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THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Thursday, November 7, 1968
After the election
Youth, try again
A little bewildered, American youth sat back yesterday and pondered the events of Tuesday and the past year.
A man was elected president but he wasn't the choice of America's youth. As a matter of fact, neither was his opponent. So we ask what's the matter.
The matter is that this was the first election in many years in which youth acted, not individually but as an almost united semi-power group.
Youth had its candidates, worked hard for them, and watched the ground cut from under them by the established party, by non-idealistic opposition and even by an assassin's bullets.
Who but youth worked so diligently to bring victory to the one avowed anti-Vietnam candidate in New Hampshire, Sen. Eugene McCarthy, working on a limited budget, actively sought youth's support and received it. A number of political observers attributed McCarthy's success to his youthful campaign workers who canvassed tirelessly for no reward save the satisfaction they were working for their candidate, a man of intelligence who had the ideals of youth and the nerve to oppose an unpopular but powerful political regime.
But Sen. McCarthy was not the only candidate who received active, organized, youthful support. Sen. Robert Kennedy, who had been actively campaigning among the nation's young people for a number of years, also received their backing in his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Kennedy, with his youthful appeal and boyish appearance, was followed by a long list of youths as supporters, campaign workers and screamers at his speeches.
speeches. On the night of his greatest victory in the
campaign, he was killed by an assassin. Youth lost another hero.
A third candidate, though not so popular with youth as the first two, but still with youthful appeal and ideals, was New York Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller. The governor, moreover, was the one Republican who appealed to youth. He tried to offer responsible programs to help some of the problems facing youth and these programs were well received.
After the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, many looked to a contest between Gov. Rockefeller and Sen. McCarthy. A common question at that time was, "Wouldn't it be nice if we had a tough choice as to who was the best man, instead of who was the lesser of two evils?"
But Rockefeller and McCarthy went down to defeat under the political machines of their respective conventions and youth was left without its political leaders.
The time now is to lick a few wounds but not lose faith in the political system. It is a good one basically. It has fostered such great leaders as Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt. And, it will foster more leaders. Perhaps this wasn't the year.
At any rate, youth is finally active in politics as a group. This may have been a disappointing year watching tremendous efforts ignored by political bosses, but there is another year, another leader and another issue. To have the idealism of youth interested and fighting for what it believes is a healthy addition to American politics and a great many people were quite glad to see it.
As the old Brooklyn Dodgers used to say every year, "wait 'til next year."
Alan T. Jones
The rock hound
Alan T. Jones Assistant Managing Editor
Blues good and bad
By WILL HARDEST $ ^{v} $
AN ANTHOLOGY OF BRITISH BLUES Volumes I and II on Immediate (released through Columbia) feature the proverbial cast of thousands. As usual in a crowd that large, there are some winners and some losers.
Appearing on one or both of the albums are: John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, Eric Clapton, Savoy Brown Blues Band, Stone's Masonry, Jo-Ann Kelly, T. S. McPhee, Jimmy Page, Dharma Blues Band and Jeremy Spencer.
These British musicians, for the most part, seem to lack the ability to really get into the blues, which is too bad since at least some of the English (for example, The Rolling Stones) can do the blues well. Blues is definitely something which has to be played from the guts with soul, and the Anthology musicians have trouble playing that way.
The blues don't try to show the happy, fine, sophisticated, Mary Poppins side of life. The blues tell about the dismal, sad, drab, dreary, unhappy side of life—the blue side. To be played well, blues should be played with certain qualities. Blues should be earthy, homepun, countrified, down-homey, common and vulgar. The blues should be a way of expressing a blue mood to get it out of your mind and body. It takes real feeling to make the blues beautiful, but these artists have big trouble finding the feeling. The music on the album is, in the majority, too antiseptic, too clean, too pure. It's so veddy propah and so veddy British. It kinda sounds like early rock 'n' roll or maybe even jitterbuggish.
However, this is not to say the albums are without any redeeming social importance. Eric Clapton is good in all six of the songs he has on the two albums. Side two of the first volume is pretty good, and the second volume is much better than the first.
On side one of the second volume, Mayall and his group team up with Clapton to really do some good work in "On Top of the World." Next, T. S. McPhee fumbles the ball, but the Savoy Brown Blues Band gets things back on the right track with a good number called "I Can't Quit You Baby." Then, Clapton and Jimmy Page do a thing called "Draggin' My Tail." Sitting quietly listening, you suddenly realize melancholy is pouring from the speakers and you are thinking of an old love who shafted you for another.
On the other side, "Look Down at My Woman" by Jeremy Spencer is pretty good, but the outstanding song is "True Blue" by the Savoy group. It is really music to smoke-cigarettes-and-suddenly remember the now-grown-warm-half-drunk-beer-in-your-hand by.
OK! You're on!'
Paperbacks
A HALL OF MIRRORS, by Robert Stone (Crest, 95 cents)—A book that was awarded the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award for 1967. The setting is New Orleans, and the central characters are three—a disc jockey drunk, a flitting nymphomaniac, a young southerner. There are some resemblances to Nelson Algren, and the side of American life today presented by the writer is a side that will shock the sheltered, if there is such a classification any more.
THE NINE MILE WALK, by Harry Kemelman (Crest, 60 cents)—A group of detective short stories by the author of "Friday the Rabbi Slept Late." Kemelman's crime-solver in these is Nicky Welt, Snowdon professor of English language and literature in a small college. The stories are incredibly gentle
WE ONLY KILL EACH OTHER, by Dean Jennings (Crest, 75 cents)—A nonfictional work about the hoodlum Bugsy Siegel and his affair with Virginia Hill. If you're enthralled with stories about racketeering and assorted crookedness this may be for you.
after some of those appearing on the stands today.
AUTHENTICITY DAILY
KANSAN
A student newspaper serving University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas is attended at the University of Kansas daily during the academic year except holidays and examination periods. Mall subscription rates: $6 a semester. $10 a year. Office hours: Kc. 60442. Accommodations, goods, services and employment advertised offered to all students without regard to color, creed, or religion are not necessarily those of the University of Kansas or the State Board of Regents.
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John Marshall
The old and election
All day long the rain drizzled on the American Flag as it stood, drooping, nailed to the short wooden pole in front of the 2nd precinct polling station-normally Lawrence Fire Station No.I.
The people stood inside in long lines in front of thin metal booths with redwhiteandblue curtains waiting for the pieces of paper on which they scratch the nation's destiny for the next four years.
There, in the lines near shiny fire engines and neatly packed tools and cans of dry chemicals "FOR FIRE EXTINGUISHER USE ONLY" were the old people. Raincoats with wide lapels that have come back in style. Snowy hair and steel-rimmed glasses that now are worn by their grandchildren who are "in." The ladies with thick stockings and chunk-heeled shoes who take too long to cross the street. The men who have white stubble on their faces in the morning and who sit on park benches or steps and talk to anyone who will listen. The tattered umbrellas that they open when the sun shines too hot.
The old people are in the lines for the umteenth time. Old people like Amelia Kaiser who sat in her living room Tuesday and talked about the very first time she voted—for William McKinley.
And now the Amelia Kaiser generation has voted in the same lines with its great grandchildren on law and order. And the war. And racial unrest. This Amelia Kaiser generation that thinks of 60 year-olds as children because they once were. And to those 60 year-olds, people like Julius Johnson who is 35 are children. Julius Johnson has a wife and two children and was the seventh person to vote in the third precinct.
And children, really, in the same line with each other . . . tattered coats and snowy hair . . .
younger people with two or three little ones . . .
the young coed with inkstains on her hands from a just-completed written exam.
They stood there in the lines Tuesday and thought about what they had seen and what they had heard.
Julius Johnson voted for Hubert Humphrey because he is a black man. He had looked at the Johnson-Humphrey record on civil rights and approved. Nixon long ago kissed off the Black man's vote, Julius says. "I think it will hurt him, as far as black-respect-for-Nixon goes."
Julius Johnson says Humphrey is an intellectual and he has courage—"Courage enough to want to debate with his opponent in front of the public." You can't say that about Nixon, he says.
Inkstain-on-hands said she voted for Nixon.
"Why?" she was asked.
The black fireman opened a door and backed in a fire truck that had been standing in the rain. He voted for Humphrey because Humphrey respects the black man.
"Inkstains" has long hair and wears smudged bluejeans and sandals as she stands in line, trying to look at the fire extinguisher near a window. Her parents are from a nice residential area in Wichita and when they ask her who she voted for, well, "I just couldn't keep a straight face if I didn't vote for Nixon."
"Could you really say that about Wallace or Nixon?" he asks. The black man looks about 30.
But the lines Tuesday, in front of the fire engines or near the desks or computers at the Douglas County State Bank, with the youngest and young, the oldest and old, is the way Amelia Kaiser looks at this election. With all the "mean" things that go on, and with all the protests and wars and hate and violence, she says, it brings a lot of people together every four years to make a decision.
So when they stood in the lines Tuesday, Mrs. Kaiser and the old people were replying to something written by young people about what it might be like to be old:
Old friends.
The old men
Winter companions.
Lost in their overcoats,
Waiting for the sunset.
The sounds of the city
The sounds of the city,
Sifting through the trees
Sifting through the trees,
Settle like dust
On the shoulders
Of the old friends. Can you imagine us
Of the old friends.
Years from today.
Years from today.
Sharing a park bench quietly?
now terribly strange
To be seventy.
—Simon and Garfunkel
“Old Friends”
Can you imagine . . . Julius or Inkstains as Amelia Kaiser.
In the election line we have taken a first look at ourselves—whether we all make the "X" in the same box or not.
But Amelia Kaiser herself could not vote today—her heart is failing. And after looking at the election line for the first time and thinking about Mrs. Kaiser's first vote in 1901, you think about why she laughed so loud when she said, "This election's gonna be the death of me yet!"
It is not very funny.