March 1981

March 1981

SPAN 2

A New Beginning by 'President Ronald Reagan

4 President Carter Urges World Effort to Control Nuclear Arms

5 Cuban Refugees Find a New Home in New Jersey

by Valerie M. Shepherd

10 American Libraries in India

14 The Importance of Crying

by Mary Peacock

15 What Makes You Cry?

18 Shame

25 Fibers That Carry Light

29 Should Government Regulate Business?

The Business View

39 The Indian Press in America

42 A Talk With Philip Guston

by Mark Stevens

48 On the Lighter Side

49 Challenges to U.S. Foreign Policy

Assistant Managing Editor Editorial Staff

Art Staff Chief of Production Circulation Manager Photographic Services

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

B. Roy Choudhury, Kanti Roy Awtar S. Marwaha A.K. Mitra ICA Photo Lab

Photographs: Front cover~Fred Ward, Black Star © National Geographic Society .12-Avinash Pasricha. 14, 16-17-United Press International. 19-Collection: Museums Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Courtesy Sidney Janis Gallery, N.Y. 25-Copyright Carl Fischer, 1980.

All rights reserved. 26-27 and 27 bottom left-Fred Ward, Black Star © National Geographic Society. 27 right top to bottom-Fred Ward, Black Star,,; Tom Roberts, USDA Forest Service: Bruce Dale © National Geographic Society. 28 top and bottom left-Courtesy The Cleveland Clinic Foundation; right-Fred Ward, Black Star ©National Geographic Society. 42-43 46-47-Photos by Philip Galgiani, Courtesy San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. 45-David McKee, Inc. Inside back cover left-----;DavidCubbage, Uniphoto; right top and bottom~Michael Philip Manheim, Photo Researchers. Back cover-Henry Groskinsky, Life magazine, © 1979 Time Inc. Asok Mitra teaches at Jawaharlal Nehru University, not Delhi University as reported in SPAN February 1981,page 13.

CORRECTION:

The following is a statement of ownership and other particulars about SPAN magazine as required under $ection 19 D(b) of the Press & Registration of Books Act 1867 and under Rule 8 of the Registration of Newspaper (Central) Rules, 1956.

United States International Communication Agency 24. Kasl.rha Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 1/0001 Monlhly H.K. Mehla Indian Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Haryana Michael Pistor American 24, Kasl.rha Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 11/)001 Jacob Sloan American 24, Kasl.rha Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 11/)001

2. Periodicity of its Publication 3. Printer's Name Nationality Address 4. Publisher's Name Nationality Address 5. Editor's Name Nationality Address 6. Names and addresses of individuals who own the newspaper and partners or shareholders holding more than one per cent of the total capital The Government of the United States of America I, Michael Pistor, hereby declare that the particulars given above are true to the best of my knowledge and belief.

(Signed) M,chael Pistor Signature of Publisher

Front cover: Th is fiber optic telephone cable, shown here in cross section, contains 144 glass fiber strands. These enable the cable to carry many million more conversations than traditional copper wire. Fiber optic technology is also being used in other fields, including medicine. See pages 25-28.

Back cover: The Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston is one of the most successful attempts at revitalizing old landmarks in American cities. See inside back cover.

On behalf of the ex-American hostages , their families and the American people as a whole, SPAN expresses its warm gratitude and appreciation to all our friends in India who have offered their sympa~hy and moral support during the 444 long days of the American diplomats' detention in Iran. The sober question at this time is, How shall we--all of us in the international community--deal with such terrorist activity in the future? In this regard, I thought you might be interested in the following quote from a recent Voice of America commentary. it is time to think as Now that the immediate 'crisis has passed clearly and unemotionally as possible about the international blight of ---terrorism, and particularly the increasing threat to diplomats.

This is harcUy a problem for the United State salone • All diplomats, representing all governments, were in effect held hostage by the kidnapping of their American colleagues;' terrorism, as events have pr:oved over the course of quite a few years now~ does not stop at any Dorder. Governments with sharply contrasting iritere-sts,- ideologies and outlooKs share a common vulnerability to acts of terrorism, and they need to answer them with a common sense of determina tion.

For itspart, the U. S. Government fully intends to protect its diplomats, and will con"tinue to protect the aiplomats of other countries who represent fheir governments in the United States. Those-who heard President Ronald Reagan's pledge on January 27 should have no-doubts about the U. S• . Government's interition to back it up. "Let terrorists be aware," he said, "that-when the rules of international behaviorare violated, our policy will be one of swift and eHective retribution."

And those who -witnessed therecentoutpouring of support for the returnea American prisoners--eifher first--handor vicariously through radio or television--should have no doubt about the determination of the people of the United States to carry out that pledge.

The United States or other countrfes with enormous economic and military power at their disposal obviously have -the resources to impose an eHective penalty for terrorism. Countries that lack such resources are- also tm-eatened by acts of terrorism, however, and they must international clim-a-te that-leaves no depend for their own safety on ambiguity about the fact that terrorism does not pay-.

-The creation of such a -climate is not impossible. Terrorism as a worldWide-epidemic is a relatively new phenomenon-.The involvement of a government fn an attack on -foreign diplomats is unprecedented in modern times. It is the responsibility of the international community in general, and of indIvidual governments in particular, to s-ee that the-rules of the civilized- worldare once again obeyed.

I

an

A New¡Beginning In his inaugural address on January 20, President Reagan called on his countrymen "to begin an era of national renewal" in order to create "a strong, . prosperous America at peace with itself and the world." The president added: "Peace is the highest aspiration of the American people. We will negotiate for it, sacrifice for it,' we will not surrender for it-now or ever."

To a few of us here today this is a solemn and most momentous occasion.

And, yet, in the history of our nation it is a commonplace occurrence.

The orderly transfer of authority as called for in the U.S. Constitution routinely takes place as it has for almost two centuries and few of us stop to think how unique we really are. In the eyes of many in the world, this every-fouryear ceremony we accept as norinal is nothing less than a miracle.

Mr. President, I want our fellow citizens to know how much you did to carry on this tradition. By your gracious cooperation in the transition process you have shown a watching world that we are a united people pledged to maintaining a political system which guarantees individual liberty to a greater degree than any other. And I thank you and your people for all your help in maintaining the continuity which is the bulwark of our Republic.

The business of our nation goes forward.

These United States are confronted with an economic affliction of great proportions.

We suffer from the longest and one of the worst sustained inflations in our national history. It distorts our economic decisions, penalizes thrift and crushes the struggling young and the fixed-income elderly alike. It threatens to shatter the lives of millions of our people.

Idle industries have cast workers into unemployment, human misery and personal indignity. Those who do work are denied a fair return for their labor

by a tax system which penalizes successful achievement and keeps us from maintaining full productivity. .

But great as our tax burden is, it has not kept pace with public spending.

For decades we have piled deficit upon deficit, mortgaging our future and our children's future for the temporary convenience of the present. To continue this long trend is to guarantee tremendous social, cultural, political, and economic upheavals.

You and 1, as individuals, can, by borrowing, live beyond our means, but for¡ only a limited period of time. Why should we think that collectively, as a nation, we are not bound by that same limitation?

We must act today in order to preserve tomorrow. And let there be no misunderstanding-we are going to begin to act beginning today.

The economic ills we suffer have come upon us over several decades. They will not go away in days, weeks, or months, but they will go away. They will go away because we as Americans have the capacity now, as we have had in the past, to do whatever needs to be done to preserve this last and greatest bastion of freedom.

In this present crisis,. government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.

From time to time we have been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is' superior to government for, by and oLthe

people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?

All of us together-in and out of goveniment-must bear the burden. The solutions we seek must be equitable with no one group singled out to pay a higher price.

We hear much of special interest groups.

Well, our concern must be for a special interest group that has been too long neglected. It knows no sectional boundaries or ethnic and racial divisions, and it crosses political party lines. It is made up of men and women who raise our food, patrol our streets, man our mines and factories, teach our children, keep our homes and heal us when we're sick.

Professionals, industrialists, shopkeepers, clerks, cabbies and truck drivers. They are, in short, "we the people." This breed called Americans.

Well, this Administration's objective must be a healthy, vigorous, growing economy that provides equal opportunities for all Americans with no barriers born of bigotry or discrimination. Putting America back to work means putting all Americans back to work. Ending inflation means freeing all Americans from the terror of runaway living costs. All must share in the productive work of this "new beginning," and all must share in the bounty of a revived economy.

With the idealism and fair play which are the core of our system and our strength, we can have a strong, prosperous America at peace with itself and the world.

So, as we begin, let us take inventory.

We are a nation that has a governmentnot the other way around. And this makes us special among the nations of the earth. Our government has no power except that granted it by the people.

It is time to check and reverse the growth of government, which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed.

It is my intention to curb the size and influence of the Federal establishment and to demand recognition of the distinction between the powers granted to the Federal Government and those reserved to the states or to the people. All of us need to be reminded that the Federal Government did not create the states;

the states created the Federal Government.

Now, so there will be no misunderstanding, it is not my intention to do away with government. It is rather to make it work-work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back. Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it.

If we look to the answer as to why for so many years we achieved so much, prospered as no other people on earth, it was because here in this land we unleashed the energy and individual genius of man to a greater extent than has ever been done before. Freedom and the dignity of the individual have been more available and assured here than in any other place on earth. The price for this freedom at times has been high, but we have never been unwilling to pay that price.

It is no coincidence that our present troubles parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that have resulted from unnecessary and excessive growth of government.

It is time for us to realize that we are too great a nation to limit ourselves to small dreams. We are not, as some would have us believe, doomed to an inevitable decline. I do not believe in a fate that will fall on us no matter what we do. I do believe in a fate that will fall on us if we do nothing.

So, with all the creative energy at our command, let us begin an era of national renewal. Let us renew our determination, our courage, and our strength. And let us renew our faith and our hope. We have every right to dream heroic dreams.

Those who say that we are in a time when there are no heroes, they just' don't know where to look. You can see heroes every day going in and out of factory gates. Others, a handful in number, produce enough food to feed all of us and then the world beyond.

You meet heroes across a counterand they are on both sides of that counter.

They are entrepreneurs with faith in themselves and faith in an idea who create new jobs, new wealth and opportunity. They are individuals and families whose taxes support the government and whose voluntary gifts support church, charity, culture, art, and education. Their patriotism is quiet but deep. Their values sustain our national life.

Now, I have used the words "they" and "their" in speaking of these heroes.

I could say "you" and "your" because I am addressing the heroes of whom I speak-you, the citizens of this blessed land. Your dreams, your hopes, your goals are going to be the dreams, the

hopes and goals of this Administration, so help me God. We shall reflect the compassion chat is so much a part of your makeup. How can we love our country and not love our countrymen? And loving them reach out a hand when they fall, heal them when they are sick, and provide opportunity to make them self-sufficient so they will be equal in fact and not just in theory?

Can we solve the problems confronting us? Well, the answer is an unequivocal and emphatic yes. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, I did not take the oath I have just taken with the intention of presiding over the dissolution of the world's strongest economy.

In the days ahead I will propose removing the roadblocks that have slowed our economy and reduced productivity.

Steps will be taken aimed at restoring the balance between the various levels of government. Progress may be slowmeasured in inches and feet, not miles -- but we will progress. It is time to reawaken this industrial giant; to get government back [to living] within its means, and to lighten our punitive tax burden.

And these will be our first priorities, and on these principles, there will be no compromise.

On the eve of our struggle for independence a man who might have been one of the greatest among the Founding Fathers (if he hadn't given his life on Bunker Hill), Dr. Joseph Warren, president of the Massachusetts Congress, said to his fellow Americans, "Our country is in danger,'but not to be despaired of. ...

On you depend the fortunes of America.

You are to decide the important question on which rest the happiness and liberty of millions yet unborn. Act worthy of yourselves ...

I believe we the Americans of today are ready to act worthy of ourselves, ready to do what must be done to ensure happiness and liberty for ourselves, our children, and our children's children.

And as we renew ourselves here in our own land, we will be seen as having greater strength throughout the world. We will again be the examplar of freedom and a beacon of hope for those who do not now have freedom.

To those neighbors and allies who share our freedom, we will strengthen our historic ties and assure them of our support and firm commitment. We will match loyalty with loyalty. We will strive for mutually beneficial relations.

We will not use our friendship to impose on their sovereignty, for our own sovereignty is not for sale.

As for the enemies of freedom, those

who are potential adversaries, they will be reminded that peace is the highest aspiration of the American people. We will negotiate for it, sacrifice for it; we will not surrender for it-now Of ever.

Our forbearance should never be misunderstood. Our reluctance for conflict should not be misjudged as a failure of will. When action is required to preserve our national security, we will act. We will maintain sufficient strength to prevail if need be, knowing that if we do so we have the best chance of not having to use that strength.

Above all we must realize that no weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women. It is a weapon our adversaries in today's world do not have. It is a weapon that we as Americans do have. Let that be understood by those who practice terrorism and prey upon their neighbors.

This is the first time in our history that this ceremony has been held on the west front of the Capitol building. Standing here, one faces a magnificent vista, opening up on this city's special beauty and history. At the end of this open mall are those shrines to the giants on whose shoulders we stand.

Directly in front of me, the monument to a monumental man. George Washington, father of our country. A man of humility who came to greatness reluctantly. He led America out of revolutionary victory into infant nationhood.

Off to one side, the stately memorial to Thomas Jefferson. The Declaration of Independence flames with his eloquence.

And then beyond the reflecting pool, the dignified columns of the Lincoln Memorial. Whoever would understand in his heart the meaning of America will find it in the life of Abraham Lincoln.

Beyond those monuments to heroism is the Potomac River, and on the far shore the¡ sloping hills of Arlington National Cemetery with its row upon row of simple white markers bearing crosses or Stars of David; they add up to only¡ a tiny fraction of the price that has been paid for ourfreedom ....

The crisis we are facing today does not require of us the kind of sacrifice... so many thousands [of our fellow Americans] were called upon to make. It does require, however, our best effort and our willingness to believe in ourselves and to believe in ou'r capacity to perform great deeds, to believe that together with God's help we can and will resolve the problems which now confront us.

And after all, why shouldn't we believe that? We are Americans.

0

PRESIDENT CARTER .URGES WORLD EFFORT TO CONTROL NUCLEAR ARMS In his farewell address to the nation on January 14, President Jimmy Carter made an impassioned plea to the world "to reduce the stockpiles of nuclear arms ... before madness, desperation, greed, or miscalculation lets loose this terrible force."

In a few days, I will lay down my official responsibilities in this office-to take up once more the only title in our democracy superior to that of president, the title of citizen.

Of Vice President Mondale, my cabinet, and the hundreds of others who have served with me during these four years, I wish to say publicly what I have said in . private: I thank them for the dedication and competence they have brought to the service of our country.

But I owe my deepest thanks to you, the American people, because you gave me this extraordinary opportunity to serve. We have faced great challenges together. We know that future problems will also be difficult, but I am now more convinced than ever that the United States-better than any other nationcan meet successfully whatever the future might bring. , Those last four years have made me more certain than ever of the inner strength of our country-the unchanging value of our principles and ideals, the stability of our political system, the ingenuity and decency of our people.

I would like first to say a few words about this most special office, the presidency.of the United States.

This is at once the most powerful office in the world -and among the most severely constrained by law and custom.

The president is given a broad responsibility to lead-but cannot do so without the support and consent of the people, expressed formally through the Congress and informally through a whole range of public and private institutions.

This is as it should be. Within our system of government every American has a right and duty to help shape the future

course of the United States. Thoughtful criticism and close scrutiny of all government officials by the press and the' public are an important part of our democratic society. Now, as in our past, only the understanding and involvement of the people through full and open debate can help to avoid mistakes and assure the continued dignity and safety of the nati on.

Today, we are asking our political system to do things of which the founding fathers never dreamed. The government they designed for a few hundred thousand people now serves a nation of almost 230 million people. Their small coastal republic now spans beyond a continent, and we now have the responsibility to help lead much of the world through difficult times to a secure and prosperous future.

Today, as people have become more doubtful of the ability of the government to deal with our problems, we are increasingly drawn to single-issue groups and special-interest organizations to ensure that whatever else happens our own personal views and our own private interests are protected. This is a disturbing factor in American political life. It tends to distort our purposes, because the national interest is not always the sum of all our single or special interests. We are all Americans together-and we must not forget that the common good is our common interest and our individual responsibility.

Because of the fragmented pressures

of spe<;ial interests, it is very important that the office of the president be a strong one, and that its constitutional authority be preserved. The president is the only elected official charged with representing all the people. In the moments of decision, after the different and conflicting views have been' aired, it is the president who then must speak to the nation and for the nation.

I understand, as few others can, how formidable is the task the president-elect is about to undertake. To the very limits of conscience and convictio'n, I pledge to support him in that task. I wish him success, and Godspeed.

I know from experience that presidents have to face major issues that are controversial, broad in scope, and which do not arouse the natural support of a political majority.

For a few minutes now, I want to lay aside my role as leader of one nation, and speak to you as a fellow citizen of the world about three such issues: the threat of nuclear destruction; our stewardship of the physical resources of our planet; and the preeminence of the basic rights of human beings.

It is now 35 years since the first atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima. The great majority of the world's people cannot remember a time when the nuclear shadow 5lid not hang over the earth.

Our minds have adjusted to it, as after a time our eyes adjust to the dark.

Yet the risk of a nuclear conflagration has not lessened. It has not happened yet, but that can give us little comfort-for it only has to happen once.

The danger is becoming greater. As the arsenals of the superpowers' grow in size and sophistication and as other ,governments acquire these weapons, it may only be a matter of time before madness, desperation, greed, or miscalculation lets loose this terrible force.

In an all-out nuclear war, more destructive power than in all of World War II would be unleashed every second for the long afternoon it would take for all the missiles and bombs to fall. A World War II every second-more people killed in the first few hours than all the wars of (Text continued on page 52)

CUBAN REFUGEES FIND

A NEW HOME IN NEW dERSEY "If there's any chance for me to get out of Cuba, please help me," a 40year-old Cuban named Miguel* said to his American friend, Delia Santana, in October of 1979. Mrs. Santana, a resident of Weehawken, New Jersey, met Miguel, whom she had known in childhood, when she returned to her native Cuba that year to visit relatives.

In May of 1980, Mrs. Santana heard from her friend again. This time he was telephoning New Jersey from Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, a camp for Cuban refugees who had fled Cuba via the boatlift from Mariel to Key West, Florida.

"Will you be my sponsor in the United States?" Miguel asked. When Mrs. Santana agreed, Miguel was released from the camp and put on a bus to New Jersey, to become one of five Cuban men the Santana family would sponsor, and one of an estimated 10,000 * M iguers last name. like that of all the refugees quoted in this article. has been omitted to protect his relatives who still remain in Cuba

ment in 1959. Over the next 20 years, they transformed the decaying towns of To escape economic privation Gutenberg, West New York and Union City into prosperous business centers. and political perse~ution Along Bergenline Avenue, the main thousands of Cubans have shopping thoroughfare that runs through taken refuge in the these towns, the evidence of this transUnited States in the past year. formation is obvious today. The commercial property vacancy rate, which was 20 percent in the 1960s, is down to less than I percent. New professional Cuban refugees who arrived in Hudson County, New Jersey, between the end buildings carry the shingles of Hispanic of April and September of 1980. doctors and lawyers. Grocery stores Hudson County, New Jersey, lies on with names like La Caridad and La top of the Palisade Cliffs just across the Flor de Cuba are stocked with Spanish Hudson River from Manhattan's jagged food products and jammed with wellskyline. Like all of the United States, it fed, well-dressed patrons. In restaurants has been home to successive waves .of and cafes, Cuban-Americans dine on immigrants. The original 18th-century traditional dishes like roast pork and Dutch settlers were followed by Germans fried plantain, and sip cafe cubano. in the 19th century, and by Italians in This close-knit, prosperous commuthe first part of the 20th century. Today nity is proud of its new homeland and this county is also home to 69,000 proud of its accomplishments in it. But Cuban-Americans, making it, after many Cuban-Americans also have strong Miami and New York, the'third largest emotional ties to their homeland and to such settlement in the United States.

The first groups of Cubans arrived here after the fall of the Batista Govern-

he refugees found their transit a wrenching and chaotic experience, attended by fear, hardship and uncertainty. the relatives many of them left behind.

When, in 1979, Castro opened up Cuba to permit emigres to return home to visit their families, many from Hudson County went. Some, like Rosa Hernandez, said they heard there of conditions that indicated a rebellious outburst was on the way. Father Raul Comesanas,

assistant pastor of St. Joseph's Catholic Church in West New York and a leading advocate of Cuban-American rights, said that those visits from relatives abroad exacerbated the current unrest in Cuba.

Cubans had been led to believe by the Castro regime that their American cousins were living in abject poverty. Now they saw them wearing new clothes and wristwatches, and heard tales of their acquisitions-cars, televisions and vacation homes.

The occupation of the Peruvian Embassy in Havana, beginning on April 4, 1980, by nearly 11,000 Cubans seeking political asylum and the right to emigrate, did not, therefore, come as a surprise to the Cu ban -Americans in Hudson County.

Mobilization to assist them began immediately. Ad-hoc groups, such as the

Crusada Cuba Peru, were formed to raise funds for those in the Peruvian Embassy as soon as it was announced they would be airlifted to Costa Rica for distribution elsewhere. When the airlift was canceled by the Castro Government and the refugees began embarking by boat from Mariel harbor .for Key West, some Hudson County residents stayed behind to prepare for the influx of refugees, and others went directly to Cuba to try to bring their families out.

Rosa Hernandez, of Hudson County, J'"' told the story of her husband Abel's successful effort to bring their family members to the United States. "On April 24, 1980, he went to Florida with nine other people, chartered a shrimp boat and sailed to Marie!' They applied to take 100 of their relatives out of

Cuba, but the government officials came to the boat and said, 'You can only take 30 of your relatives with you; you have to take these other people instead.'

So they had to sail back to the United States with 30 of the people they wanted, and the other 70 were people of Castro's choice. But they went to Mariel a second time, and this time they were allowed to take all the other relatives.

Still there were many more that the Cuban officials ordered them to take on the boat. The boat should not have carried more than 100 people, but it was carrying 310. It was dreadfully overloaded, almost sinking in the water."

Those Cuban refugees who were not lucky enough to be escorted to the United States on boats chartered by their relatives found their way to Hudson

County by more circuitous routes. However they came, the refugees found their transit a wrenching and chaotic experience, attended by fear, hardship and uncertainty.

Miguel, for instance, was afraid it might be a trap. "In April friends stopped by my house in Cuba and said I could leave if I filled out the right papers at the police station. I couldn't believe itI thought, if I do that they will only put me in jail. I thought about it for five days, and then took the chance, went to the police station and presented myself. I had been working in a pizzeria for 18 years, but in order to get out, I said I was anti socialist and didn't want to work, that I was a bum. They let me leave."

While waiting for passage on a boat,

Above t A political prisoner in Cuba, Luis r!ould not bring his wife and child with him to the United States. Always wearing a picture of his child like an amulet on his belt, he says: HI just want to earn enough money to free my family." Center: Flag bearers at the head of the procession of Our Lady of Charity, which commemorates the patroness of Cuba. Far left: A Cuban-American family watches the procession.

Miguel was interned in a camp at out of the El Bohio restaurant in Union for these services.

Michael Leggiero, executive director Mosquito for two days. "The soldiers City, had raised $136,000 and was sicked their dogs on us and yelled ready with clothing, cash and food for of the Community Action Agency in insults at us. If you said anything, or the refugees. An apartment building in North Hudson, said last year, "At least 5,000 Cuban refugees have applied reacted in anger, they would rip up your the area was rented for temporary housing and the organization lined up in North Hudson for public assistance, passport and throw you in jail." or about 50 percent of those who've Angel, 22, was among the first 85 sponsors and offers of work. people to seek asylum in the Peruvian arrived here. We have 400 students Under the auspices of the United enrolled in the English classes run by Embassy, where he spent 13 days with States Catholic Conference, the Union practically no food or water. Before of Cubans in Exile, a church-related the Board of Education, and 400 more on the waiting list; there are 700 applileaving on an airlift to the United group, raised funds, found sponsors, cants waiting for CET A classes."

States, he went home to say a last and distributed over $100,000 in donated Emergency grants of $20,000 from the good-bye to his mother, father and food, handling, altogether, over 6,000 U.S. Defense Department and of$50,000 sister. At his house, a crowd of strangers refugees in four months. assembled and pelted him with eggs and Margarita Campo, a coordinator at for additional bi-lingual summer edutomatoes and yelled insults at him and St. Mary's Catholic Church in West New cational programs had eased the situahis family.

York, described the scene that took tion, and the community was awaiting, "They threw eggs and tomatoes at place in May, June and July as volun- in August last year, the passage of us, too, when we applied to leave," teers worked feverishly around the clock. Federal legislation that would yield said Alina, 25, a former day-care teacher.

"We would start at 6: 00 a.m. and $14 million in refugee aid for the New "And when they put us on the bus to begin making phone calls, and we would Jersey area. take us away from Havana, people stay at the church sometimes until ~~~ smashed the bus with pieces of lumber."

3 :00 a.m. to greet arriving refugees.

Jobs for the refugees are a major People donated money, furniture, stoves, problem in an area where unemployment Alina was convinced these demonstrais as high as 15 percent. Those most tions were organized by the Castro Government. Alina, her elderly mother hard-hit are the young single men who make up a high percentage of the refugee Caridad and her seven-year-old son he soldiers sicked population.

Many of them know no were also taken to Mosquito. "The their dogs on us and conditions there were terrible," she said.

English, have few skills and no previous yelled insults at us.

"Spoiled food, bad water, and the army contacts with friends or relatives in the Hudson County community. Bergenline sicked their dogs on us constantly. And If you said anything, Avenue is lined, every day, with young the boat was the worst-we were put or reacted in anger, men who, in their new shoes and clothes, . on it with the criminals and the mentally they would throw imbalanced that Castro was sending sit on the steps of buildings and stroll you in jail." the avenue, looking for work, looking out of Cuba. for friends who might have word of a job.

After arriving at Key West on May 19, the three were immediately put Most of the refugees-even those with they had. Gloria special skills-say they will take any on a plane to Pennsylvania, where the clothes-whatever U.S. Government had opened a new Sac, a pharmacy owner, donated drugs job they can get here. Jose had b~en a refugee camp at Fort Indiantown Gap. and found doctors who would provide cook in a "tourist" restaurant in Cuba, free medical care. Every day trucks preparing the cuisines of many different "The U.S. Army was just great to us," Alina said. She was able to contact pulled up at the door from manu- countries. He is currently working in a facturers of Spanish food productsher sister and brother-in-law, Maria grocery store, but he says, "Just being Goya, Bustello, El Pico, Iberia. We had here is fantastic. Coming to the United and Ramon Lemus, of West New York, New Jersey, by telephone, and was soon rice, beans, coffee by the ton. The local States was always my dream. Here A & P supermarket sent food, and there is freedom, people don't look over reunited with them. your shoulder spying all the time. Later But people like the Hernandez' rela- butcher shops like Los 4 Hermanos tives, Miguel, and Alina and her family and Amaro sent meat. We made up I will learn English, and then' maybe are among the most fortunate of refugees, shopping bags of food and sent them I can work as a cook. But at least now I have peace of mind." those with prosperous relatives and home with the refugees."

The refugees are eligible, under the Guillermo, 21, is still looking for a job. friends able to care for them and help U.S. Immigration and Naturalization "I'll do any job, I just want to bring my them adjust to life in a new country.

Act, for government supports such as family over to the United States so For thousands of others, the situation was more uncertain. The Hudson County food stamps, day care, job placement they don't have to suffer like I had to suffer." He added, "In Cuba, you work Cuban community responded with an through the Comprehensive Educational outpouring of aid, and many non- Training Act (CETA), and English- and work, but you don't accomplish Cuban citizens and groups contributed language training classes. The Commu- anything. Here you can see what you to the effort. nity Services offices in Hudson County accomplish when you work. Maybe, The Crusada Cuba Peru, operating were promptly inundated with requests later I will go to college."

A college education is a new option for some of the refugee Cubans, since in Cuba, enrollment in college is restricted to those who are politically active in the Communist party. Carmen, 21, had not been to college in Cuba because, though her high school grades were excellent, she was not "political." But here, she said, beaming, "I am attending college,Just four months after I came to the United States."

Freedom of religious expression is another facet of life in the United States 'that the refugees looked forward to.

"In Cuba," said Caridad, an attractive grandmother, "the church was just for senior citizens. The children are taught in the youth groups that there is no God. They can't study catechism. You can't even baptize your children, because if you do, and are reported, you might lose your job. My grandson Mauricio was baptized, but we kept it a secret. Now that we are in the U nited States, Mauricio can have a religious education."

Bishop Boza Masvidal, who is the spiritual leader of exiled Cubans all overthe world, related the circumstances of his eviction from Cuba. "On September 8, 1961, we were going to have the normal procession and mass for the festival of Our Lady of Charity, patroness of Cuba. We were told the procession would have to be rescheduled. But wecouldn't do that, because there wasn't time to notify everyone. So we took the statue of the Virgin and put it in a house, where it wouldn't be harmed, and everyone went into the house. Because we weremeeting in a large group and having this procession, they began firing at us with guns, and several people were wounded." A few days later Bishop Masvidal was summoned by officials to make a report on the incident. When he arrived at his appointment, he was put in prison, and five days later he was put on a boat out of Cuba.

The festival of Our Lady of Charity that was held in Hudson County on September 7, 1980, made a poignant contrast to the 1961 one described by Bishop Boza Masvidal. Down Bergenline Avenue, and through the streets of West New York and Union City, crowds of residents and refugees marched, singing, behind the statue of the Virgin, while thousands more watched from the street.

Not all of the refugees were clear about what they wanted to do in the United States. A young man named Eugenio, who had beenjailed in Cuba for trying to seek asylum at the Peruvian Embassy, but was released fromjail when the mass exodus began, said, "When I came here I thought I just wanted to be a hippie. I had no sponsor, and was living in the park. But Father Raul Comesanas found me. He took me to New York City and showed me the lower east side and 42nd Street. He showed me how people live who don't

ust being here is fantastic. Here there is freedom, people don't look over your shoulder spying all the time. Now I have peace of mind."

have jobs." Eugenio laughed and shook his head. "I changed my mind. I work for a moving company, and I plan to study and work on my painting."

Eugenio was fortunate to meet someone like Father Raul Comesanas, who had the understanding and ability to guide him thrqugh the confusion of shifting suddenly from one society to another, very different one. There are many more Cubans who have not yet been so lucky.

Of particular concern to Father Comesanas are the 14,000 Cubans still in refugee camps. Though 1,600 of them who have been identified as serious criminals have been removed and sent to Federal correction institutions, most of those who remain in the camps are young, single men, many with prison records.

Father Comesanas goes once a week to the camp at Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania, to say Mass, offer counsel, and to bring back from the camp those refugees for whom sponsors have been found. "Once, while I was conducting a Mass, one young kid was so frustrated he pounded a window out with his fist," he said. Father Comesanas views this as understandable. "They are coming from an oppressive system

and are still bottled up. Their only true crime might have been anticommunism, but they need guidance and orientation in order to adjust to a different life here."

The tension felt by the inhabitants of the refugee camps has led to outbreaks of violence and rioting that actually make their plight worse, as public sentiment against them makes it harder for the legitimate refugees to find sponsors. Grail Brookshire, commander general of the Cuban Task Force, said at Fort Indiantown Gap, "It's only a small group of people who are creating the disturbances in the camp, but they are ruining the chances of the other Cubans to get sponsored out."

Probably the people in the United States most upset by "lawbreakingparticularly the wave of hijackingsby recently arrived Cubans are the refugees themselves. Many of them view the Castro Government's "dumping" of the criminal and mentally unbalanced into the United States as part of a plan to discredit them in their new homeland. "Castro sent the delinquents and the 'locos' to the United States so the world would think we are all delinquents and 'locos,'" Alina, said. "But it isn't so."

There is always the hope that, whatever their background, the new refugees can build a different life for themselves, like the one Raymond is building for himself. Raymond once had a good Job in Cuba as a representative for Volvo, but was accused of being a spy and sent to political prison. The charges were never proved, so he was released from jail, but he could never find a good job after that. When he arrived in the United States on May 20, 1980, he asked for and received a job with the American Red Cross, working to help the refugees. Now he has an apartment in Lebanon, Pennsy 1vania, and has been able to sponsor his . nephew in addition. In excellent English, Raymond said, "w. e're working, and we're paying for everything just like American citizens."

0 About the Contributors: Marcia Keegan is the of The Taos Indians and Their Sacred Blue Lake, Mother Earth, Father Sky, We Can Still Hear Them Clapping and Pueblo and Navajo Cookery. Valerie Shepherd author-photographer

is afree-lance

writer.

A panoramic view of the air-conditioned Calcutta American Center library.

The entrance to the recently renovated library, which is located off Chowringhee.

Guests sample the publications on display during the widely attended inauguration.

Visitors browse in the comfortably fitted library, membership of which is free.

The display racks o.ffer a wide selection of American books and periodicals.

The public service desk answers questions on subjects ranging from pollution to politics.

Among other services, the American Center library o.ffers microform and video facilities.

or almost 40 years, S.B. Chatterjee, an assistant editor with Calcutta's Statesman, has been visiting a library, following it as it shifted location three times around India's busy eastern city. Since 1943, he has browsed through its constantly growing collection, and concentrated on the numerous books in his field of interest-international relations and cultural affairs. As a young journalist, he participated in seminars organized by the library. Today, Chatterjee's son, a student of chartered accountancy, also finds the library useful.

The Chatterjees are typical of the thousands of people who, as members of the American Center libraries in Calcutta, Delhi, Bombay and Madras, have access to a wide range of books and periodicals that give them an insight into political, social and cultural developments in the United States. As all the libraries are located in the heart of the city, the air-conditioned halls are more often than not filled to capacity.

"Most come out of curiosity or sometimes to escape the summer heat," said it librarian at one of the centers, "and find that there is little formality and no cost involved in becoming a member. After they've sampled the facilities we offer, few have

F

to be reminded to renew their membership."

The facilities that go with the simple membership cards are many. Books are loaned for free-there is even a mail loaning service-and all the libraries have video monitors and microform equipment. Well-trained reference staff, besides guiding patrons, provide magazine reprints and other research material to specialists in many diverse fields. .

The librarians also exchange and share their experience through programs of internship training for selected library science graduates. These students are shown how to put into practice the "service" philosophy of the modern librarian.

In April 1943, the U.S. Government set up a reading room on the third floor of Tower House, near Calcutta's Dharamtala crossing, to dispense war information. From almost the first day, hundreds of Calcuttans swarmed the small office for briefings on wartime developments-and also to read the selection of American periodicals on display. That was the modest beginning of, the Calcutta American Center library.

To meet the growing interest in American studies, the Calcutta library broadened its collection in 1947 and shifted to a small apartment on the first floor of Esplanade Mansions. It started its free lending service in 1950, and the following year

moved to its present location on S.N. Banerjee Road, off the famous Chowringhee.

A second library at the American University Center was started in 1965 in north Calcutta to meet the needs of the students and faculty of Calcutta University. Ever since, the two libraries have worked in tandem to supply information about economics, art, international relations, literature, and science and technology in the United States.

Between the two of them, the libraries tote up an impressive collection-20,000 volumes,. over 350 periodicals, 7 daily U.S. newspapers, back issues of 54 periodicals on microform and 200 videotapes. The selection is also diverse: one can find the latest issue of Rolling Stone, the counterculture magazine, or, if one fancies, the National Tax Journal.

"We're constantly ordering new titles," says R. Satyamurthy, one of the librarians of the American Center, "and also keep dropping outdated volumes. The idea is to provide the latest developments in every aspect of U.S. society."

Last year, the American Center library took another step in its effort to provide modern facilities to the public-a complete renovation of its quarters. The new look is in total contrast to the old British facade of the building, whiCh housed Whiteway and Laidlaw, once a fashionable store in east India.

The interior of the air-conditioned library impresses with its sensation of floating space and shimmering light, the elegance of soft gray walls and carpeting, and black and chrome furniture offset by collages and posters in brilliant colors. With its quietness and occasional rustle of a page, it is a world far removed, yet only a step away from Calcutta's bustling artery-Chowringhee.

But there is more to the American Center than mere refurbishing. Unlike more conventional libraries, where periodicals occupy separate stands, here magazines rub shoulders with books on the same subject. "It's a small thought," says Satyamurthy, "but it enables people to find material of their interest more easily."

Scholarly pursuit at the American Studies Research Center, which has one of the best American studies collections outsidp. the United States.

Similarly, the reference and circulation desks are now combined into one-the public service desk-which allows librarians to provide comprehensive and personalized service.

At circulation, joining the library is easy; anybody can become a member simply by providing the necessary identification, and is then entitled to borrow two books at a time.

At any moment of the day, the reference staff may be gathering material on such varied subjects as population control, space programs, or education systems. About 40 questions requiring more than five minutes of a reference librarian's time are answered every day by letter, telephone, or in person.

Requests come from people in all professions. Last year, for example, the reference section provided material on juvenile delinquency in the United States to Justice Jyotirmoyee Nag of the Calcutta High Court for an article for The Statesman. A few months earlier, it put together a package for a minister in the West Bengal Government who was preparing a draft recommendation on pollution control. And a staffer explained to a student the origins of the Democratic and Republican Party symbols-the donkey and the elephant. In all these cases, the answers went out within half an hour.

Another renovation at the American Center has been the reorganization of the audio-visual facility. Now, in one secluded

INDIAN COLLECTIONS IN THE U.S. "Why should the national library of the United States collect in so many languages?" a representative of the Biblotheque Nationale, the French national library, asked Daniel J. Boorstin, librarian of the U.S. Congress.

"The answer," replied Boorstin, "is in American history. We can be an adequate national library only by building an international collection for, as Walt Whitman said, we are 'a nation of nations.'"

Working with that philosophy, the Library of Congress has, inevitably, emerged as the largest library in the world. Its inventoried items-materials that range from books, magazines and maps to television films and recorded folk musiC-add up to a massive 75 million; the bound volumes alone come to about 18 million. In variety too, the library leads unquestionably: No less than 470 languages are represented on its shelves.

Of these, over 30 are Indian. For more

than a century, the Library of Congress has been collecting printed material that originated in India, in languages ranging from Manipuri and Konkani to Pali, Newari and Prakrit. With about 9,000 titles selected by its office in New Delhi for shipment to Washington each year, it is an impressive collection of material on Indian culture, history and society.

"The basic reason for our being in India," says E. Gene Smith, field director of the Library of Congress office in New Delhi, "is to acquire new material which can prove of importance to research in the United States. The large number of books that we buy for the library and the other 30 research libraries that are participants in our India program, reflect the intense interest American universities and researchers have in South Asia."

"There has been a long-standing interest in our institutions," Smith continues, "in what is known as classical

Indology-a blanket title for Indic culture, history, classical languages, art and music. Now, there is an increasing focus on modern India-on economic, scientific, social and political developments in India,' as a major developing .nation."

Thus, the New Delhi office has acquired material ranging from Salim Ali's famous Indian Hill Birds to a translation in Khasi of the discourses of Ramakrishna. The number of titles selected in each language and subject fluctuates with the needs of U.S. research institutions.

"One of our biggest problem areas," says Smith, "is the field of creative literature. We try to apply the rule that we would not want to collect popular. fiction, except for samples. We normally select a title only if it is intended to be a serious piece of writing. Obviously, we want to collect extensively the Hemingways of India, but do not want to have every Harold Robbins."

section of the library hall, four video playback and television sets are available to any visitor who wants to view and tune in on headphones to one of the 200 tapes in the collection. The subjects taped are diverse-one can select a cassette on foreign affairs, energy, trade, or the performing arts. Again, accessibility is the working rule-patrons operate the sets themselves.

~$~ By following the same philosophy of informality, the American University Center (AUC) at Bidhan Sarani has succeeded in establishing a close-knit academic center. Right from its inception in 1965, the AUC tried to bring about a greater interaction between academics. It began by organizing seminars and discussions, on trade and investment and involving teachers. and government leaders, and then gradually roped in the student community through such group meetings as poetry recitations, drama presentations and graphic workshops. The AUC also promoted a jazz club.

The library soon built up a reputation for being an institution anyone in Calcutta's academic world could turn to-from a postgraduate student seeking help for a term paper on sick industries to a minister wanting information on the bicameral legislative system of the United States.

The AUC library focuses on economics, history, and political science. The titles in the collection reflect the interest of the visiting students: one is likely to find books on social stratification and modern economic models. The library invites suggestions from the university and, if the book fits into its program, orders the required number of copies. ~~~ While the American Center libraries, which are run by the U.S. International Communication Agency, serve the general public, another library at Hyderabad has for over 15 years been promoting an unobtrusive but quiet scholarship by providing resources for academics (see SPAN, July 1975). This is the American Studies Research Center (ASRC), whose selection on the humanities and social sciences is regarded as one of the

best American studies collections outside the United States.

Located in a brand new structure opened in December 1979, on Osmania University's quiet campus, the ASRC has a collection of about 80,000 books, periodicals and other material that span all schools of thought-from the fairly radical to the very conservative. Since it is unhampered by any ideological considerations-the center is an independent academic body -the library has been able to acquire books on such controversial subjects as the Ku Klux Klan, and titles like The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence.

The use of the center's facilities is restricted to its more than 1,800 members. They can borrow books by mail (the ASRC mails out 24,000 books a year all over India) or in person; receive free copies of the center's publications, including the Indian Journal of American Studies; request typed or photocopies of materials at nominal cost; or visit the center at their own cost or on modest grants awarded on a competitive basis.

The center also serves as the venue for lectures, seminars, and national and international conferences.

With the varied facilities and programs they offer, the ASRC and the American Center libraries at Calcutta, Delhi, Bombay and Madras have emerged as important and popular centers for what, in librarian's parlance, is known as specialized dissemination of information (SDI). During the inauguration of its renovated library, for instance, the Calcutta center received an accolade from Professor R.K. Dasgupta, director of the prestigious National Library, when he said that it might help the authorities of the other libraries in the city organize their collections better.

But perhaps the best praise took the form of an insignificant report in Calcutta's Statesman several years ago: The clock on top of the USIS library building, a reporter complained, had stopped working. For the staff of the American Center, the gripe represented a minor victory-the old structure, once popularly known as LIC Building, had finally been recognized 0 by the facility it housed.

The Library of Congress and other libraries in the United States possess rich and varied collections of Indian publications which researchers all over the country have access¡ to.

Applying that rule of thumb is the job of the New Delhi office, set up in 1962.

The process starts with the local book dealers, who are assigned languages and areas and submit books that fall within the frame of what the Library of Congress.is interested in. These volumes then undergo a rigid selection test.

"Our selection and cataloging division is staffed by experts in the language and literature of an area," explains Smith.

"As we don't have an expert for every language, they are helped out by consultants who go through the books and make suggestions on whether they are useful.

They then work with one of the catalogingofficers to make a final determination, and also help in the cataloging."

"As the national collection of the United States," adds Smith, "we also have a keen interest in areas like Indian folk and classical music. We have, for example, selected recordings by Kumar

Gandharva, Vilayat Khan, and others."

The library has also been collecting Indian films extensively. Recently, the New Delhi office acquired prints of four of Satyajit Ray's works, including Apur Sansar, which the archives lacked. The expanding collection of Indian films is in part due to the personal interest of Eric Barnouw, chief of the library's motion picture and recorded sound division, who coauthored Indian Film with S. Krishnaswamy (see SPAN; January 1980). Under his guidance, the New Delhi office is now looking for important new-wave films.

Besides the India program, Indian publications also percolate to researchers in the United States through the Library of Congress' English Language Program (ELP). At the moment, there are 288 smaller university libraries and a few public libraries in each of the 50 states which are interested in building up collections of Indian journals and

monographs of a more general nature.

Through ELP, the Library of Congress offers them a choice of over 30 different periodicals, besides about 10 books a year, which cover almost every field of interest-from India Today and The Illustrated Weekly of India, to Cinema Vision and the Southeast Asian Review.

"What the libraries in the United States have discovered," explains Jerry James, a former field director in New Delhi, "is that they do not need to possess every book. The American research libraries that receive books from us, under the India program for instance, have agreed to make them available on interlibrary loan. Therefore, anybody, anywhere in the United States, has access to the books that the Library of Congress acquires in India. All people have to do is to go through the trouble of checking what they want, and ask their library source for it."

0

THE IMPORTANCE OF CRYING

by MARY PEACOCK

What makes you cry? What is crying? Sounds like a dumb question, right? But in the 60 interviews from which the following excerpts are taken, virtually everyone first said something like, "Gee, I never really thought about. ... " And neither had the scientific community until just recently.

Tears are shed at the best of times, and the worst of times.

But mostly the worst. We do occasionally cry for joy sometimes mixed with relief (I not only got the Oscar; I didn't not get it).

But we more often cry in grief, rage, pity, rejection. We feel that it's good to let out our feelings, to be able to express vulnerability.

So we figure ifs healthy that men are feeling more comfortable about crying when they are sad or touched.

At the same time, women seem to be crying less-and that may be healthy, too. Perhaps we are finding other, more effective ways of expressing anger and frustration. Moreover, contrary to stereotype, all women do not find it perfectly natural to burst into tears. Crying can be frightening and humiliating as well as cleansing and relieving. It represents a loss of control, and the less you've done it the more fearful it seems.

Those of us who find crying a natural response to hurt still try to suppress tears in public places or in front of a frightened child or a boss. Working women often have to deal with men who mistakenly assume they will cry if crossed or cornered.

The other side of that coin is crying for effect. Men often feel resentful and trapped by a crying woman, but all of us can feel manipulated by weeping. Tears are effective, whether they evoke real sympathy or just discomfort ('Tlldo anything if you'll stop").

Crocodile tears aside, women have almost always granted crying its psychological benefit. What none of us ever expected was that crying would turn out to be good for the body as well as good for the soul.

William H. Frey II, a biochemist with the department of psychiatry at St. Paul-Ramsey Medical Center in Minnesota, believes that shedding tears rids the body of toxic chemic(j.ls produced under emotional stress. (His subjects alternately watch tearjerker movies and hover over chopped onions.) Although it is too early for conclusive results, comparison of the tears shed in emotion and in response to eye irritants suggests that emotional tears do contain chemicals known to be associated with emotional stress. Frey believes that sad or depressed people who cannot function may be experiencing a metabolic imbalance due to toxins produced by their distress.

Another indication that crying is a necessary excretory function comes from Dr. Hans Selye, former director of the Institute of Experimental Medicine and Surgery at the University of MontreaL and now president of the International Institute of Stress. He says: "We are just beginning to see that many common diseases are largely due to errors in our adaptive response to stress, rather than by direct damage by germs, poisons or other external agents." Frey goes on to suggest that the social prohibition against men crying may contribute to their high incidence of stress-related disorders.

Even the common cold may be brought on by failure to cry.

One of the first symptoms of stress is swelling of the mucosa of the nose, and prolonged engorgement of those tissues weakens the nose's resistance to virus. This could explain why we often get sick when we are feeling down or harassed: a cold may be a symbolic form of weeping.

And weeping, when we have cause, is essential. The voices that follow demonstrate that crying, like all of our other forms of expression, bears a very personal stamp.

About the Author: Mary Peacock is a cofounder and features editor of Ms. magazine, and publisher and president of Rags magazine.

Crying scares me. Talking about crying scares me. It'll make me cry.

-7 -year-old-girl

If someone is very, very sweet to me,tears willcome to my eyes. Maybe it touches an underlying sadness about the rest of one's life, the cold levelon which we spend most of our time. You think: God damn it, why isn't it like that all the time?

Being really sad and being unable to cry is like knowing you're sick and you need to throw up, but you resist it. Somehow I know I'd be betteroffifI did cry. There have been occasions when I felt my head was going to explode and I'd wish for a total tantrum, just turn inside out and cry and scream. I'd get doubly frustrated then, thinking: Why can't you just cry and get it over with?

Thefewtimes I did cry it felt choked, somehow,stumbling and jerky, as if I wasn't doing a good job of it.

Part of the problem is that being sadfor me seemslike an unacceptable feeling,an admission of f~~Iure.It's okayto be angry, I can rant and rave and be sarcastic. But going all the way, really crying, frightens me. I don't know what would happen, but I have the fear that it would be unbearable. I have this feeling with crying that I'm tapping into a well of water, all of which might rush out and drown me.

-26-year-old

woman

Sometimes you feel a pressure in yourheart, or on top of your head, as if you are carrying a heavy weight, then crying is like taking the weight offfor a few minutes. Or being very dirty and washing yourself and feelingclean again.

When somebody is picky with mywork, people who run their finger acrossa dresser in front of me to see if I have dusted, I never dream of crying right then, I feel only anger.

When I feel like crying, I think of my pride and what I have to do the restof the day. But at night, when the tension closes in and makes my heart full of pressure, then I know I haveto cleanse my heart. Then I cry.

-47-year-old

woman

Twoweeks ago I picked up an old ladyin my cab, real old. She had two Facingpage: George Mejat's poignant World War 1I picture shows a Frenchman weeping openly as he watches French battle flags being taken across the Mediterranean toprevent their capture by the Nazis.

WHAT MAKES YOU CRY? small suitcases and wanted me to take her to a hospital. I got to wondering why a lady that old should have nobody to help her with her suitcases, especially when she's not going to some airport but to a hospital, for herself, she said. She had to stop at a bank first to cash some money. 1 parked right in front. It was the kind where you can see through the windows and I watched her shuffle up to a teller.

There was no line. Three young dudes pushed through the door and she had only one more step to go to the teller, but they pushed in front of her. She just stood and waited.

I had a rush in my chest and bolted out of my cab, but then I got back in. There was no use doing anything, I told myself. What could I have done? I dropped her off at her hospital and then I went to Ditmouth Boulevard, there is this park, and 1 bawled, it just kept gushing.

1 don't cry in front of people, it embarrasses me. But by myself I do.

There is a bad thing, this holding back. You know \.vhen it's coming, you get all puffed up inside. A good man will cry, because what makes anybody cry is compassion, and a good man has compassion. Sometimes, driving a cab, you can feel the infirmities of others all around you.

-46-year-old

man

As long as I live I will not forgive my father for his treatment of me when I cried as a child. He would watch me for a few moments and .then say in a low voice, "I bet there is a smile left in this little girl of mine, what do you think?" And 1 would be desolate over being excluded from some grammar school clique, or having my best friend tell a secret of ours to a group of girls, and my father would go on, "Not just a little smile, maybe even a big one, or a giggle?" And he would tickle me, lightly at first and then determinedly, and I'd run out of the room, but he would follow me and say, "I bet you a quarter that you can't laugh !ind cry at the same time." And he would hold up a

quarter and smile broadly because he knew the outcome. He would keep on smiling and talking in a low voice and tickling me, and I always ended up where he wanted me: smiling for him through my tears.

-28-year-old

woman

Some years ago I was eating dinner in a restaurant with a man I loved.

We didn't talk much, but he seemed to be in a good mood. I was deeply, wretchedly, miserably unhappy and jealous. I waited as long as I could and then I said, "I know Nancy is in love with you." He said, "No, I told you she's a friend and that's all there is to it." I said, "She is more than a friend. You've been seeing her. 1know you have. Look at me and tell me you haven't." He laid his dessert fork on his plate, covered his face with both hands and said in a near-wail, "I can't stand this. I simply cannot stand this any more.

You browbeat me!" Then he burst into tears.

I wanted to kill him. I'd been trying to tell him as best 1 could and as calmly, too, how unhappy I was-f had been doing my utmost not to cry.

And there he was, a man who cried very rarely, sobbing his heart out, weeping aloud in public. He is wrong, 1 thought, he must be wrong, how can I be such a horrible creature, I surely can't be, can I? A dreadful woman, cruel enough to make a public spectacle of him, he is wrong.

I thought, I am not that horrible.

I simply am not. I also thought: I feel cheated. 1 have been shabbily cheated. How dare he cheat me of my tears, he is crying my tears.

-37-year-old

woman

Commercials, believe it or not. I've cried over a laxative commercial. It had two old people. It struck me that soon they are going to be gone.

Something in me tells me: that's going to be me. It is fear.

I am very argumentative. When I'm in the middle of a fight with a woman and she cries, normally that blunts my attack. Sometimes I've felt had by that. Once a woman said to me, "I wish 1 didn't cry and you

should treat me as if I weren't crying.

I can't help it. I do that when I am frustrated and angry." So I took her at her word.

Sometimes at night, just before I'm ready to fall asleep, 1 think out of nowhere: I should spend more time with my mother, and something wells up in me and I cry.

1live alone in the woods and sometimes I wail, there is no one to hear me. 1 say "no" to myself first. I do my best to fend off tears and the frightening feelings that bring them on. It is never over some specificthing that just happened. Something has been sitting there for a while and then it wants out.

-40-year-old

man

For me, crying onstage is most often a reflex action. It has nothing to do with emotion, I do it like a habit, it is a physical thing.

One out of 10 times I will bring up something that means something to me. Certain words do it. Onstage -and this sounds so stupid-when I think, "The bones of all my people are buried in the Midwest," well, I go to town. It's not a line from anything, it just occurred to me once, my family, those people I knew that are dead.

Very often 1 have to work against it. Because onstage, many things might do it, a piece of molding on the stage will do it to me. I like to clean moldings. When I am depressed over something, I love getting down on my hands and knees to scrub moldings with a toothbrush.

It is the best feeling in the world, onstage, simply to be saying something and to start to cry.

-42-year-old

woman

I cried two years ago when my father died. Now I have nothing more to cry over for the rest of my life.

-59-year-old man Since my father died, tears sometimes come to my eyes, but that's as far as they go. They sit on my eyelids and then they dry up. The last time this happened was in a car: my brother was driving me to the airport; I had spent Christmas with his family. He told me he had been to our father's grave and had found a letter there, lying .on the grave, written to my father by my sister.

It started, "Dear Dad." My eyes began to smart, and I had this absolute horror that 1 was going to burst out crying-the pain for my

Clockwise from right: Joe DiMaggio, actress Marilyn Monroe's second husband, wipes a tear away at her funeral; Shirley Spruill, of Somerset, New Jersey, breaks into tears on hearing from lottery director Gloria Decker that she has won the grand prize of $1,000a-week for life, with a guaranteed minimum of$l million; soccer hero Pele weeps on the shoulder of former teammate Carlos Alberto, after receiving a standing ovation from fans before his retirement game on October I, 1977, at New Jersey; this shot of British weightlifter Vic Daniels crying in defeat won a "best picture" award for photographer Barrie Ward. sister, the thought that she would do something like this, not crazy but strange, that she would need to talk to him in such a way. That she would bare herself. Anyone coming along could have read that

letter.

There was something so naked about it. I refused to be naked about it by crying. I dug my fingernails my palms.

into

I have always felt like that. Crying in front of others is a loss of control for me, a losing control of the worst kind, an ultimate humiliation.

When my father died, I did not cry while everyone else did. I comforted the others, I made funeral arrangements. I was m~thodical, efficient. I cried the next night. All of a sudden these gasps came. They came from the bottom of my stomach, and I knew they were not sounds I had made before. I did not recognize them as sounds I'd heard anyone else make either, no person. They were animal noises. I called a woman from across the street-she has six children and she has known me since I was in high school. It was two

and buy onions. The most

I ever

bought was six pounds, that was when' my husband left me after II years. I carry my onions home and sit down on the kitchen

floor

with some newspaper and a sharp knife and a cutting board and a roll of toilet paper to blow my nose with.

First I peel the onions, then I mince them. Because of the onions, the crying feels right. At some point I stop. I still feel bad, but buoyed up too, both. I tell myself: It didn't even take the four I counted on, all it took was three. I wash the chopping block and the knife right away and then I wrap the minced onions in the newspaper and put it in the garbage.

I cook a lot of food that

calls for onions, but I never use those, they are sacrificial onions.

-51-year-old woman Once a year or so I see my father close to tears. I feel sad for him and helpless, but at the same time I think he shouldn't show it. There is something so embarrassing

about it. He's

and she stayed for

a grown-up, he's my father, he should go take a walk.

It's all right with me when my

three hours. She brought whiskey . and fed it to me in sips and tucked

mother cries, she's a woman, she always cries about my father. I feel

in the morning,

a blanket around me and held me.

-32-year-old woman I do what my mother taught me.

When I've had a blow dealt to me, I go

sorry for her, but I don'tdo anything.

I don't want to take sides. I go to my room or outside.

Playing records makes it permissi-

ble for me to cry, only by myself, of course.

I don't believe any of this garbage of how not crying is bad for you, how bottling things up is bad for' you. I want to bottle things up.

-15-year-old boy Fashion magazines always describe taking a long bath, complete with bubbles and sponges and whatnot

best place to cry. I make noises with a washcloth and swish my body around when I worry that the neighbors might hear me sob. When it's really bad, I scrunch down until my face is submerged. It feels like being held, but at the same time it's under my control,

I have set it up. After-

What they

ward, I dry myself gently and sort of intentionally, personally, as if I were drying somebody else, maybe

don't mention is that a bathtub is the

a child. Usually I do it at night, but

as "a sybaritic pleasure."

twiceI've gone home from work to do that, at lunchtime.

-24-year-old woman Sometimesmy chest is heavy like a stone,then I drink a glass of water and don't talk. Sometimes I don't talk for a day. When someone says, "What is the matter?" I say, ¡'Nothing." Use your brain, whatever much of it you have, for a solution to a problem. If your brain cannot finda solution,crying willdo nothing

either.

I have been in the United States 30 years. I came from Puerto Rico. I came alone. I missed my family, I missed my life. I had no food. 1 talked no English. I walked around every day until I found work. I never thought to cry.

-57-year-old man Last week I began to cry in a restaurant. The woman I was with seemed to take no notice and continued to

talk, but she ,lifted her hand to my face and brushed a tear off with her forefinger. It comforted me immensely.

-19-year-old woman To me, intimacy includes being able to break down in front of the other person. But that kind of intimacy gets cheapened when someone breaks down at the drop of a hat and for any number of people. Emotional intimacy is extremely valuable to me. I guard it closely.

-38-year-old man I won't talk about crying, to you or anyone else, about my crying or anyone else's. Crying is the essence of privacy to me and being asked about it is the essence of invading that privacy, -45-year-old woman I think what my mother misses in me and perhaps longs for is the one thing I do not do for her. I do not give her what I think she craves, the intimacy bound up not just with confidences-I do confide in her-but the crying on the shoulder, the emotional moments. 1 have those emotional moments, but 1 use them onstage.

They are part of my work, I need to draw on those moments, I cannot and will not give them away in dribs and drabs though I know she craves them. Craving someone to cry for you is a form of blackmail. It gives the con soler a position of power.

-38-year-old woman I have a very good pal who cried today. He's been on drugs and drinking a lot. I said to my sobbing friend: "Go to bed. Things get exaggerated by drugs. How do you even know who's doing the crying, you or all that shit in you?" More tears are shed because of drinking or drugs than because of anything else.

-25-year-old man When I think I might cry, I become methodical. No matter where I am, I contrive to get to the nearest washroom. There I wash my face and then I reapply my makeup as slowly and perfectly as I can. I've put on foundation, blusher, powder, eyeliner, mascara, and lipstick at two in the morning alone in my apartment, at six in the morning in someone else's bathroom, at four in the afternoon at Schrafft's. It always works for me. I haven't cried since I was 16 and I mean to keep it that way until I'm senile.

-32-year-old woman

Crying never makes me feel better afterward. There is always a resentment. It comes from that thought 1hate so much, this thought that anyone has the power to make me cry.

It's because of pride.

Once I had a woman say to me, "There is nothing in the world worse than a proud Negro." I looked at her for a little while and 1 said, "I have something to be proud of." She said, "Negroes were better people under slavery." 1 might have cried then, but I was never so angry in my life so 1 didn't. I was in the middle of cooking Christmas dinner, and just then my boss came into the kitchen. The woman who'd said that was a guest of the house. I told my boss, "You get her out of this kitchen or there will be no dinner." Her husband took her home. It was a long time ago. She was from Georgia.

Now, when I've been hurt in my soul, I go by myself and I read or I turn on some music and I try to think it out. If none of that works, I grab up a pillow and cry-and after it's over I think: how stupid! and wash my face and just go about my business.

Other times I go for a walk. I like walking in the rain most, I like feeling the rain beat on my face, I don't cry but the rain cries for me.

But movies, movies, that's different, that's what I like crying about - Wuthering Heights, and ImiIation of Life with Claudette Colbert, and one called Pinky with Ethel Waters.

It made me feel good, talking about crying, I haven't done that before.

-68-year-old woman I have always envied the custom of havingprofessionalmourners, the kind who sit around a coffin in your living room and wail and do it for you. I have had secretaries and brokers and cooks and assistants and cleaning women and husbands and tax accountants and agents and lawyers and gardeners and lovers. I still long for a professional weeper who will do this sorry business for me, in exchange for an hourly wage and a good meal.

About the Interviewer: Ingeborg Day is the author of Ghost Waltz.

A short story by Joyce Carol Oates Much change here? No, not much. He had been worried about that, but really there was little sign of change. Things were older, houses looked meeker, stores were crowded absurdly together along this familiar block. He felt a little perplexed, coming back here, as if he had been presented a gift he could not understand.

At one time this neighborhood had been his entire world, bounded on the north by the tire factory and its great, dangerous parking lots, and on the east

by Grand Boulevard, and on the west by Lincoln Park; the southern end of the neighborhood just dwindled off into a twilight of street after street of ordinary shabby houses. Much of the neighborhood was now occupied by Negro families but still things looked the same. He stood on the sidewalk where the bus had left him, staring with a foolish fondness at the old grocery store. Its interior looked murky as always, but detailed and promising, and "Salada Tea" on the window had the same trim white letters as always, the word "Salada" arranged in a semicircle above the word "Tea." Good, that was the same. He was pleased. And the gas station at the corner, not much different, with three or four old cars in its weedy grease-splattered side lot; they looked like the same old cars he had played in as a child, in that very lot.

He seemed at first to see no people at all, only the street and the buildings. It was important that he see them and understand what they were. But gradually, as if awakening, he noticed crowds of school children and women with babies and men in baggy trousers, old men who were a sign of big cities: they wandered along the sidewalks to Lincoln Park, where they played cards all day long, arguing with one another in languages-Polish? Hungarian?-no one else could understand.

The school children were in a hurry and noisy. They reminded him' of his classmates years ago, who had always seemed to know where they were going, who had the noise and bustle of adults. He glanced at the young women ,with their babies. wondering if they were the girls of his childhood now grown up and married and, like him, committed to another life; . he was a little shy before their smiles.

Smiles were frequent in his life, not because

anyone recognized him but because he was a priest. Wearing the collar and the black suit did it, it was a complete transformation, and it pleased him because he was able to learn tenderness from the smiles of such people and that was good.

His name was Andrew Rollins but he was called Father Rollins and sometimes just "Father," which was a magical name, and he felt complicated in coming back here. His life was a clutter of events that had somehow marked him for success in the competitive life he had chosen. This neighborhood looked untouched by complications. Time must have rushed through it, generations after generations, and yet the buildings still faced one another in that resigned, hunched way, and the thirteen-year-old girls with long swinging hair who passed giggling by him seemed the same girls he had known twenty years before.

The address he wanted was not far from the corner. It was a nondescript house with a wide, sagging veranda spanning its front. After ringing the doorbell a few times, he knocked. He knew someone was inside because he could hear a child crying and another sputtery noise, probably a television set.

The curtain at the door window was moved suspiciously aside and a woman of about forty squinted out at him. Then she opened the door quickly. "Yes, hello?" she said. She stood flat-footed in bedroom slippers, a messy, hopeful woman. "What did you want, Father?"

"Does Frank Taylor live here? I have this address-" "Frank Taylor, oh, him~they moved away-I mean she moved away, his wife -" The woman stared at Andrew with a look of alarm and pity. She was very confused. "I'm terrible sorry to tell you this.

Father, if you're a friend of his or a relative or something, but Frank is dead. I mean, he died, he had a accident, he's dead .... " "Dead?"

"Yes, dead. He died," she said, shaking her head.

Andrew stepped back. "But when did it happen? I hadn't heard about il .... " "Oh, a few months ago, I don't know, it was real terrible-the two of them like that¡-I'm a friend of her mother's, I mean Frank's wife, her mother. I'm a friend of

her mother's and I moved right in here when Toni-that's the wife, you know her -when she didn't want to stay here-I moved in, it was real convenient for me-'-" "He's dead?" ''I'm awful sorry, Father, were you a friend of his?"

"Yes, but we were out of touch ..... , "He was a real nice boy. 1 am sorry. I just don't know what to say," she said, looking up at him 6S if he had to think of something, had to make things right. As a priest he was always being tossed things, even in the midst of his own private grief, burdened with clumsiness and pain he had to make right through magic words. ''I'm sorry to have troubled you," he said shakily.

"If you want Toni's address, it's right down the street here-" He had never met Frank's wife and her name offended him. "Toni" was a name that made death seem cheap.

"I don't want to bother her."

"Oh, it's no bother, she'd like to talk to you. I know she'd like to talk to you, Father. It would be good for her," the woman said with a sharp downward twist of her lips, which Andrew interpreted as: the girl has stopped going to church. Or. the girl is getting into trouble. "Her mother don't live up here now and she'd be real glad if you went. I know that."

"How did Frank die?"

The question was too blunt and he regretted having asked it. The woman, confused, muttered something about a car accident, two cars. She flinched away from that topic and latched onto the female topic. the wife, who was just down the street.

And so he finally agreed to see the wife.

The woman would have talked on but he backed away, smiling, polite, thanking her and saying good-by. Good-by. Her solid, sloppy, friendly body reminded him of his mother and his mother's world of female friends and relatives; he felt a kind of affection for her.

Out on the sidewalk, he was in the midst of a sudden gang of children. They rushed around him, on either side, and ran past and did not touch him. Their hard stamping feet and their cries mixed with the clamor in his head.

Frank had died?

Frank was his own age and had been his

closest friend for many ye~rs, at a time in Andrew's life when he had needed a friend and had not understood what his life was to be. Frank's role in his life was magical; it was hard to explain how closely they were related, though for years they had had little in common and Frank had never answered Andrew's last several letters .... They had been friends as children and as young teen-agers and in a way they were closer than brothers; Andrew was sure that he had loved Frank more than he would have loved any brother of his own.

Disturbed, he walked down the street.

His legs felt weak. The neighborhood did not seem so familiar and friendly now. It was a great shock to him that Frank was dead. The fact that he would not see Hank but only hear of him from other people, from strangers, was a puzzling fact. He felt a surge of anger. as ifhe had been cheated.

He arrived at the old mustard-yellow apartment building and stood out front for a while, thinking, a tall, lean priest with a look of being lost. This apartment building was a familiar landmark; he remembered its ugly bulk from childhood.

Hadn't the kids had some vulgar name for it? The desire to go inside had left him completely. A woman with a full shopping bag passed by him on her way in and said, "Hello. Father.¡' His head ached slightly, as if he had been studying too much or thinking too much of hopeless things. He did not want to see this wife of Frank's, this widow-he had never met her, knew nothing about her-and so he had to go in, for he never let himself off easily. He climbed up the three flights of stairs, sensing how fatally he was being drawn back to this neighborhood, back to the smells and noises and faces he had left behind; it was no oddity being back, nothing to enjoy, but only a burden. What vulgar name had the kids made up for this building? He could not remember it and was disturbed at his inability to remember.

The door was opened quickly upon his knock and a woman stared out at him, not speaking. He said, "I was a friend of Frank's. Your husband?"

Despite the gentleness of his voice, the woman looked frightened. A blast of music behind her must have confused her thoughts She said finally, "You heard what happened 7" "I was just told that he had died. Just now."

"You want to come in 7" She was thin and banally pretty; her voice had no depth to it but sounded like George Segal's sculpture Girl Looking Through Window.

19

another voice from the radio. She stood aside awkwardly and he entered, prepared for the cramped living room and its bargain-basement furniture, the quilt fixed primly over the back of the sofa, the remnant rugs in doorways to protect the ugly brown rug beneath. Familiar, familiar. Andrew felt absurdly sorry for both himself and this woman.

"So you were Frank's friend? You're Andrew?" she said nervously. "He talked about you a lot, he liked you." She paused and shot a shy, inquisitive look at him.

"What kind of priest are you?-I can't remember. " "A Jesuit. I teach in Chicago."

"Yeah, what do you teach?"

"History. " She sucked her lower lip and considered this. She was a daughter of this neighborhood, from her painted nails to her plucked eyebrows and the long, smooth, naked expanse of her legs beneath a house dress, but this hesitation belonged to a newer generation; she read the newspapers, she had opinions. "Yeah, do you like that?"

"Very much."

Her eyebrows rose in an expression of agreement. She was a rather tall woman.

Andrew himself felt ungainly and coarse and suddenly dirty. His hands felt dirty; perhaps he had touched the railing outside. "Would you like to sit down or something?" she said. She was probably as tall as Frank had been. Her hair was a bright chestnut color, puffed up on the crown of her head so that she looked even taller than she was. She looked as if she had half-prepared to go somewhere, doing her face and her hair and then losing interest, slipping into a shapeless dress, slipping into worn-out shoes. She said shyly, "I'm sorry it's so messy in here-" With a gesture of his hand he dispelled . the clutter. He smiled and sat and the girl wavered above him. She said, "Would you like some coffee or something? Or maybe some beer? What time is it?"

"About five-thirty."

"Well-would you like anything?"

"Thank you, no. I won't be staying long."

She hadn't the shrewdness to disguise her relief at these words. She sat facing him on a footstool, the sort of odd piece of furniture Andrew remembered as a hassock -how strange that such things had dis~ppeared forever from his life! In the living room of his parents' tiny home and in the homes of his friends' parents there had been big, squat, shiny hassocks, usually red, often ripped, and they were a symbol of something, but he had no idea what. He wanted to laugh. This hassock was a gay orange-brown.

Joyce Carol Oates, winner 01' the National Book A ward for fiction in 1970for them and frequent recipient of the O. Henry Award, is regarded as one of the United States pre-eminent ./iClion writers of today. The latest in her prolific output of novels, short stories, poems and literary criticism is the novel Bellefieur. She is currently a writer-in-residence at Princeton University.

He did not laugh, but a pain shot up into his head. He said apologetically, "1 wouldn't mind a glass of water. ... " She jumped up, eager to serve him. He was accustomed to this mechanical jumping-up and running-out from women.

Service like that was a way of not quite seeing him as a priest, not listening to him or dealing with him; he supposed that he understood. The sight of a clerical collar had often disheartened even him hImself.

The girl went to the kitchen and, in his range of vision, selected an especially clean glass from the cupboard and let the water run to get cold and filled the glass and returned to him, like a handmaiden.

She had a very light, lithe step, probably exaggerated.

"I sometimes get headaches when I travel. I carry a few aspirin," he said, explaining as he took out a small folded tissue and opened it and finished off the three aspirins left. The girl watched seriously. "Thank you," he said, returning the glass.

"Y ou got a headache?"

"It's nothing serious. " She set the glass absent-mindedly on a coffee table between them. Andrew wanted to protest that it would stain the table, thinking of the expensive furniture at his seminary. He did not want to look at the table to see if there were other stains on it, and he did not want to look at the girl's rather distraught face. The jazzy music rose from the other room and he thought wildly that he had to get out of this place.

The girl jumped up. "I better turn that off, that's just junk," she said, explaining,

and she snapped off the radio. He could see the radio above the sink-red plastic.

It occupied a position of importance in the kitchen. The girl returned to him again, and his eyesight blurred, the repetition of her going out, coming back, unnerving him. He was not accustomed to women in such informal situations. There was something naturally jerky and alarming about women, particularly this kind of woman; his college students were rather different.

This woman leaned over him and said, "You're sure your headache's all right?

You feel all right?"

"Yes, thank you. Your name is Toni, isn't it?"

"Yes, it's kind of a silly name, I don't know where I got it from," she said, pleased and embarrassed.

"I'm Andrew Rollins. " She nodded eagerly and sat on the hassock and gripped her knees, watching him. He felt strange not to have shaken hands with her, but it would have confused her; better to sit still. Now it was too quiet between them, with the radio off. He said gently, "Your husband and I were very good friends at one time. I hope you don't mind talking about him."

"I don't know. I guess not," she said.

"I talked about it an awful lot with my family and people and things like that; I mean, we talked about it but that didn't do any good. What good does it do?" This was a long speech for her but she spoke slowly and languidly, as if she were in a trance. Her earlier remarks had been abrurt and clumsy; now she lowered herself into a kind of dreamy sorrow. Her face was rather pretty. Then she did a strange thing: she yawned. It was a small surprising yawn that she tried to hide with her hand.

"How long were you married?" Andrew said.

"Oh, three years." ''I'm afraid that Frank and I lost touch in the last five or six years. I don't know why. I was always sorry about it."

"Oh, he showed me your letters, he saved them .and was real proud of them," she said. "I've still got them. I used to read them, they were ... interesting .... He didn't know what to write back to you but he liked your letters. Oh, I remember one letter," she said sadly, as if the letters of her husband's friend were the real sorrow in her life, "I remember you talking about Italy. describing someplace .... " "Florence? The Vatican?"

"The Vatican, yes," she said, repeating the word exactly as he had given it, blinking, "that was very interesting, it was like we were there ourselves. But didn't everybody there speak Italian?"

"Some speak English."

"They do, why?"

Andrew smiled a quick, annoyed smile.

"Languages are important to Europeans; they study many languages."

She nodded, but her expression showed that he had not answer'ed her question.

"Well, it was a vivid letter. It was vivid. It was nice to read a letter like that, from a priest and everything. I told Frank he should write you back but he was afraid you'd laugh at his spelling or something.

He thought a lot of you."

"Do you go over to the cathedral, or where?"

This was a priestly shaft and he used it deliberately, innocently. The girl said, a little nervously, "Sometimes I go to the cathedral, yes. But you know, it isn't safe there any more-a woman was attacked at the six-thirty mass last week, on her way to it. What do you think of that ?"

"I'm sorry to hear about it."

"The priest himself says we should be careful. Someone else, a Negro, was stabbed not around church but a few blocks away. It's terrible to be alone down here. " She had an ordinary doll-like face and most of her lipstick had worn off. But this pronouncement was almost tragic; Andrew frowned and wondered when he would begin to pity her. He said softly, "Are you all alone here now?"

"Well, yeah, my family went back to WestVirginia. They got fed up here."

"Oh, you're from West Virginia?"

"Sort of. I was born there. But I'm really from right here. I mean; I'm not a hillbilly."

"Where did you meet Frank?"

"I don't know, at a dance. A blind date or something."

"Was he in the Navy then?"

"Oh, no," she said, shaking her head emphatically to set him right. "No, he was out of that for a long time. He was twentynine when he got married, that's pretty old for a man."

He felt that she had somehow accused him of being old and unmarried; he was Frank's exact age. But the girl was looking blankly down at her ballerina-type shoes, flat black shoes with pointed toes and worn-down heels. How like the girls of his childhood! The same wistful plucked look, the same ballerina shoes, the same thin, sloping shoulders that were carried without grace and yet without any clumsiness, the way a bird hops from one branch to another.

"I'd be real pleased if you stayed for supper. It's stew that I got on the stove, there's enough for you," she said suddenly.

"I really should be leaving."

"Are you visiting your parents here?"

"No, my parents are dead." He paused.

"They did live here though, a few blocks away. But I should be leaving anyway " "But I wanted to ask you something " "Please ask me anything. It's just that I don't want to bother you, and you probably have something to do .... " "You're not bothering me," she said in a faintly accusing voice, as if he had said something preposterous. She moved the toe of one foot in a little circle on the rug.

"It's sort of funny that you and Frank were friends. I mean, you're sort of different."

"What do you mean?"

"Oh, he quit school and everything, he <: didn't like books-" "He shouldn't have quit school."

"That's what his mother said. She told me that," the girl said quickly. Between them the image of Frank seemed to rise, a muscular, dark. blunt-jawed man of about five feet eight. sometimes suspicious, sometimes quick to smile .... "She always said she tried to talk him out of it but I don't believe that. Was that the truth?"

"1 think his parents wanted him to quit.

They wanted him to work."

"Ah. Sure," the girl said, nodding.

"He didn't like reading but he liked math. He was good at math."

"Was he?"

"Yes." She stared at him. Her face was so young and thin that he was distressed, seeing that look upon it. "You think he could have done better than he did, I mean, you think he was smart enough?"

"Yes. I do."

He wondered how old she was. He had been wrong in dismissing her as an ordinary girl; she was solemn, dazed, pathetic, and only the cheapness of her plucked eyebrows and dress were ordinary. Her sorrow was not ordinary.

"I should have given you notice before coming here," Andrew said. "I don't want to make you unhappy."

"Oh, no! Please, no, it's just wonderful that you came," she said, staring at him.

A minute passed in silence. He was afraid that she would cry and that her tears, unlike those of other women who cried in his presence, would be inexhaustible.

"You sure you don't want to stay to supper? I got this stew all ready, I start it on Monday and have it every other day .. " " ..But I don't want to inconvenience you."

"No, please stay. It's no inconvenience."

So he agreed and had to wince as she jumped up again, set for the kitchen. She said breathlessly, "I have to make biscuits. I have to set the oven."

She talked to him from the tiny kitchen as if anxious to let him know what she was

up to, anxious that he might sneak out. He glanced around the living room. The coffee table had a fonnica top and of course could not be stained; there was no question of damaging it. The same was true of the other furniture, which was made of synthetic materials that could be washed easily-an easy chair, the sofa on which he sat, the hassock, a table, a few lampsall of it anonymous and sad. There was no hint of any man having lived here and he realized suddenly that Frank had never lived here. He felt a vague curiosity about the rest of the apartment.

"Why did you move here?" he said.

She turned to him at once, at his service.

"After the accident I ~idn't want to stay in the other place. It cost too much. And anyway, you know our boy was killed too-" "No, what? What boy?"

"Our boy. Our boy was killed with him, in the car. They were both killed together," she said in a flat, embarrassed voice. Behind her something was whirring.

The refrigerator. Andrew could think of nothing to say and so he did nothing but stare at the girl's delicate face. She said, blundering, not looking at him, "His name was Robert, Robin. Sometimes we called him Robin. On the birth certificate it was Robert, of course. He was two. They¡ were both killed in the crash, I thought you knew that."

"I didn't know you had a son."

"Oh, yes, a son, that was Robert," she said vaguely, as if listening for something behind her, "and so ... so I didn't want to stay there, so I moved over here where a girl friend of mine is.... We both work downtown. " "Oh, do you work?" he said. He was trembling. For her sake he wanted to get this conversation going in another direction. What sorrow this girl had had to bear! He felt like a coward, he felt shame for himself, his achievement, and his security and his adulthood-it was shameful that he sit here so divorced from her, unable to take any of her suffering onto himself. The girl smiled slowly. "Yes¡, I like to work. It's in Millicent's, a women's store. I always liked to work -, ''I'm glad you like to work ".

"Let me get something; I almost forgot," she muttered, and turned. He sat there with a foolish strained look, waiting for her to return. When she did return carrying two glasses and a bottle of wine he felt immense relief.

"I bought this yesterday, isn't that lucky? Do you like this kind of wine?"

She showed him the label and it, too, was familiar. Now he never drank anything so cheap. But he smiled with a sincere delight and said, "That's wonder\

ful, thank you," and she poured them both some wine with a self-conscious, elegant movement. They drank. The girl stared down at her long, angular foot and moved uncomfortably. "It's just a regular stew, it's nothing special," she said.

"It smells good."

"Does it?"

She looked at him quickly and critically.

It was a meaningless look. The girl seemed to be listening to another conversation, or perhaps to sounds or utterances that were beneath hearing, and her talk with him was a surface affair that sometimes distracted her. She said in her rather sleepy, sad voice, "I like this apartment because it has a side porch. Just a little porch and I can stand out there and let my hair dry or anything. It's funny that Frank never saw it, because now it's a place I go all the time and stand there and, you know, think about things .... Off to the side there's a bird's nest on the railing with some eggs in it. I didn't want to scare the mother bird away but for two days she's been gone. I felt sort of bad about that. ... " "That's nice, I mean about the porch."

"1t is nice," she said, nodding. Her eyes were large. There were slight hollows about them and he wondered again how old she was-twenty-six?-because there was something tired and ageless and familiar about her, even the slope of her shoulders. He omld see the faint vaccination scar on her upper arm and how familiar, also, that seemed to him .... He drank the wine and thought of people of his childhood, packed in so closely in houses that were divided and subdivided into apartments, packed in at school, packed in at church, and he, a child of ten or eleven, distracting himself from the solemn business of the Holy Mass by staring at the uncovered upper arm of a girl, in warm weather, at the faint white vaccination scars that were like symbols of a secret he could not understand and did not want to understand; something frightening and treacherous.

The girl was speaking. She sounded sleepy, as if the wine had rushed to her head. "It's funny how the birds do that, 1 mean, they fly south and then they fly back north, and they never make a mistake. Did you ever think about that?"

"Yes." "And they oon't help it? And they make nests, like the one outside, and-and they can't help any of it?"

"It is strange, yes."

"I wouldn't want to be like that," st:e said seriously.

"But it's the same thing that makes them live."

"What?"

"It's the same thing."

"What is?"

He didn't want to get tangled in any foolish conversation but it was impossible to back out. So he said, as if speaking to an especially slow student, "I mean that the principle that makes them migrate also makes them live-it's the same principle, the life force itself. It's all the same instinct."

She stared at him and he seemed to hear, replayed, his own words in her brain.

"What I wanted least of all was to upset you," he said. With the bottle of wine safely between them he felt more at ease; perhaps he could handle a more personal and yet more impersonal attack.

"But it was a great shock to hear of Frank's death, and a woman down the street-" "Oh, Thelma," the girl said flatly, as if she didn't think much of Thelma.

"She said I should talk to you. 1 had no idea about the other-about the child."

"Yes," the girl said, finishing her glass of wine, "that was sad. That was very sad. I don't know what to say about it."

"Do you have any pictures of them?"

"No, I don't," she said arrogantly.

"His mother wanted them all so she could cry over them, so 1 said take them, go ahead and take them, and she did.

She wanted back some goddamn old dish she gave us for a wedding present.

It was tarnished anyway. I gave that back and good riddance and 1 don't see any of them, I mean his family."

"That's too bad," Andrew said, alarmed.

"Oh, the hell with them."

"But it's too bad-" "It was a big goddamn dish made of silver or something, with a vine in it. A design. You were supposed to put meat on it or fish, I don't know, whoever in hell uses stuff like that? I think she won it at a bingo game. I don't think she bought it with money. Or else she got it with yellow stamps. Every time she came over to see us she'd ask me about the dish and 1had to show it to her and she always said, Why don't you polish it? For Christ's sake, why didn't I sit around night after night while he went out bowling or whatever he did and polish that goddamn bowl! Why didn't I!" She rose unsteadily. She said, "I'll be right back."

Andrew had the idea that she was going to get the dish to show him, but she went instead into another room. He was glad to be alone. He poured himself more wine, making a face. It was an intolerable situation but here he was; in an hour or two he would be free. He could bear it.

And she needed someone to talk to, obviously, it was a shame for a woman like that to be alone; she was a fairly

attractive woman. He heard water running in another room. It was an intimate sound, and the feeling of the apartment, now that it was twilight, was intimate and pleasant. It was strange to think that Frank knew nothing about it. Time had passed over Frank, who was as old as Andrew and yet dead, mysteriously dead.

Did Frank dominate their thoughts in spite of being dead, or had they hardly thought of him at all? When the girl returned, Andrew saw that she looked prettier. Embarrassed, awkward, she stood in the doorway on thin stork's legs and said, "Nobody wants to hear me talk about him anymore, I don't blame them.

It's a bore. That's why 1 was glad when you came but 1 don't want you to feel bad or anything .... " She sat again and dawdled over her glass of wine. Noises began in the apartment next door but she did not hear them.

Andrew was hungry; he wondered about supper. If they ate, it would be something to do with their mouths that did not involve words. Good. Why didn't they go into the kitchen? He finished his glass of wine and felt a stab of hunger.

The girl said sleepily, "You and Frank had some hobbies together, didn't you?

You collected some stuff?"

"Stamps. Just cheap stamps, and sea shells. " "Oh, sea shells?" she said, pleased.

"Where did you get them?" He talked.

His memory blossomed as the sound of the sea blossoms magically in a shell, and he recalled for her the gritty November days and the dark afternoons after school and the hopeless Saturday mornings, when for him even to go outside was a risk-no use explaining that to his parents -and he CUldFrank would spend hours with their collections and their spiritless rehearsals of what revenge they would get upon the older boys who bothered them.

They had been bothered endlessly, for years. Endlessly. It was an amazing fact that they had been struck and tripped and chased for years, and now he, Father Rollins, sat and discussed it all objectively, fairly, and his colleague in such shame was dead and it was all over, the terrible arena of their boyhood through which they had passed and which, itself, had not changed. Did its horrors exist for other boys, still? The exhaust and smoke of the great city were still present, heavier than ever, heavy as the clouds that drifted languidly across the sky from the great I~kes, clouds that looked as if they must reek with filth. Very strange.

"I was very fortunate to survive this neighborhood," he said solemnly.

"Tell me more about it, you and him. In high school," she said. She leaned toward

him greedily, her large eyes fixed and commanding. And so he talked.

After a while she had to go and finish preparing supper, so he came to the doorway and watched and talked. She seemed anxious to hear everything. He talked about things he had not thought of for years, things he had nearly forgotten. Then he said, breaking off, "You know, it's strange that Frank was never here. I mean in this apartment."

"Yes, I think about that too."

"Do you have any plans for the future?"

"What plans?"

She gazed at him blankly. He could not decide if she were stupid, or only dazed from her grief. What if Frank were watching them through the window, listening?

What if Frank somehow wanted to return but could not, just as he, Andrew, sometimes wanted to wake from nightmares but could not wake, although he understood he was sleeping and needed onlyto wake himself in order to be free ... ?

"No, no plans," she said.

They ate in the kitchen. He liked eating here; it was artless and direct. At the residence hall, of course, he ate in a large dining room with the other Jesuits and the only artlessness was in seeming not to avoid certain boring people; they could not always be avoided. In the past he had always eaten in kitchens. He was not one of those Jesuits who came from good families; he had never disguised his background.

"It's funny," said the girl, "but I'd swear that Frank's mother wrote to you.

She said she was going to."

"No. I wish she had."

"I'm pretty sure she said so." It was not clear to Andrew whether he, or the motherin-law, was being accused. But the girl went on, "That old bitch always wanted to make trouble. She thought we had to get married but that wasn't true. She went around telling everyboqy that."

"She must be a very unhappy woman."

"Yes, unhappy, she's a miserable bitch.

That's true," the girl said agreeably. She ate thoughtfully but Andrew ate quickly, as if he had been waiting a long time for this.He hadn't remembered to have lunch.

Distrustful of his appetite, of most physical demands, he often forgot to eat, and then the power of hunger was terrible in him, a kind of revenge for his having ignored it.

It was very strange. He felt both heavy and lightheaded from the shock of Frank's death, from the wine, heavy from the meal and the relentless conversation and lightheaded from the occasional bursts of absurdity in their talk --the girl's offhand reference to Frank's mother--and the two sensations, heavy and light, passed back and forth dizzily in his mind. The

stew was good. It was thick with potatoes and carrots and the meat was scant, but of course meat was expensive and where did this girl get money? She worked at a poor-paying job. It was evil of him to take food from her, mouthful after mouthful, and yet his hunger was prodigious.

"It's awful when somebody dies," she said, laying down her fork, "it's like it was torn out of you-you know-like a bandage ripped off with the skin in itsomething like that -" For an instant he imagined Frank in the doorway, watching them.

"I'm very sorry that you're alone," he said.

"Well, I got some friends."

"You wouldn't want to Jom your family?"

"Back there? Hell, no. No, I don't have to do with them now."

"It's a comfort to be with somebody at certain times .... " "I like it here on my own. Except for how things are, I mean how dangerous it's getting .... I was coming back from work once and a man followed me from the bus, a white man, he walked right after me, he had a funny look ... it was like he was asleep and walking in his sleep .... Oh, that was awful, that was awful," she said, and sucked in her breath and covered her eyes with her hands.

Andrew stared at her. Then, after a moment, she lowered her hands again and sat dry-eyed, though faintly astonished.

It was a peculiar moment.

They went back into the living room and she poured more wine, and he thought of how he must leave soon and how he would be leaving her alone, and how empty this apartment would seem. He spoke to comfort her and was not sure of where his words would lead: "Everyone of us goes through periods of unhappiness, sometimes of depression, and the only way we get through is by holding onto some words. In order to be Catholic you must understand that: hang onto the words even when you don't believe and then the belief will return to you. It will return."

"Was Frank a good Catholic when you knew him?" she said curiously.

"When I knew him."

"He made me turn Catholic, you know.

Then he sort of forgot about it."

"He was a good Catholic then, back then," Andrew said emphatically. "We both got scholarships to the Jesuit high school across town. It was a wonderful opportunity for boys like us and I went from the high school right into the seminary. It was terrible that Frank had to quit. ... " "He might have got fed up with it too.

That's how I felt."

"But it was different with us. Our school.

It was an excellent school. Frank should have continued .... " "Y ou really think he was smart?"

"Yes, certainly."

She let her head fall against the back of the easy chair. She looked listlessly at him. "Well, I don't know."

"What?"

"I don't know, how smart he was."

"Why do you say that?" Andrew said, startled.

She made a noncommittal gesture, turning her hand idly one way in a halfcircle, then turning it back. Yes, an eloquent gesture. Andrew stared at her hand and saw in it an old gesture of Frank's that had always annoyed him.

"He was smart in some ways. Some certain ways," she said. "But in other ways, I don't know." She yawned and opened her eyes wide in a look of ingenuous sorrow. "You know, he couldn't get ahead at work, and he used to yell at the kid .... He used to go out every night and I went with him, I knew enough to tag along because there were some women who wouldn't mind him, I knew that, but he never figured out why I came with him. He thought it was because I loved him so much."

"But what do you mean?" Andrew said, his face suddenly warm.

"I don't know," she said groggily.

She reached around and found some cigarettes on the floor by her chair.

"I used to tell myself when I was a kid that people aren't much good to each other. They're really better apart, not together, like my mother and father were always fighting and out of them being together all us kids were born ... what's the point of it?"

"Haven't you ever experienced any happiness in your life?"

"What?" she said. He felt a strange panic. His knees were weak. The girl watched him levelly and said, "You said that when you're unhappy or something you keep yourself going by some words.

Why do you do that?"

"We have to keep ourselves going."

"But you're a priest, you believe all sorts of things. You don't have to worry about things, or work."

He laughed. "I teach school. It took me five years to get my Ph.D." "Yes, I mean, but ... but it isn't the same because you can't fail and can't fall out, the way Frank did. You know, he fell out of things and could never get ahead, he was sort of a bum .... " Seeing Andrew's look of alarm she said quickly, "Oh, he was a nice guy, I know that, but he couldn't catch onto things the way you

do, a man like you, you know how to talk and be polite but he didn't. And a priest has things he doesn't have to think about, that he believes."

"Priests certainly think about their religion. Of all people priests experience doubt."

"But does it mean anything?"

"Why wouldn't it?"

"Because you're a priest," she said sleepily, "and it's all set, you ... you have that black suit you wear and I'd like something like that, something I could hide in and wouldn't have to worry.

It's like a big black bird; nuns always reminded me of birds. Penguins."

Andrew laughed in surprise. "Y ou don't have the right idea. It isn't unbelievers who doubt, but believers. It's believers who doubt."

"I never doubt anything. I know how things are," the girl said simply. "But when I was Catholic I worried about things, yes, that's right, about sins and things. I doubted things and then I stopped believing and didn't have any doubt left, I was free. Now I know how things are and don't think about it but it's about the same. I mean, I feel about the same.

Whether you're Catholic or not doesn't make much difference."

"That's true."

He felt that his body had become quite warm and heavy. He was perspiring, nervous before the girl's relentless impersonal sorrow, which was brittle and glib as the sorrow of medieval madonnas on museum canvases. Strange girl! The dazed look of her face, the way her skin seemed stretched tight across her girlish skull, made him feel uneasy.

"Loneliness is dangerous. It's bad for you to be alone, to be lonely, because if aloneness does not lead to God, it leads to the devil. It leads to the self. Thinking too much." He spoke hypnotically. The girl exhaled a cloud of smoke. "The aim of the religious life is not to be conscious of oneself as an individual but to experience the universe, to feel its fragments unifying in us .... That experience is God." She frowned in thought. She balanced one foot atop the other and the shoe of the higher foot loosened and would have fallen off, but she caught it on her toe.

Her toenails were painted pink like her fingernails.

"Sometimes, when I'm very lucky, I can achieve this feeling," he said. His voice was rising with something like passion. "I wish I could explain it to you, I wish I had time.... " "Y ou have time. You can stay all you want, nobody's coming over tonight." " ... at these times I feel that by merely

looking at a person I can reconstruct his past life, or her past life, I feel that I enter into his life as a lover, someone who loves ... and sometimes I feel that just by glancing at a photograph, in a magazine perhaps, a photograph of mountains or a foreign. country ... I somehow enter into the mystical life of that world, into its reality, I can imagine a gigantic world beyond it, its history, an entire civilization running up to that photograph that is presented to. my view.... " She nodded vaguely. She put out the cigarette and folded her arms across her stomach, staring at him.

"Did you always want to be a priest?" she said.

Something seemed to have gone out of her voice. He said, "No, I didn't.

I found my vocation through the guidance of a priest at my school. There was nothing simple about it. And Frank, too, Frank might have considered-" "Oh, the hell with Frank," she said.

He stared at her and his heart began to pound.

"Why do you say that?"

"Look, you don't know him. Maybe you knew him once but it wasn't the same guy I knew. Look, the reason he cracked up the car, the reason it happened was he was drunk. He was always drunk. He was a loser and he had to take the kid out for a ride, and that's that. The hell with him."

"But why did that happen? Why did he choose that kind of life?"

"Why, whywhat?Who chooses what?"

"Certainly people make choices-" "Look, where are you staying tonight?" '"At a residence in town here."

"Why are you here?" ''I'm on my way to Cleveland. I wanted to see Frank." "'After so many years?" ''I've wanted to see him often, but my time isn't my own."

"You sure his mother didn't write to you?"

"Yes, of course," he said impatiently, "of course."

She got to her feet and stretched.

She was wearing a yellow dress. "I guess I have to go to bed. I have to work tomorrow," she said.

He got to his feet at once, embarrassed.

"I shouldn't have stayed so long .... " "Y ou want me to show you my porch?

Here, it's over here."

She led him to the other room and he followed obediently. She opened a door and stepped out on a small porch; it was just as she had said. Across the way was another old apartment building, its many windows lit in the darkness, and

down on the grourid were uncertain shapes half in shadow and half in light.

Andrew saw something move down there.

"What's that?"

"Where?"

He smelled something faintly lemony about her, probably her hair. He was not thinking about her at all. It was a deliberate avoidance of thought, which he had le~rned as a young seminarian, and it had never failed him. She went over to one side of the little porch and felt for something and laughed.

"What's wrong?" he said.

"Nothing." She led him back to the living room, and now the way seemed clearer. Once back it was obviously time for him to leave; there would be no awkwardness about it. The girl smiled up at him, pleased. He said a few final things, she said a few things, there is no telling what people about to part cali discover to talk of! -once they are safely released from each other. She went with him to the door. Almost out, good.

A few more words. He said, "I'd be very happy if you wanted to write to me, I mean, if you ever had any doubts .... " "But I don't have any doubts," she pointed out. She smiled and he smiled with her. She was like a clever student who courts her teacher by insights and coquettish bursts of intellect. He stepped out into the dim corridor, she leaned in the doorway, slender and somehow pleased with something, and as he turned to leave she said, "On, Father, waithere's a little present for you. It's just nothing. It's for you."

And she deposited in his palm a tiny blue egg, a robin's egg.

"But what is it?" he said, amazed.

"Oh, I don't know," she said, smiling shyly and cleverly at once, and moving back, "just something I thought of. I'm kind of crazy sometimes. I just thought of it for no reason."

He descended the stairs rapidly, his heart pounding. It was terrible not to know why his heart was pounding!

Downstairs in the foyer he opened his hand again, dreading what he must see, and there the egg lay-a tiny, perfect egg, a lovely blue, a miracle achieved by some forlorn, enslaved robin. "What the hell is this?" he muttered. He closed his hand suddenly upon the egg and smashed it, and when he opened his hand again there was just a mess there, any kind of mess and not necessarily the mess of an egg.

He took out his wad of tissue and cleaned it off and rolled all the tissue into a ball and, being neat, did not drop it in the foyer or out on the cluttered street but put it back ~eatly into his own pocket.

0

ecently in a Chicago hospital, lung specialist Dr. L. Penfield Faber insert, ed aharrow, black tube-called a bronchoscope-down the throat of a sedated but awake patient. As he peered at the small subdivisions of the bronchi, he detected an abnormal growth blocking one-third of the opening. Faber then inserted a tiny brush through the tube and scraped off some cells for laboratory analysis. The test showed that the growth was malignant, and the patient is now undergoing radiation therapy.

But for this fiber optic tube, the patient would have had to undergo the trauma of surgery.

The first fiber optic medical probe for detection of ulcers was perfected in 1958 in the United States. The instruments became commercially available by the mid-sixties, and popularized the then-fledgling science of endoscopy-the study of the body's internal organs without resorting to exploratory surgery. Today, some 10 million Americans undergo endoscopic examinations each year, mostly with fiber optic tools. "It's a totally new, revolutionary world with fiber optics," says Dr. John Marlow, a gynecologist at Columbia Hospital for women in Washington, D. C. "Endoscopy saves time, money and agony, because it eliminates much of exploratory surgery," he adds.

That, however, is only one use of fiber optics, the wondrous technology of transmitting information with bursts of light through glass fibers. Experts believe that in the years ahead, optical fibers will revolutionize many areas of human endeavor, especially communications-in telephones, computer hookups, cable television, facsimile transmission of printed matter, and communication between ships and aircraft. In fact, they are certain that in the not too distant future, it will be possible to build fiber optic communications systems interconnecting humankind in a "glass-wired society."

At the moment, however, the technology of fiber optics offers the most promise in telephony. A single fiber can carry 10,000 times as many telephone conversations as can be transmitted through a copper wire.

(In fact, theoretically, a single fiber can transmit millions of conversations.)

The advantage of glass fiber over copper lies in the differing properties of electronic and optical communications systems. A pair of copper wires carries only up to 48 conversations at one time. Besides, electric current used for transmitting messages in electronic systems creates magnetic fields that distort signals. There are several other disadvantages in transmission through copper, such as electromagnetic interference from lightning and nearby electric motors, and cross-talk-

R

MAKING OPTICAL FIBERS. A hollow silica-glass tube filled with chemical vapor is heated by gas jets (above) so that the vapor fuses to the tube's inner wall, forming very thin layers of glass. The heat is turned up, collapsing the tube into a solid rod called a preform. Heated in a furnace, the preform is pulled like taffy (right) into thin and fine strands whose Iight-earrying core is jacketed by a silica coating.

conversations "leaking" from adjoining wires fewer repeaters are required. In fact, fiberwhere magnetic fields overlap. Again, signals optic systems linking telephone centrals sent through copper wires need to be ampli- six to eight kilometers apart need no refied with "repeaters," placed at intervals of peaters at all, thus eliminating the need for about 1.5 kilometers. expensive, bulky electronic hardware. And, Fiber optics, which work on extremely unlike copper, glass does not corrode. high frequency, are free of most of these Yet, the promise of fiber optics remains drawbacks. Here, the light, which is in just a promise. Although telephone comfact invisible infrared, comes from tiny panies in the United States have installed semiconductor lasers smaller than the tip fiber optic cables on an experimental basis, of a needle, or from light-emitting diodes. there are certain disadvantages with fiber Flashing on and off a million times a second, optics that have stalled large-scale produc. these lasers or diodes send streams of tion of glass wires. photons-or bundles of light-through the The biggest limitation of fiber optics is fibers, which act like tubular mirrors to their inability to switch optical signals. Fiber speed the flashes along. cables can be likened to railway tracks withSmaller than electrons and with no mass, out switches or spurs. They can carry "freight" photons make it possible to send infinitely only between end points A and B-and only more information than is possible with cop- after it has been converted to a different form. per wires. As light creates no magnetic fields, Because telephonic messages can be switched the nuisance of cross-talk and electromag- only electronically, they must be gathered netic interference is completely eliminated by electrons moving on a network of copper in fiber optics. wires-like trucks bringing freight to a railFurthermore, since light pulses are far way station through congested streets-and easier to propel than electromagnetic signals, then converted to optical signals by lasers

SEEING THE INVISIBLE. Millions of optical fibers bundled, cut and polished to make up glass plates (bottom) that become parts of various light-amplifying devices.

Night-vision goggles enable a U.S. Forest Service pilot (left) to spot embers that could cause forest fires such as this one (below), photographed through an image intensifier.

or diodes. At the other end of the railway station, the process is reversed-the signals are reconverted to electronic form for final distribution. This job is done by the "avalanche" photodiode-a wondrous device so named because of the cascade of electrons set off inside the diode by the incoming photons.

But even with this major drawback, glass fibers offer immense advantages. For instance, the telephone companies in the United States are changing their electronic equipment from analogue to digital systems, which glass fibers can accomplish with ease.

In the digital system, information is converted from analogue waves typical of telephone signals into a series of flashes similar to the on-off pulses, or ones and zeros, of computer language. At the receiving end, the information is decoded, emerging as voice, data or pictures.

This enhances the versatility of the transmitted information. Different types of information can be intermingled and transmitted at the same time over the same channel, and with much greater fidelity.

Fiber optics fit perfectly into this communication conversation. For the lasers that send light through the fibers send data in digital on-off pulses.

Though it is still many years till the full promise of the new technology is realized, experts believe that its major beneficiaries will be the developing countries. For there will be little incentive in the industrially advanced countries, which have already very sophisticated communications systems, to switch over to fiber optics on a large scale.

As Gene Bylinsky of Fortune magazine says: "The United States may thus find itself in the peculiar position of being bypassed by less developed countries in applications of a technology it has been instrumental in perfecting and in whose development it has until now pretty much led the world."

0 PEERING INTO THE BODY. An opticalfiber medical probe called an endoscope (right), first developed in the late fifties, enables doctors to examine the gastrointestinal system and other inner body areas. Right, above: A patient's pancreatic duct is viewed by an endoscope equipped with a tiny camera that flashes a picture on a television monitor. Above: A stomach ulcer as seen through an endoscope.

-I-I-IREI: VIEWS SI-IO lJ 1.1) G()VEI~NNII=N-II~E(alJIâ&#x20AC;˘â&#x20AC;˘ I-E BIJSINESS? Yes, agree most America~s. But they differ on the extent. In the following pages SPAN presents American attitudes to what was one of the highly debated domestic issues in the latest presidential election. In its zeal to protect the health of its citizens, has the U.S. Government in recent years resorted to overregulation, as conservative critics repeatedly have charged? The actions and views of the Federal agency portrayed here are expected to change under the Reagan Administration, but the u.s. Government's dilemma remains the same: how to strike that perfect balance between public and business interests without endangering one or inhibiting the other.

America's fast-food favorite, the hamburger, wouldn't seem to need a lot of regulating. But recently United Press International reported that a one-year survey counted 200 statutes, 41,000 regulations, and 111,000 court cases associated with Federal, state, and local control of ground beef.

The bite out of the consumer's budget was estimated to be 4.3 cents per pound of beef and 8 to 11 cents per pound to the cost of a hamburger (l to 2 rupees per kilogram).

In California house prices are sky-high. One explanation: The Building Contractors Association calculates that the average new home now costs $80,000, and that of the total, $13,000 goes to government-mandated fees for schools, sewer hookups, water connections, park acquisitions, construction permits, and civil engineering required to comply with government regulations.

A small American businessman, operating as a oneman autQmotive mechanic, is required by law to fill out 548 government forms per year. He calculates that unavoidable paperwork annually costs him $3,904 worth of his productive and leisure time.

It's time for a family in Detroit to buy a new car.

They wince at the price. They don't realize it-because the information is not included in the window sticker price list-but government regulation today adds close to $700 to the sales price of an average Detroit-made car.

Four pennies a pound for hamburger. $13,000 per house. $4,000 of a man's time. $700 extra for a new car.

They s~rye as daily, commonplace reminders that the costs of governmental regulation can be real, dear, and pervasive.

In many if not most instances, such regulation is conducive to public health, product safety, and economic fair play. Regulation of some sort has been an accepted governmental role since the United States was founded. Federal regulatory commissions have monitored industries for more than 90 years. Few critics deny the need for reasonable and workable regulation. Few critics fault the goals of a cleaner environment, safer work places, product quality, and equal opportunity.

But in these times of chronic inflation, multiplying taxes, and diminished dollars, increasing scrutiny is being given to regulatory excess. In just five years American governments at all levels, stimulated by ambitious

Federal examples, have rapidly expanded programs which attempt to foster social improvements. More and more, individual Americans and their institutions are told what to do, as well as what not to do. All too often bureaucrats enforce rules that are silly, conflicting, and wasteful.

The business of regulating business has become one of the fastest growing sectors of government. Former Assistant Secretary of Commerce Jerry Jasonowski went so far as to say: "Our regulatory system is out of control."

Given that nearly all regulations carry a costeither in added taxes or lllgher prices or lost mcentiveat what point do the expenses of regulation outweigh the hoped-for benefits? How much regulation is enough?

In short, how much can the United States afford?

Since 1975, data useful in answering such questions have been developed by experts at a pioneering institution, the Center for the Study of American Business, at Washington University, St. Louis, Mi6souri.

From' a modest beginning-an idea, one professor, and a secretary-the center has matured as a major focal point for.research of American economic matters. Spurning both government funds and project grants from the private sector, the center has attracted no-stringsattached support from more than a hundred foundations, business firms, and individuals from across the nation.

The original goals of the center remain: â&#x20AC;˘ To engage in scholarly research into topics that impact the formulation of public policy. â&#x20AC;˘ To communicate to the public facts about American business. â&#x20AC;˘ To advance understanding of American business on college campuses.

Today, scores of students and faculty volunteers at Washington University assist the center's full-time investigators in studies ranging from taxes to banking, from wages to credit, from productivity to investment.

The center promotes workshops, seminars, lectures, and awards programs. Center personnel several times a week deliver talks to trade associations, management teams, civic groups, and academic gatherings. The center's materials frequently are used by the press; center staffers testify before congressional committees. Some 30 publications, both in formal scientific style and informal language, have emerged from the center's own research.

Findings of other schools of business and economics

have gained a wider audience through the activities of the center.

Taken altogether, the interests of the center provide a great debate of the dilemmas confronting the United States today and for the future. For the center has taken on some tough subjects, alive with controversy. Consider: An American risking a small business venture today must count on accepting the government as a full, arbitrary, and all-too-frequently inefficient partner. In evety available case examined by center economists, small businesses suffered unduly under a mounting burden of government-stipulated paperwork, labor practices, safety and health requirements, environmental considerations, securities rules, and consumer guarantees. "The entrepreneur, that American species traditionally willing to take a chance to provide a new product or service, is an endangered species," says a center spokesman.

The center estimates the annual cost of Federally mandated paperwork at $40,000 million. American businesses fill out 10,000 million sheets of paper a year for the Federal Government. N or is the papery storm limited to the marketplace. Campus administrators, farmers, city mayors, bankers, and utilities executives are forced to contribute to a massive pile of paper.

In advocating long-term national economic planning, a U. S. senator reasoned, "If corporations are to take a look where their companies are heading, it seems appropriate for the gOJlernment to do the same." As logical on the surface such a point of view may appear, successful business planning has little in common with governmental planning, concludes a center study. Because consumer desires have to be considered, "Business planning is part of a decentralized decisionmaking process in which individual consumers make the ultimate choices." Contrariwise, "National planning is a centralized process in which the key economic decisions are made in the form of government edicts."

Consumers have little say.

The center pursued the first detailed estimates of direct costs of environmental and safety regulation of passenger car production. While not quarreling with efforts to decrease pollution and reduce accidents (and using 1976 as the base year), center investigators totted up a bill of $666 as the average consumer payment for emissions controls, safety gear, and other items that were deemed by Federal regulators to be indispensible equipment for any

new cars which were sold in the United States.

Provocative as these findings have proven to be, the center's most famous-some embarrassed bureaucrats might prefer infamous-findings to date have been in the general field of governmental regulation.

The center noted that until 15 years ago Federal regulatory agencies largely dealt with controlling industries.

The Interstate Commerce Commission, the Civil Aeronautics Board, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and kindred agencies enlarged their responsibilities as their industries grew. But since the mid-1960s and early 1970s, Federal regulation sharply expanded as regulatory emphasis turned from industrial control to social reform.

Fundamentally different were the tasks handed by the U.S. Congress to the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, to name but a few.

More regulation is on the way with the passage of the 1975 Hazardous Materials Transportation Act, the 1976 Toxic Substances Act, and the 1976 Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. Center studies divide regulatory costs into two main categories: (1) administrative budgets, and (2) the money it takes for citizens and companies to comply with the rules.

The first category, the visible Federal spending to run the regulatory agencies, has zoomed from $745 million in 1970 to $4,800 million in 1980. For another perspective, the Federal Register, which records governmental

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regulations, ran to 3,400 pages in 1937, swelled to 10,000 in 1953, and ballooned to 65,000 in 1977. At least 90 Federal agencies at present issue governmental regulations.

But these indicators, dramatic as they may be, only hint at the economic burden imposed upon Americans by a new generation of regulators. The center estimates that complying with the regulations imposes, at current rates, $100,000 million annually upon the private sector. And the costs are on the rise. The overall costs of Federal regulatory activities over the past six years have increased lIS percent -a faster growth rate than the Gross National Product, faster than the population growth, faster than the growth in the rest of the Federal budget, and faster than the growth of the regulated industries. If indeed regulation cost the United States $100,000 million last year, it approached government spending on national defense.

Throughout the country, the center's studies maintain, regulation is having ~'profound impacts.:'. Regulation. is fueling inflation, lowering worker productIVity, hampermg capital formation, aggravating unemployment, discourag~ ing innovation, crippling small business, and passing on a sometimes hidden but nonetheless real burden to every American. No small potatoes, administrative and compliance costs of Federal regulation at present cost each U.S. citizen $500 per year, or $2,000 for a family of four.

Center testimony contributed substantially to a congressional publication, The Costs of Government Regulation of Business, prepared for the Joint Economic Committee.

More than 50 of the center's research reports have been read into the Congressional Record. Center research has been cited in The New York Times, Business Week, the Wall Street Journal, the Christian Science Monitor, the Manchester Guardian, Time, U.S. News & World Report, and scores of other journals. Findings of the center like~ise were published in the widely respected Consumer Research magazine, something of a confirmation of the center's own assessment of its work. Said Consumer Research: "The single most effective national issue the center has developed thus far is the position that overregulation of business is not in the public interest because it increases the prices that consumers pay for the products they buy." 0 About the Author: Don Dedera, a free-lance journalist Carlsbad in California, writes on a wide range a/subjects.

based in

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ow does the American public today look upon government regulation ofbusiness? After investigating nearly all of the national polls that have been taken with regard to government regulation since the 1930s, we would offer the following conclusions: For over four decades, the U.S. public has been ambivalent in its attitude toward regulation. A majority has always expressed opposition to greater regulation, but over the years-as more and more regulation has been enacted-a majority has also voiced approval of existing regulation and indicated that it did not want to roll back the tide ..

In the past three years, the intense criticism of excessive governmental regulation expressed by business, as well as by many in government and academe, apparently has had some effect. Recent surveys suggest slightly less public support for regulation than in the past.

Nonetheless, it remains true today that government regulation of many aspects of business activity is widely accepted and even popular.

The essential reason why people support government regulation is not that they have lost faith in free enterprise ..To the contrary, public belief in the principles of private competition remains remarkably strong. The public sees government regulation more often a~ a way of preserving free enterprise against monopolistic corporate power, not of restraining it. What people are asking is that government act as a watchdog over business to make sure that business does not abuse free enterprise and exploit its powerful position in society.

The American public is certainly not convinced that government regulation is the ideal way to curb business abuses.

Th~y are wary of giving government too much power, since government, too, is

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often irresponsible and abusive. The public would prefer to rely on consumers, consumer activists, and self-regulation by business. But they are alsQ certain that business will not regulate itself and that consumers lack sufficient power to act as a check on business. Thus, in the absence of better alternatives, they turn to government regulation as the only answer.

Looking over surveys stretching back to the 1930s, one is struck by how little the American public's basic evaluation of regulation has changed over the years.

There have been some occasional ups and downs, but all of the studies indicate that a majority has consistently opposed greater regulation of business at any given moment, with considerably more support voiced for stricter control of labor unions. The majority has generally taken the position that the present amount of regulation was about right or too much.

Thus, in September 1953, George Gallup asked the Americans: "Do you think government regulation of business and industry should be increased?" Even then, in the depths of the Great Depression, the public said rio, by 53-47 percent. A similar result was shown in a Gallup poll in May 1940, but in that same survey, when people were asked, "Do you think labor unions should be regulated to a greater extent by the government'r', the answer was a resounding yes, hy 62-20 percent.

Coming out of World War II, which generated the most extensive regulation of the economy in the United States history, American voters were perhaps even more wary of governmental control over private enterprise. Fifty-four percent, for example, told interviewers for a Nell' York Herald Tribune national survey in August 1945 that they thought "it is a good idea ... to have less government regulation of business." Yet in September 1945, when the National Opinion Re-

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search Center (NaRC) went into tht: field, it found that 42 percent favored more governmental control over business than was the case before Pearl Harbor, while 20 percent favored less. Apparently, the public in the mid-1940s wanted more government regulation than in the 1930s but less than during the war. In a follow-up question in its 1945 study, NaRC found that the form of "regulation" that had grown in popularity during the war was government control over wages and prices, not regulation of business competition or product quality.

A series of surveys in the postwar period, while differing in wording, suggested that antiregulation sentiment declined from the Truman-Eisenhower period to the Kennedy era. Dl,lring the latter period, only about a tenth of respondents believed that business was overregulated, down sharply from the one-

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half who took that position in 1952. But even under President John F. Kennedy, only a quarter felt that there should be more regulation. A plurality of around 30 percent was presumably satisfied with existing regulatory legislation. There was, on the other hand, considerably greater antilabor sentiment, with close to half stating that the laws regulating unions were not strict enough.

During the 1970s, even though confidence in business had plummeted, those favoring an "increase" in government regulation of business still continued to be in the minority.

It would be a mistake to conclude from these figures, however, that the public is opposed to regulation. While a majority rejects an increase in regulation, a majority also rejects a decrease in regulation, in spite of the fact that the scope of controls has actually grown considerably in recent years. Basically, most people for over 30 years have continued to state that regulations should be continued at their present level or be made stricter. The message, therefore, is that government regulation of business has become widely accepted, and in many industries. even popular.

Yankelovich, Skelly and White

Opinion Research Corporation

average of 6 surveys, 1974-1978

average of 3 surveys, 1976-1978

( 1978 survey)

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36 ~'o 35% 27%

25 ~o 23 ~~ 43%

Cambridge Survey Research undertook an extensive probe of attitudes concerning regulation in 1975. One question

asked: "People have said that government control is wrong and what we really need is to end all government control of industry. They say rules and controls cause inefficiency and waste and should be stopped. Do you feel this is true?"

Exactly half of the sample, 50 percent, said, "No, it is not true." Only 30 percent took the obvious bait offered by the question and said it was true. Indeed, there was no segment of the population in which a majority felt that government control of industry ought to be totally ended. Even self-described conservatives rejected the idea, 46-37 percent. Interestingly, the groups most opposed to regulation were the extremely poor and the elderly.

If abolition of government regulation is too extreme for most of the U.S. public, how about a lessening of regulation? The survey that has put the question most directly was taken by Cambridge Survey Research in 1976, which posed the issue this way: "Some people have proposed removing Federal regulations on many kinds of business and commerce. They say such regulationswhatever they're intended to do-actually reduce competition and hurt consumers.

Others say such regulations help keep industry healthy and protect consumers.

Do you favor or oppose lessening Federal regulation of industry?"

The idea of lessening Federal regulation was opposed by a narrow margin, 39-35 percent. In part, the slight margin against reducing regulations may have been stimulated by the reference in the question to protecting consumers-a very popular cause. Still, even conservatives were evenly divided over lessening regulation, 38-38 percent.

The Cambridge Survey findings are reinforced by the polls taken by Harris, Yankelovich, and Opinion Research Cor-

poration (ORC). In both the Harris and spending, as revealed by different surYankelovich surveys, it will be noted, a veys, show how the public seeks to' rereduction in regulation was favored by duce the contribution of government to less than 30 percent of the sample. Only inflation. It appears that wage and price the ORC poll taken in the fall of 1978 controls and reducing wasteful governshowed a plurality (43 percent) in favor ment spending are the only solutions for of reducing regulation. Yet in that same inflation which have made an impression ORC survey, when people were asked on the public. The first is more popular whether "government has to play an in- on the left, while the second has a more creasingly active role in regulating busi- natural appeal to conservatives. ness and industry because of the increasEven though a majority of the public ing size of corporations and the complex- shows little enthusiasm for rolling back ity of the U.S. economic system," 59 regulation, it is clear that they also bepercent agreed and only 33 percent dis- lieve that the current regulatory frametheir agreed. Thus, there is no basis yet for work has its shortcomings-and arguing that a great antiregulation tide is skepticism may be growing apace. For sweeping across the United States. instance, the public is well aware of the The status quo approach taken by cost of regulation: most of the U.S. public toward Federal • A majority consistently says that regulation-opposing an increase but also government regulation of business inopposing a decrease-is evident in a creases inflation. (Yankelovich, 1975 Louis & Harris Associates poll of 1976 through 1978.) on attitudes toward Federal regulation • A large majority (over 80 percent) of specific industries. A majority favored believes that conforming to government Federal regulation in everyone of 13 standards involves extra spending for major industries. In none of those indus- business and that these costs are passed tries, however, did a majority support along to consumers. (Yankelovich, 1975 increased regulation. What people seem' through 1978.) to be saying is: "We need regulation of • A majority (51-37 percent) also beindustry, and we like what we have now, lieves that the money spent by compabut we don't need any more of it." nies in meeting government requirements One area in which the public has shifted "has significantly reduced the amount business can invest in the expansion and its attitude in favor of increased regulation is wage and price controls, presumably in modernization of plant and equipment."

(ORC, 1978.) response to the burgeoning inflation.

When asked by different pollsters • The proportion believing that "govwhich institution is most responsible for ernment activity to protect the environinflation, people are much more disposed ment and consumers" increases inflato blame government than either labor or tion has hovered around 50 percent from business. Thus, the public sees govern- 1975 to 1978, while less, between 14 ment control as one way to cut down the and 23 percent, feel it does not do so. ra;e of inflation, in spite of the fact that (Yankelovich, 1975 through 1978.) primary blame for price increases is Antiregulation sentiment also seems placed on the government itself. Presum- to be growing: ably the "tax revolt" and the substantial • Declining numbers now believe that majorities favoring cuts in government regulation is "a good way of making

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do all sorts of things which are against business more responsive to people's the public interest in order to make needs." In 1973, 60 percent professed such a belief; in 1978, 50 percent agreed. money. Even conservatives in a Cambridge survey agreed, by 60-32 percent, (ORC, 1973, 1978.)

• There. is increasing support for the that the government has to keep an belief that "competition is better than eye on business. But when regulation is government regulation to make sure the defined as telling individual firms how to public gets what it pays for." In 1976, run their business, then people draw the 70 percent agreed; in 1977, 73 percent line. Even liberals agreed that telling business "what they can produce, how held this view. (U.S. News & World much they can charge, how much they Report.)

• The percentage believing that the can pay, and so on" is bad, 57-30 perFederal Government would be very effec- cent. In short, the message is: Regulation tive if it were "given the main job of is bad when it means telling people how trying to regulate business and enforce to run their business or when it forces standards of product quality and reliabil- business to raise production costs or ity" has fallen steadily, from 25 percent prices unreasonably. Regulation is good in 1972 to 20 in 1975, 16 in 1976, and when it means protecting the public in15in 1978. (Harris.) terest from the "bad behavior" of busi• There is also growing fear that nessmen who charge high prices, polregulations are encroaching too far on lute, produce shoddy products, exploit free enterprise. In 1964, when respon- workers, or indulge in corruption. dents were offered the argument· that It is difficult to ev~luate the American "the government has gone too far in regu- public's concern about the cost tradeotfs lating business and interfering with the involved in government regulation. The free enterprise system," there was nar- public's willingness to pay for ~egulation row agreement, 42-39 percent. When the varies over time and according to the identical question was posed in 1978, purpose of the regulations. Thus when agreement had widened to 58-31 percent. asked by Yankelovich whether they would support requirements for "more effective (Gallup, 1964; CBS NewsfNew York pollution control devices in automobile Times, 1978.)

• An increasing plurality thinks that engines and exhaust systems" if this would "businessmen's complaints about exces- mean increasing the cost of automobiles, sive government regulation of business the support-to-opposition ratio fell from are... justified." Agreement with this view 48-to-28 percent in 1974 and 38-to-28 rose from 39 percent in 1976 to 44 percent percent in 1978. Willingness to pay more in 1978, while disagreement fell from for drugs as a consequence of requiring "drug companies to inspect their prod35 to 32 percent. (Harris.)

Public ambivalence toward regulation ucts much more critically than they do was captured nicely in a 1978 ORC now" remains high. The support-to-opsurvey. A majority, 62 percent, said that position ratio was 55-to-14 percent in "many important and positive benefits 1973 and 50-to-14 in 1978. In a poll takhave resulted from government regula- en in October 1978, Harris found that 45 tion of business and industry." But a percent favored enforcing "the toughest majority of the same respondents, 52 environmental standards possible, even if percent, also agreed that "the cost of they increased the cost of things to both government regulation outweighs the business and the consumer," compared to 36 percent who said they would be benefitsof such regulation."

Thus, the public is clearly aware of satisfied with "a somewhat lower level both the benefits and the costs of govern- of environmental standards if this turned ment regulation. The data suggest that out to be less costly."

The polls show that Americans in their in recent years the public has become inrole as consumers have strong and increasinglytroubled by the costs.

If Americans harbor so many misgiv- creasing misgivings about the quality of ings, why then do they support govern- the goods they buy. Thus Harris found in ment regulation and what are the limits the summer of 1978 that a majority, 57 percent, expressed "a great deal" of of their support?

The variations reveal the difference be- concern about "the poor quality -ofmany tweentwo ideas of regulation. The reason products," up from 48 percent in 1976. we need regulation, the public believes, Over half, 52 percent; were concerned is that business "behaves badly" - they "a great deal" about "the failure of

many companies to live up to claims made in their advertising," up from 44 percent two years earlier. Close to half, 45 percent, were strongly bothered by "the poor quality of after-sales service and repair," an increase from 38 percent in 1976. Other matters which greatly concerned between a third and fourtenths of the 1978 respondents were "too many products breaking or going wrong soon after you bring them home," "misleading packaging or labeling," and "failure of companies to handle complaints properly. " Cambridge Survey Research identi11ed comparable concerns in an early 1978 poll. Substantial majorities stated that the quality of automobiles, home construction, and furniture has grown worse compared to 10 years ago, while pluralities felt the same way about clothing and household appliances. Food products were the one item which a plurality believed had improved in quality.

What also bothers many Americans about business is its concentration of power and the abuses that are thought to flow from such a concentration. Abuses of power are usually identified with big business, not small business or even business in general. Thus regulation of "big business" is considerably more popular than regulation of "business" in general.

Large majorities, between three-fifths and three-quarters of those interviewed by Yankelovich in 1976 through 1978, fa. vored stricter enforcement of antitrust regulation, compared to between onequarter and one-third, who said that It should remain as strict as it is now and a scant 3 percent or less favoring less strict enforcement. In 1976, a plurality also supported an increase in regulation of big business but not business in general.

To the extent that opponents of regulation can convince the public that small business-not large business-is suffering at government hands, they would thus appear to have a sympathetic audience.

The 1976 Harris survey went on to ask Americans for "open-ended" comments on why they wanted an increase in regulation of big business. The reason most frequently given was that big business has too much power (14 percent); 12 percent said such increased regulation was needed to keep big business from fixing or raising prices; 9 percent said that big business is pushing small business out of the market; and 9 percent said greater regulation is needed in order to

promote competition and prevent monopolies. The abuses cited in these comments~too much power, administered prices, anticompetitive behavior~are criticisms that can be lodged only against big business, and not against small business. They are not criticisms of free enterprise or capitalism; they are criticisms of big business practices which most people feel violate the principles of free enterprise and capitalism.

The 1976 Harris polls asked respondents whether or not they favored Federal "legislation or regulation" in a number of specific areas. The most popular areas favored for Federal regulation were the following: • Product safety and quality standards (85 and 83 percent favored regulation in these areas, respectively); • Pollution controls (82 percent); • Corruption - bribes, payoffs, illegal contributions ~(75 percent); • Equal employment opportunities for women and minorities (72 and 69 percent, respectively) ; • Allowable price increases (54 percent).

Each of these areas relates to widely publicized abuses of business power, or to social problems associated with business activities. In each case, business is perceived as doing something wrong, and regulation is needed to see that it is stopped. People believe that regulation is worth its costs in order to achieve certain desirable social goals.

There were a few topics on the 1976 Harris list for which respondents did not see any strong need for Federal regulation: "salaries paid top executives" and "maximum profits a business can make" showed about equal numbers favoring and opposing regulation, while most respondents opposed regulation of "the amount of profits a business can make," "pay in-

creases," and "dividends paid stockholders." All the items on the list represent conventional business practices in a system of free enterprise. The fact that most people want to keep government out of these areas strengthens our general conclusion that regulation is favored as an instrument for correcting abuses in the free enterprise system. Comments made in response to open-ended questions revealed that those who say there is "not enough regulation" defend their position in terms of the same values and priorities as those who say there is "too much regulation": both sides assert that their approach will do the most to strengthen, preserve, or restore free private enterprise and competition.

The Roper Organization asked a question in its December 1977 survey which directly compared a number of alternative government-business relationships.

The survey was complex. It centered on four basic industries: automobiles, chemicals, steel and oil. In brief, the findings suggest that there are four basic attitude groups with respect to government involvement in the business sector: • A small minority favors the most extreme forms of government intervention, namely, nationalization and government-owned enterprise. Support for these approaches comes to no more than 20 percent in the case of the most unpopular industry of the four cited, namely oil.

The low level of public support for these positions may be taken as an indicator of the public's unwillingness to challenge the principles of free enterprise.

• A substantially larger proportion~ between a quarter and a third of the public~favors a "moderate" form of government intervention, either by divestiture or increased regulation. What makes these options "moderate" is not

the amount of disruption they cause (divestiture is certainly more disruptive than ereating a government-owned company).

Rather, they are "moderate" in the sense that they do not tiirectly challenge the principles of free enterprise. Regulation and divestiture may be interpreted as measures to restore free enterprise and curb the concentration of "monopoly power."

• A plurality of the public favors for most industries, except oil, the present system~which includes a substantial amount of government regulation.

• A 10-20 percent minority prefers less government control and regulation than exist under the present system.

Thus the preponderance of public sentiment seems to be somewhere between the present system of government intervention and a "moderate" increase in that system, either by means of more regulation or through divestiture~which, of course, means a break-up of large corporations and greater reliance on competition. The two minority fringes are those whowanttoreduce the U.S. Government's role in business and those who want to challenge free enterprise head on. Government regulation appeals to many in the United States today for the same reason that trust busting appealed to an earlier generation: as a use of petition and to curb antisocial behavior by business. But the public today is far more knowledgeable about the costs of excessive government power and increasingly alert to the possibility of antisocial behavior by government.

0 About the Authors: Seymour Martin Lipset, coeditor of Public Opinion, is professor of

political science and sociology at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. Dr. William Schneider is associate professor of government at Harvard. They are coauthors of From Discrimination

to Affirmative

Action:

1935-1978.

I WA~ DOINC:{ ~OME qoVERNMENT PAPER WORK AND IT FELL ON ME!

"So many decisions come into play, it's like a mosaic," Heinz J. Eiermann was saying the other day in his cubicle of an office in a drab Federal building near the Capitol.

"One must be very careful not to get the public involved before it is necessary. We cannot cry wolf too often. We proceed with proper deliberation. We always must differentiate between a claim and a fact."

Cautious words those, coming from a man who has learned to walk the shaky tightrope between scientific fact and political reality. As head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) cosmetics division, Heinz Eiermann, a 55-year-old German-born chemist, has one of the great ulcer jobs in 'Washington as a lieutenant in a small army of Federal officials who regulate the safety of drugs, foods, cosmetics and other consumer products.

A few months ago, after nearly a decade of scientific, legal and corporate maneuvering, the FDA ordered that all permanent hair dyes containing an ingredient called 4methoxy-m-phenylenediamine, or 4MMPD, carry a label warning that the chemical can penetrate the skin and "has been determined to cause cancer in laboratory animals."

The process by which this and other regulatory decisions are made in the United States, most agree, is as much political as scientific. Sometimes effective, sometimes futile, the decisions are always convoluted and complex.

The hair dye issue raises the kinds of questions that are increasingly being asked by Americans about the whole regulatory process: How much risk can be accepted in products? Will every product with even the slightest hazard be banned or labeled? Are the regulators focusing on the highest risks? How good is the scientific data on which these decisions are made?

Among other substances under scrutiny are nitrites used to cure meats, the antibiotic Ilosone and cancer-causing nitrosamines in beer. Action on the nitrites, suspected of causing cancer, is awaiting evaluation of a study done by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The agency has proposed to ban Ilosone, known generically as erythromycin estolate, because it has been shown to cause an undn~ amount of liver damage. The FDA this year will move against any beer that contains more than five parts per billion of nitrosamines. The beer industry says that it has already changed the malt-heating process and reduced the nitrosamine count.

Weighing present public hazard against considerable political, economic and social cost, the regulators must often act on indirect and necessarily inadequate evidence.

They must make many an inferential leap without looking, often into political fires that leave them burned.

It is also a process marked by strange anomalies, quirks of law and irony. For example, a simple bar of soap is subject to entirely different rules depending upon whether the maker calls it a cleansing, deodorant or medicated soap.

And in the case of the hair dyes, at least one manufacturer -Revlon-has substituted an analogous compound that preliminary tests suggest may be just as carcinogenic as 4MMPD, the compound requiring the new warning. But it would take years of new testing and deliberations to gather enough evidence to move against the substitute.

"We can go only on facts," says Eiermann, who spent 20 years as a cosmetics researcher in industry and then "changed sides," as it were, to join the government. ("It got boring," he says. "I could not see myself developing another shampoo, another shave cream, another hair conditioner for 15 more years. ") Even achieving any action at all on hair dyes required legal acrobatics. When the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act was passed in 1938, the hairdressers' lobby persuaded the U.S. Congress to exempt coal-tar dyes-the main ones still in use today in the United States by over 30 million women and many men-from banning as long as they carried a warning about skin irritation.

"Give us this day our daily breadJree of strontium, mercury and lead."

Those were simpler days when skin was thought to be impermeable, and a product safe if it did not cause a rash.

But the law remains, and the best-or worst, depending on your point of view-that the FDA could do in the case of 4MMPD was to demand a warning label to rectify the "misbranding" of cosmetics.

As it happens, few consumers will ever see that label because the ruling had its effect long before it was finally approved. Most of the major makers, including Clilirol, the largest, anticipated the ruling and have already removed the offending component and found substitutes.

The hair dye matter did not attract the kind of public attention and controversy that have marked other FDA actions, particularly the agency's effort to ban the artificial sweetener saccharin.

Prodded by angry constituents, the U.S. Congress intervened in the regulat9ry process to halt a ban on the chemical, found to cause cancer in animals. But, in that respect, the dye issue is probably more typical of the hundreds of decisions that are quietly made every year by a kind of invisible government whose actions affect the lives of millions of people and billions of dollars in industrial activity.

The main evidence against 4MMPD-used in the darker dyes for six decades-was a study on rats and mice commissioned by the U.S. National Cancer Institute. For years before any move was considered, the rodents in a Worcester, Massachusetts, laboratory ate large doses of the chemical, and in 1977 it was reported they developed unusually large numbers of skin, lymph and thyroid cancers. In addition, another study showed that chemicals like 4MMPD can penetrate the human skin and enter the bloodstream.

Eiermann's staff prepared reports which ultimately reached the desk of the FDA commissioner, then Dr. Donald Kennedy. "I remember I was particularly concerned with the skin penetration studies," Kennedy recalled in a telephone interview from Stanford, where he is now provost. He knew that the feeding studies would not stand up to an expected challenge if it could not be proved that the dyes entered the body.

Ultimately satisfied, Kennedy formally proposed the warning label on January 6, 1978, concluding that the dyes posed an established carcinogenic threat whose "possible consequences appear grave and irreversible." like most such decisions, the hair dye matter involved a large cast of characters who have moved on and off stage in the I0 years since four Japanese scientists first raised questions about the safety of dye ingredients. There were not only government scientists and lawyers, but also cosmetic industry people, who felt they were moving too fast, environmentalists who thought they were too slow, and more than 800 rats and mice who gave their lives so that blondes could turn themselves into brunettes safely.

Because human beings cannot be put in boxes and experimented on for years, most decisions like this are based on inconclusive animal and epidemiological evidence subject to 'widely differing interpretation. The White House

is uneasy about the quality of the data often used in regulatory decisions and is studying ways to improve it.

The proposal, along with questions raised about other dye components, caused something of a panic in the cosmetics industry. It was unthinkable to put a label with the word cancer on a product with the psychological connotations of hair dyes. "We want our customers to love us," said John Corbett, vice-president for technical development at Clairol, which controls 60 percent of the U.S. market.

"We thought we might lose our whole primary color palette, the red, yellow and blue shades," Corbett said.

"We knew other ingredients would come under study."

So in May 1978 the industry trade group, the Cosmetic, Toiletry and Fragrance Association, entered a 132-page brief challenging almost every aspect of the FDA findings.

What ensued was a kind of intellectual Ping-Pong match, in which the FDA was both a player and referee.

The industry contended that feeding large doses to animals was an inappropriate test of a product that is not ingested in normal use, and that its own skin tests on animals had found no link to cancer. The FDA countered that since only a small fraction of the suspect chemical penetrates the scalp, exaggerated feed doses are needed to detect a risk that would not emerge in skin tests without using many thousands of animals.

The industry pointed to numerous human epidemiological studies, some involving hairdressers, none of which found an unusual number of cancers among dye users. The FDA rejoined that such studies are too imprecise and flawed to rule out any risk conclusively. And so it went.

Even though they initially said 4MMPD was irreplaceable, all the major makers-Clairol, L'Oreal, Revlon, Redkin and Helene Curtis among them-have reformulated and, after some initial complaints, consumers appear to have accepted the new tints, which are slightly different.

While the reformulations make the label issue moot for the moment, the industry's main complaint goes to the heart of the regulatory issue now swirling in Washington.

"We felt this was an emotional rather than a scientific decision," Corbett says. "In the current climate everything that produces an animal tumor, no matter how unrealistic, is something that the government has to move on.

The regulators are knocking off things of marginal risk."

The dye makers argue they have been unfairly attacke<; for a risk that is minuscule compared to that posed by aflatoxin, a natural carcinogen in peanut butter, by saccharin and by cigarettes, which carry a less stringent warning than would have been required of the dyes.

The regulators like Eiermann of the FDA reply that they are only following the law and that the law is often inconsistent. In the coming years, the U.S. Congress will come under increasing pressure to bring more coherence and consisten~y to the regulatory process.

0 About the Author: Robert Reinhold is a reporter in the Washington bureau of The New York Times.

Catering to Indians settled in the U.S., a small but lively ethnic press focuses on the social, political and economic developments back home, as well as the activities and problems of local Indian communities.

early a million Indians now live, work and raise their families in the United States, adopting or at least adapting to a new way of life witha different language, culture and social system.

Yet, though they've chosen to put down their roots in America, many have left their hearts in India. And because the emotional and spiritual bonds with India remain strong, thesenew Americans hunger for word of what's happening back home- be it in the halls of Parliamenr in New Delhi, on the

N

cricket fields of Hyderabad, at the movie houses of Bombay, or around the villages where many still have friends and relatives.

American newspapers fail to meet this need. Even the biggest and best of them limit their news of India to major elections, disasters and occasional human interest stories, primarily due to lack of space and general reader interest.

Some Indians turn for news to papers published at home and flown to the United States daily.

They're available in the major cities, but the cost of getting

them regularly is a luxury that not many can afford.

Still, Indo-Americans do have a reliable source of the news they want-a still small and relatively new, but flourishing ethnic press.

Staffed with veteran newspapermen and competent journalism students from India and the United States, and using wire services, correspondents and other news sources, these publications focus on the political, social and economic developments in India as well as the activities and problems of local

Indian communities.

Mostly owned and operated independently, they are printed in English in various cities across the United States and sold mainly in the areas with the largest Indian populations- New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, Houston and Dallas.

The Indian Embassy in Washington; which keeps track of the ethnic press, says at any given time as many as two dozen papers are in business. But this can change from week to week.

Some of the papers die quickly, explains an Embassy official,

because they're too smallmany are mere one-page newsletters that can't attract needed advertising-or too specialized, such as those printed only in Punjabi or Gujarati.

There are, however, five Indian papers that are financially sound, and have a wide reader appeal. They are India Abroad and News India, both published in New York City; the Overseas Times, headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey; the India Tribune of Chicago and India West ofEI Sobrante, California.

T

ogether these weekly tabloiqs boast a paid cIrculation of over 60,600families, and an estimated total readership of some 300,000.

Recognized as number one in circulation and prestige by independent observers and competitors alike is India Abroad, whose editor, Gopal Raju, says his main goal is "to tell the news as it happens, accurately, fairly and without fear of repercussion."

India Abroad enjoys its position as pacesetter partly because Raju, who came to the United States in 1950 and took ajob as a travel agent in New York, got a big jump on his rivals.

Realizing there was a wideopen market for a quality newspaper geared to the Indian community, ~aju used his life savings along with some borrowed money, and launched India Abroad on a shoestring as a monthly back in 1970.

Raju built circulation quickly by using mailing lists and sample copies to lure new readers. Soon the paper became a fortnightly, and eventually a weekly whose circulation now is more than 20,000. Although most issues are sold in the New York-New Jersey area where nearly 300,000 Indians live, several thousand copies are sent to subscribers in cities across the United States.

Raju says the readers of India Abroad as well as those of the other major papers in the Indian

press are mostly professionals -perhaps as many as 80 percent -doctors, lawyers, engineers, scientists, educators. There is also a smattering of businessmen. They are in general the more affluent and better educated Indians in the United States.

A typical issue of India Abroad, which usually runs 20 pages or more, is heavily laced with political, economic ¡and social news from home gathered by five correspondents in India and 14 reporters and editors based in New York. Additionally, India Abroad gives full local coverage with stories on Indian cultural events, civic functions, organization meetings and even store openingswhatever is happening of note in the community in the United States.

Raju, who began his career in journalism with no formal experience, allows that "I make more mistakes than I should, but I'm learning a little more every day." And one thing he has learned is that a quality paper needs a constant supply of fresh top-notch talent. With that in mind India Abroad has funded a journalism fellowship at New York's Columbia University, which thus far has paid full tuition for seven students, several of whom have joined the paper's staff.

India Abroad's closest competitors are the Overseas Times and News India. If rapid growth is any indication, the Overseas Times. has a clear edge for the number two spot.

The Overseas Times was started only three years ago as a sixpage monthly. As its popularity grew, it was changed first into a fortnightly, and then in July 1980 into a weekly. The move, says Prakash Vyas, the editor and publisher, will make it more topical, and will raise the readership above its present 15,000 plus. Besides, he brings out a Canadian edition of the Overseas from Vancouver to cater to the large Indian population there. It sells mor~ than

10,000 copies each week.

Prakash Vyas and his wife, Lalita, who's the paper's feature editor, entered the newspaper business much the same way as did Gopal Raju. But the edge they had was that Vyas had worked on newspapers in India and knew the business from the bottom up.

The Vayses had been in the United States for eight yearswith Prakash working as an accountant for a New York book publisher, and his wife studying for a master's degree in business administrationwhen they decided to launch the paper.

Using his newspaper contacts,

Interest in the Indian press in the United States may wane with new generations of children, whose ties to India are not as fresh and strong as their parents'.

Vyas built a 20-member staff of writers and editors, as well as a network of well-respected correspondents from papers and magazines in India. Amongthem are bestselling author Janardan Thakur, former Times of-India editor N.J. Nanporia, sports columnist A.F.S. Talyarkhan, film and gossip writer Krishna and political writer Rajmohan Gandhi.

These writers "are so good," says Lalita Vyas, who is convinced her paper soon will overtake India Abroad, "that the competition can't come close to offering what we do."

Mrs. Vyas believes the Overseas Times' strongest point is its political writing. "News is news, and anyone can just pick it up from the Reuters wire," she explains. "But we give more ... an independel1t look at the political situation in India and that is vital. What our writers say,

and the way they say it, makes the difference."

The Overseas Times also is one of the few papers that prints hard-hitting editorials, a practice avoided by most competitors out of fear of losing readers.

Although news from India is the paper's prime concern, says Mrs. Vyas, it cah at times be top-heavy with stories about the local community "depending on what is happening at the time."

Local stories also are a prime concern of News India, which sold its first issue to 1,000 readers in 1975 and now has a circulation of 12,500. The paper is part of the India-based Hiba Publishing Corporation, and the only publication among the top five in the United States with big money backing.

"We strive for a blend of detailed news from home and news ot: the Indian community here," says Rohit Vyas (no relation to the Vyases of Overseas Times), a 24-year-old senior correspondent and assistant editor of News India.

"But our coverage of local news has increased in recent months, because we consider the Indian community here a small India away from home," he explains, "and we try to serve that small India the way we would if we were publishing back home."

Rohit Vyas believes local news is especially vital because many readers buy more than one of the five major Indian papers "to see what's going on elsewhere" in the United States. "They are involved in the same kind of life, they have common links and they are curious, and the papers are a way of keeping in touch with what old friends and relatives are up to in their adopted country."

This focus on local news is beneficial in two ways, he adds.

First, it encourages readers to provide feedback-many know reporters by name and provide' valuable tips for stories-and it

also encourages subscribers "to become part of the paper" by sending in letters to the editor which often make print.

Secondly, it keeps each paper on its toes. "We all want to be the first and the best with the news: and knowing that the readers are comparing us puts a fine edge on the competition.

And there is competition. It's healthy and even amiable at times because we know each other. Nevertheless, we'll break our necks to get a scoop, if we possibly can."

Rohit Vyas got such a scoop -a worldwide exclusive-when he reported in 1978 that Moshe Dayan of Israel was holding secretmeetings with members of the Janata government. The report was discussed in the Indian Parliament, but to Vyas' dismay he was unable to interest The New York Times and several other papers in the story. He was even turned away by the Associated Press and United Press International, where he has a number ofJriends.

"It was, I guess, an indication that they considered us somehow untrustworthy. They must have figured'How could such a small paper get such a big story?'

But I'm sure they'll be listeningthe next time around."

News India's staff of six also tries to provide featur~ material in each issue-stories about a bandit queen operating in the north of India, another discussing whether virginity is an outdated concept, and the like-as wellas articles on job opportunitiesand the immigration laws.

Rohit Vyas came to the United States in 1976 to study international relations after working for wire services in India. Now he intends to settle down in America. "My feeling is that the United States welcomed me and gave me something. If a country does that, I think you ought to stick around and give something back."

In the months to come, he undoubtedly will be bumping heads with reporters from the

India Tribune, a 1O,OOO-circulation weekly based in Chicago.

More than 70 percent of its readers live in the midwestern United States as well as in Texas, Louisiana and California.

But editor and publisher Prashant Shah, who gave up his job as a chemist to launch India Tribune three years ago and now considers "newspapers my life," began including aNew York supplement in each issue in July 1980.

"Getting into New York will be tough because there is real competition there," says Shah, "but we feel we can pull readers away from the other papers."

To do this Shah is offering sub-

The ethnic press is bound to grow. "Indian parents are raising their children to be in touch with India, to know and love her more intimately than we thought they would." scribers a mix of breaking news from India, in-depth coverage of the local Indian community-at least four pages worth-plus political commentary, gossip, a large movie section and plenty of sports.

He plans to increase his staffnow there are two correspondents in India and four reporters in the United States-and begin using various news wires. In the past most of the India Tribune's stories from home were articles rewritten from papers published in India and flown to the United States daily.

W

hile the other Indian papers fight it out for readers east of the Rocky Mountains, Bina Murarka and her husband, Ramesh, will continue to focus on Indians living in California and the Pacific northwest. Their paper, India West, sells about 80 per-

cent of its 5,000 weekly press run in California, most of it in the large Indian communities of San Francisco and Los Angeles.

"We're not competing with the other papers," says Bina Murarka, India West's editor.

"They're oriented toward the East Coast, and that's fine with us. It gives us time and space to do what we do best."

And what India West does best, Mrs. Murarka explains, is zero in on the particular problems of Indians in its area.

One of those problems recently was an article that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle portraying the Patel community as "some kind of mysterious, threatening group that had 'invaded' the U.S. motel business and taken it over," she says. "That piece fostered a lot of misconceptions, even suggesting that everyone in the Patel community was related. So we decided to undo the damage with a story of our own."

The India West article explained who the Pate Is were and what they did and fortunately, says Mrs. Murarka, it was picked up and reprinted by a number of local papers. "I believe we promoted some real understanding with some good basic journalism and we're very proud of that," she says.

India West also provides some political, social and economic news. most of it culled from the Reuters news wire because the paper is too small to afford reporters in India. In fact, Mrs. Murarka and American newspaperman Michael Potts are the paper's entire working staff.

Ramesh Murarka, the publisher, "helps out a bit from time to time," but mostly is involved with his own construction business, his wife says.

Ramesh M urarka, a civil engineer, came to the United States in 1969. Three years later he married Bina, who had been a researcher on a Stanford Umversity welfare project. In 1976, just like Lalita and Prakash

Vyas, they decided to get into the newspaper business, and India West was born. ~~~ Is the Indian press fulfilling the goals it has set for itself?

In general, yes, but not completely, says Prakash Shah, .vice-president of the National Council of Asian Indians, an umbrella group for 80 Indian associations in the United States with more than 100,000 members nationwide.

"All the papers have weak points, and none really stands head and shoulders above the others," contends Shah. "But they all do provide news from India which is unavailable elsewhere, and their local coverage has created a kind of community bulletin that has brought Indians living in the United States closer together. "What is needed, he says, is more editorials- "the strong and independent .kind" -and more consistency in good writing and editing.

Shah is unsure what the future has in store for the ethnic press, whether interest in the newspapers will wane with new generations of children whose ties to India are not as fresh and strong as their parents'.

But Lalita Vyas of the Overseas Times is convinced that growth and expansion are over the horizon. "From what we have seen, Indian parents are raising their children to be in touch with India, to know her and love her more intimately than we ever thought they would," she says.

"This is the trend, and we intend to be part of it, to help it flourish. Of course, in 30 years or. so things might change.

People might change. What our readers want might change. But then we'll change, too. That's what this newspaper business is [J all about."

About the Author: Leo Standora has worked as a reporter-writer for the New York Post. He has also authored a nonfiction book on the New York City police department.

ATALK WITH

Philip Guslon Philip Guston's death last year coincided with a resurgence of interest in his paintings. His defiance of labels cost this "unschooled" painter the esteem of critics for a while, but he then emerged as "the most active, pertinent and youthful elder statesman" of American painting in the seventies.

In the I950s, Philip Guston was a celebrated painter who was grouped with the founding members of abstract expressionism. His style was distinctive. He combined a seductive touch with a rough awkwardness of line and shape; the brushstrokes seemed to emerge almost hesitantly from the picture's background. The abstract Gustons of the 1950sremind me of the calloused farmer who, it turns out, knows and loves classical music.

In the 1960s, Guston's style changed. He turned to representational imagery of an often brutal and visceral kind, portraying hooded figures, for example, which were drawn from his memory of the Los Angeles Ku Klux Klan of the 1930s. His generally pinkish palette-suggesting both blood and a pastel playfulness--compounded the unease of these pictures. Almost without exception. the critics disliked the new Gustons.

Since then, critical opinion has softened somewhat. His work has become important Reprinted by permission from The New Republic. Copyright Š 1980 the New Republic. Inc.

to large numbers of young painters, and a retrospective of his work opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in May 1980.That exhibition demonstrated that the late, outrageous Gustons are not so different in spirit from their predecessors. Like many American painters who found their stride in the late 1940s, Guston had not won an early success. He felt remote from the fashionable art of Europe. His figurative painting, no less than his earlier work, reflects a love for the naive which is close to the heart of much 20th-century art. Guston takes a kind of revenge upon fineness.

Guston never went to college and attended art school for only six months. During the Depression of the 1930s he worked for the Federal work program, WPA; and ill a factory, where he helped to organize a strike. He disliked most recent art. His principal quarrel was with the reductive art of the 1960s.This art, which pays great respect to the physical facts of art, such as the flatness of a painting, claimed for itself the blessing of history: Guston, a well-read man, disliked that kind of intellectual self-consciousness. He gave this interview a few months before his death in 1980.

Pmlip Guston: I like things rooted in the tangible world. I like ord-fashioned things like gravity, how we locomote when we walk.

I used to lie sideways on a park bench and watch how people walk. I used to think how amazing it is, the locomotion. AIl art is a kind of hallucination, but hallucination with work. Or dreaming with your eyes open.

Mark Stevens:' You start your paintings with the most ordinary objects in mind.

Guston: It could be anything. A briefcase, or a bug crawling across the floor. Then I go on from there. I was thinking one night about Kafka's story "The Metamorphosis," when he wakes up and he's a bug and he's late for work. Well. I think the most fantastic thing about this story is that this man has not really changed. He's totally conscious, totally aware. There's no metamorphosis. I like Isaac Babel too because he deals totally with fact. There can be nothing more startling than a simple statement of fact, in a certain form. As Babel says, there's no iron that can enter the heart like a period in the right place.

Stevens: Or a brushstroke in the right place?

Guston: You sweat like a dog for that. In the beginning the canvas is empty, and you can do anything, and that's the most frightening experience. You have to get the white out of the way. As you progress in the picture, and it gets to where you're involved with an inch in ... this rectangle which is your world,

Stevens: Then you find a sense of freedom from the anarchy of white?

Guston: All my pictures must be fought for.

Lots of overpainting and rubbing out. You want to have lived it. The complicated problem is when you do a painting that you think looks good. Then you go into the house and you go to sleep and you wake up in an hour convinced that you're kidding yourself.

You haven't lived it yet. So' without even looking at the picture you scrape the whole thing out and stay with it until-this is the mysterious part-you feel transparent.

Stevens: That reminds me of Stravinsky's famous remark, that he was the vessel through which Sacre du Printemps passed.

Guston: All artists have known that. When you look at paintings, you can always tell which part is forced and which part is free.

Stevens: Is it grim work painting your more grisly image~?

Guston: Someone once said to me, "Doesn't this make you sad?" It doesn't at all. The important thing is you've let go of something inside, no matter what it is.

Stevens: You began your work as a figurative painter in the 1930s. Since then there have been two principal changes in your style- two hinges. The first was the turn to abstract expressionism in the late 1940s.The second was the return to figurative work in the 1960s.

Could you explain some of the reasons why you took up abstract expressionist painting?

Guston: I didn't take it up. I didn't join a club. "Abstract Expressionist" was a phrase coined much later. But in 1947 I became lost for about a year, because I felt I had exhausted my subject matter, which was a series of pictures about children. I didn't feel they were aesthetically felt-they were rhetorical.

I was flattening out space at that point too.

In 1948 I went to Italy for the first time, got to brooding and feeling that those artists were abstract in many ways. I decided to start from scratch when I got back. I also knew painters like Tomlin, De Kooning, Kline, Pollock from the 1930s, and they all had the same problems. They wanted a new territory, to leave Cubist and semi-Cubist painting. We all gave each other moral support. Toward the end of the 1950s I was slowly evolving toward a different kind of figuration. Sort of black heads on fields of gray. Again I began to feel the necessity for a subject. It's a different contest when there's both subject and structure.

is for you to "live" your paintings. Do you like Harold Rosenberg's definition of abstract expressionism as "action painting," an arena in which the artist acts out his...

Guston: I was never certain what it meant.

It's so general. We argued about it for 20 years. Titian was an action painter. All painting is action painting. It's not an arena in which to act. Act what?

Stevens: He might have said, to try to act yourself, for a moment.

Guston: But that's been the story since the caveman, only the styles have changed.

Besides, you don't know yourself when you're painting, and as for freeing the unconscious, all art's unconscious as well as conscious.

What's meant by the unconscious anyway I don't know. I know less as I go along. Or more. Or simpler.

Stevens: In the mid-1960s you stopped producing your successful abstract works and did no painting at all. You just drew. What was going on?

Guston: It was clearing the decks. It was like starting again, like a child, just taking a very simple line.

Stevens: Does that explain the extreme simplicity, almost crudeness, of those drawings') Guston: Could be. It was a feeling I had, in about 1966: What would happen, I thought. if I eliminated everything except just raw feeling and the brush and ink, the simplest of means without even the seductions of color? It was like testing myself, to see what I am, what I can do. You see, at that point in the 1960s I wanted to be a stranger to myself.

Stevens: What did the critics say about the new figurative work?

Guston: Well, when I had my first show in the new figurative style in about 1970 the people at the opening seemed shocked.

Some painters of the abstract movement - my colleagues, friends, contemporaries-refused to talk to me. It was as if we'd worked so hard to establish the canons of a church, and here I go upsetting it, forgetting that that's what good artists should do. At the opening only two painters, David Hare and Bill De Kooning, acted differently. It wasn't necessarily that they liked it. De Kooning said something else. He said, "Why are they all complaining about you making political art, all this talk? You know what your real subject is, it's about freedom, to be free, the artist's first duty."

Stevens: Your earlier success had become a kind of prison?

Guston: It was more that in working wjth

as modernism, and yet there are certain problems that we have that separate us from the past. There's no point in pretending you're walking down the streets of Florence in the 15th century.

subjects and tangible forms I was led into somesurprising and unpredictable structures.

That was exciting. Also, I began to discover that the art world in general is very conventional. They're just as conventional as the TV world, in that once you establish something, you're in a niche and that's that. My concept always has been that artists should change all the time because you feel differently all the time.

Stevens: Certain formal problems? That's been the drift of criticism.

Guston: Our great problem is subject. What to do. How to begin. I'll sound moralistic: to do something worthwhile. Much modern art has only itself as a subject. I don't mean that it's abstract or not. I never felt that mattered. What could be more abstract than Goya? But a lot of contemporary art, whatever might be claimed for it, is made simply to create a pleasant environment.

Stevens: Do you read much art criticism?

Guston: Used to, but now I don't pay much attention to it. I gave all my art magazines away, and when I read criticism it's mostly literary¡criticism. In fact most of my friends arewriters. I like their reactions to paintings.

Stevens:What's different about it?

Guston:They see without the art world lingo.

Sharply. Freshly. Sometimes they're funny, or their reaction is funny, and I enjoy that.

I don't like writing that's snarled up. It's a cover-up. Good writing is simple. Meyer Schapiro last year sent me a pamphlet he wrote about Van Gogh and it's written very simply.T.S. Eliot takes complicated subjects in his essays and writes about them in the simplest way.

Stevens: Have you kept up with contemporary art?

Guston: I don't think contemporary American art is much worth talking about. It's college art in which you preconceive what it is you want to do and then you illustratewhat it is you have preconceived. Totally mannerist. In the last several decades modern art has been degraded into ornament. It's too bad. It fits American society very well.

In an office building you're not going to see one of my pictures on the wall, next to the plant, but you could put a picture of a few verticals and horizontals there. I prefer a more critical art.

Stevens: The term "avant-garde" doesn't meanmuch today.

Guston: The term "avant-garde" means money.It used to be-well, a military campaign would have an avant-garde to smell out the enemy. Now it's the New York Thruway[for automobiles]. It's an accommodating art. If you have the proper writing, advertising. blurbs, you're set. The public b~haveslike the avant-garde now-it's only too anxious to be new. Actually I like Andy Warhol,because he takes all this foolishness andpushes it to the extreme.

What's wrong with modernism in painting is that it paints for this century. People seequickly today, so they paint so you can seeit quickly. How often do you go into a

In the beginning the canvas is

empty and that's the most frightening experience. You have to get the white out of the way .. museum and you see paintings that, so called, work within the limits? And your eye just bounces off. Anybody can go out and put down pretty colors, or smear around, or use a T-square. It's become attenuated finally, without the crudeness, guts, rawness, whatever you want to call it, when you really have to grapple with a subject. I think what Da Vinci wrote-that painting is a thing for the mind-is still true.

To my mind the beginnings of modern art are wonderful. Certainly Cezanne is the key figure, but you know he meant exactly what he said when he wrote that he was trying to do Poussin after nature, and he was a great student of El Greco, Tintoretto, Titian. Picasso, De Chirico, Leger, and Matisse carried on from there, and of course they also studied painting from the past.

They had a subject and used objects. They really wanted to find out what it was about the old masters that made them so solid, and what gave them that particular quality of fluidity and solidity at the same time.

That effort is exhilarating. I don't see much after Picasso and Leger, though. I used to like Miro for his playfulness, but you can get tired of playfulness too. Paul Klee, for instance. It's like this is humorous week, "let's be humorous."

Stevens: In the art world there's a pervasive sense that modernism has run its course. I don't know whether that's true, but what do you think is left for artists?

Guston: Actually, there is no such a thing

Stevens: But that's also been a stimulus for the creation of some of the greatest art of the past.

Guston: No. I don't think so. There was much more to consider in the art of the past.

But the problem is deeper, this one of subject.

It's a cultural and psychological problem for us. There's no such thing as pure manipulation of form or color. That's a myth.

What's the difference between that and a sphere in Piero? The shibboleths of the last 50 years are amazing. But take an abstract painter like Mondrian. He's so good that when you go to the museum, and there's this picture and that and you see a Mondrian, you go right to it. It's like a gun pointed at you. It's because he's passionate.

He was a marvelous religious crank. He put his passion into forms. His passion for theosophy and art was a true subject. I think an artist has to reject all these shibboleths.

I've always had the feeling that art is nourished by the common and ordinary. Picasso drew constantly from the common. I have a feeling that in America a lot of good art may come out of this impulse. I love the self-taught artists, like Pippin and Kane.

Just as strong in my memory as the old masters is once seeing an old-fashioned icetruck in Manhattan which had a bucket painted on it, with the grain of the wood and everything, and spilling out of it these cubes of ice. Sometimes, when my painting is getting too artistic, I'll say to myself, "What if the shoe salesman asked you to paint a shoe on his window?" Suddenly everything lightens.

I was once talking to Harold [Rosenberg] on a panel and I said, ''I'd like to paint as if I'd never painted or seen a painting before."

Of course it's impossible. But Harold said that was Mallarme's definition of the true poet: the poet in Eden.

0 About the Interviewer: critic for Newsweek.

Mark

Stevens

is the art

ON

THE

LIGHTER SIDE

"They're apparently intelligent, but so far all I've been able to train them to do is to stick a fish in my mouth whenever J jump through a hoop."

"Stop worrying about inflation. There's nothingyou can do about it. That'll be sixty dollars."

CHILLI181S TO U.S. rOBI181 POLICY In the American political system, thepresidential cabinet nominees have to appear before-and be confirmed by-the various committees of the U.S. Senate. They are closely questioned on both their overall philosophy and their specific approach to the problems they will face as department heads. Following are excerpts from the recent testimony of General Alexander M. Haig, since confirmed as the Secretary of State, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The testimony, which lastedfive days, covered the gamut of American foreign policy.

Senator Charles Percy: It would be very useful if you would give us a brief assessment, as you see it, of the Soviet purpose and how best the United States may cope ,with the Soviets in the whole range of foreign policy. What are their long-term military and political objectives in the world today as you foresee them and how should respond?

we

General Alexander Haig: I think that Soviet intentions are in large measure irrelevant.

These intentions can change from day to day by changes in incumbencies or the pressures and exigencies of day-to-day international events.

I think what remains the fundamental bottom line, if you will, of U.S.Soviet relationships and East-West relations at large is that there remain profound differences between East and West in political, economic, security, and, most importantly, perhaps, moral terms; and that just so long as these differences remain, they are inevitably going to spawn confrontations and disagreements on a regular basis from time to time: and

that as we view these inevitable confrontations, it is vitally important that we assess the overall power balance between ourselves and the Soviet Union.

I have been concerned in recent years [that] ... a declining American and Western capability will inevitably begin to influence unfavorably and dangerously our ability to meet these confrontations on terms in which our vital interests are protected and the interests of the American people are protected, and that international stability itself and the prevention of conflict can be best achieved.

Percy: Briefly, then, General Haig, are you generally supportive of the responses of the United States Government, of the Carter Administration, to the Soviet invasion, brutal invasion, of Afghanistan?

Haig: Well, I would be very inconsistent if I suggested at this late date that I have not been disturbed by not only the United States but the overall Western handling of the Afghan situation.

It was my view at the time, and it remains that view today, that had we in the West been more vigorously opposed to the earlier intervention of the Soviet Union into Afghanistan when it established a puppet regime some two years ago. and when some of our newspapers at the time urged us to "stay cool in Kabul," had we been more forceful in bringing to the Soviet leadership our disagreement with that action, we would not have been confronted by the blatant interventionism that took place .a year ago.

Senator Howard Baker: Mr. Haig ... do you feel that the avoidance of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union or the United States and any other country is the paramount item of foreign policy and the cornerstone on which we must build that policy for the future?

Haig: I think this is an extremely important question. It is a very sensitive question. And I think it is awfully important that we always keep our focus on what the vital interests of the United States and the American people are, If we make just the maintenance of peace alone, as vitally important as that is, the raison d'etre and the core of our policy deliberations, I am afraid that we are going to bring about .circumstances that are going to have the practical consequences of bringing about the disruption of the very objective we have established for ourselves-peace.

Now why do I say that?

What I really intended to convey to you and what I would like to use to answer is that there are

things that for. .. there understand under that

we Americans must be, willing to fight are things worth fighting for. We must that. We must structure our policy credible and justified premise.

Senator Paul Tsongas: Let's talk about Afghanistan.

You said that we should have taken a stronger stand when the Soviets tried to install a puppet regime in Afghanistan, so I take it you think it was wrong for them to do that.

Haig: Yes, I do.

Tsongas: And why was that?

Haig: I think it represented a fundamental clash to our national interest, Senator. I believe the upsetting of a long-standing international posture for Afghanistan, which was achieved almost a century ago, primarily by the United Kingdom, represented an ominous development to postWorld War II Soviet activity, not just in tge context of the employment of force there, but !J16re importantly. of their willingness to directly dabble in a rather high-profiled way in such an area ....

Senator Richard Luger: The Soviet Union is the one large power that threatens the existence of the United States, and the existence of other nations ....

Would you comment on this general thesis ~ Haig: I would like to point out one aspect of that world view that I think we Americans must keep a very, very clear eye on as we assess the sacrifices that are facing us in this period ahead. That aspect is that we are not facing the inevitable and inexorable supremacy of Marxist-Leninism as a system. Quite the contrary, it is a profound hIstoric failure.

If one measures the success of the Soviet brand of communism, we find economic shortfalls that are increasing in severity over the last three to four years. We find an agricultural basket case in the historical sense. Despite the fact that Soviet leadership has driven larger and larger segments of their population into agriculture, the consequences have not been remunerative.

We find growing demographic problems with the Soviet system, as the non-Soviet populations begin to thrust for greater autonomy and a greater voice in the conduct of Soviet policy. We find that transmitted into the Eastern European¡ zone of influence.

What I suggest by that is, if we Americans, and those who share our common values, have the discipline to get our act together and to move in concert, and to manage this very dangerous period at the far end of a decade or more, we will then be facing a period of utmost opportunity and promise.

Why is it so dangerous ... this facing us? There are two converging realities. On the one hand, we have this growth in sheer Soviet military power, which some years ago my friend, Helmut Sonnenfeldt, d~scribed as inorganic because it was not

accompanied by growth and success in the other segme~ of the Soviet society. Simultaneously, we have these pressures [on the Soviet economy], these manifestations of Soviet failure.

I think history will confirm that totalitarian states, when plagued with internal failure, and armed beyond the limits of prudence and reasonableness, frequently indulge in external diversions to ensure their incumbency and continuation in power. One need only look at Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, to suggest at least there is some flirtation with that kind of diversion underway in Moscow today ....

Senator Alan Cranston: Do you believe that there is any acceptable alternative to the determined, steadfast pursuit of balanced, verifiable nuclear arms control agreements if our long-term security interests are to be advanced?

Haig: I have always been a proponent for arms control, and especially efforts to minimize the levelof nuclear wl;apons, minimize nuclear proliferation ... but they must always be pursued as ancillary to our own vital national interests first and foremost.

For example, I have always believed that we acquire breakthroughs in negotiations with the Soviet Union in arms control only when they perceivethat the alternative facing them is a willingness of the United States to match or better what they are willing to deploy. Why in heaven should they sit downand negotiate limitations with us if we're going to do it to ourselves without negotiations?

Cranston: What do you see as the limits of linkage?

For example, should we withhold our support for an otherwise desirable SALT treaty as a means of pressuring the Soviet leaders to show greater respect for their citizens' human rights? Or, another example, should we attempt t.o use SALT to pressure Soviet leaders on Middle East issues, such as their support for the PLO [palestine Liberation Organization)?

Haig: Senator, I do not view linkage as a mechanistic arithmetic game in-which we add up pluses and minuses each day and decide how we are going to proceed in a number of important functional areas. Not at all.

But I think it is vitally important for Americans to understand that the Soviets are not in arms control negotiations with us because they like the color of our eyes. It is because it is of importance to them. But we must make it clear to the Soviet leadership that they...cannot expect benefits in a number of functional areas, whether it be arms control, trade, credit transfer, technology transfer, while they are indulging' in activity worldwide which is endangering worldwide peace.

And I know that the leaders of the Soviet Union wouldunderstand that message.

Senator ChristopherDodd: I'd like you to talk about nuclear nonproliferation.

Haig: I think nonproliferation is a very important objective for American foreign policy. It must not be the exclusive one. And, above all, it must be dealt with in a context in which our other activities

and policy don't generate the incentives to drive have-not nations into a position where they want to be nuclear powers.

For example, you must keep consistency in a regional sense. Policies toward India should be consistent with policies toward Pakistan.

Dodd: Take Argentina, Brazil, South Africa-three nations, in addition to India, that have refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Assuming that we decided to sell nuclear components to those three countries, what sort of assurances would you want that they would not be used for the production of nuclear weaponry?

Haig: Well, I think we'd have to insist on iron-clad assurances. One of them clearly might be signature commitment.

Dodd: But not necessarily inspection?

Haig: Well, you know, I think everything is relative here. You can speak to some of our friends abroad, and they think they're being inspected on a 24-hour basis and we haven't been very generous with them in this particular area.

One of the great problems is not to create ramifications or impressions that are counter-productive to our broader interest. I saw this in Europe some years ago when we came over and threatened to cut off enriched uranium if West Germany and France continued with contracts that they had made-one with Brazil and one with Pakistan.

Senator John Glenn: How about your views on reprocessing equipment, shipments of plutonium, on uranium enrichment plants?

Haig: I would never be a proponent for policies which had the practical consequence of raising the dangers of nuclear proliferation.

Glenn: You just mentioned safeguards methods a moment ago. Are you talking about something different from the International Atomic Energy safeguards?

Haig: Well, I think there are bilateral assurances that must accompany. There are technical assurances that must accompany [them]. There are a host of safeguards that can be applied, related to such a decision.

Glenn: We have 108 nonnuclear weapon nations that have followed us in agreeing to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the NNPT. What benefits do you think should accrue to those nations as opposed to those which do not agree with us?

Should we go ahead and continue shipping to other nations, whether or not they have signed the NNPT? Haig: I think what is important as we address this issue and continue to try to broaden acceptance of the nonproliferation agreement is not to pursue ancillary or related policies which contribute to the insecurities which raise the appetite. In a regional

sense, if one nation, a have-not nation, is threatened by a have nation, the appetite is rather large.

We have to deal with that in a host of possible ways.

Glenn: Let's go back over this again. You indicated that our policy should be the same to different nations, and you specifically said Pakistan and India.

Would you favor our shipments to Pakistan, then, so that we are even-handed, because we have just sent nuclear fuel shipments to India?

Haig: Well, that would have me join that syndrome that one mistake begets another. Perhaps that's true. but I would like to think about that very carefully. I am not comfortable with that thesis.

Glenn: Well, W6 tried and have cut off our support for Pakistan. We went ahead and cooperated with India, which has not signed the NNPT. Haig: There are a host of ways of dealing with this.

There are assurances, American commitments, in Pakistan, rather long-standing-since 1958, as I recall, with respect to their future and their viability.

There are things in the area of conventional armaments which can relieve the kind of tensions that feed an appetite for nuclear weaponry.

Senator Larry Pressler: Would you make sort of a final statement on how you see arms control?

Haig: I think arms control is an extremely important, high priority item for the Department of State and for our entire Federal bureaucracy that is associated with national security affairs. I think Presiqent Reagan has commented on that explicitly d urmg the campaign.

Senator Nancy Kassebaum: You touched in your opening statement on the increasing frustrations that we find in foreign policy decisions advancing a position at the cost of one interest to the advantage of another interest.

I think an example is the question of Somalia and Ethiopia. What do you feel regarding the obvious need or the strategic advantage that a base at Berbera would provide us versus the obvious cost of upsetting the colonial borders that are important to allies?

Haig: I think most of us who have wa.tched the situation and the changing strategic environment not only in the Persian Gulf but also in the Horn of Africa have been concerned by the growing Soviet presence along both littorals of the African continent with their activities in Afghanistan and the successful outcome for them there, and the uncertainties in Iran. The lifelines of Western access to vital raw materials could rapidly come into serious threat.

Many in [the Carter] Administration have looked at the important needs to increase the American presence in that area, and they have sought to gain access to a number of base rights ... designed to

enhance American flexibility to react rapidly in the event the vital oil resources needed by this nation were threatened.

In general, I am comfortable with the current trend to accomplish that, and to include the development and preparation of a rapid reaction force which can be perceived and available to the American president and to this committee, should it unfortunately become necessary to employ it.

[However], one of the great problems of talking glibly about an American presence in the Persian Gulf area is that it could have precisely the opposite consequences that we are ¡seeking. It could unite so-called radical Arab states against us in a way that I think would be counterproductive.

Senator Samuel Hayakawa: What actions do we need to take that will change America's selfperception of inadequacy and, at the same time, erase the impression other countries have of the United States, one that has been created in the last four years that we lack will, that we are weak, that we are not determined, as you so aptly put it, to master world problems? What are we going to do?

Haig: I am one who does not believe for a moment that the American people have lost their .will.

Precisely the opposite. But I do think that we have been confused-confused with respect to the nature of the dangers facing us and perhaps confused with respect to the priorities we should establish to deal with those dangers. . . . So, our problem, in my view, is to sort out the confusion, to set our priorities in an orderly, systematic, unified, bipartisan way. There are no partisan policies in the international arena. We have to deal with truth.

Hayakawa: What do you see as China's role In Asia? How should we balance our interest in a stronger China with our absence of interest in creating a Chinese threat to Taiwan, to the rest of Southeast Asia?

Haig: It's awfully important that we recognize that the situation is fundamentally one of strategy.

It's a strategic relationship that is the underlying motivation for normalization of relationships with the People's Republic of China. It doesn't mean in any respect that we have a convergence of interests and values.

The challenge of this decade facing us is the necessity on the one hand to conduct our policies in such a way that the People's Republic of China recognizes that there is some value in a normalization of relationships with the United States, that we are reliable. On the other hand we cannot permit this normalization process to result in a situation that my European friends describe as "poking sticks in the polar bear's cage."

With respect to the role of the People's Republic of China in the regional area; that strategic relationship has increasingly begun to suggest

that their concern about what they refer to as the search for hegemony by the Soviet Union on their border and south of them and to the north of them, has given them a motivation for a certain stabilizing influence in the area. Evidence-without a value judgment-their punitive action against Hanoi when Hanoi continued its activities III Cambodia.

So I see a compatibility and a convergence, in the strategic sense, between ourselves and the People's Republic of China. It is in our interest to continue the normalization process begun during the Nixon years, furthered during the Ford years, and furthered even further during the Carter Administration.

I do not see a particular threat at this juncture to the nations of the area as we look at the overall demographic assets of the People's Republic of China. They have a long, long way to go before they could be considered a military threat, in my view, to the people of Taiwan, to Japan. And I would hope there would be a structuring of improved relations between Japan and the People's Republic-and there is a great deal underway today that could lead to that-despite historic differences of the past.

Pressler: I have three questions regarding the Middle East. Since the general election, President Ronald Reagan has labeled the Palestine Liberation Organization as a terrorist organization. In the past the State Department has refused to explicitly identify the PLO as a terrorist organization.

Do you view President Reagan's statement as requiring a change in State Department policy?

Haig: I think it is awfully important that we be careful of our labels. If you are talking about the Palestine Liberation Organization, I think that encompasses a number of forces, influences and attitudes.

Pressler: Under what changed circumstances do you enVIsion the inclusion of the PLO in negotiations?

Haig: I could not think of anything today that would more profoundly undercut the positions, the couragious position taken by President Anwar Sadat and the current position in the relationship of the state of Israel or the credibility of the United States Government [of such an inclusion], unless conditions that have been laid out are met and unless the parties concerned were to agree.

Pressler: The inflated price of oil has not reflected the true value of this commodity. What we have here is a forceful transfer of wealth from the Western nations and developing nations to the oilproducing countries.

What would you do to convince OPEC to give a larger share or their share to developing nations?

Haig: Our level of influence on'OPEC policies leaves something to be desired. I know that were OPEC members here to answer your question, they would highlight the fact that they are caught in the same cyclical escalation of worldwide inflation and have to pay more for the finished goods of the West, and therefore they have to charge more for the oil.

There is some truth in that.

It is tragic that those most severely damaged by

this escalation are the developing states themselves, who are least able, have the least resiliency within their economic structures to cope. It is a very horrendous problem for all.

Senator Paul Sarbanes: How importantly do you regard the use of our economic power in influencing events and developments in the wofld?

Haig: Clearly economic power is the most important asset the world has to influence events.

But, international legitimacy for those who violate international law-when we concede that to them, we are conceding to them an incentive to continue. This is the problem with terrorism. We just have to take a somewhat more steely-eyedview of breaches of international law and the standards and mores of Western civilization.

Sarbanes: Do you think that the economic relationships with other countries should essentially proceed on a separate track or thatjud gments with respect to economic relationships should be made in thecontext of the total, broader foreign policy considerations~ Haig: I feel very strongly and share the latter opinion. It is absolutely essential for the Department of State to get a better handle on American economic policy, technology transfer, issues of nuclear proliferation as well. All of these factors must be integrated into the fundamental bedrock of what is politically in the best interest of the United States.

Senator Charles Mathias: In your opening statement you have given us a very serious list of problems, all of them demanding your immediate attention.

Could you give us any sense of the agenda with which you will attack that long list of problems?

Haig: Well, I think that you can't do in a rigid sense, Senator, because frequently some tactical questions of great urgency, although less profound in the sense of their significance to the national interest, just require tending.

So I can't say, but I could give you a menu of the areas I consider to be the most urgent and dangerous. Certainly the Polish situation at this moment poses the most grave potential consequences for world peace or for a continuation of efforts to improve East-West relations. The situation in Afghanistan continues to be an important irritant to improvlIlg efforts to get international stability, especially in an East-W~st context. [There are] the problems' of developing nations, the need to establish a meaningful relationship with them, that we dO'a better job of satisfying the urgent human needs of these peoples and developing states, ensure at least a compatibility of policy, if not a convergency of policy between them and ourselves. Above all. .. we [must] manage more effectively the turmoil and the conditions that generate turmoil which make such a fertile ground for external fishing expeditions. In that context, .'I think the growth of terrorism worldwide is a matter of increasing urgency for Western powers to address. I think international economic and energy problems are offundamental importance.

This is just not certainly an all-inclusive list.

0 I think these are among the most urgent.

history put together; The survivors, if any, would live in despair amid the poisoned ruins of a civilization that had committed suicide.

National weakness-real or perceivedcan tempt aggression and thus cause war; That is why the United States cannot neglect its military strength. We must and we will remain strong. But with equal determination, the United States and all countries must find ways to control and reduce the horrifying danger that is posed by the world's stockpiles of nuclear arms.

This has been a concern of every American president since the moment we first saw what these weapons could do.

Our leaders will require our understanding and support as they grapple with this difficult but crucial challenge. There is no disagreement on the goals or the basic approach to controlling this enormous destructive force. The answer lies not just in the attitudes or actions of world leaders, but in the concern and demands of all of us as we continue our struggle to preserve the peace.

Nuclear weapons are an expression of one side of our human character; But there is another side. The same rocket technology that delivers nuclear warheads has also taken us peacefully into space.

From that perspective, we see our earth as it really is-a small and fragile and beautiful blue globe, the only home we have. We see no barriers of race or religion or country. We see the essential unity of our species and our planet; and with faith and common sense, that¡ bright visio~ will ultimately prevail.

Another major challenge is to protect the quality of this world within which we live. The shadows that fall across the future are cast not only by the kinds of weapons we have built, but by the kind of world we will either nourish or neglect.

There are real and growing dangers to our simple and most precious possessions: the air we breathe; the water we drink; and the land which sustains us. The rapid depletion of irreplaceable minerals, the erosion of topsoil, the destruction of beauty, the blight of pollution, the demands of increasing billions of people, all combine to create problems which are easy to observe and predict but" difficult to resolve. If we do not act, the world of the year 2000 will be much less able to sustain life than it is now.

But there is no reason for despair.

Acknowledging the physical realities of . our planet does not mean a dismal future

"America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense, it is the other way around. Human rights invented America." of endless sacrifice. In fact, acknowledging these realities is the first step in dealing with them. We can meet the resource problems of the world-water, food, minerals, farmlands, forests, overpopulation, pollution-if we tackle them with courage and foresight.

I have just been talking about forces of potential destruction that mankind has developed, and how we might control them. It is equally important that we remember the beneficial forces that we have evolved over" the ages, and hold fast to them.

One of those constructive forces is enhancement of individual human freedoms through the strengthening of democracy, and the fight against deprivation, torture, terrorism and the persecution of people throughout the world. The struggle for human rights overrides all differences of color, nation or language.

Those who hunger for freedom, who thirst for human dignity, and who suffer for the sake of justice-they are the patriots of this cause.

I believe with all my heart that America must always stand for these basic human rights-at home and abroad. That is both our history and our destiny.

America did not invent human rights.

In a very real sense, it is the other way around. Human rights invented America.

Ours was the first nation in the history of the world to be founded explicitly on such an idea. Our social and political progress has been based on one fundamental principle-the value and importance of the individual. The fundamental force that unites us is not kinship or place of origin or religious preference. The love of liberty is the common blood that flows in our American veins.

The battle for human rights-at home and abroad-is far from over; We should never be surprised nor discouraged because the impact of our efforts has had varied results. Rather, we should be proud that the ideals which gave birth to our nation still inspire the hopes of oppressed people around the world. We have no cause for self-righteousness or complacency. But we have every reason to per-

severe, both in our own country and beyond our borders.

Ifwe are to serve as a beacon for human rights, we must continue to perfect here at home the rights and values we espouse around the world: a de.cent education for our children, adequate medical care for all Americans, an end to discrimination against minorities and¡ women, a job for those able to work, and freedom from injustice and religious intolerance.

We live in a time of transition, an uneasy era which is likely to endure for the rest of the century. It will be a period of tensions hoth within nations and between nations-of competition for scarce resources, of social, political and economic stresses and strains. During this period we may be tempted to abandon some of the time-honored principles and commitments which have been proven during the difficult times of past generations.

We must never yield to this temptation.

Our American values are not luxuries but necessities-not the salt in our bread but the bread itself. Our common vision of a free and just society is our greatest source of cohesion at home and strength 'abroad-greater even than the bounty of our material blessings.

Remember these words: "We hold these truths to be selfevident. that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable . rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

This vision still grips the imagination of the world. But we know that democracy is always an unfinished creation.

Each generation must renew its foundations. Each generation must rediscover the meaning of this hallowed vision in the light of its own modern challenges. For this generation, life is nuclear survival; . liberty is human rights; the pursuit of happiness is a planet whose resources are devoted to the physical and spiritual nourishment of its inhabitants. .

As I return home to the South where I was born and raised, I am looking forward to the opportunity to reflect and further to assess- I hope with accuracythe circumstances of our times. I intend to give our new president my support, and I intend to work as a citizen, as.l have worked as president, for the values this nation was founded to secure. Again, from the bottom of my heart, I want to . express to you the gratitude I feel. Thank you, fellow citizens, and farewell.

0

Meaningful jobs are an antidote to cynicism about working. This thought-provoking article by an iconoclastic educator discusses steps that could be taken to reduce young people's alienation from work, which seems to be increasing with each decade.

In this amusing, sometimes irreverent, so"metimes laudatory feature, Manish Nandy recapitulates his impressions of the United States.

A picture story of how American social welfare agencies, both private and public, attempt to realize the American ideal of social justice.

Two experts-one Indian and one Americandiscuss the problem of improving the quality of life in rural areas. Accompanied by an interview with Bunker Roy, the man behind the successful rural development project in Titonia, Rajasthan.

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