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University Daily Kansan
Monday, May 17, 1965
Let's Raise Hell
I am a voice.
I am a voice in the night, if you will. I am cry-out against student apathy on this campus.
(For those of you who are now saying, "Oh. dear! It's another one of the editorials." Stop! Please read on; it may get interesting later.)
I WOULD LIKE TO ADD MY PLEA to those that have already covered this nation (in many places to a depth of several feet). But, there is a difference in my plea, dear reader, that sets them apart from the alarmists that are beating their breasts and bemoaning the fact that our students are not interested enough in ... (fill in the blank). I am protesting that our students are just not interested enough in good simple hell-raisin'.
Just to set the records straight, I am not out to knock all the serious students on our nation's campuses that are demonstrating for all those important causes. I think that equal rights and free speech and academic freedom and all those things are really pretty good ideas and they are worth a demonstration now and then.
The thing that is bothering me (and it has been pointed out by no less than 10,000 editorial writers this spring) is that the students on our campuses seem to be more interested in serious demonstrations than they are in the traditional rites of spring—panty raids and water fights.
WE ARE TOLD THAT SOME OF THIS is really good. It is an indication that our students are aware of the situation and are taking steps to make their world a better place to live in. They are, in fact, getting a very liberal and broad education. But I contend that man cannot live by breadth alone. The student has just gotten too serious.
Our campus, like so many others, has a tradition of pranks and mischief and rallies and so forth. It is part of our heritage. However, these days, one would hardly know that this tradition ever existed.
I REFER TO THE DAYS WHEN THE Chancellor of the University led the students around the streets of Lawrence in his nightshirt, the days when the four classes participated in class rivalry, often rather spirited. It was a time when someone could drive a Model "T" into Potter Lake (and, incidentally, this happened. The rusted-out frame was found when the lake was drained in 1958)
And more recently there have been the incidents of painting of Jimmy Green statue and putting dye in the Chi Omega fountain. All of these have become almost accepted campus spring sports—accepted by a few students, maybe, but certainly not by our administrators and our serious scholars.
I, for one, would plead for a return to the good old days when students could let loose occasionally and blow off a little steam.
THESE DAYS SEEM TO BE PRACTICALLY beyond recall. On our campus now, any spontaneous gathering of more than five people is eyed with suspicion by the men from traffic and security. When the number reaches six, the group is assigned its own policeman. And this is the thing that keeps some people from being thrown in Potter Lake and from having water fights, etc.
For the benefit of the record, I am not condoning an outright assault on our University with all the disastrous results that I am sure our students could come up with. I am protesting for clean, but wild fun.
There are always suggestions like competitive can-stacking contests. (It has been known to happen and I'm sure there are enough cans emptied here each weekend to supply quite a contest.) There can be water fights and even snowball fights. The possibilities without wrecking something are numerous.
WHY NOT HAVE A FEW LAUGHS once in a while instead of always being out for a cause. For the students, loosen up a little and have some fun! For the administrators, let us loosen up. You had your fun, let us have ours.
— Glen Phillips
Conflicting Ideals Weaken OAS
By Phil Newsom UPI Foreign, News Analyst
A sad fact of the present United States position in the Dominican Republic is that it was open to dammation either way.
Whether it pressed the panic button too quickly is a matter that now will never be settled. Whether the Marines prevented a slaughter of American and other foreign residents or whether they prevented a Communist take-over also are questions open to debate.
Not open to debate is the fact that had either of the two above-mentioned possibilities occurred, the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson never would have lived it down.
Few Arguments
Only a President De Gaulle or a Communist nation would argue that the United States could take a chance on the establishment of another Cuba within the perimeter of the Caribbean Sea.
Yet there are other elements which are open to debate or criticism.
Of the latter it may be said that United States' foreign policy too often has been based upon hope rather than firm reality.
In the American hemisphere, for example, U.S. policy has been based upon cooperation with the Organization of American States (OAS).
Hemispheric Effort
The OAS has been described as the world's oldest and most successful international body. Dating from the old Pan-American Union, it represents 75 years of effort to weld the American Hemisphere into an economic and defensive unit.
And it has had successes. Its charter of human rights and its hemispheric defense concepts ante-date either the United Nations or NATO.
It has headed off conflicts between Costa Rica and Nicaragua and Ecuador and Peru. More recently it helped to settle a dispute between the United States and Panama.
The Treaty of Rio provided that an attack upon one American nation would be an attack upon all.
The doctrine of Caracas proclaimed that international communism is incompatible with the concept of American freedom.
Conflict of Ideals
But within the OAS there is a conflict of ideals that has been its weakness.
The one proclaims the OAS keystone which is non-intervention in the affairs of American States. The other is the declaration against a take-over by international communism but makes no provision for meeting infiltration and subversion.
The over-all effect is an indecision which, in the case of Cuba, was overcome only under the threat of Russian nuclear rockets.
In the Dominican revolt, the United States acted with fore-knowledge of this particular paralysis. But it aroused the ire of the Latin states both because they were not consulted and because the action aroused the old bugaboo of U.S. gunboat diplomacy.
Belated U.S. attempts to soothe Latin American sensibilities and to place the intervention in the Dominican Republic under the flag of the OAS have done little to help.
For the inter-American force proposed to restore stability to the Dominican Republic have come only two firm offers—one from tiny Costa Rica and another from equally tiny Honduras.
"You Shouldn't Stick Your Nose Into Other People's Affairs"
BOOK REVIEWS
LOOKING FOR THE GENERAL,
b Warren Miller (Crest. 60 cents).
This wild comedy will find fans of the stripe that liked "Catch-22." Things are not spelled out for you too well, and if you were mystified by "Dr. Strangelove," you'd better leave this one alone.
Looking for a General" is about a middle-aged research physicist, one Billy Brown, who, with his superior, The General, has conceived the notion that there's a race of perfect beings inhabiting outer space. The General decides that not only is the case but that something had better be done about it, and shoves off to get the job accomplished. And Billy has to make a search for the missing General.
It's all a comment on our times—the idea of freedom, security, intelligence, the fear of the Bomb, the mass mind, the obsessions with sex and salvation. And all in all it's a pretty authentic satire.
THE CRISIS IN BLACK AND WHITE, by Charles E. Silberman (Random House, $1.95).
Nothing is more contemporary or telling than this book, published last year, now out in sturdy paperback volume. Charles E. Silberman traveled the entire land to gather material for the book, conferring with leaders in many walks of life. The student of the Negro story should know about "The Crisis in Black and White."
Silberman starts with the premise that his story is an offensive one, that it will be impossible to discuss the problem without annoying people on both sides (if "both sides" be the proper term) of the question. There are many myths and half-truths presented in "solutions," Silberman says.
Militancy cannot be the only answer, he writes, but little can be achieved without much militancy. He does not agree with those who foresee great violence emerging from the Negro side; the greatest violence in 1963, he says, came from the whites. But the overwhelming thing he tells us is that the racial movement of today cannot be stopped. There will be quiet spells, but the fight for racial justice is like a great flood, and intelligent Americans will try to adjust themselves and their circumstances to the changes taking place in the land.
ROMAN WALL, by Bryher (Pan-
theon. $1.95).
"Bryher" is the pen name of one Mrs. Kenneth MacPherson, if that isn't revealing too much. You have to go back to learn that. The book is vintage 1954, and it's a historical novel, but it's not really in the mood of Thomas Costain or Samuel Shellabarger. More Thornton Wilder, say.
A historical novel, that is, of life in a Roman outpost in Switzerland in the third century, of the destruction of the outpost, the disappearance of its roads and walls, and of peace. The hero is a Roman officer who commands the post, and the atmosphere is that of cities on the fringes of Rome, being threatened and overrun by the barbarians.
The author has not written a story in the mood of Cecil B. DeMille. It is light, not epic, history, but it has intricate and revealing details, a
good series of pictures that reveal considerable research. Its success is in capturing what would seem to be the spirit and the sense of life as it may have been lived in that ancient time.
THE PROPHET ARMED, TROTSKY; 1879-1921; THE PROPHET UNARMED, TROTSKY: 1921-1929; THE PROPHET OUTCAST, TROTSKY: 1929-1940, by Isaac Deutscher (Vintage Russian Library, $2.45 each).
Here is a brilliant three-volume biography, vast in its scope, treating one of the pivotal figures of the 20th century whose name is still important to the Communist movement. The three volumes appeared in 1954, 1959 and 1963, respectively, and they are a tremendous buy for students of Soviet studies, such as many enrolled at the University of Kansas.
The work has been hailed as "one of the most remarkable biographies of the 20th century," the words of Sidney Hook, who has written on the development of Communist thought himself. The moral and political complexities of communism are captured by a writer who seems absorbed in these himself.
The research of the biographer itself seems a tremendous task. Deutscher had access to the Trotsky archives at Harvard, and he is acquainted with developments in the European left between the two world wars, the great time of Trotsky. He writes with sweep and imagination, and the size of the work should not dismay the student truly interested in the Russian revolution, the age of Lenin, and the celebrated break between Stalin and Trotsky.
***
CHALLENGE TO AFFLUENCE,
by Gunnar Myrdal (Vintage, $1.45).
This man, to use the Jefferson metaphor, rings fire bells in the night. "An American Dilemma," written almost a generation ago on the American Negro, has been one of the powerful books of our time. "Challenge to Affluence" speaks as bluntly and iconoclastically of other American matters of our time—our economy and our government.
Myrdal is one of those nosy foreign visitors, like Bryce and de Tocqueville, who see things here that are too close for most of us to understand. He is professor of international economics at Stockholm University, and his belief is that the American economy has become stagnant and needs to be moved out of the swamps.
He knows that he, as a foreigner, runs a risk by speaking forth about certain of our beliefs and myths, but he does it anyway. He deals with "liberty" and "equality of opportunity," but not in the traditional way we frequently hear these concepts defended by political orators.
In August of 1964, after the book originally appeared, he prepared a postscript, for he saw that changes had taken place in America, including an improvement in the economy. He praises the attack made by both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson on the concept of the balanced budget. He also makes observations on what was happening in America in respect to the Negro question which he had treated so well so many years before.
Daili'i Hänsan
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EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
Leta Roth and Gary Noland
Co-Editorial Editors
NEWS DEPARTMENT
Don Black ... Managing Editor
Bobbie Bartelt, Clare Casey, Marshall Caskey, Fred Frailey, Assistant
Managing Editors; Judy Farrell, City Editor; Karen Lambert. Feature-
Society Editor; Glen Phillips, Sports Editor; Janet Chartier, Telegraph
Editor; Harry Krause, Picture Editor.
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Tom Fisher ... Business Manager
Nancy Holland, Advertising Manager; Ed Vaughn, National Advertising Manager; Dale Reinecker, Classified Advertising Manager; Russ Calkins, Merchandising Manager; Bob Monk, Promotion Manager; Gary Grazda, Circulation Manager.