University, in Cleveland, showed that nerves must make up at least one-third of the total tissue mass in an extremity before regeneration will occur spontaneously.

By transplanting extra nerves to a frog's forelimb, he produced about a centimeter of new tissue growth at the amputation site.

Could nerves provide the electrical signal that triggers blastema formation?

To find out, Becker then measured electrical voltages on the outside of the nerve fibers themselves.

According to standard textbook accounts, there is only one mechanism by which nerves transmit an electrical signal. That message consists of a series of brief impulses that move down the nerve fiber. Becker, however, discovered what he believes to be a second and more primitive method for the nervous system to transmit information. His measurements indicated that the cells coating the outside of peripheral nerves carry a continuously flowing current, in contrast to the short bursts of electrical activity the nerves themselves conduct. This constant current, he believes, radiates throughout the body's dense network of peripheral nerves and gives rise to the field patterns all organisms display. It seemed logical to him that disturbances in these fields, created by an injury, for example, would be detected

"A considerable amount of regenerative growth could be restored to the human." by cells, which would then begin repair processes. If the nerve mass were large enough, the voltages generated could be sufficient to initiate complete regeneration. Otherwise, scar tissue would form.

Becker's theory clashed with the traditional concept of how the nervous system functions. "I got an awful lot of lumps on my head when I first published my report in Nature," he recalls. But initial skepticism has gradually given way to broader-although not universalacceptance.

Bone healing is one of the few examples of man's ability to regenerate an injured part spontaneously.

"It is truly a regenerative process," says Becker, "because a blastema actually forms." In this instance, however, the source of electrical voltage is not the nerves alone. The bone itself becomes electrically polarized when bent or broken. As Bassett and Becker discovered, its crystalline structure converts mechanical stress into electrical energy-a process independently noted at about the same time by two Japanese doctors, Iwao Yasuda and Eiichi Fukada. These voltages in turn help to guide cellular-repair mechanisms, beginning with the appearance of a blastema at the fracture site. Unfortunately, sometimes something goes awry in the normal healing process and a troublesome nonunion develops.

Electricity, they reasoned, might be the solution.

Animal studies confirmed the idea.

Then, by introducing direct current through an electrode at the fracture, Dr. Carl Brighton and his colleagues at the'

University of Pennsylvania Medical School were able to cure severely crippled patients, many of whom had been scheduled for amputation because their disabled limbs had become infected. At dozens of clinics in the United States and abroad, electricity has become the preferred treatment for difficult bone nonunions. Since the first clinical experiments, however, orthopedists have varied in their approach to electrotherapy.

Bassett, for example, prefers electrical coils to electrodes because they preclude surgical intervention.

The success rate is 85 percent; he hopes it will eventually work in 95 to 98 percent of cases.

Bassett's coils are so simple to operate that astronauts may use them in space to prevent what o'fficials of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration commonly refer to as astro-osteoporosis.

Astronauts' bones become thin and brittle owing to a loss of calcium. Over prolonged space missions, the condition worsens. When t.he Soviet cosmonauts first returned from their 175-day journey aboard Salyut 6, they were no more capable of walking than jellyfish are.

Vigorous rehabilitation is required to recover from this "spaceman's disease," which for a while threatened to jeopardize the future of manned space exploration.

But astro-osteoporosis is not a disease.

In fact, it is a remarkable adaptation to life in zero gravity. "The astronauts produced less bone," says Bassett, "because they didn't need big heavy bones in the weightlessness of space. Their bone was under less mechanical stress. Hence, it did not generate the normal electrical voltages that help maintain bone formation." The coils, he believes, should counteract what would otherwise be a superior adaptation to permanent residence in space.

Like several other doctors in the forefront of electrical medicine, Bassett is now attacking the problem of repairing damage to the spinal cord-the cause of partial or total body paralysis. Earlier in his career, while working with neurosurgeon James B. Campbell, he discovered a simple, nonelectrical technique to promote central-nervous-system growth.

After the scientists created a defect in a cat's spinal cord, the injured area was wrapped in a millepore sleeve, a type of filter material. Hundreds of thousands of nerve fibers would grow across the gap.

"Unfortunately," says Bassett, "the'

lower half of the eat's body remained paralyzed. By the time the nerve fibers had grown back, the motor neurons below the point of transection had formed abnormal connections with neighboring cells-what we call collateral sprouting.

The switchboard was busy.

There were no free circuits for the nerves to connect to.

"Now what triggers collateral sprouting in the first place is an injury current. To open the switchboard, we then inserted electrodes into the spinal cord. This drove the voltage in the opposite direction, countering the injury current. In fact, we found we could eliminate collateral sprouting in small, defined areas.

To do this on a practical basis, however, we would have needed 2,000 million electrodes, each touching an individual cell. But now we can induce currents in the spinal cord using coils. We don't have to make do with electrodes."

Equally encouraging, Drs. Walter Booker and E.B. Chung, at Howard University, in Washington, D.C., have been successful in treating burn victims with pulsed electromagnetic fields. The therapy accelerates healing and reduces swelling around the charred flesh.

A recurrent pattern pervades the history of medicine. Often new treatments are adopted long before anyone fully understands why they work. Electricity is no exception. Becker:s meticulous probing has helped to identify several important sources of bioelectricity, from the electrical voltages generated by bone to the electromagnetic fields that radiate from our nerve network. Yet there is an aura of mystery around the magical transformations that take place at the most fundamental level-that of the cell.

By intercepting the electrical messages the body transmits, scientists have learned 'how to code signals that make sense to cells. In effect, they are practicing a form of speech through mimicrywithout understanding the basis of the language itself. What information is encoded in the electrical signal? Why do cells alter their behavior in response to changes in their electrical environment?

There are still many more questions than answers, but a few unifying principles have emerged. In an office adjacent to Bassett's, electrochemist Art Pilla develops and fine-tunes the electromagnetic pulses used in therapy.

"In every single living system studied," Pilla says, "we have found that the same level

Tansman of Mount Sinai School of Medicine, in New York City. At the 157th Cancer therapy, neurology, meeting of the Electrochemical Society, held recently in St. Louis, the team bone regeneration, wound reported that mice injected with deadly healing-electrical medicine melanoma cells lived an average of 27 days when untreated, 36 days if given is being tried in several chemotherapy, and 43 days when chefields of curative research. motherapy and electricit~' were combined. Though these findings are enof currents is required to exert cellular couraging, more research will be required control. If the amplitude and frequency before electricity's true potential in cancer therapy can be properly evaluated. of the electromagnetic current do not fall within a specific range, cells fail to Cancer therapy is far from the only respond." Only when he tunes the signal exciting avenue of research Pilla is now into the "biological waveband" is it possipursuing. He is equally intrigued by the ble to establish a dialogue with cells. possibility of using electromagnetic fields In cellular communication, ions-not to alter brain functioning.

To test his words-are the key elements. "At the theories, he is now working with Dr. right waveband," Pilla explains, "the Ross Adey, president of the Veterans electrical signal appears to move ions, Administration Hospital in Los Angeles. such as sodium, magnesium, and calcium, Bassett describes Dr. Adey as "one of the across the selective membrane of the cell. most amazing individuals in biophysics This in turn unleashes a chain of chemical today." Adey has shown that he can reactions within the cell itself, which may increase the rate of learning and memory ultimately lead to the unraveling of retention in primates and cats by focusing DNA-the first step toward growth and an electromagnetic field at the animal's repair." According to Pilla, the influx of head while training is under way. The ions may determine, among other things, electrical signal is carried over a radio why some genes are switched on or off. frequency, and Adey modulates its amCould electricity transform a cancerous plitude in the same way one tunes an AM cell into a normal one? Or a bone cell radio. Adey believes that neurological into cartilage? Pilla is seeking the answers changes occur because the frequency of to these and other questions that are the electrical signal is within the same inextricably tied to genetic control. range as the alpha and beta waves of the "I've always believed in a Morse code brain. But Pilla emphasizes another inapproach," he says. "That we could, in teresting aspect of his results. He thinks fact, send in heavily coded signals and Adey's findings represent a more general modulate everything. Of course, we don't phenomenon.

The currents he uses to know how to do it yet!" Pilla exclaims. enhance learning and memory just hap"But that day is approaching." pen to be similar to those that are Working in collaboration with Smith, biologically active in other cell systems..

Pilla has helped develop electrical pulses For the immediate future most experts that will speed salamander limb regeneraagree that electrical therapy will have the tion by a factor of four-or stop new greatest impact in healing tissues that do tissue growth altogether. Smith and Pilla display some regenerative capacityare also studying the effects of electricity skin, bone, and peripheral nerves. But as on cancer growth. "We have found cerscience becomes more sophisticated in tain pulses that kill lymphoma cells grown controlling vital functions with electricity, in culture," Pilla remarks. "Other fields infinite possibilities may open up. Conchange the cell lining of the lymphoma, quering cancer, regrowing limbs and ortransforming it into a fibroblast-a type gans, and augmenting the brain's cognitive of connective-tissue cell found throughprocesses are just a few of the advances out the body." that electrical medicine may offer.

"There is not a single branch of mediBoth scientists caution that their reas a search is still merely at the experimental . cine that will remain unchanged result of this powerful tool for controlling stage. Yet they are optimistic about the life processes," Bassett declares.

0 results of one of the first animal studies, which Pilla conducted with William Riegelson, of the Medical College of About the Author: Kathleen McAuliffe is an associate editor with Omni magazine.

Virginia, and Larry Norton and Laurie

The Neutron 80mb:

Imagine, if you will, a situation in which the military effectiveness of a battlefield weapon could be substantially increased while, at the same time, the number of civilians who would be killed by its use merely because they lived near where the battle was underway was dramatically reduced.

Imagine too, a weapon designed to stop a massive invasion by enemy tanks that might otherwise bulldoze, in blitzkrieg style, across the face of Western Europe.

Imagine, finally, that in addition to the weapon's ability to halt an invasion of Europe and spare many thousands of innocent lives, it was also safer, had increased range and better security and replaced older weapons on a less than one-for-one basis':""'sothat the total number of weapons would in fact be reduced.

The neutron weapon, which President Ronald Reagan has decided to produce, has precisely these advantages. Further, the weapon has a crucial feature that is more important than anything else: It would reduce the likelihood that, even in a crisis, the Soviets would be tempted to launch an attack on U.S. Allies in Europe.

This holds out the promise of adding badly needed credibility to the Allied deterrent and thereby actually reducing the standing of the case for their deployment will emerge in Europe despite Soviet efforts to misrepresent U.S purposes and obscure likelihood that nuclear weapons would ever be used in Europe.

That is why the neutron weapon is a deterrent to war, and the facts. one which the Soviets genuinely respect-as their propaganda The key facts are these: campaign proves. As such, the neutron weapon is a crucial • A massive Soviet military buildup sustained over almost 20 element in protecting the liberties and political institutions of years has turned the European theater balance against the the West.

West, necessitating the modernization of NATO's deterrent Thus, it is ironic that the neutron weapon has been opposed forces, as w.ell as [an increase of] U.S. ability to deter Soviet as immoral. There is nothing immoral about defending our threats in other theaters. heritage and common future.

• A more refined NATO capability to halt a Soviet invasion of Europe will strengthen our ability to deter attack there and The reason for the opposition lies in the varied misperceplessen the likelihood of either conventional or nuclear war tions about the neutron weapon, some of them innocently grounded in ignorance of the facts, but many of them elsewhere. deliberately disseminated by a well-orchestrated propaganda • Neutron weapons are more precisely targeted and would do less unintended damage to civilian populations than the campaign based in Moscow.

For this reason, President Reagan's decision to proceed with weapons they replace. the production of neutron weapons for stockpiling on U.S. The unrelenting Soviet buildup of the last two decades calls into question the legitimacy of the Soviet claim to ,desire territory was certain to be controversial, especially in Europe, where the Soviet campaign has centered since the last U.S. detente with the West. It makes a mockery of the indignation Administration and has exploited both European fears and an with which the Soviets have attacked this decision to protect impression of .American indecisiveness .• Western defenses.

The President's decision to produce and stockpile neutron There are th()se who worry that the neutron weapon, because weapons on U.S. territory is meant to strike a prudent balance it would not cause massive civilian fatalities near the battlefield, between European sensitivities and the necessity to make is more likely to be used than the weapon it replaces.

The logical conclusion of this reasoning is that we should difficult decisions affecting V.S. forces qn their merits.

Responsibility for making those decisions cannot. be abdi- . make our weapons as indiscriminately damaging as possiblecated by the United States or turned over to even its closest so that we would be deterred from using them. That is not the. kind of defense that will protect the peace.

0 allies, even though any ultimate deployment of neutron weapons to any country would be made only after consultation with the countries affected.

About the Author: Caspar W. Weinberger is the U.S. Secretary of Meanwhile, it is possible that European attitudes toward Defense. He was head of the Office of Management and Budget under neutron weapons will gradually change, that a clearer under- President Richard Nixon.

Ra, Retrospective Draws Crowds in lew York The fullest presentation of Indian cinema ever screened abroad drew record crowds and a chorus of praise to its first phase, a retrospective of Satyajit Ray's films which opened to long queues of both Americans and Indians at New York's Museum of Modern Art (above right) and had an equally successful twoweek run at a commercial theater (above).

Summer brings such madness to New York that though rain is fairly frequent," people refuse to carry raincoats or umbrellas.

Rid of the heavy encumbrances of winter, they tend to wear the lightest possible clothes (many women sport Indian garments).

It is easy to get drenched to the skin. That is what often happened to long queues of people lined up before 11 West 53rd Street, waiting to buy tickets to the month-long retrospective of Satyajit Ray's films at the Museum of Modern Art in June-July this year.

The Ray retrospective, the completest shown anywhere, formed the first phase of a project termed "FilmIndia" by its sponsors-the Indo-U.S. Subcommission for Education and Culture working with the Asia Society and the Museum of Modern Art (MaMA) in New York and the Directorate of Film Festivals in New Delhi. Like the rest of FilmIndia, it was funded by the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, the Smithsonian Institution, the Asian Cultural Council, Air India and the Indo-U.S. Subcommission.

The show is now traveling to nine other American cities. A second phase in July-August consisted of landmarks of Indian film history and was confined to New York because of its

relatively limited interest for non-Indian audiences. The third part of the series opened in New York last month and presents, for the first time, a large and representative body of work in what has been variously described as India's "parallel cinema," or "the other cinema," or simply, "new cinema." Twenty-two films by 19 contemporary directors other than Ray should reveal a new facet of Indian cinema to an audience hardly aware of the existence of any films besides Ray's, which they have seen, and the commercial "Bombay" films, which they have heard of. If the reactions of American critics to new Indian cinema at Bangalore's Filmotsav 80 are any guide, the unveiling of an array of talent to New York's sophisticated audience should produce a considerable impact-not unlike that of the French "new wave" that broke upon an unsuspecting Cannes Film Festival in 1959.

New York has a large Indian population-with a high per capita income, one might add. Some of them were in evidence in the queues and corridors of FilmIndia; but the crowds at Asia Society's functions and MaMA's shows were mostly made up of non-Indians of all ages and hues. Only a certain type of Indian, the film buff, was to be seen jostling for tickets, the uninitiated staying somewhat at a distance, slightly mystified by the chorus of praise from the high priests of American culture (is he that great?). Of course among the Americans too, it was' not the average filmgoer who crowded these events but the film culture enthusiast, to whom, as far as the cinema is concerned, "the world is my oyster." But their ratio to the total population is high, as I realized in trying to see Jean-Luc Godard's new film Numero Deux at a cinema opposite my hotel. The show was on at 10 o'clock every night but there was always such a formidable queue when I came back from the day's wanderings that I

always lost heart, postponing my in tomorrow that never came.

In an interview on Vision of Asia, a New York Indian television program broadcasting on weekends, I was asked the inevitable question whether Ray projects an image of India's poverty. Of course, I pointed out that very few of Ray's films deal with the subject and some of the all-time favorites in the West such as Jalsaghar ("The Music Room") or Charulata are in fact about the rich. More than Ray, it is the new generation that addresses the problem of poverty and social injustice directly. Their films show people that Indians are not indifferent to these problems; that the sensitive Indian's conscience is in fact deeply stirred, and that's where hope lies for social justice in India.

Satyajit Ray has been well known to the United States' vast army of film buffs for a long time. FilmIndia's retrospective has widened and deepened their knowledge of him. It has earned him still greater respect among the initiated and taken his films beyond what someone called the phantasmagoria of the art house audience. More than a thousand people were turned away from the The Chess Players for lack of seats. The rush for tickets inspired a commercial theater, the New Yorker, to scrape together all the Ray films it could get from U.S. distributors for a one-week run, later extended to two weeks.

Some films, such as the Monihara episode of Teen Kanya, or Abhijaan, were shown in the United States for the first time, and evoked a lot of interest. Another new entry into the scene that caused excitement was Pikoo, a 27-minute short made for French television. It is an extraordinary study of adultery in which the silent, almost separate flow of the lives of the lovers, the husband, the son, and the dying old father-in-law, creates a magic spell. Newsweek magazine saw in it "a master's crystalline simplicity .... Ray again shows his special affection for the. very old and the very young, with whom he has always had an uncanny rapport." The New York Post said: "27 great minutes ... should be required viewing for every American film purveyor of the gory grandiose." It was shown at the opening of FilmIndia and drew prolonged applause.

Arthur Penn, director of many distinguished films, including

the classic Bonnie and Clyde, inaugurated Filmlndia. "For the last 25 years," he said, "Mr. Ray has consistently given his films a classic distinction ... (his) extraordinary sense of the authentic details of Bengali society has given his work a uniquely universal appeal. His concern for the social and individual identity of his characters results in an aspect of film which is difficult to attain-the mythic in the ordinary."

Ray himself spoke briefly of his long association with the United States, which began with the world premiere of Pather Panchali in 1955, and noted that some of the best reviews of his films had been written by American critics. "My films being about India and more specifically about Bengal, I never imagined that they would be able to cross the cultural barrier .... The fact that this has happened has been one of my most rewarding experiences."

He also put on record his debt to: " ... the American cinema of the Thirties, Forties and Fifties, which taught me almost everything I knew about filmmaking at the time when I decided to take my plunge into this profession .... When I say I learnt from the American cinema, I mean that I learnt both what to do and what not to do .... " The fate of the international film was debated a few days later at Asia Society's elegant new home on Park Avenue, by Girish Karnad, noted playwright-film actor-director from India, with participants from the United States, France, Germany and Britain. Charles Michener, senior editor of Newsweek, moderated. Girish Karnad pointed out that Indian cinema is shown on such a large scale in South and South-East Asia, the Middle East, parts of Eastern Europe and Britain, that it is second only to Hollywood in its international distribution. So far as India is concerned, the international cinema is not the endangered species it is in many other regions of the world.

What cast a pall on the proceedings in the second week of Filmlndia was the sudden death of Bansi Chandragupta, the famous art director. He had a heart attack at Patchogue railway station while catching a train for New York after a very pleasant stay with George Stony, head of New York University's film school, and myself, at the house of Betty Puleston, an associate of Stony's, in the village of Brookhaven, Long Island. He died in the hospital within a few minutes of the attack. Bansi had not only been art director of 19 of Ray's films, but a very close friend of his, and mine. He had been in filmmaking from well before Ray came into it, and was the art director of Jean Renoir's The River in 1949. For the last few years, he had been working in Bombay, where he designed the sets for a number of new filmmakers. Those who have seen Rabindra Dharmaraj's Chakra may be surprised to know that the slum where most of the story takes place was not a real location chosen by the director but an outdoor set built by Bansi. He and I were to have traveled with Ray to Washington from New York the afternoon of the day Bansi died. The seminar at Washingt.on was canceled. Ray returned to India by the next available flight.

His films, however, continued their triumphal march. Both Mary Lea Bandy, director, and Adrienne Mancia, curator of MaMA's film department, said that the Ray retrospective was "our most successful film program ever."

The Ray films are now touring museums and universities in nine other cities in the United States including Washington, D.C. and Boston on the East Coast, Berkeley and Los Angeles in the west; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Denver, Colorado; Madison, Wisconsin; and Austin, Texas. Close on its heels will follow the group of 22 contemporary films, shepherded by seven directors, actors and actresses after their showing in New York this month. "(Filmlndia is) a big event," said Muriel Peters, director of film and broadcasting, Asia Society, "one which I think is going to change the perception in this country not only of Indian films, but of India itself."

0

others have sought to make the state the motor of economic development, they encouraged the private sector through tax concessions to' corporations and individuals.

We in the Reagan Administration believe that such models of development are a source of hope, not just because they demonstrate that rapid, dramatic success is possible, but also because they reaffirm the importance of freedom-the very freedom that the¡ civil rights movement struggled to achieve and which is the core value of our nation. It is especially encouraging to note the growing awareness in the world today that economic liberty, for example, far from being an obstacle to material well-being, is a precondition for it. As the experience of the Western democracies and the newly industrialized countries has shown, wealth is most often a consequence of economic freedom. It is created by innovation and experiment, by human intellect and effort; by the activity, in other words, of creative, innovative indi-' viduals. Such freedom is not a luxury for the rich, but a necessity above all for poor nations and poor peoples.

The lessons of experience with development and the core convictions of President Ronald Reagan and his Administration coincide almost perfe<;tly, for just as President Reagan's vision of politics features the free individual, his approach to economics features the free individual as the source of creative energy and production-the source of the wealth of nations.

This brings me to the third and final myth that causes many people to think ill of the Reagan Administration's foreign policy: that we see all other countries through the lenses of East-West relations. Once again it simply isn't so. Nowhere is it less true than in Asia and Africa. The United States Government wants today in Asia precisely what Asians want for themselves-strong, stable, independent states that are able to articulate their own interests and promote the well-being of their populations. Our interests, we believe, are entirely consistent with the hopes and aspirations that were exemplified in your own great struggle for independence and in the guiding ideals embodied in the Indian Constitution.

We are fully committed to working to achieve peace, stability, self-determination and democracy for the nation.s of the world. We will work for these goals in all available arenas-in our bilateral relations, in regional organizations

independently of East-West conflict. We are concerned with East-West issues in Africa, Asia and Latin America only where Soviet-sponsored violence and military adventures force them into the forefront of our attention. Only where, for example, the presence of Cuban troops-as 30,000 Cuban troops in Angola, or more /than 10,000 Cuban troops in Ethiopia, or Cuban troops in the Middle East, or East German troops in the Middle East and Northern Africa -bring those East-West issues into the equation do we in fact focus on them. We much prefer not to. But I don't think it's necessary to remind you that the United States, no more than India, was never a colonial power.

"We care about the develop- Just as we always opposed the old we also cannot look with ment of the less developed colonialism, equanimity upon the imposition of a new nations for both rational and colonialism, albeit one that hides its real purposes behind revolutionary slogans. moral reasons."

We seek in Namibia, in Kampuchea, in and in the United Nations.

Afghanistan, in Chad and elsewhere the We have also taken a particular in- replacement of any kind of foreign terest in trying to put an end to the last domination by strong, stable, indepenremaining vestige of the old colonialism dent governments which provide national in Africa. We have been working on the self-determination and self-government problem of bringing independence and to their peoples. stability to Namibia.

The Reagan Administration represents There should be no doubt in the minds a new mood in U.S. foreign policy. For us of anyone present or distant that the power and influence are never, and I Reagan Administration stands squarely repeat never, ends in themselves. They opposed to apartheid. We have made it are always instruments to be used for an perfectly clear at home, in conversations end. For us the end we seek is a world of with South Africa and elsewhere that we peace, freedom, diversity and national find policies of racial separation, such as independence. We believe that the electhose practiced in South Africa, repug- tions of 1980 marked a kind of new nant. It is our profound hope that there beginning in our own national policy. will be steady progress in South Africa That new beginning. is characterized toward the elimination of all the vestiges above all by a recommitment to our basic of this objectional racialism. We in the values. This recommitment, we think, United States have not gone through a makes us internally strong; we are per-. revolution in our own race relations only suaded that we must stand for our basic to acquiesce in a system of racial separavalues at home and also abroad. We tion practiced by others. agree with former Prime Minister JawaAnother indication of our Administraharlal Nehru and Mrs. Indira Gandhi that tion's commitment to development aid the strength and position of the U:nited has been our strong support for major States gives us a special responsibility to United States contributions to th~ reple- help others achieve a better life in peace. nishment of the International Develop- We in the Reagan Administration welment Bank. come that responsibility as well as the There is also, of course, the heartrendprospect of working with you and all ing problem of refugees. At the ICARA other interested peoples to achieve our conference for African refugees, the common goals.

Reagan Administration pledged $285 milWe hope that you will join us in lion in aid for Africa refugees, and that working toward shared objectives. That, pledge constituted more than half the total if I have any message in my visit here, is amount raised at that conference. my message: the hope of my Government We in the Reagan Administration are that your Government and the Indian committed to the peaceful resolution of people will join us in working toward conflicts throughout the world, quite shared objectives.

0

Thirty~five million Americans are disabled. As the International Year oj the Disabled comes to a close, SPAN pays tribute to their heroic efforts to enter the mainstream oj life, in work and in play.

Advertising-For

a Good Cause

Public service advertising represents a large-scale exercise in volunteerism in the United States, promoting many socially desirable causes. HaJeez Noorani, himself an experienced ad,vertising practitioner, outlines American and Indian efforts.

President Ronald Reagan's tax cuts signal the United States' adoption oj supply side economics. In a lively discussion, Dr. Arthur Laffer-the man most credited with converting the President to this view-answers questions and criticism oj the theory.

Ravi Shankar and Zubin Mehta In "Ragamala" A report on a grand musical meet-the two maestros presented Ravi Shankar's sitar Concerto Number 2, Ragamala, in New York recently.

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19.7. 309.

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254. 310 139.

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2130-2230

Short Wave: 168. 198.

251 Medium Wave: 190

LettiDllature Take Its Coune

by BIL GILBERT

Using his sandy farm in southern Wisconsin as a laboratory, pioneer ecologist Aldo Leopold proved that nature's self-healing properties could turn wasteland into lush woodland.

Paddling or floating in a canoe down a river has always seemed like one of the best. things there is to do. I have had a good many opportunities-or at least excuses-for doing so, traveling rivers from the tundra to the jungle. I have never met one I did not like, but one of the best for me has been the West Branch of the Susquehanna, which flows eastward out of the highlands of western Pennsylvania.

The West Branch is not a ferocious white-water stream, but it moves along briskly through an almost continuous series of riffles and small rapids which make for sporty and easy going.

Purists would not classify this as a wilderness river, but the upper West Branch does flow through a narrow, largely roadless valley/canyon in which the native flora and fauna of the central Appalachians flourish in abundance and variety.

Beyond or underlying these tangible attractions, there is an important intangible one: the memory of how badly abused this river was only a quarter of a century ago. I think there is no better place to observe the benign influence of what has come to be called the environmental movement, or to contemplate some

of the better sides, or at least possibilities, of human nature.

For these reasons, on the West Branch I have often thought of a man named Aldo Leopold. So far as I know, he never saw this river and he died in 1948, long before its recovery had commenced or was even being actively considered. Nevertheless, I think he was and remains importantly involved in the happenings there and in a good many other places in the United States, because he so significantly contributed to the raising of the general level of consciousness in regard to these matters.

Twenty-five years ago the West Branch valley was approximately the same as it is now, but the river itself was in terrible condition. It smelled bad, tasted bad and burned the eyes. It was of a diseased yellow color and the water stained everything it touched the same color: rocks, logs, mud and sandbars, even canoe paddles. In it was considerable raw sewage and miscellaneous pollutants from riverside communities, farms and industries. The worst problem, and the one which, among other things, caused the garish discoloration, was that much of the water had, before reaching the main river, seeped through and steeped in deposits of sulfur exposed in abandoned coal mines.

In consequence, it was highly acid. For miles not a fish, crawdad or sweet aquatic plant could live in it. Most of the plants, insects, reptiles, birds and mammals which formerly had used the shallows and banks used them gingerly, or not at all.

In the late 1950s the West Branch was very nearly a dead river, but since then it has slowly 'returned to life. This return has been a fascinating and moving thing to watch, like the comeback of an apparently badly beaten fighter. There has been no single Lazarus moment, but rather a slow, often almost imperceptible reappearance of vital signs and functions: ferns and grasses pushing down toward the river and patches of aquatics establishing themselves in it; salamander and frog egg masses in a backwater; raccoon and sandpiper tracks in the mud flats; the replacement of yellow stains on rocks with periwinkles; suckers, dace and bass moving upstream.

The tenacity of a great many species has contributed to the resurrection of the West Branch, but it is coming back largely because of things our species has done and is doing-or, more accurately, has stopped doing. We have closed down many former sources of pollution-most notably the flow of acid water out of many old mines-and are creating new ones far less often than we did a quarter of a century ago.

The changes occurred when and as they did (the techniques and resources for such restoration were already generally available) because there was an obvious shift in public opinion that encouraged and supported them. The conviction grew that a filthy, dying river was bad for business, recreation and health.

There was also a sense of another sort of judgment-essentially a moral one-that killing a river is a disreputable act, while trying to restore it is an admirable one.

During the past decade or so there have been situations elsewhere, comparable to that on the West Branch, in which there is evidence that a new sort of environmental ethic is a factor influencing public and private behavior. The creation or recognition of this type of conscience will be remembered as the most important environmental accomplishment of our timethe one that made the rest possible.

Although others have made the claim for him, Aldo Leopold was too sensible a man himself to claim that he was the creator or author of an environmental ethic. "Nothing so important as an ethic is ever 'written'," he said. However, with great insight, he persuasively described the origins of such a code of behavior and the need for it.

"An ethic, ecologically, is a limitation on freedom of action in the struggle for existence. An ethic, philosophically, is a differentiation of social from antisocial conduct .... The first ethics dealt with the relation between individuals....

Later accretions dealt with the relation between individual and society .... There is as yet no ethic relating to man's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it .... The extension of ethics to this third element in human environment is, if I read the evidence correctly, an evolutionary possibility and ecological necessity. It is the third step in a sequence."

Born in 1887, Leopold was a pioneer ecologist, a professor of wildlife management at the University of Wisconsin, and one of the founders of this discipline and vocation. However, he was not widely known outside the profession until the publication, in 1949, of his book, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There. Ironically, the manuscript-which had been re jected elsewhere-was accepted for publication by the Oxford U nive,rsity Press only a week before Leopold died, after suffering a heart attack while fighting a brush fire in April 1948.

The volume is a collection of essays about a poor, sandy farm he owned in southern Wisconsin, his travels in western North America and the environmental philosophy which developed out of these experiences and observations. Since its publication, the Almanac has come to be regarded as a 20th-century Walden-or more. Currently, the book is used in dozens of

"The whole point here is to maintain a place where the rights of the land are pre-eminent," says Nina Leopold Bradley, Aldo's daughter.

American universities as a text and reader for students of natural history, philosophy and literature. Almost a million copies have been sold.

Environmentalists as a class tend to be wordy and have produced, at the very least, a large volume of literature.

Unfortunately much of it has been shrill and self-righteous in tone, deductive and abstract in style, more polemical than persuasive or memorable. Leopold is an outstanding exception, obviously caring as much for the language as he did for the natural world, and possessing the ability of a classic essayist to get at the general through the particular and to build toward the subtle from the simple. "There are," begins the Almanac, "some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot.

These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot."

In 1935, when Leopold bought the first 32 hectares of his farm along a Wisconsin riverbank, it was eroded and exhausted, having been cut and burned over, overworked by a series of previous owners, the last of whom, a farmer-bootlegger, set fire to the ramshackle farmhouse in a fit of pique at the hardscrabble place. The only remaining structure was a henhouse which Leopold converted into a rough cabin. As "the Shack," it figured prominently in many of the published musings about the farm and became perhaps the most famous American chicken coop. It was added to the U.S. National Register of Historic Places in 1978.

The farm was a family retreat, but Leopold used it most regularly. "We would come and go," says Nina Leopold Bradley, one of his five children, "and there were times as teenagers when some of us found the bright lights of Madison attractive. Dad was glad when we wanted to be at the farm, but never seemed hurt if we didn't. It was the same with his

interests. He would share them if we were curious but never pushed them on us. Obviously, as time went on, those interests and this place came to have an increasing influence on us."

Obviously. There are few families who have followed so closely and successfully in the footsteps of a famous parent.

Each of the young Leopolds became a natural scientist, and three have been elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Starker, a zoologist, and Luna, a geologist, are both professors at the University of California, Berkeley, while Carl, Estella and Nina are botanists of one specialty or another. The Leopolds have also had considerable influence on a number of American public policies and programs, and as a clan achieved a unique status in the U.S. environmental establishment.

Following Aldo Leopold's death, the family retained ownership of the farm. In 1968, under the persuasive urging of an admirer of Leopold's, Reed Coleman of the L. R. Head Foundation in Madison, adjacent landowners cooperated to establish the 485-hectare Leopold Memorial Reserve. Nina Bradley and her husband, Charles, a retired geologist, are permanent residents, having built a home about one and a half kilometers away from the Shack. Among other things, they oversee the work of the three or four Leopold fellows, who are selected each summer to live and study at the reserve.

The reserve is in a zone where for millennia the prairie and northern woodlands have contended for dominance. (The tension zone between these two biotic communities, the temporary advances of one or the other, the effects of the elements and human activities on the wavering balance between them, fascinated Leopold.) Here, at the Bradleys' request, the place will be no more specifically located.

This sort of request can be awkward to make, but it is related to a fundamental problem of land use which Leopold raised and we have yet to resolve or have even shown much desire to face squarely. It is this: if we accept the proposition that other species, communities and the land itself have natural rights, and it seems desirable to behave toward them in an ethical way, then there are times when we must place restraints on our activities, even such seemingly innocuous ones as recreation.

He was not, of course, thinking of his own memorial reserve, but Leopold had in mind the sort of problems his daughter and son-in-law are now facing when he wrote: "It is clear without further discussion that mass use involves a direct dilution of the opportunity for solitude; that when we speak of roads, campgrounds, trails, and toilets as 'development' of recreational resources, we speak falsely in respect of this component.

Such accommodations for the crowd are not developing (in the sense of adding or creating) anything. On the contrary, they are merely water poured into the already-thin soup."

"We have many requests to visit," says Nina Bradley. "Most of the people are genuinely interested. What alarms us is that if the farm site is publicized or located on road maps, there will be a lot of casual visitors who will want to stop by to pass an hour or so. We could accommodate the public-provide parking, trash disposal and sanitary facilities and the rest-only by converting part of the land for their use, by exploiting it. The whole point here is to maintain a place where the rights of the land are pre-eminent.

"There are really no attractions here," she concludes gently, "no geysers, canyons or breathtaking views. This is just old farmland restoring itself. To the extent anything is happening, it is an ecological process which at any given moment is invisible."

This is an accurate description, the attractions of the place being more cerebral than sensual. From the Shack a footpath,

following deer trails, crosses a sandy ridge, skirts the river, cutting through heavy thickets and boggy spots. Along it are some good places for watching muskrats and hearing pileated woodpeckers, but no scenic or biotic spectaculars suitable for postcard photographs. The mixed deciduous woods are not majestic but rather crowded and tangled. In them a whole lot of species of flora and fauna are obviously competing vigorously and surviving modestly. "Whole" may be the key word, as wholesome is the pervading sense of the reserve. An overt sign of this is an abundance of twisted, stunted, fallen, dying and dead trees of a sort that, paradoxically, a professional forester intent on managing land so as to produce a lot of a few things-say saw logs or deer-would find objectionable. They indicate that diverse life cycles are proceeding at their own pace. The rot eating away at oak wood around a hole drilled by a woodpecker can create a cavity suitable for a raccoon den. In time it may fell the oak. When the tree comes down, it will clear away smaller ones and some of the understory, promoting the growth of deer browse and oak seedlings.

Pre-eminently among our environmental philosophers, Leopold was a humanist who did not forget or find reprehensible that before thinking about grouse and parrots our species will and must think about breakfast and a good many other phenomenal needs. "Dad always said that land ethic came after breakfast," says Nina Bradley. He did not preach that ecological hellfire and doomsday disaster would consume us if we did not immediately mend our ways. Rather, he recommended an ideal which might be beneficially pursued.

Leopold was not a primitivist and probably would have had little patience with current fads which suggest that the environmental hope of mankind is to support itself by digging roots, the light manufacture of turquoise jewelry and heavy meditation.

He obviously thought highly of wilderness, but also of using the land well, an act which he descriptively called husbandry.

Husbandry involves recognizing, to the extent we can, how the natural system functions and then working with rather than against it. He did not consider technology evil, but opposed the inclination to seek technological solutions for all our problems.

To exhaust a piece of land and then attempt to keep it in production with intensive use of machines and energy did not seem to him to be either ethical or in anyone's true self-interest.

After it was acquired by Leopold, the "Sand County" farm was managed to be, if not wilderness, at least a tract on which the self-healing properties and natural vitality of the land were demonstrated. ("In many cases we literally do not know how good a performance to expect of healthy land unless we have a wild area for comparison with sick ones.") However, land rehabilitation and husbandry-gardening, hunting, woodcutting-was and still is practiced there.

Leopold's days began at 3:30 a.m. One morning, he noted, having risen "with such dignity as I can muster of a July morning, I step from my cabin door, bearing in either hand my emblems of sovereignty, a coffeepot and notebook. I seat myself on a bench, facing the white wake of the morning star. I set the pot beside me. I extract a cup from my shirt front. ... I get out my watch, pour coffee and lay notebook on knee. This is the cue for proclamations to begin."

The proclamations were songs offered by birds, some of the tenants of the farm, and Leopold recorded them in the order of hearing them. The first, at 3:35, was a field sparrqw.

0 About the Author: Bil Gilbert is a contributing writer for Sports Illustrated and lives in Fairfield, Pennsylvania.

CaliforniaComes Wine of Age

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Bring out the glasses. California has a major cause for celebration. Italso has the means: California wine has come ofage. Old, they say, is gold.

But this state's relatively new vintage is now winning golds-silvers and bronzes too-at international wine tastings and contests. The maturing of California's wines fulfills the promise depicted in a 19th-century engraving (left) which shows an old Bacchus passing a vine-wreathed staff to a Westerner. Wine connoisseurs hitherto looked to Europe for inspiration,

and for good reason. Vilis viniferathe leading species of grape used in all great wines, native to the Mediterranean region-has always had trouble surviving in North America. But California has now mastered the art of growing a good grape and turning it into fine wine.

It has, first, the advantage of lush land on which wineries thrive (below). And it has the University of California's department of oenology, regarded as the world's most advanced wine research establishment. The state's vineyards merge

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old methods (for example, the ancient technique of assembling barrels, left) with new ones (like the automatic corking machine shown in the center panel below).

While most of California's wines come from the dozen .established. firms that annually produce mort; than two million cases, some of the more interesting wines (see labels in center panel below) come from new estates started in the last decade. Together, California's vintners supply 70 percent of all wines consumed in the United States.

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A TOAST TO CALIFORNIA WINE