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University Daily Kansan Tuesday. May 17, 1960
Passive Diplomacy
The United States' prestige is taking a battering before all the world at the Summit Conference this week.
Never before in the 20th century has a U.S. president been given such a brash, insulting brush-off. This just isn't done in international politics unless the person handing out the criticism is sure he can withstand the impact of any possible consequences. Nikita S. Khrushchev obviously thinks he can.
DIPLOMACY IS A TOUGH GAME to play. One can't afford to lose many sparring matches before the game is suddenly discovered to be over. At any rate, it is impossible to continually be on the defensive.
Yet this is what our diplomats choose to do. Khrushchev leads with an accusation and before the public realizes the implications, the United States is looking for its best defensive move.
We are not only faced with Khrushchev's boisterous behavior. The United States must listen to bold criticism from a two-bit diefactor 90 miles off the Florida coast. Our judicial system has had to submit to foreign pressure because somebody didn't like the way the Chessman case was being handled.
When we have to endure Khrushchev's pompous attitude and Castro's nationalistic fits, it's time the United States stopped its idiotic bluffing and started getting tough.
OUR CHIEF CONCERN is not with the U.S. foreign policy. We doubt if anyone could define what it actually is. It varies from year to year, always containing one qualification — flexibility. It was so flexible earlier this spring our foreign specialists had difficulty telling the foreign ministers from France aand England what it was. We expect more changes after this hectic week.
We are concerned primarily with our diplomacy. No one in a responsible diplomatic position has yet shown himself capable of coping with a Khrushchev. At present, our foreign diplomats look like a group of amateurs who are dabbling in a professional's game. In fact, it is too much of a game. Our foreign diplomacy should be serious business.
WE DON'T KNOW what happened to the "West Point for diplomats" idea Congressmen used to kick around in their spare time. But now certainly is the time this proposal deserves new thought. Our "on-the-job-training" with no preparation policy has its limitations as is being demonstrated by the notorious U-2 spy plane incident and the results at Geneva.
Our politicians are going to have to learn to apply some tact to international situations, and we can't wait around until Khrushchev has pushed Russia into world leadership before we do it.
— Doug Yocom
Does Ignatius Exist?
Editor:
(In reference to the recent socio-political controversy beginning with Ignatius Schumacher's letter, "A Measuring Stick," proceeding through the letter, "A Measuring Stick Revisited," and culminating, until this point, in a letter entitled "All That is Good.")
LET US MOMENTARILY sweep aside these more mundane issues of national and international politics and policies, the future of "Good Old America," the East-West struggle and the maintenance of internal security and the realization of some degree of equality among men, economic and political, which has become the goal of American government in both major political parties since at least 1932. Let us, just momentarily, hold off the attempts, loyal Americans, to defend Hoover and defeat Roosevelt, to reinstate the old order, return to normalcy, and, generally, to argue within the framework of the 19th century, advancing political arguments that would probably embarrass most public officials in Washington, whether they be Republicans or Democrats — arguments that have not had any substantial reality in international politics or policies since the unfortunate and disgraceful failure of the U.S. to enter the League of Nations or since World War II, and arguments that have not had any substantial reality on the national scene since the farm depressions of the 1920's
Daily Hansan
University of Kansas student newspaper
Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904,
triweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912.
Telephone Viking 3-2700
Extension 711, room
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Member Inland Daily Press Association. Associated Collegiate Press. Represented by National Advertising Service, 18 East 50 St., New York 212-746-3930. News service: International subscription rates: $3 a subscriber or $5 a year. Published in Lawrence, Kan., every afternoon during the University year except Saturdays and Sundays, University holidays, and examination days. Second semester Sept. 17, 1910; atrence, Kan., post office under act of March 3, 1879.
NEWS DEPARTMENT
Jack Morton ... Managing Editor
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
Douglas Yeom and
Douglas Yecom and Jack Harrison - Edi-Editorial Editors
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Bruce Lewylen ... Business Manager
and the growth of unchecked industrial power in the U.S. up to the post-World War I years.
Let us sweep these political issues aside, for now. Let us drop the controversy over the spelling of "Hays" and "welfare." These problems are old hat; they have been eliminated to some degree by both Republican (that strains my objectivity almost to the breaking point) and Democratic governments, and by my own attempts, feeble though they may be, to correct my spelling. Let us forget them now.
LET US MOVE to the more immediate issues, to the deeper, more philosophical implications of this controversy: Does or does not Ignatius Schumacher exist?
Although this particular controversy may be of little interest to the general reading public, it certainly should be of great interest to Mr. Schumacher; and the philo-
sophic issue of existence should be important to everyone.
In view of the weighty evidence affirming Mr. Schumacher's existence, among which was an editor's note attached to one of the letters that sounded more like an invitation to ficticus than an affirmation of Schumacher's existence, one, less skeptical than myself, would be prone to resign himself to Ignatius Schumacher's existence. I couldn't and still can't! Just recently returned from the realm of Bishop Berkeley David Hume, I'm forced to conclude that not only are Mr. Schumacher's arguments unreal, but, indeed, he himself may be unreal — a mere allusion of the mind, a bundle of perceptions! There may be no 13-C Sunnideys! There may be no Daily Kansan office! What is real?!
Alan Kimball Derby junior
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS By Dick Bibler
"Your name has just come up for consideration, Worthal."
"We'll just get rid of some of this extra weight"
Quill Praised
By Arvid Schulenberger Associate Professor of English
QUILL, Spring, 1960. William J. Hudson, Editor.
This issue of Quill is the most interesting assortment of student writing to appear at KU in a blue moon. In nine years, to my knowledge. Perused without sophistry, it could amuse and instruct the wisest student or most middle-aged professor on the Hill. Natural talent and freedom are its qualities. The writing is neither beat, nor square, nor genteel, nor sophisticated, nor otherwise phoney. There is little evidence in its pages that professors have been at work stuffing the product with "symbols." A far cry from the sad stuff issued under most academic auspices. Alive, as distinct from dead.
THE CONTENTS? The contents: Michael Ahnemann's "An Automatic America" is a cheerful poetical miscellany, skirting the edges of nonsense, American history, and the international scene. Skirting is the word. Lively and successful. Rita Robinson's "Hello, Tiger" is the funniest story in the magazine; also, the best. Post-Salinger but not derivative — ten minutes in the life of an outrageously authentic kid-sister.
NANCY CRUMMETT'S POEMS are also first rate; in her longer poems she uses the language as if she had invented it herself, and were seriously considering abolishing it. Her shorter ones run to alarming clarity, as in "Let's Be Friends":
"Loetia," a poem by Daryl Warner, is not very likeable but is distinctly worth disliking. That is to say genuine. Jean Marie's short poems include a fine epigram;
"Black carbon stone is but a shade.
Hiding for a while the diamond it has made."
Hiding for a while the diamond it has made. Mona McCoy's short story is alive and coherent, deceptively slow-paced. It is a development of an attitude expressed by one of O. Henry's genteel widows: "There are very few cultivated gentlemen among the sap-headed plug-uglies of my acquaintance."
be philosophy but because Rita Robinson's poems are first rate; they start easy, and go off like a small pistol at about line twelve or fourteen. "Or Walk With Kings," by Jean Marie, reads like the short story of a potential novelist — the only thing of the sort in the magazine and very good to see. Delfred Fambrough's "First Prom" gets the essence of sophomorium into six lines.
AHNEMANN'S "Children and Their Promises" must be a good story; one editor, according to rumor, has already resigned in disapproval of it. It is well-written, deals with an immoral situation, wouldn't shock your maiden uncle, and will promote morality by simple revulsion. Larry Mason's short poems have character, and deserve the prize-money which they were awarded. "Pvt. Davis Tarkington" by Daryl Warner strains a little toward a great symbolic whatzis, but remains interesting, like the fellow who tried to be philosophic but cheerfulness kept creeping in.
"Last week's lovers
clasp hands
in an agony of friendship."
Barbara Smith's "The Secret Way" is charming fantasy, which ought to please any reader who has ever been a child. Arly Allen writes like an artist — that is to say like an honest workman not afraid of experimenting, falling on his face, or even being called sentimental. Smith's poems are sensitive and accurate, whether dealing with scenery or with love among the filing cabinets. Other interesting poems are by Caruthers, Reiter, Siebert, and Stiff.
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ONE OF THE BEST FEATURES of the magazine is a total absence of critical essays — a special feature which ought to be continued. The cover and format are in good taste, if one cares for that sort of thing, as well as sufficiently striking — a cover view of ectomorphic students (mononucleosis?) drifting past a ghostly Fraser Hall. The writing styles of the editor and others are so natural that they may well stir English instructors into a mad desire to "correct" them into textbook-ese.
In general, the whole magazine seems untouched by the dead hand of academicism. Recommended reading.