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University Daily Kansan
Friday, Jan. 6, 1961
The Super Patriots
Ever wonder what puts a cynical gleam in the eye of the veteran newsman? Try reading his mail a while and you'll find out.
Each day mail from obscure people with equally obscure return addresses beech the journalist to join a cause and fight for some ideal. Always the cause is half lost, the fight worthy and the ideal the salvation of mankind.
Recently we happened to daily too long over the desk and our horrified eyes caught sight of a card pleading with us to enlist in the ranks of the N.A.A.R.M.W.P.
Being a sucker for initials (a hangover from the F.D.R. administration) we were compelled to read on. Somebody from down in Sow Belly County wanted us to push the National Association for the Advancement of the Rights of the Majority of White People.
It isn't enough to fight for the minority, now you also have to fight for the majority. If there are any "in-betweens" around, we are starting to sympathize with them.
THE SUPER PATRIOTS ALSO SEEM TO be out in force this year. They seem to confuse issues about as bad as the "me first," "state first." Federal government first" and minority first' boys.
We have another hot little number on our desk from one Jack Franklin, editor of the Student. Statesman, beseeching us to assist in "launching a journalistic crusade to combat the malignant menace of Communist propaganda in this country."
If he had left out the word Communist, he might have made a sale.
What ever happened to the fierce independence of the American citizen? Maybe we are from the "old school" but we always thought one of the basic principles of the American democracy was the right to be what you wanted to be.
NOW YOU MUST THINK TWICE BEFORE you even join a young people's club. Eager Edgar seems to have his FB-eye fastened on the "yunguns." It might be a front, you know, for the Communists.
We wonder when they will get around to finding out what is in back.
Old Jack Franklin and his "Student Statesman" want to fight fire with fire and out propagandize the propagandists, so to say. Sounds like a vicious circle to me.
Maybe we are trying to hold on to our democracy so hard we are losing sight of the very principles for which we are struggling. "Self determination" has been bandied about so much it is starting to sound shopworn, but that seems to be the forgotten criteria.
We shake in indignant wrath at the busy-body neighbor who attempts to tell us what to do, yet we get equally indignant at a country which refuses to accept our principles of Democracy.
WHEN A FOREIGNER ASKS ME "WHAT is democracy?" I feel like the guy who's been asked "do you still beat your wife?" The question is loaded, friend. It's loaded.
I might have joined Franklin's little group (and I'm sure it's little), but I noticed the American Legion is aiding him in distribution "to all major college and university campuses in the United States."
They might want to give me some type of award which I wouldn't particularly want. You know what happened to another schoolboy who tried that.
God save us from the super patriots—Russian or American.
The little people of the small nations of the world must feel the same way. We notice a flood tide of neutralism sweeping over the world.
WE WONDER WHY MORE AMERICANS don't stop to remember that their forefathers were little people from other countries where power politics got to be too much for them.
"Give me your tired, your poor.
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door."
Remember?
- Ray Miller
Editor:
Zeus the Defender
... Letters ...
Reference is made to your editorial in the issue of Tuesday, 29 November 1960, entitled, "Zeus, the Defender." This editorial contains a misstatement of fact, i.e. your statement that the Army and Navy are adhering to the doctrine of massive retaliation against heavily populated areas. The Army and Navy have never endorsed this policy. As a matter of fact, the Army has protested this
policy ever since 1947; three distinguished soldiers (General Gavin, General Ridgeway, and General Taylor) have left the service as a result of the controversy within the Department of Defense concerning emphasis placed on "massive retaliation."
The Army has consistently sought funds to place the Nike Zeus system in preliminary production. The Nike Zeus System is in an advanced state of development and is an extension of the
research and development which placed Nike Ajax and Nike Hercules in operation. Your attention is invited to the article, "Danger: Anti-missile Gap" on page 67 of the U. S. News and World Report issue of 14 November 1960 for additional facts on this subject. Additional background material on this subject is contained in General Taylor's "The Uncertain Trumpet," and General Medaris' article in the 27 September 1960 issue of Look magazine, "How to Rescue Our Defense Effort."
Clyde L. Jones
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS
Colonel, Artillery RMS
"AT LEAST HE'S TRYIN' TO HOLD OUR INTEREST."
(Editor's note: We erred in placing the Army on the side of those who advocate massive retaliation. The Army, its strategic objectives dictated by shorter-range weapons designed for use against enemy military concentrations, is indeed opposed to overemphasis on the Army's ability to deter the release of funds for the Nike Zeus program came not from the Army but from other areas within the department of defense. We did not intend to impute that anything else was true.
However, the statement that the Zeus is not yet in the testing phase was true, in that no full-scale tests relied on the Zeus for production objective to replace opponents against a suitable target have yet been conducted. (Army Information Digest, December, 1960). Such tests will not be conducted until later this year or as long as two years after this. The Zeus on site and operational in sufficient numbers to provide effective defense certainly cannot be reached for perhaps as long as two years after this. Zeus should be placed on site, and this writer witnessed advanced testing of this weapon in 1957.)
Short Ones
It will ever remain incomprehensible that our generation, so great in its achievements of discovery, could be so low spiritually as to give up thinking—Schweitzer
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Show me a woman's pocketbook and I can tell you her fears, hopes and desires--Albert Reuben
"Oh, A routine landing, thanks. Clipped a Braniff, brushed a Pan-Am Connie and just missed a TWA jetliner. And you?"
By Calder M. Pickett
Acting Dean, School of Journalism
THE SUN ALSO RISES, by Ernest Hemingway. Scribner Library, $1.45.
Whether there was a Lost Generation really matters no longer. Whether the Twenties really roared also is of no importance. There were many who thought the generation was lost and that the years in which the generation got lost were roaring years. This is what counts today. Tell a student who was born in 1940 that your parents and many parents like them never drank bathtub gin and he probably won't believe you.
Ernest Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises" is likely to remain the number one chronicle of those who believed themselves part of a lost generation. Hemingway later found himself, and came in time to write some strikingly affirmative things. But in 1926 there was disillusionment in Hemingway, and the impotence of the world about him was reflected in the impotence of Jake Barnes.
Is this a great book, one that can say much to the college generation of today? I think it is. Beyond its importance as a reflection of how a good many people thought, it is important for what it says about style. Hemingway seems over-simple at times, and his English almost becomes pidgin English. But he is always forceful and direct, always uses the right word, always tells us right off just what he is trying to say.
And despite the essential lack of adornment of characters, plot and setting, "The Sun Also Rises" is consistently vivid. As Jake, Lady Brett, Robert Cohn, Bill Gorton and Mike Campbell drink and eat and make love and watch bulls and fight and fish the reader is caught up in the disillusioned kind of life that Hemingway — even more than Fitzgerald — has captured for us from the lost generation.
Our daughters must be taught that the ideal female is not a male, that a woman must find fulfillment within her own biological needs and that sacrifice and dedication are foundations of the home.—Dr. Morris Gross
Dailu Transan
University of Kansas student newspaper
Founded 1889, became biweekly 1004; trieweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912.
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