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New politics
Not that it makes any difference to anyone in Kansas, but two of America's most prominent authors are running for two top political positions in New York City.
Norman Mailer is running for mayor, and Jimmy Breslin is running for president of the city council.
The two writers are running on a platform which advocates the secession of New York City from the State into the Union, as the 51st state.
Now, to people in Kansas, this sounds pretty anarchistic. But it is not. Not at all.
It is not all that wierd, because Mailer and Breslin also have said that if New York City "secedes" under their program, they would call for democratic rule by districts that have already been established in the city. Home rule, indeed. Queens, for instance—where Breslin grew up—would become a separate ruling body within the new state.
And this is not such a bad idea—since, in this writer's opinion, the city is choking itself to death anyway. Many districts that currently are under city government financial, societal and political "supervision" have been socially autonomous for many years. Now, say Breslin and Mailer, it is time to give these districts their own governing power, within their own state.
And so would the Bronx, and Manhattan, and Harlem and other areas in the city which for so many years have evolved as their own autonomous districts within the city. These districts, according to the Mailer-Breslin ticket, would govern themselves under the new state of "New York City."
The city is now strangling itself under an archaic tax structure-the more wealthy districts financially dictating educational tax policies of the less wealthy districts.
The city is tying its own hands by delegating the same political and societal rules to the Village as it does to Queens—a rather inadequate way of dealing with two entirely different financial, societal, and politically different sections of the city, Breslin and Mailer say.
As the two political candidates say, and admit, they do not have any clear-cut answers to the problems of the city in which they both have lived most of their lives. But what they think they have done, is attack some of the roots of these problems.
Breslin and Mailer believe they are questioning the basic social structures of the city—which both the candidates think need serious revision, if the city is to keep from killing itself.
The Mailer-Breslin approach to big city politics seems at first glance to be a new one-artists offering their ideas for social improvement to the city. Initially, their approach to urban problems seems simplistic and rather idealistic.
But it is the idealism of this minority which may eventually influence the policy of the majority.
State governments should carefully examine the effects that the Mailer-Breslin candidacy will have on the next city administration in New York.
For it seems that many state governments—especially Kansas'—are so involved with partisan politics that they do not take a humanistic approach to government. In their legislative bickering they apparently forget that they "represent" human beings.
Human beings who pay taxes and get hungry and need to feel that they really do have some kind of influence in their government.
Their advocating a return to individual local government instead of a city-wide central machine has drawn support for the Mailer-Breslin ticket from both liberals and conservatives.
It is this coalescence of both partisanships that makes the Breslin-Mailer approach so attractive to "future politics." It ignores prejudice, and political puffery for a more let's-get-down-to-business program of government.
Perhaps Kansas politicians should look more closely at these two candidates-perhaps the first two-who really care. (JTM)
Significance of Sirhan
By MIKE SHEARER
Back in 1948, President Harry Truman expressed the core of humanism which has backed the plight of the Jews in Israel. He said, "Do the Arabs have any votes in the American presidential elections?"
Indeed, politicians ever since have been vastly concerned with the Jewish vote and financial support. This, along with the comradeship of Jew to Jew, has tended to distort drastically the events leading up to the Israeli-Arab war, that six-day war which started in June of 1967 and continues today.
In a pamphlet published by the Organization of Arab Students at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, Sirhan's very traumatic history in Palestine and his testimony concerning his studies into the Israeli-Arab dispute have been told. If nothing else is learned from the Robert Kennedy-Sirhan B. Sirhan tragedy, it should now be understood that the Arabs have not been entirely at fault and the Israelis have been far from blameless.
Sadly, the bit of wisdom which might have benefited the American populace concerning the Sirhan B. Sirhan trial never made the big newspapers. The fact that Sirhan feverishly blasphemed his victim Robert Kennedy along with other U.S. figures simply made better news copy than the testimony he offered to explain the history of the Zionist suppression of Palestinian Arabs.
Sirhan saw grotesque horrors as a child, horrors perpetrated against
his Palestinian Arab family. He saw streets full of bloody bodies after a Zionist terrorist attack on Arabs. He saw his own brother killed. His people were imprisoned by the Jews who had come to Israel to reclaim "their land."
So when Americans seemed incensed against the aggression of the Arab nations against Israel, Sirhan could be nothing but bitterly confused, having seen the bloody aggression of the Israelis some 20 years ago. When American Jews sent $370,000,000 in cash to their Jewish brothers in Israel, once again Sirhan did not understand. When American politicians began to step up military aid to Israel at the insistence of American Jews, Sirhan once again was perplexed.
Israel, technically, has been the home of both Arabs and Jews for at least the past century. Historically, there is reason for both groups to claim the territory. Historically, both sides have aggreed against the other. Neither has been magnanimous.
The sense that should come, for Americans, from the situation is that the Israeli-Arab war is not a simple matter of right against wrong. The energetic forces in this country calling for a step up of military aid to Israel should be ignored, even at the cost of votes, at least until Israel shows that it is interested in peace and not vengeance, and for peace, military aid will be unnecessary.
This American war fever backing Israel has brought about tensions, such as that tension which finally determined for Sirhan that beautiful, young Kennedy had to die.
Sirhan said, in the testimony not published widely, "Through my life in this country and back there I always felt that I had no country, that I had no place I could call really my own and I was sick and tired of being a foreigner."
He was sick and tired of being a foreigner because he saw the American allegiance, partly founded on greed for votes, to Israel, and he was tired of being a foreigner because of the Americanism which that doll of the 30's and 40's (and orgate of the 50's and 60's) Kat Smith has so adquately summed up:
"We have been infiltrated so heavily in the last 30 years by Communists, by adverse types of people from other countries. They have been able to get to a lot of young people . . . who are weak or who are not as happy as they should be. The rioting and dissension every place is all Communicistically inspired."
Not all "foreigners" are Communists, let Kate say what she will. All foreigners are people, with virtues and with weaknesses. Americans should view both Israelis and Arabs as the complex individuals they are, not as Communists, not as the good guys in a foreign war, not as the bad guys in that war.
Anyone interested in reading about Sirhan's past, his views on the Mid-East crisis and on American responses to the Israeli-Arab war will be interested in:
"The Lost Significance of Sirhan's Case" (pamphlet), Organization of Arab students, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, Calif.
Kennedy and Sirhan ... Why?
(book), N.Y. New World Press.
($1.95).
Sam, who REALLY is the minority these days?
Readers' write
To the Editor:
The Sunday issue of the Kansas City Star carried on its front page a story about the Annual Meeting of the American Association of University Professors at Minneapolis on 2 and 3 May, which stated that the meeting had passed a resolution calling for the United States to withdraw from South Viet Nam. We attended the meeting, and sat through the entire session which considered the report of the appointed Committee on Resolutions, and we know that the assertion is incorrect. No such call for withdrawal was made by the meeting.
The story in the Star was the result of a reporter's confusion about a substitute motion offered in place of a resolution coming from the Committee on Resolutions. The fourth paragraph of that substitute motion, offered by 55 members, was: "The Fifty-fifth Annual Meeting of the AAUP wishes to support this week's statements by former Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford and by Republican Senator George Aiken urging rapid U.S. withdrawal from South
Vietnam." But the AAUP delegates and members did not accept that paragraph for inclusion in the resolution on "National Priorities" which it approved. What the Annual Meeting did approve in this regard was two sentences from the original recommendation of the Committee:
"The Fifty-fifth Annual Meeting of the American Association of University Professors asserts the absolute nesessity of examining and re-establishing priorities in the nation's social policy. The Annual Meeting recognized that the war in Viet Nam has
been a major factor in the dislocation of those priorities, and it therefore welcomes any effort to bring the war to an end.
As you will see, there is very little similarity between the proposed substitute and the sentences actually adopted by the Annual Meeting. Its primary concern was the financial stringencies now being suffered, and foreseen as due to increase, by institutions of education in America.
Clifford Griffin (Vice-president and President-elect of AAUP at KU) W. D. Paden (Member, the Executive Committee of AAUP at KU)
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY
KANSAN An All-American college newspaper
Published at the University of Kansas daily during the academic year except holidays and examination periods. Mall subscription rates: $6 a semester, $10 a year. Second class postage paid at Lawrence, Kan. 68044. Accommodations, goods, services and employment policies students are welcome regard to color, creed or national origin. Opinions expresses no majority those of the University of Kansas or the State Board of Regents.
Executive Staff
Editor-in-Chief Business Manager Edition Editors
Ron Yates
Pam Flatton
Steve Haynes, Robert Entriken Jr., Don
Westerhaus, Marla Babcock, Sandy Zahrdnik