Summer Session Kansan
Page 2
Tuesday, July 16, 1957
Passivity: The Deathless Problem
Editor's Note: William Allen White and Pearl Buck had brought in the verdict. During 1936, American writers had been arguing the question which has been just as popular a topic during 1956: What is wrong with college youth? The answers of the midwestern editor and a writer just back from attending the birth of a new China indicated a mild enough sounding evil—passivity. They said American students were reacting to no such arguments as were shaking the walls of European universities. They wanted defiance and elenching fists. Like today's educators, they were tired of sophisticated languor and apathetic acceptances. Following is an editorial which appeared in a September, 1937, University Daily Kansan, commenting on the statements and demands by W. A. White and Pearl Buck:
It would be pleasant merely to point out the fact that European student defiance consisting of bellowed banalities such as American youth refuses to employ, has not made a wiser nor a more peaceful continent. Disturbingly, however, there is not the mark of wisdom in putting away thinking because false philosophy is rife.
College students in America have become interested spectators of a dramatic scene. They possess a keenly developed sense of the ridiculous with which to mock their elders, and a number of beautiful theories, they will rapidly forget. They are a little bewildered by the complexity of the world. They do not believe in dying for causes—but suspect they may be forced to. And they are passive.
Now rebellious Europe is naturally the land of ideas, abstractions, and "solutions." The United States, though, is part of a new world where "freedom" is a synonym for the right to raise wheat or cotton.
It is in the chaos between these two worlds as merged by the war that the college student is lost. He distrusts charming phrases. He has no frontier on which to vent his energy. Society has been at
pains to tell him the horrors of mass murder without doing much about it. Communism, Socialism, and Fascism beckon enchantingly—often with a promise of a superman to do the thinking. It would be lovely to rebel—but exactly where to begin? William Allen White and Pearl Buck forgot to mention that.
Yet, there is a slow breaking of the fetters of indolence and bewilderment. The last election had a deeper significance, perhaps, than Farley's machine politicians imagine. It was away for the new voters, from the bloated words of the post-war days in whose sound they were reared and whose spell was a thrice-magic circle around them. It was away from the shadows of Europe and her "isms"—even her interpretation of republianism.
To fight a war to end war—glorious if it worked. It didn't. Forget saving the world for democracy then. Turn to the practical Pan-American League and strengthen the ties of two continents which want to be saved. Build long highways; run airlines; learn to talk Spanish—and to talk business.
To feed the hungry and protect the laborer—noble if the rich did it. They didn't. Let the hungry and the laborer, therefore, fight in their nefarious greed for the principles mentioned in the preamble to the Constitution. State the facts crudely and plainly: You have too much; we have too little.
Study ways to prevent the Midwest's becoming a desert. Dig into scientific methods of crime prevention. Criticize the administration constructively. Tinker with the atom and the molecule.
The passive generation may develop an art or literature, but not a mythology. It may build skyscrapers, but not dream-castles. It must find a cold basis of actuality and stand firm while Europe swails and Asia surges. It must establish its kinship with the nation of both Americas. This is not a romantic task and it is a grueling one. It may not even save the present form of government intact. Yet, it will do much more. It will preserve whatever small degree of Whitman's brotherhood has been achieved.
- Two On The Aisle -
Though there are several schools of opinion on the subject, it is safe to say that there is only one comedy now playing at the downtown depots of histrionic art.
"The Delicate Delinquent" stars the inimitable Jerry Lewis and we thoughtfully concluded that it would be good for a few boffs. However, it became increasingly apparent, as we sat gumming our buttered popcorn, that Mr. Lewis was making his debut in a "message" picture. The message was this: People are making a grave mistake when they classify in the same pidgeonhole students of the Midwestern Music and Art Camp and the bombthrowers of Carstrippers Local No. 17. In other words, not all teenagers are juvenile delinquents; some are delicate delinquents. That they are all, in some manner, delinquent was a subject that Jerry chose not to treat.
The film began with three streeturchins and Mr. Lewis participating in a street brawl. Later, at the calaboose, one of the cops (Darren McGavin) decides that the comedian is not beyond reclamation. During much soul-searching and tomfoolery, McGavin steers the comic up the straight and narrow until he realizes his life's ambition: he becomes a policeman. Now Jerry Lewis makes an idiotic and hilariously funny delinquent, but his pose as an officer of the law is even more ludicrous. Unfortunately, this was not Mr. Lewis' intention.
In the end, Jerry in his turn helps his old delinquent pals in the same corny way that McCavin helped him. Throughout the course of the action (?) one feels that Lewis was in dire need of the Italian street singer Dean Martin. There is one point at which the funnyman himself even tries to sing.
If you subscribe to the traditional story of the clown with the hidden, broken heart, then this story is your meat. To others it will be poison because that tradition is not the Lewis tradition of fast-paced slapstick comedy.
Even the veterans will want to re-enlist if they partake of the gem now at the Varsity Theatre. "The Drill Instructor" was apparently too long a title for its notoriously blunt star Jack Webb. Advertised under the initials, ("The D.I.) it is the story of the Marine Corps' efficiency as the world's largest brainwashing machine.
The setting is Parris Island, South Carolina, where the Corps initiates all its new brothers with a candlelight ceremony and secret handclasp. The geographical location is significant in the film as it boasts swarms of sand fleas. Indeed, this was the title of the television play upon which the story was based. It is further supposed that the hot climate encourages diabetes as there are constant references to "getting Able Sugar" if the place gets any hotter.
Jack Webb produces and directs and stars in this romanticized training film. As the flint-hearted technical sergeant Jim Moore, he is at once hated and admired by all recruits, Don Dubbins, as the boy whose "mudder, fadder, sizer, and brudder was all mureens," begins by hating the Corps, but is shown the folly of his ways by a
(Continued on Page 6)
TV Notes
NEW YORK — (UP) — ABC has scheduled its new fall program, "The Patrice Munsel Show," to start Oct. 18. Fridays from 8:30 to 9 p.m. It immediately precedes the "Frank Sinatra Show," which also bows on that date. Miss Munsel will be the first Metropolitan Opera star to have her own regular TV series. Her husband, Robert Schuler, will produce the program. Miss Munsel still will appear with the Met next season, but, naturally, not on Friday nights.
Forty-seven college stars will be in the squad of football players that will be pitted against the New York Giants, pro champs, in the annual College All-Star game to be played in Chicago Aug. 9. ABC will telecast the game beginning at 9:30 p.m. EDT.
Jack Barry has picked up a third job with the debut of "High-Low" on NBC, Thursdays at 9:30 p.m. Like the same network's "Twenty-one" and "Tic Tac Dough," this new one is a creation of the firm of Barry and Enright, with the former master of ceremonies on all three.
"Lux Video Theater" on NBC is presenting only new stories this summer, which is a pleasant departure from the general practice of most programs of offering repeats. These also will be TV originals. The July 18 play is "Summer Return" by Anne Howard Bailey.
There will be 13 repeat shows of the "Blondie" series on NBC this summer. The last will be shown on Sept. 27. The program was not renewed for next season.
Veteran film comedian Andy Clyde will have an important role in the TV serial, "The Mystery of Ghost Farm," which Walt Disney is making this summer for use on ABC's "Mickey Mouse Club" program next fall.
"Tonight" will be retained by NBC as the title of its 11:30 p.m.-1 a.m. live program when Jack Paar takes control of the segment July 29.
Books
Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek believes that an all-Asian war against the Chinese Communists is the only way to defeat the Soviets and to prevent World War III. He advises the United States and other Western powers to keep out of it.
"All we need from them is moral and material assistance and the supply of arms and technical aid," he says in his book, Soviet Russia In China (Earrar, Straus and Cudahy).
Chiang has fought the Communists in China for more than 30 years. He went through three periods of "peaceful coexistence", each of which he described as disastrous to his government and his (Kuomintang) party.
He urges the Western nations to employ "indirect warfare" against the Reds, and to depend upon a "strategy of detours." Russia's time-tested means of avoiding head-on collision with the West.
The democracies, he said, must "revive the free world's confidence in the outcome of its anti-Communist efforts, shatter the neutralists' illusion about peaceful coexistence and bring about coordination between military and political tactics and between the nationalist movements outside the Iron Curtain and the Revolutionary movements inside the Iron Curtain all under one positive and unified strategy."
Padraic Colum, who is this year celebrating his 50th anniversary as a writer, recently remarked that the Irish, excellent storytellers they are, have always found the construction of the novel somewhat difficult; due, he said, to the fact that they were forced to cater to (romantic) American and English markets, rather than being free to develop a native style for themselves.
The Flying Swans (Crown)—if one doesn't count 1923's abortive Castle Conquer—and Colum would rather not count it—is his first novel and it both proves and disproves his contention. It is entirely Irish, so much so that the foreign reader may often feel—as he does with Joyce—that he is missing something. On the other hand, its construction drawn out over ten years of Colum's writing time, is rambling and episodic to the point of formlessness.
Chiang said the West's containment policy and the "hydrogen bombs are all-powerful" theory have merely given the Communists time to paddle the peaceful coexistence line and to pave the way for a bloodless victory. . .
The story is that, apparently most dear to the Irish fantasy, of alienation and expulsion. Young Ulick O'Rehill is rejected first by his father and his father's family, then by his country; a pattern of rejection growing from home to society to the last, most dangerous threat, of alienation from himself. A solution is found through art: "The sincere artist . . . is the man who reconciles."
Colum is a poet, playwright, and story-teller. As was almost to be expected, the broad statement of his theme often becomes engulfed by the more vital by-play of his story. The matchless evocation of boyhood in Ireland, and the characters who people Uliker's never-quite-believable country: hunchback, patriarch, cynic and a rack of unforgettable females—all make Swans, a notable performance.
Fire, Burn!, by John Dickson Carr: (Harper): A story about a woman killed by a bullet that couldn't logically have been fired in the presence of three witnesses, one of whom couldn't possibly have been there.
As is Carr's recent custom, his new book is a historical novel as well as a detective story. The period he has chosen is one relatively untouched by fiction—the pre-Victorian era when London's uniformed police force was in its infancy and the idea of plain-clothes detectives was downright shocking.
SUMMER SESSION KANSAN
(Published Tuesdays and Fridays)
Ed. Phone 251 Bus. Phone 376
Editors ... Dale Morsch
      John Eaton
Business Mgrs. ... Colby Rehmert
      Bill Irvine
Reporters ... Martha Crosier
      John Husar
Janet Juneau
Manager .. James E. Dykes
The mystery is rather less mystifying than the plots of some of his semi-classic locked-room stories, but the hairbreadth pace of the accompanying historical adventure and romance more than makes up for any lack of Sherlockery. An engrossing story from cover to cover.
IT'S ON THE WAY
A "New Look" in Milk Cartons
- RED
WHITE
BLUE
... Why Sure From
LAWRENCE SANITARY MILK
And Ice Cream Co.
"Lawrence Sanitary On Dairy Products Is Like Sterling on Silver"
WATCH FOR IT AT YOUR FAVORITE FOOD STORE
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