From the Newsstand
Satchmo's Music
"I don't want a million dollars. See what I mean? No medals. I mean, I don't feel no different about the horn now than I did when I was playin' in the Tuxedo Band. That my livin' and my life. I love them notes. That why I try to make 'em right. See? And any part of the day, you liable to see me doin' somethin' toward it for the night."
"A lot of musicians, money make a damn' fool out of 'em. They forget all about the life they love, standin' on the bandstand. They get famous and can't play music for watchin' the box office to see how many people come in. I don't give a damn how many come in, if it was one or one thousand. I ain't goin' play no louder or no softer, and I ain't goin' play no less. I might play a little more, but always up to par.
"How many modern trumpet players could play my solos?" he asked. "You'd have to carry 'em out on stretchers," he answered himself positively. "Just because they had the best professor in the world and they talk this—um—universal music and things, they can have all the knowledge in the world, but if they don't know how to protect the chops serenus"—he rubbed his lips—"I don't care how much you have up there"—he tapped his temple. "Jus' like a fighter," he added. "He can hit you and tear your head off, but if he ain't got strong legs to get over there to hit you, why shame on him...
"Now," he said, "you take some of those cats that go on those weird kicks. They lazy and inferior. In the olden days, jazz musicians in New Orleans play everything—dance one night and liable to go the next day and play a funeral, so sweet it make you cry. Lot of musicians today don't have that kind of tone because they don't have that kind of imagination."
Memory stirred fitfully in him. "I'm playin' a date in Florida years ago," he said, "livin' in the colored section and I'm playin' my horn for myself one afternoon. A knock came on the door and there's an old, gray-haired flute player from the Philadelphia Orchestra, down there for his health. Walking through that neighborhood, he heard this horn, playing this 'Cavalleria Rusticana,' which he said he never heard phrased like that before, but still to him it was as if an orchestra was behind it..."
A larger theme crossed his mind. "I look at it this way, too," he said. "I get outa that bed every day, see? I make a good salary and my horn still sound good. And I feel good. So I don't think nobody in the world any richer than I am. Musicians don't retire. They stop when there's no more work. We never thought about that in New Orleans. Like we say there, 'That our hustle, you know, a day's work.' But anybody sit down with their money and look at the four walls, they don't live long; they die. There's nothin' I can say other than I've set myself up to be a happy man. And— I made it."
(Excerpted from an article "Africa Harks to Satch's Horn" by Gilbert Millstein in the Nov. 20 New York Times Magazine.)
Magazine Rack
A Youth Peace Corps
In a number of speeches across the country ever since I came back from India I have talked about a "peace army" of American college graduates. Doubtless others have been doing it too. It is in the air.
I got my own notion from William James' classic essay "The Moral Equivalent of War." James grappled there with the age-old problem of the destructive streak in all of us, young as well as old. He proposed, as a way of rechanneling this warlike current of energy into a constructive direction, a youth peace army which would tussle with danger in nature and would build community projects under difficult conditions. Franklin Roosevelt adopted one aspect of this idea in his CCC camps. . .
I DIFFER WITH Senator Kennedy's proposal . . . on two scores. First, I think it is dangerous to put the plan in terms of an alternative to military service. You are dealing here with inflammable stuff—the hope for life and the fear of death, the resentment that the less privileged bear toward the more privileged. The boys and girls in the peace corps will be among the brightest and most talented in the nation, but also among the best educated. Don't set them aside as a privileged caste to replace the draft by something which, however arduous, will look soft to the envious.
My second objection is linked with the first. Why do this under government auspices, whether under the International Cooperation Agency or any other government bureau? If you do it thus, you run inevitably into an excited Communist propaganda campaign, charging that America is sending soldiers abroad who are disguised as student technicians but are in reality spies and propagandists. Within this frame the students might do more harm than good to the democratic cause.
IN THE END the U.S. Government may have to foot much of the bill by subsidies, but the shaping guidance of the plan at its inception should not come from any government agency. Let it come from the big private foundations. . . . Let the foundations' plan and run the plan, let the students and graduates who enroll be volunteers who get nothing from it except travel and toil and the chance to learn and be useful—and the feeling that they are part of their era and the shapers of their world."
(Excerpted from an article by Max Lerner in the New York Post, Nov. 14, 1960.)
Editor's Note: This is an actual letter written by a government employee in Laos to his mother. No names he used for obvious reasons.
Dear Mother:
Time I sent you another one. I was going over some of your past letters when in Bangkok, (I got back last Monday from there) and you asked the same question in several of them which I think I can answer today.
LETTERS
I've been having a long bull session with a couple of TDYers in from Washington here. To me your question had such an obvious answer that it really didn't occur to me to give you the answer. Your question was why did we stay here when they were fighting so close to town. As I said before these instances of fighting were just patrol action firstly. The answer is because this is where the job is.
As I see it we have to be here if only for the "presence" we give, so the Lao can see us, on the streets, at home etc. It helps to some degree their morale to see that some Americans are here. If they see us run they get scared, feel that all is lost, and run themselves.
When I joined the government service I did so with only one motive in mind, that every job I held would be in a way a part of the fight against communism. Someone has to fight it, and this is a part of the frustration when you spend 10 years out of your life fighting something and then pick up Time, Life or read the newspaper and see all of the condemnation and abuse heaped on the people who were involved in the Cuban effort of late.
Alright, it was a flop, perhaps it was illimited and illrun, but it was a part of the effort to stop communism without involving the world in World War III. Forhings we should have acted sooner, or later, but we as a nation acted, and this is more than a hell of a lot of the free world is doing. Hence I think we can justly hold our heads up and say, if you don't like the way we are doing it then get in there and do something about communism yourself.
Tuesday, June 27.1961 Summer Session Kansan
We are not the only country which will be pulled under if communism wins, we just happen to be one of the largest and therefore we have to put proportionally more money, effort, blood, etc. into the battle. It is a battle, be it fought by civilians or by military and therefore I say to hell with the critics, the breast beaters and the rest of the lily liver, lets get on with the next step.
As a nation we cannot tolerate a communist Cuba, sitting right off our mainland and spreading communism into North, Central and South American countries at will. As a nation we had better start realizing that if we continue to fight the enemy with a strict rule book of golden rules we will be clobbered in the end. We are fighting the bully who is using the brass nucks, the switchblade knife and the broken bottle. We have got to, if necessary, lower ourselves to fighting him with every dirty weapon we have at our disposal.
The Russians are slow patient fighters, willing to year after year keep after their objective, eating away at the free world, little by little while we pursue our fun, our finned autos, our high standard of living. Unless we are willing to oppose them constantly we will find ultimately that while we were day dreaming about a better tomorrow that our tomorrow will be under a red flag.
Perhaps it is too late here in Laos but that doesn't mean it is too late elsewhere. It means that we have to bide our time, strengthen ourselves and be ready to take advantage of the first sign of weakness that they show in their chain. It will turn up, in the case of Cuba it was in the hundreds of dissatisfied refugees who had left Cuba rather than live under communism. There are still hundreds of them in Cuba today, fighting and they deserve our support. I hope to God that they will receive our support.
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