KANSAN COMMENT
An Incomplete Sneeze
By JEANNE GOLDFARB
By JEANNE GOLDFARB Somewhere in an undiscovered ring around the earth's atmosphere there is a vast repository. In this repository, suspended in their various stages of incompletion, are all the sneezes that have never come to fruition.
Spring 70 was like an incomplete sneeze, slowly building to its culmination only to disappear, as it were, into thin air, leaving the prospective sneezer unfulfilled, vaguely disappointed, with a faint ginger-ale buzzing in his head and a resentful feeling of having somehow been cheated.
"What were you doing when ...?" people ask. What were you doing when President Kennedy was assassinated, when Martin Luther King was shot, when Bobby was killed? Drinking at a party in a converted stable in South Central France, setting up camp in a coastal city of Florida, watching TV in a bedroom suburb of Washington, D.C.-violence and tragedy crystallized in a moment of time, placed into a drawer of the mind. Take it out, roll it in your hand like a piece of clay so
that it is no longer just a moment in time but is a thing.
What were you doing, they'll ask, during Spring 70?
More important, what will you ask, during Spring 70?
Spring 70 didn't fizzle out, it didn't grind to a halt, it didn't end with a whimper instead of a bang. The optional finals are over, the grades are in. The summer term, compressed in time and somewhat less serious in aspect, has already begun. But Spring 70 isn't over yet, even though the academic ceremonies and formalities that were salvageable have taken place.
Spring 70 hangs suspended.
But, unlike that unrealized sneeze, Spring 70 must be completed, and it is Fall 70 that will signal either its end or its continuation. Fall 70 is when we'll learn how Spring 70 is to end, if we're fortunate. We'll discover whether students at KU are committed to education and responsible expressions of dissent or to what seems to have become "business as usual" (that's the current term, isn't it?) on the campus.
Fall 70 will indicate whether violence, destruction and agitation will be replaced by constructive, non-disruptive, within-the-system efforts to change that system. It will tell us whether Spring 70 is to be relegated to the position of a numbered event—Chicago 7, Expo 70, Kent State 4- or whether the question will have to be escalated and expanded to read "What were you doing during 'Year 70'?" or "What were you doing during the decade?"
The waiting game, the stall for time, the great compromise have no place in the first weeks of a new semester, particularly when the hint of autumn in the last days of summer presages the getting - down - to - work atmosphere that usually surrounds the fall semester.
The spirit and actions of Fall 70 can redeem those of Spring 70, can cancel out the "no win" appellation hung onto the sad months of April and May.
September can be an end as well as a beginning.
When will Spring 70 end?
Waiting is.
Amendment possible
By Raymond Lahr
WASHINGTON (UPI) — It is possible but improbable that the Constitution will be amended in time to provide for direct popular election of the President in 1972.
Interest in the amendment has been reawakened by George C. Wallace's victory in Alabama and Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy's public musing about the likelihood of a new liberal party running a presidential candidate. Backers of the amendment see it as a safeguard for the two party system. The proposed amendment now awaiting action in the Senate would have to finish its route through Congress and be ratified by 38 state legislatures by next
April 15 to apply to the 1972 election. The states needed only 10 months to ratify the 20th amendment, repealing prohibition, and nine to approve the 23rd, giving a vote for President to the District of Columbia.
Wallace's vote as a third party presidential candidate in 1968 and the 46 electoral votes he collected gave a new push to the old campaign to abolish the electoral college system of electing the President.
The House approved its version of a constitutional amendment for popular elections last year by a vote of 339 to 70.
No such margin is expected in the Senate. There are doubts that
the Senate would give the amendment the necessary two-thirds vote and greater doubts that 38 legislatures would agree by April 15, 1971.
Sen. Birch Bayh (D-Ind.), manager of the senate version, viewed Wallace's victory as a call for the senate to move quickly. He said the nation could not afford to have a minority vote president elected by bargaining among presidential electors, chosen by the states, or by the house, where each state would have one vote regardless of size.
McCarthy, who rattled the teeth of the Democratic Party as an antiwar candidate for its presidential nomination in 1968 speculated about the formation of a new liberal party in the June 7 New York Times magazine. He thought that new party was almost sure to come if 1972 produces an issue like the 1968 debate over the war.
"Well, at least we got in there . . . "
Since House approval of the proposed amendment, the Senate Judiciary Committee has heard conflicting testimony from students of politics about whether the amendment would encourage or discourage formation of new political parties.
The committee's majority report quoted only the views of Paul Freund, Harvard Law School professor, who described the amendment as "a deterrent to the rise of splinter parties."
"Some critics of the direct popular vote have feared that . . . the plan would foster the growth of minor parties and would jeopardize the two party system," said Freund.
"If, however, the only achievement of such splinter parties could hope for would be to force a runoff between the two leading candidates, the gain would probably not seem to be worth the candle in the first place and there could be an incentive to come to terms with a major party as at present."
If Wallace ran as the candidate of a southern based party as he did in 1968 and McCarthy or a like minded candidate led a new liberal party, the voters would see a four party race resembling that of 1948. Harry S. Truman then won less than a majority of the popular vote but more than a majority of the electoral votes to retain the presidency.
Washington window On secrecy
By FRANK ELEAZER
WASHINGTON (UPI) — The House will be asked shortly to give up its habit of deciding crucial issues in secret. It might even do that—except for one thing. The antisecrecy vote will be taken—you guessed it—in secret.
Some quibblers will say secret is too harsh a word for the way the House has taken its stands this year for deployment of the antimissile (or ABM) against cutting impacted school aid for construction of a new 2.3 billion bomber; and against requiring the President to get out of Cambodia when he promised he would.
The fact is, their votes were taken in open session of the House. There isn't any other kind. But they-and many others-were taken in a way to keep you from knowing how your congressmen voted, unless he happened to want to advise you or you were present and watching very carefully.
What your congressman did was line up with dozens of others and walk up the aisle to be counted for or against. His body was counted. His name wasn't recorded.
His face as he passed through the tellers was hidden from the press gallery, which would have had a hard time keeping track anyway since at the moment there are 430 members. Lobbyists or taxpayers so seated in the public galleries as to face the oncoming vote line were forbidden to record the name of any lawmaker they spotted.
Rep., Charles S. Gubser, R-Calif. among others, says that the system fully justifies the word secret. He and others are demanding that the system be
changed so that roll calls may be had on all significant issues. Their chance to change it comes later this month when a long awaited House reform bill reaches the floor.
"Every citizen has the right to know how his congressman voted," Gubser said in a letter to fellow lawmakers. "The charge of secrecy is a valid one and we should move forthwith to correct what is wrong."
You may have thought the Constitution took care of this problem. It says the yeas and nails shall be ordered in both houses of Congress on demand of one fifth of those present.
Gubser says the time has come for a change. He is supported in his belief by a mixed bag of members sharing little more than a common concern for growing criticism of Congress.
That is supposed to mean a roll call. And in the Senate that is what it does mean. The House, though, gets around this by legislating in "committee of the whole," a device borrowed from the House of Commons which way back in 16 hundred and something found itself at odds with the king and needed some way to keep his agents from observing its doings.
Gubser said he would seek to amend the reform bill to provide for roll calls in the House not only on amendments approved in committee of the whole, as at present, but also on those that have lost.
His problem is the one mentioned above. When his amendment is offered, it will be voted on by passing up the aisle between tellers. He's afraid it won't be the hawks and doves deciding the issue so much as the chickens.
BOOKS
ON BEING BLACK, edited by Charles T. Davis and Daniel Walden (Premier, 95 cents)—still another collection of writings by famous blacks, including James Baldwin, Arna Botemps, Gwendolyn Brooks, Eldridge Cleaver, W. E. B. DuBois, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, LeRoi Jones and Richard Wright.
THE LOVING CUP, by Allan Prior (Crest, 95 cents)—A love story about a racing car driver (shades of "A Man and a Woman") and his wife, and what happens when the husband is involved in a freak highway accident and the wife finds herself serving a prison sentence.
ME, THE FLUNKIE, by Andrew Sunmers (Premier, 75 cents)—A description of an educational experiment, Operation Wastebasket, centered around hard-core school failures, probing the thought processes of the dropouts. The author uses the work of the students, their papers, their reactions, to tell the story.
MOTHER'S DAY, by J. M.
Ryan (Gold Medal, 75 cents)
Sing a Sad Song—The Life of Hank Williams, by Roger Williams.
Blood and violence, in the guise of a novel, about the life of Ma Barker and her boys. Is there coincidence in the fact that Ma is now being glorified by Shelley Winters in "Bloody Mama"?
What this book does present, however, is a comprehensive examination of country music to which Williams brought popular recognition outside the South. The author also details the rise of Nashville, Tenn. to prominence as the hub of the recording industry in America.
Doubleday, $5.95. This latest biography of Hank Williams gives little new information about the late country western singer. Like others it tells of a "semi educated, good natured boy from a poor family in the heart of the South" who became a recording star and died at 29, the victim of "Love and alcohol and loneliness."
While the Hank Williams tale itself presents no surprises, the book is worth reading because of the author's examination of William's music.
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