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THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Friday, May 17, 1968
Not today
It's a nice day today.
For the moment, our little corner of the world is out of the path of whatever campaigns or crusades that presently are sweeping across our campus and/or country. And, if you'll forgive one metaphor quenching another, we are not spinning in the whirlpool of any burning issues at the moment.
It's a nice day today.
Write your own editorial.
—John Hill Assistant Editorial Editor
Book review
Galbraith's novel slaps U.S. diplomacy
bv Scott Nunley
John Kenneth Galbraith's novel "Triumph" is philosophically anti-conservative. We expect this from an intellectual of Galbraith's liberal credentials. But "Triumph" also is a fairly readable novel: its cynicism with U.S. foreign policy is successfully lightened by recurrent humor and colorful characterizations.
Galbraith's "hero" is archetypal state department executive Worth Campbell, an unimaginative but reassuring career man who sees the world in rather simple hues of Red and Red-White-and-Blue.
"Triumph" makes this myopia easy to attack by choosing an extreme battlefield: the American effort to suport corrupt (but anti-Red) Latin American dictatorships. (Even William F. Buckley quails at the hypocrisy we display in protecting democracy through Trujillo "patriots.") Galbraith's novel, however, does not bother to offer much proof to convince us that this foreign policy is visibly bankrupt.
"Triumph" instead argues its message with wit and irony. The fantastically pompous characters of the novel move us as no statistics could.
"Triumph" is at its worst where Galbraith's fictional narrative dissolves into obvious preaching. Some ironic, unidentified narrator has his own opinions to interject into this tale of American diplomacy:
"It is often better to continue error than to draw attention to it by changing course and it follows that diplomacy is best practiced by people who have a resistance to novelty and no undue flexibility of mind."
And at times Galbraith seems to be constructing a tribute to respected friends. Junior state department officials speak up with obviously sensible advice—always to be overruled by their conservative superiors. So often and so favorably do these minor characters appear that "Triumph" begins to seem a roman a clef, leaving future graduate students to laboriously identify each disguised member of the Kennedy Administration.
Satire on public officials is not extremely effective unless the satirized figure is readily identifiable. But in Galbraith's book, only Dean Rusk is obvious—and the satire on Rusk is "Triumph" at its mildest.
John Kenneth Galbraith has become highly respected as an economist, policy adviser and, most recently, as a critic of the Vietnam war. But he is not yet a completely competent novelist. Nor will he ever be able to devote the full attention of his fiction to the lives of its characters so long as he blatantly touts his ideology.
"Triumph," however, is not mere unreadable dogma. Its seamy Latin backdrops and its cool Washington foregrounds are beautifully believable. And when it does focus upon its varied east of Important Men, "Triumph" is both a fascinating and convincing indictment of our hoary policy leadership.
Kansan editorial essay
Mrs. Murray's lonely war
Atheist Madalyn Murray (O-Hair) has been the gadfly of organized religion in America since she won the 1963 Supreme Court ban on prayer and Bible reading in the public schools.
With that ruling, Mrs. Murray began the process she hopes will end forever the relationship between the churches and the state, a relationship cemented by tradition and tenacity. The day after the high court declared religious devotions in the Baltimore public schools unconstitutional, Mrs. Murray initiated a suit to force Baltimore area churches to pay property taxes. Tax exemptions on church property, she contended, constitute an indirect subsidy from the government which puts an extra tax burden of about $200 a year on every family in the United States.
Mrs. Murray's war on organized religion has earned her infamy in the mind of the general public and the pathological hatred of religious bigots. Within 24 hours after she initiated the prayer suit in 1960, she was fired from her job as a social psychiatric worker with the Baltimore welfare department. Her children were ostracized and beaten up at school. Threatening and obscene mail and phone calls plagued her and her family in their home.
In June, 1964, one year after the prayer decision, Mrs. Murray, her two sons, and her mother fled to Hawaii for "sanctuary from Christian persecution." The flight came after she and her older son Bill, then 18, were released on bail after being charged with assaulting several policemen during a fracas in front of her home.
From Hawaii she went to Mexico, then to Austin, Texas, all the while under a cloud of extradition and a possible five-year jail sentence. Early in 1966, however, the Baltimore charges were dropped—there were no atheists on the grand jury that indicted her—and she married artist Richard F. O'Hair, now a co-worker in the Society of Separationists ("S.O.S."), Mrs. Murray's Texas-based legal action group.
Meanwhile the tax-exemption suit she had initiated in Baltimore was ruled on negatively in the lower courts. Mrs. Murray appealed to the Supreme Court which refused to
grant certiorari in October, 1966.
"In order to sustain a tax-the-church suit," Mrs. Murray wrote the Kansan regarding the Supreme Court's refusal to hear the case, "one must be a property-holder, and the State of Maryland has spent the last three years methodically stripping me of my property, my home, my business, and my bank account."
Photo courtesy
Topcka Capital-Journal
MADALYN MURRAY
Hence the Society of Separationists has found it necessary to obtain property elsewhere and to build financial strength to sustain another suit. Land near Stockton, Kan., was willed to Mrs. Murray's legal action group at one time for the purpose of establishing an atheist-sponsored university, but in Mrs. Murray's absence, her then-legal counsel placed the land in his name. The S.O.S. currently is suing to erase that claim to the title, and if successful it may initiate a tax-the-church suit in Kansas.
The revenue from a tax on church-owned property and the income from its miraid private enterprises would be enormous. Dr. Martin Larson, author of Church Wealth and Business Income, has estimated the value of real estate owned by churches in America to be $79.5 billion. (Under present laws, there is no way church assets can be exactly determined.) To put this colossal wealth in perspective, the assets of our five largest industrial corporations (Standard Oil, General Motors, Ford Motors, General Electric, and Chrysler) total only $40.6 billion or about one-half the value of church-owned real estate. If current values were placed on this property, the churches would pay $'1 billion a year in local taxes. This does not include revenue from an income tax on church-owned private enterprise.
It is strange and a little disheartening that Mrs. Murray has had to carry on relatively alone the campaign to insure the constitutional guarantee provided by the First Amendment that "Congress shall make no law protecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. . ." Her legal action groups have never had more than 5,000 contributors.
Of course, she could never expect anything but reaction from the public-at-large,but where has the "intellectual community" been?
Granted, anti-Vietnam war protest is sapping the current reserves of energy. Granted, this energy previously was devoted to the battle for civil rights for the Negro.
But it may be, too, that Mrs. Murray's blatant atheism and brash manner repels many intellectuals and radical theologians who find them too bourgeois. And it may be that separation of church and state is no longer quite so fashionable an issue as it was in 1963 and 1964.
Perhaps with peace and with the end of white participation in the Negro's struggle for identity and integrity, and perhaps when marijuna is legalized and the Los Angeles and Oakland police stop clubbing the gentle people—in other words, when all competing issues are dead—then maybe there will be sit-ins in plush church foyers on Sunday mornings, the protestors exhorting, "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's."
Until that distant time, it appears that one honest, bellicose woman will have to continue to fight pretty much alone for our right to choose our own religion or creed by making sure the state doesn't establish one for us.
Assistant Editorial Editor
Letters to the editor
Of equality and pom-pons
To the Editor:
I am for the equality of men. I am for the non-discrimination of men and women. I am for a society where relations between people are not defined by color. I also understand perfectly the importance of tension-free race relations at this time when America is in crisis. But, because of the recent developments concerning the selection of pom-pon girls, I now ask the Negroes of this university and also, the University in general, who now are the "Uncle Toms"?
I do not believe in the bowing of another because of his color nor do I believe in the bowing to ananother because of his color; I thought KU could be that place where prides does not have to be
appeased by the appointment of a token Negro or a token anything. This seems, to me, to be detrimental to pride, not white man's pride or black man's pride, but to man's pride.
Equality should reign in the minds of men, but is, too often, a concept interpreted into literal
counsigned at the University of Kansas daily during the academic year except holidays and examination periods. Half subsulted on admission to $1 a semester. Second class postage paid at Lawrence, Kan. 66044. Accommodations, goods, services and employment advertised offered to all students with degree or foreign origin. Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the University of Kansas or the State Board of Regents.
terms. Will KU and its students, who come and leave, continue to judge equality visually and not morally? I hope not.
John Turck Wichita junior
...quotes
"The world is changing."
The world is changing Sen. Frank Lausche, D-Ohio, a political conservative, conceding defeat by John J. Gilligan in the Ohio senatorial primary.
"I cannot see life without Elizabeth. She is my everything — my breath, my blood, my mind and my imagination."
Richard Burton