In May 1979, English-speaking Canadians, tired of Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the way he badgered them about the threat of Quebec separatism, ousted him from office. That vote, reflecting the English Canadians’ indifference to Quebec, split Canada along dangerous communal lines. On February 18, barely nine months later, many English-speaking Canadians changed their minds about Trudeau and voted him back into office. On the surface, the recall might seem like a new awakening by English-speakers to the gravest crisis facing their country. But, in fact, it represented the same old indifference. Trudeau, the Montreal intellectual who has based his political career on his ability to deal with the awesome problem of Quebec, came back from defeat and near retirement to regain power as Prime Minister with a campaign that made believe the problem did not exist at all. The problem not only exists but must be met in the months and years ahead. There is, in fact, some urgency now. The Parti Québécois Government of Premier René Lévesque has promised a referendum in Quebec this spring, probably in early June, that could nudge the province a step closer to separation...

The question of unity in Canada may be settled in the months ahead. Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau has called a general election for May 22. If the latest polls prove prophetic, he could lose, and politics could divide in a dangerous way, with almost all of English Canada voting for the Progressive Conservative Party and only Quebec voting for Trudeau's Liberal Party. On top of this, Premier René Lévesque of Quebec has promised his province a referendum on separation sometime after the federal election, at the latest in early 1980. An outsider might expect Canada, with this kind of calendar ahead, to be engaged in a grand national debate. But, in fact, little debate is going on. Most Canadians, especially English Canadians, seem bored with the whole issue of unity and Quebec. The reason for the ennui is that many Canadians do not take the danger of Quebec secession seriously enough for serious debate. They simply do not believe that Premier Lévesque really intends to take Quebec out. Perhaps they are right. But, if they are not, they are giving him an advantage in tactics...

Nothing has embarrassed the self-proclaimed Spanish democracy of King Juan Carlos and Premier Adolfo Suarez more than the case of Els Joglars, a Catalan mime troupe convicted of insulting the army. Protests have come from the best-known writers and artists of Europe. Paloma Picasso has warned that the Picasso family will never agree to the transfer of her father’s “Guernica” from New York’s Museum of Modern Art to Spain until the four imprisoned actors are released. The case is so ludicrous, anachronistic and unjust that many outsiders are convinced the King will find a way soon to free the actors and end the embarrassment. But whether or not the actors leave their prisons in Barcelona before the end of their two-year sentences, the case has revealed some of the flaws in Spain’s remarkable but fragile attempt at transition from the dictatorship of the late Francisco Franco to a parliamentary government. A latent, unhealthy fear of the army still ties the tongues of critics. And, after almost four decades of Francoism, people here feel that injustice to an individual or defilement of a principle are not worth fretting about so long as the outer forms of democracy are intact...

Americans, when they think of Mexico, see it as a pleasant place for midwinter holidays, a rich source of (perhaps authentic) pre-Columbian treasures, an accommodating provider of divorces, or a more or less permanent refuge from the demands of 20th-century industrial life. However, Mexico presents no problems, and therefore Americans do not think about it very much. But for Mexicans, the United States is the big problem and they think about it all the time. They have been doing so with renewed intensity during the current administration of President Luis Echeverria, a proud, ambitious man in a proud, small country. Mexican relations with the United States have long been founded on humiliation and dependence. Mexicans know that the United States is usually strong enough to work its will - whether conquering all the land from Texas to California or invading in pursuit of bandits or closing the border to punish Mexico for lax drug enforcement. All this is seen by Mexicans as a reflection of their weakness as much as American strength. It is not an easy assessment for them to accept. No matter how urbane he may seem, a Mexican official has trouble keeping resentment out of his feelings when he deals with the United States...

When Generalisimo Francisco Franco executed five revolutionaries in Spain in September, the fiercest reaction came from Mexico. That reaction surprised many outsiders and made some veteran diplomats at the United Nations shake their heads at what seemed like naiveté. But in fact Mexico was behaving consistently. It is the only country in the world that still harbors an embassy of the old Spanish Republic, and perhaps 20,000 aging Spanish Republicans still live in Mexican exile. In his reaction to Franco, President Luis Echeverria Alvarez was powered by his sense of Mexican history. That Mexico still recognizes the Spanish Republic in exile is to some Mexicans diplomacy based on fiction. Journalist José Natividad Rosales once called the policy “a romantic absurdity.” For many other Mexicans, however, the recognition affirms their country’s political ideals. “I do not want to assume dramatic or declamatory tones,” wrote journalist Pedro Gringoire recently, “but some day it will be universally recognized that, in giving aid to the Republic and then taking the defeated to its breast, Mexico lived through one of the purest and most glorious hours of its history." In a sense, by his reaction to the September executions, President Echeverria was trying to recall that hour...

American foreign aid is returning to the scene of one of its greatest disasters - Haiti. In 1963, the Agency for International Development (AID) closed its mission in Port-au-Prince and suspended most American aid there. The U.S. Government was at last fed up with the corruption, repression and harassment of the strange and tyrannical regime of the late President François Duvalier, better known as Papa Doc. Papa Doc died three years ago, and Haiti is now ruled by his 22-year-old son, Jean-Claude Duvalier, who, like his father, bears the title of President-for-Life. Last year, AID sent a chief of mission down to Haiti for the first time in a decade. Plans have been made, and agreements have been signed. Now Haiti will have an American aid program about as large as it used to be before the United States gave up on Papa Doc. U.S. officials have persuaded themselves that the regime of the son will be easier to work with than that of his father. They believe it is less corrupt and tyrannical and more efficient. Some even insist that Papa Doc's rule wasn't as bad as painted by Graham Greene, the movies and the American press. In any case, they say, something must be done to help the people of Haiti, who are among the poorest in the world...

The difficult negotiations now in process between the United States and Panama over a new Panama Canal treaty are almost certain to ignore the rights of one people: the descendants of the blacks who dug the canal in the first place. “We are just hoping,” said a black who lives in the U.S. Canal Zone, “that whatever happens between the two countries, our position doesn’t become worse.” It probably will. Although Americans look on the Panama Canal as one of their great engineering achievements, it was dug mainly by foreign workers, mostly blacks from the West Indies. Few of these blacks left when the job was finished in 1914. They stayed on to help run the canal or to work in Panama. Their children did the same. As a result, Panama’s two main ports, Panama City and Colón, have urban ghettos of English-speaking blacks in the slums near the U.S. Canal Zone, and the Canal Zone itself has embarrassing communities of virtually segregated blacks. They are a people without power. Although many are America-oriented, they are not American. Although they are now citizens of Panama, they are a distant cultural minority. Their descendants will probably be assimilated, some day into the racially mixed Panamanian culture, but that does not help the present generations...

It was always inevitable that the new black African governments, insecure and nervous and sensitive to even the shadow of a threat to their authority, would lash out at the Jehovah's Witnesses. After all, this strange, fanatic, fundamentalist sect not only was among the first victims of the Nazis in Germany but was harassed for years by outraged local governments in the United States. Since the independence of most of black Africa, the Witnesses have been banned or restricted in Malawi, Gabon, Cameroun, Zambia, Guinea, Tanzania and Kenya. The sect's most terrible troubles came in Malawi last year and its most recent in Kenya this year. There are relatively few Jehovah's Witnesses in Africa, perhaps 250,000 on a continent of 340 million. They can hardly be called more than a minor irritant. But the threat of their presence has been exaggerated by African leaders unsure of their political power, intolerant of opposition, equipped with fragile institutions, and frustrated by their failure to make nations out of hostile tribes. As ever, the problem stems from the attitude of the Witnesses toward governmental authority. Founded in the United States by Charles Taze Russell in the 1890s, the Witnesses believe that governments are part of "Satan's world.” In their view, therefore, God's authority is always greater than the authority of any government...

General Idi Amin of Uganda has laid bare a treacherous weakness of Black Africa that its defenders have either ignored or covered for some time. It is easy to flick aside the fragile political institutions left behind by the colonial powers; the parliaments, the parties, the constitutions, the rules of foreign law have not taken root. The masses are unschooled, timid and ignorant of their rights and potential for power. They are riven by tribal strife. Instead of loyalty to their country, they feel hatred for one another. The quality of statesmanship is low. Leaders are possessed by greed and megalomania. Their promises of the good life have, with few exceptions, collapsed. Most economies are faltering. Life may be getting better for the common man, but not much better. The countries are small; the towns that count are few. A leader only needs a few thousand guns to rule for his lifetime. Thus, the conditions that favor tyranny are many; the checks are few. General Amin’s callous expulsion of the Asians has brought worldwide (though not much African) condemnation upon himself and crippled all those, both black and white, who have spent years trying to focus the attention of outsiders on the injustices of white Southern Africa. But his treatment of the Asians is only the most dramatic of the wrongs inside Uganda...

For more than a decade, an obscure civil war has ravaged the Sudan. Largely ignored by the rest of the world, it is Africa’s longest war, paralyzing the Sudan’s three southern provinces intermittently from 1955 and continuously from 1963. The war has led to perhaps a half-million deaths and has forced 200,000 southerners to flee for refuge in neighboring countries. All the terror and turmoil have come from cultural hatred. A visitor can catch the meaning of the war on a Saturday night at the dance hall in Juba, the main town of the southern Sudan. As a southern quartet blares out its kinetic jazz, tall, black southerners and their callipygous women leave their opened bottles of “Camel” beer on metal tables and move toward the enormous dance floor, their legs suddenly beating, their rumps shaking with the first step on the floor. A few young northern men, who work in the government offices of Juba, ask southern girls to dance. The northerners, a shade or two lighter in skin color, flail their arms and beat the steps. Their heads bob and their knees shake, but somehow they miss. They seem awkward, ill at ease, out of beat. In the words of the racial cliché, the northerners, though African, don’t have rhythm. Or, to be more accurate, they have a rhythm that is culturally different from that of the black southerners. Northerners look to the Middle East and Arabic culture; southerners to the heart of Africa and black culture...

Walk down the frenzied, color-splashed side streets of Nairobi where most people do their shopping. This is Africa, but for block after block, the signs on the dukas, as the shops are called, evoke India and Pakistan: Ganijee Glass Mart, Indian Emporium, Patel & Co., Shah & Sons, Ghela Manck, Hindustan Boot Co., Bombay Sweet Mart. Most of the shops of downtown Nairobi are in the hands of Indians and Pakistanis. Wearing Benares saris and Punjabi pants and Sikh turbans, these shopkeepers and their families, with their jet black hair, enormous black eyes and pale brown skin, living in a land run by African blacks, are the most visible evidence of the gravest minority problem in East Africa today. There are 350,000 Asians, as the Indians and Pakistanis are called here, among East Africa’s 29 million people. About half of them live in Kenya, a quarter in Tanzania, a quarter in Uganda. They are the shopkeepers, clerks, artisans and foremen of East Africa, resented and often despised by the Africans who feel cut off from the economies of their own countries. The Asians fill just those jobs and places that Africans believe they now have enough experience and training to take...

The aftermath of the murder of Tom Mboya has mocked what he stood for. Mboya, who seemed to represent all that was modern in Africa to the rest of the world, always shunned the appeals to tribal allegiance that have crumbled political stability elsewhere in Africa. His constituents were mainly the urban workers groping for a modern way of life. Yet his assassination on the first Saturday in July unleashed intense tribal hatreds. Kenya faces a long and dangerous period of instability unless the government can somehow placate his grieving Luo people. Mboya was shot and killed in downtown Nairobi on a street crowded with shoppers trying to make their last purchases before stores closed for the weekend. Two weeks later, police charged a young African with the murder. They released no details about him but his name, but that was enough to confirm all the suspicions that had been excited by tribal passions. The name, Nahashon Isaac Njenga Njoroge, identifies the accused as a member of the dominant Kikuyu tribe, the people of President Jomo Kenyatta. Without a shred of evidence, most Luos, whether educated townspeople or illiterate peasants, had decided from the beginning that the killer must be Kikuyu. Now they had proof...

Images play as important a roIe as guns in the Nigerian civil war. The Biafran secessionists, among Africa’s most sophisticated peoples, have known from the beginning that their chances for success depended as much on evoking world sympathy as on holding back the federal army. Now, after twenty months of war, it is clear that the Biafrans have been far more adept at propaganda than soldiering. If they survive in some sovereign form, they will owe it to their skill with images. Part of the Biafran success in public relations stems from the federal Nigerian Government’s failure at it. At the beginning, the Nigerians made absolutely no intelligent effort to get their point of view across. In fact, the government’s publicists often hurt the Nigerian case as much as they helped it. Many officials of the Ministry of Information were new at their job. Before the troubles, the top information officers had been Ibos, but they fled to their tribal home in eastern Nigeria soon after thousands of Ibos were massacred in northern Nigeria in September, 1966. When the eastern region seceded and called itself Biafra in May, 1967, these civil servants remained there. Besides lacking experience, the new Nigerian information officers also had the disadvantage of working for a military government...

Since the beginning, most writers about the Peace Corps have either derided it or heaped praise on it, but never understood it. In this book, David Hapgood and Meridan Bennett, two former officials of the organization, never mock or gush about it but always understand it. Their work is tough, realistic criticism, so tough and real that it is sometimes cruel and occasionally unfair. But it tells us, as no other book has, what the Peace Corps is all about. In assessing the work of the 30,000 volunteers sent to the Third World since 1961, Hapgood and Bennett conclude that “as a contributor to development in the Third World, the Peace Corps can make no great claims to accomplishment. . . . Volunteers have filled a lot of jobs, but their utility on those jobs, and often the utility of the jobs themselves, is questionable.” The writers do see more hope for the future. “An enormous potential clearly exists in the Peace Corps. ...” they write. “If the Peace Corps can build on the isolated cases of its success that its volunteers have registered, then its help to the Third World could be much greater than it has been to date.” But, even if the potential for development is unrealized, Hapgood and Bennett see a great deal of worth in the project...

When he gets to reviewing American images and interventions abroad, President Nixon might start with the way in which the State Department and other U.S. Government agencies overseas are sometimes upstaged by an old foe of his — American labor. For years, the AFL-CIO has pursued its own foreign policy in Latin America, boasting, among other things, of how it helped to bring down Cheddi Jagan in British Guiana (now Guyana). Now it is turning to Africa. Since the AFL-CIO activity there is fairly new, that might be a good place for President Nixon to choke it off. In its foreign operations, American labor sometimes acts, or tries to act, as an arm of the U.S. Government. But it can be an uncontrollable arm. In January, 1968, for example, Vice President Humphrey visited Kenya with a large party that included Irving Brown, executive director of the African American Labor Center, the main agency for AFL-CIO’s activities on that continent. American Ambassador Glenn W. Ferguson thought it unwise to include Brown because he is disliked by many Kenya leaders, who believe he has shown too much favoritism to Minister for Economic Planning Tom Mboya...

Little can be done to save the lives of those bloat-bellied children of Biafra until the civil war in Nigeria is over. That is the heart of the matter; all else is peripheral. The pitiable pictures in the London press, the stricken conscience of the British people, the rush of volunteers to feed and nurse Biafran babies, the American powdered milk piling high on the docks of Lagos, the mad scrambling of relief workers to crack Nigerian inefficiency and push the supplies somewhere, somehow — all mean little as long as the war goes on. Some idealists believe that the world’s indignation, outcry and shamed anger over the thousands dying in Biafra will force the two sides to end their war, in the name of decency and humanity, but that is doubtful. “No group can stop a war because people are dying,” said Alison Ayida, an influential Nigerian civil servant, in a meeting with foreign newsmen in Lagos recently. “It’s never been done in a war before, and it won’t be done in Nigeria — unless you stop the cause of the war. That’s what war is all about.” The federal government feels that it is about to crush the rebellion in Biafra, and it is in no mood to be cheated of this victory by pictures of starving children...

Complete apartheid reigns at the winery of fictional Jock Silberstein: white wine is bottled by colored girls in white uniforms while red wine is bottled by white girls in brown uniforms. Jock Silberstein is a creation of Etienne Leroux, an Afrikaner novelist who explores sex, evil and decadence, and sometimes treats Afrikaners and apartheid with mocking irony. By doing so, Leroux and André P. Brink, another Afrikaner novelist who is like him, desert the traditional way of the pastoral, patriotic and puritanical Afrikaans novel. The Afrikaner literary set in South Africa likes to describe the new novels of Leroux and Brink as "the renaissance in Afrikaans prose.” That’s overblowing it, but the novels do have significance, for politics as well as art. Afrikaner nationalists have long looked on their language, which comes from 17th-century Dutch, as more than a means of expression; to them, it is an end in itself. Using Afrikaans glorifies nationalism. Extreme nationalist Afrikaners, convinced that Leroux and Brink use it in a way that soils Afrikaner nationalism, now condemn the two writers as traitors to their culture. After the Boer War, Afrikaners, descendants of the early Dutch settlers, tried to avenge the humiliation and indignities of their defeat by intensifying their belief in the worth of their own culture...

The white mercenaries of the Congo, now in rebellion, have humiliated black men everywhere in Africa, and by doing so shattered some of the self-confidence that Africans need to run their affairs well. Moreover, some Africans have struck out at whites to assuage this humiliation, and the beatings and killings have torn relations between white men and black men over the continent. These are terrible consequences. Yet it is pointless to condemn these confused, aimless and distorted men. Their role in the Congo was created by others. The rebellion of the mercenaries was the legacy of an attempt by the United States Government to stage-manage the unmanageable Congo. Using them worked for a while; then they flew out of hand. Why blame them? The present group of rebellious mercenaries first came to the Congo in 1964 with the support of the United States Government, then as now the most powerful and significant outside influence on the Congo. It was prepared to do whatever it could, even to the point of supporting mercenaries, to help Moise Tshombe, the new Prime Minister, put down a leftist rebellion in the eastern Congo...

Two simple posters explain the civil war in Nigeria. The first, a thin strip, was glued to the walls and windows of most public buildings in Enugu, the capital of Eastern Nigeria, a few weeks before the region seceded on May 30 to become the Republic of Biafra. The poster shows four men. Three look alike, obviously Ibos, the dominant tribe of the east. The fourth man is a Hausa from Northern Nigeria. “This Is Your Region,” the poster says, “Report Any Strange Face to the Police.” The second poster, a little larger and more colorful, was slapped all over Lagos, the federal capital of Nigeria, a few weeks before federal troops invaded Biafra on July 6, the beginning of the civil war. This poster shows a monstrous drawing of the severed head of Col. Odumegwu Ojukwu, the ruler of Biafra, lying under the heavy combat boot of a Nigerian soldier. “Crush Rebellion,” the poster says. The first poster reflects the intense tribal feeling of the Ibos of Eastern Nigeria. They are enraged and bitter over the massacre of thousands of Ibos in Northern Nigeria last year. They believe the other tribes of Nigeria would wipe them out if they could. For this reason, the Ibos feel they are fighting for their survival. But in Lagos, just 270 miles from Iboland, the federal military rulers and their civil servants, now mostly from the north, refuse to acknowledge that this emotionalism exists. In their view, as the second poster shows, a gangster named Ojukwu is stirring up the Ibos. Crush them, and all the problems of Nigeria go away...

I have spent a good deal of the past five years reading reams about Africa, some of it informing, some of it nonsense. David Hapgood’s book has more sense than all the rest. This is not unexpected. Those of us who have met Hapgood, or have read his newsletters and magazine articles, have long known that he leaves all the academicians and other journalists far behind. Few Americans understand Africa the way he does. The university professors who trek through Africa tend to see it through the prism of their own pet theories. The embassy men tend to see it as a giant continent cracked by the cold war into one part that adulates John F. Kennedy and another that cheers Chou En-lai. The newsmen tend to see it through the whispers of the elegant elite, sipping brandy and ginger in the hotel lobbies of the capitals. Hapgood, a former New York Times writer who spent two years in Africa as a fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs, looks at Africa with a cold eye and tough mind. He enjoys Africa, he feels it, even loves it, but he is not taken in...

In 1963, during a Security Council debate on apartheid, Adlai Stevenson announced dramatically that the United States had banned all sale of arms to the Republic of South Africa. The step had been taken, he said, to show America’s deep concern that South Africa refused to abandon its racist policies. In March of this year, a reactor went critical at a research center near Pretoria, and South Africa joined the nuclear age. The feat was made possible by the firm that designed and built the equipment: Allis-Chalmers of Milwaukee. Juxtaposed, the two events drive home some little-known truths about America and apartheid. The United States, while mouthing its disdain for the Afrikaan regime, is an accelerator of the economic boom that insures the Verwoerd government’s confidence and self-righteousness. As an investor in South Africa and as a trading partner, the United States is outranked only by Great Britain. The investments and the volume of trade rise month by month. Seeing this growing American entanglement, South Africa takes with a grain of salt any rude comments that may come from official American sources...

No other despot in the world has the romance and regality of His Imperial Majesty, Haile Selassie I, Conquering Lion of Judah, Elect of God, King of Kings and Emperor of Ethiopia. This bronzed, slight, 72-year-old man, with curled gray hair and crinkled brow, has survived a lifetime of struggle emerging as Emperor in an era of brutal court intrigue, defending his land against the mustard gas and bombers of the Fascists, trying to modernize his medieval empire without revolution. A legend has been fashioned that describes him as an absolute yet incorruptible monarch, ruling with benevolence, not fear alone. Leonard Mosley’s book adds weight - in many ways, convincing weight - to the legend. Mosley is a British newsman and novelist who has spent much time in the Middle East and East Africa. His tone is respectful, admiring but not fawning. Mosley long ago made a hero of the little man who appealed in vain to the conscience of the League of Nations. But this does not blind him to the blemishes in the portrait...

Medicare will be “the most sweeping new departure in American Social legislation since Roosevelt’s Social Security Act thirty years ago.” That description, culled from one of the many news accounts of House passage of the bill, already has deadened into a cliché. All analysts have accepted the fact of medicare’s great impact, but very few have bothered to delve into the details of that impact. How will America and medicine change after medicare? Only a fool would try to predict this with certainty. A bill, especially one 296 pages long, has byways and tremors and lurking commas that can twist society in a manner no one anticipates. Yet some trends can be spotted ahead of time. Medicare has the potential to confirm doctors’ fears that federal pressures will change the way they practice medicine. It also has the potential to stuff a financial bonanza into the pockets of America’s fat-cat doctors...

Lie Detectors - The Industry, the Technology and the Victims. The first lie detector, employed centuries ago, was a handful of rice dropped into the mouth of a suspect. If the rice stayed dry while he answered questions, he clearly was a liar — exposed under the questionable theory that a liar's salivary glands would dry up when gripped by fear. The lie detector used most commonly today is far more sophisticated. Developed by the psychologist and criminologist Leonard Keeler almost forty years ago, it comprises a pneumatic tube that fits across a subject's chest to measure breathing, an inflatable rubber cuff that wraps around the arm to measure blood pressure and a pair of electrodes that touch the fingers and, by the flow of current, measure the dampness of the palm. These instruments activate pens that draw wiggles and waves on a rolling sheet of paper — a process that gives the lie detector its modern name, polygraph, Greek for "many writings." In theory, an examiner can look at the chart, note any unusual wiggles and waves, and nab his man. This polygraph, obviously more complicated than a few grains of rice, is also touted as more accurate. In truth, it is not...

A month after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, an Army colonel testified before Congress that the deed might harm the Army's civilian marksmanship program. "I think that this terrible tragedy did have a tremendous impact upon marksmanship in the United States, and in this way, it focused the attention of all American citizens on the weapon that was used in the commission of that crime - the gun," Colonel John K. Lee, Jr., told the House Appropriations subcommittee on Defense. "The public sentiment is against it as a tool . . . There is a feeling of revulsion against the instrument which caused a tragedy of this sort." Colonel Lee made it clear that he did not share this revulsion: "To me, a gun . . . in itself never commits any act, wrong or right, but is controlled by the people who handle it." Almost all of the Congressmen present indicated that they agreed with the irrelevant logic of this cliché. Colonel Lee's testimony took only a few minutes and covered only $500,000 or so during days of hearings on the $50 billion Department of Defense budget. But his comments on the assassination attracted some attention and so drew notice to a little-known segment of Army life – its program of distributing guns and ammunition to civilians and training the recipients in their use...

A peculiar American disease has been isolated by medical scientists. The disease was first described in 1960 by Dr. J. V. Brown in the Western Journal of Surgery. An editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association then drew wide medical attention to it. Commercial houses are now marketing products designed to cope with it. Statistics on incidence and morbidity are scanty, and the name of the disease is hazy. Some doctors call it “the fast draw syndrome”; others, “the Dodge City syndrome.” But whatever the name, it is with us. It is most prevalent, of course, among the numerous special gun clubs that have sprouted across the land in recent years. Members, taking a leaf out of days of yore and some scripts of today, draw guns from their holsters, quick as lightning, and fire away. Unlike their legendary heroes, they don’t shoot at one another but aim at balloons. Sometimes, though, they miss the balloon and hit themselves in the right foot...

The Alliance for Progress, whatever it signifies for Latin America, has meant for American labor an alliance with government and big business. American labor has never minced words about the unions of the Soviet Union. “The so-called trade unions in the USSR,” the AFL-CIO Executive Council has proclaimed, “are nothing but agencies of the Communist dictatorship.” The implication, sharp and clear, has always been: Unions of America are anything but agencies of government and big business. That has been a pride of American labor, but the new alliance raises questions that may make that pride ring a bit hollow. British Guiana is a good place to begin. American Government, business and labor have never been happy with the leftist administration of Cheddi Jagan that took office after the August, 1961, elections in the British colony. American woes and worries have multiplied with the approach of independence. The AFL-CIO boasts of its part in helping the trade unions there battle the Jagan government. “In British Guiana,” said a recent union advertisement, ‘‘the AFL-CIO has rendered generous aid to the free trade unions resisting the attempt of the pro-Communist Jagan regime to destroy their independence.” On the surface, American labor has moved into British Guiana to help brother unions fight communism. But the situation in British Guiana is far more complicated than that, and its “generous aid” has involved the AFL-CIO in racial and political strife. In addition, not all the aid given by the AFL-CIO has come from the labor treasury...

For most of his years under the lights of Washington, Barry Goldwater of Arizona has sported the guise of a hard-hitting, sure-thinking Republican who speaks his mind without blur or fuzz or fudge. “Much of his popular appeal,” wrote biographers Rob Wood and Dean Smith two years ago, “centers around his willingness to stand firm on his beliefs, and to speak frankly - even bluntly - no matter what the cost.” Even as late as last August, Russell Kirk, the sage of the National Review, could write, “he has a mind calculated to arrive at hard decisions without dangerous vacillation.” Goldwater’s views always have evoked the same journalistic vocabulary: decisiveness, ring of action, no pussyfooting. In recent weeks, however, this rock image has begun to flake. Newsmen have started the inevitable comparison of recent pronouncements and found them clashing. Goldwater simply is not saying the same things he said so surely one, two or three years ago, or he is saying them with far less sureness in his tone...

On July 4, the National Armory in Washington looked like every Goldwater fan’s dream of a Republican national convention: pretty girls and blaring bands and bunting and flags and hotdogs and spotlights and college kids and TV stars and gay placards and enormous portraits and cowbells and hooters and laughers; and everyone united for one man, not there, named Goldwater. The occasion was the National Draft Goldwater Independence Day Rally, staged by the National Draft Goldwater Committee to convince everyone (including Goldwater) that Barry means business. At the least, the committee convinced reporters and politicians in Washington that it knew how to run a show. This is a feat sure to impress people in this town and to keep the committee above the “bunch of amateurs” class. The conservative Republicans bent on nominating Goldwater would have lost face badly if the show had deteriorated into a hoarse, shoving melee, but things ran smoothly and with decorum. The committee, headed by Texas Republican Chairman Peter O’Donnell, Jr., had planned for weeks. Hotel reservations were set up for thousands of visitors. Suggestions for placards, were issued (DON’T TARRY- GO BARRY, JFK - WE WILL BARRY YOU)...

The flood of recent writing about Africa has rushed in two directions. One has been the Tarzan-pygmy-Time Magazine-cannibal-witch doctor-Robert Ruark way. The other has been the slide rule and footnote way of the political scientist, studying the twists and turns of Dark Continent politicians as if they were all Lyndon Johnsons. But Africa is not a land of comic-strip characters or of leaders practiced in the fragile art of gentlemanly politics. Either approach ignores the human side of Africa. Anthropologists Melville J. Herskovits and Hortense Powdermaker, in their new books, try to illuminate just that... In The Human Factor in Changing Africa, Herskovits tries to summarize decades of scholarship, so that the general reader can make something of the mystifying and ever-changing events of the continent. Herskovits concerns himself mostly with how the impact of colonial rule changed African cultures, and with how the cultures themselves changed some of the European innovations... In Copper Town, Miss Powdermaker’s approach is much narrower, though her subject is as broad. She focuses on the town of Luanshya in the copperbelt of Northern Rhodesia and tries to define the moods and tensions of Africans caught in a swiftly changing society. She exploits the particular incident to illustrate the general movements in Africa...

THE CAPTURE of military personnel, and of key civilians, is vital to a Pentagon publicist, but his more exciting, perhaps more significant, work centers on the capture of the mass media — Hollywood, television, the press, even the comics. The Department’s Office of News Services has an Audio-Visual Division which, among its other duties, sees to it that some movies and television shows have good chunks of military propaganda. The division examines scripts and then lends aid to those deemed worthy of cooperation from the Department of Defense. Cooperation can save a producer a good deal of money. Indeed, if he plans a movie based almost entirely on the activities of the armed services, cooperation can determine whether he will have a movie at all. For a producer clutching a script blessed by the division, the services may provide military equipment that he can’t get elsewhere: modern tanks, weapons, ships, planes. An officer, acting as technical adviser to insure the movie’s authenticity, often is sent along...

IN THE SPRING of this year, Martin Burke, Gilbert Bauer and David Figlestahler, pupils of the Holy Redeemer Elementary School in Portsmouth, Ohio, wrote a letter to Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. In the event of war, Russian troops “will be landing inside our borders,” they told the Secretary. If that comes to pass, “the American people will defend this country in a last ditch, to the death stand, along with the military.” The civilian population must train itself for this future. “Please send us any able weapons,” the schoolboys asked. They listed recoilless rifles, antitank guns, bazookas, mortars, machine guns, browning automatic rifles and submachine guns. Martin, Gilbert and David said the weapons would help them learn about arms and would “help us prepare ourselves for our future military service.” The boys closed with a compliment: “We the senders of this letter are in full accord with your conduction of your duties so far as Secretary of Defence” [sic]. Although the schoolboys had not learned their spelling, they had learned other lessons well, for they are growing up in a time when all the channels of communication and education overflow with images of war and might and glory, images that tend to obscure the views of death and destruction that linger from other times and other lands...

IN 1975, Americans will have 111 million cars, trucks and buses. To keep these wheels rolling, the federal government has embarked on the biggest public-works project in history, spending billions of dollars for 41,000 miles of superhighways crisscrossing the nation. Millions of this money already, have been spilled over into waste, inefficiency and fraud. There is nothing secret about this. Newspapers and Congress have uncovered scandal after scandal. But the revelations have not evoked the same indignation and outcries that scandals like the Dave Beck plunder of the Teamsters treasury have caused. Instead, much of the public has a boys-will-be-boys attitude about corrupt highways. When you spend 41 billion dollars in a public program, influential and impatient people say, you have to expect some tomfoolery, so let’s get on with the show. Americans want their highways in a hurry. “When you have a program of this magnitude,” Rep. Gordon H. Scherer, (R.-Ohio), told the House last July 1, “you are bound to attract the chiselers and the grafters.”...

IN ARTES PLASTICAS, one of the government cultural magazines spawned by the Castro revolution, Manuel Diaz Martinez writes that “the artist must learn to help purify the revolutionary conscience of our Latin American brothers without ceasing to be an artist, without submerging his art in politics.” These words — surely contradictory — bare the dilemma of culture in Cuba today. Like all other revolutions, the Cuban upheaval of social and political institutions has stimulated a companion effort to uproot cultural institutions and nourish new and vital theatre, music, art, movies and writing. But this new culture can also wither under the upheaval’s propaganda demands. In Castro’s Cuba, no one doubts that cultural life today is busy, almost frenzied, but no one can be sure it is vital. Havana offers abundant evidence of activity: commercial and government playhouses show a varied theatrical fare. Foreign ballet and musical troupes, some of the world’s best, visit the city often; seats are available for the government admission price of 25c...

LUIS MUNOZ MARIN, Puerto Rico’s first elected Governor, remains in La Fortaleza. He sits in the Governor’s Palace, confident and pleased, for the jibaros of the mountains and countryside, in overwhelming numbers, have defied their Roman Catholic bishops to elect him to a fourth term. But, while confident and pleased, he also is uneasy. Despite his victory, a threat lingers, perhaps not to his power, but (more important) to the political stability of Puerto Rico. And, while the threat evolves primarily from clericalism, part of the threat also stems from Muñoz Marín himself. During the campaign, the flare-up over the tactics of the bishops, who issued two pastoral letters forbidding Catholics to vote for Muñoz Marín, obscured some of the political problems of Puerto Rico — the very problems that set the climate for the letters. The Governor’s rout of the new Christian Action Party, a creature of the bishops, tended to fill his supporters, particularly abroad, with a heady optimism, blinding them to the dangers still enveloping democracy on the island...

JOHN CRAMER of the Washington Daily News recently reported the mounting cries of complaint from Post Office workers under pressure to buy U.S. Mail, a book by the Department’s leading literary critic, Postmaster General Arthur E. Summerfield. “Not enough of our employees have bought it,” Cramer quoted some supervisors as telling postal workers. “It’s been suggested we really ought to make a better showing. . . . We think you ought to give us an assist on this.” Summerfield, his voice muted in this book through an “as told to” collaborator, surveys postal history, describes and defends present programs of the Department, and prophesies a bit about mail transport in the post-Summerfield, space age. The book would rank among the dullest ever written but for the fact that it appears at about the same time that another writer has decided to cover the same material from a very different point of view. Placed side by side, the views tend to tangle. Mailman U.S.A. comes from William C. Doherty, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers. Doherty is a jovial Irishman with a keen wit and, at least where Postmasters General are concerned, a bitter pen...

THE UNITED STATES hovers over the Dominican Republic these days, waiting eagerly for a reward. The reasoning is simple: Everyone sees that the regime of Generalissimo Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina is tottering; everyone knows the State Department nudged it a bit; surely, after the crash, the new regime will embrace the nudger. But, in the chaos and anger that will follow the fall, there will be no embrace. The sudden anti-Trujillo policy of the United States and the dramatic condemnation of the Dominican Republic by the Organization of American States (OAS) at San Jose have come too late to avert what State Department planners fear most: an anti-American, Castro-leaning successor to Trujillo. For thirty years, the United States has bolstered the brutal tyranny of El Benefactor. Now that his enemies have him on the run, the United States has jumped to their side. For the final push, this new aid may be accepted and used; but the United States will receive in return only a few cold stares, a polite nod, contempt, smoldering bitterness. However, there are degrees of bitterness and contempt, and the exact character of the post-Trujillo regime will depend on the forces used to overthrow the Generalissimo...

TO AT LEAST one Congressman, a sugar bill posed no problem. The issue was simple, Representative William E. Miller of New York, chairman of the Republican Congressional Committee, told his colleagues: You are either for Castro or against him. Since few praises for Castro have sounded through the chambers of Congress recently, Miller’s analysis, if accurate, meant that a sugar bill could be legislated with ease, speed and clarity. But the analysis was far from accurate, and when Congress, after a twenty-three-hour session during the Fourth of July weekend, finally did bring forth a sugar bill, its haggard members looked neither easy nor speedy nor clear. Their decisions had been shaped and pounded by unceasing and sometimes contradictory pressures — pressures so varied, fascinating and obvious that even a hurried survey of them can reveal some of the realities within our legislative process. The story of the 1960 Sugar Act is a case history in American politics. Despite Miller, the issues turned on much more than an attitude toward the Cuban Premier...

ONCE A YEAR America dances in a comic ballet against the backdrop of a world of terror. The dance masters call their creation, Operation Alert, fitting it snugly into a continuous show entitled, Civil Defense. This year’s show took place May 3. In New York, Civil Defense authorities qualified the Men’s Bar at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel as a shelter area, and 100 men continued to sip their highballs as three mythical nuclear bombs hurtled toward the city. At Yankee Stadium, bleacherites cowered under the stands while more affluent customers remained in their comfortable grandstand seats. Several Manhattan firms stopped work, but one company declared its 400 employees “automatically dead” and kept them on the job. In Washington, Congress ignored the drill, and President Eisenhower spent the day elsewhere. Only one top government official scurried from the city to his secret command post in Virginia - Leo A. Hoegh, Director of the Office of Civil Defense and Mobilization. The State Department set a new record as 4,000 employees tucked their secret papers into safes and rushed from the building in eight minutes (previous record: twelve minutes). Fifty-five schools stayed out of the drill, serving as polling places for the District of Columbia’s Presidential primary...

THE BRUISED cultural feelings of Washington received a fillip of sorts during the week of April 17, when twenty-eight writers and artists from eleven countries assembled for an annual congress sponsored by the capital’s Institute of Contemporary Arts and financed by the Ford Foundation. The roster included Italian Nobel-Prize poet Salvatore Quasimodo, American poets Richard Eberhart, Stanley Kunitz and Allen Tate, England’s critic-poet Sir Herbert Read and potter Bernard Leach, French poet Yves Bonnefoy and Brazilian novelist Erico Verissimo. Keeping close to a prepared schedule, they ate, drank and partied together, delivered lectures, plunged into panel discussions, declaimed poetry and exchanged views on the theme of the congress — the status of the artist. Leach even potted. While these activities did not tear headlines from the other major events of the week (the convening of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the opening of the Washington Senators’ annual drive to soar higher than eighth place), enough occurred to make Washington cultural buffs puff out their chests and, for at least a week, forget Howard Taubman...

ON MARCH 4, the 4,309-ton French freighter La Coubre, carting seventy-six tons of Belgian grenades and ammunition to the army of Fidel Castro, exploded in Havana harbor, killing more than seventy-five seamen, dock workers and firefighters. The series of deadly blasts triggered a series of sensational questions that hit headlines in both the United States and Cuba. Had an American agent or anti-Castro Cuban slipped aboard and left a time bomb in the hold? Had a careless dock worker dropped a match into the munitions? Had a cargo net snapped, unleashing crates of grenades against the deck? Had a plane sneaked low across the harbor and tossed bombs into the freighter? Other questions, tinged with less excitement, were also evoked. But, too theoretical, old and uncomfortable, they made few headlines. They are questions which have arisen time after time, applied to incident after incident, in the last decade. Their most cogent expression came from Colombian liberal Eduardo Santos in 1955. “Against whom are we Latin Americans arming ourselves?” he cried out before a Columbia University forum...

In the world of U.S. Commissioner of Narcotics H. J. Anslinger, the drug addict is an “immoral, vicious, social leper,” who cannot escape responsibility for his actions, who must feel the force of swift, impartial punishment. This world of Anslinger does not belong to him alone. Bequeathed to all of us, it vibrates with the consciousness of twentieth-century America. Anslinger, however, has been its guardian. As America’s first and only Commissioner of Narcotics, he has spent much of his lifetime insuring that society stamp its retribution in to the soul of the addict. In his thirty years as Commissioner (Anslinger is now sixty-seven), he has listened to a chorus of steady praise. Admirers have described him as “the greatest living authority on the world narcotics traffic,” a man who “deserves a medal of honor for his advanced thought,” “one of the greatest men that ever lived,” a public servant whose work “will insure his place in history with men such as Jenner, Pasteur, Semmelweiss, Walter Reed, Paul Ehrlich, and the host of other conquerors of scourges that have plagued the human race.” But some discordant notes, especially in recent years, have broken through this chorus...

MEXICO CITY’S Palace of Fine Arts assigns one of its salons to modern art and another to Mexican art, but both, like all the others, exhibit the same kind of paintings. In tiers of galleries, this huge museum offers little but work by twentieth-century Mexicans. A first look is far from a dull experience. Eager for more, I marched from room to room, excited by a mural still in progress, by the stark perspective of Siqueiros, by the cluttered symbols of Rivera, by the bright colors and stunted figures of young artists, by the mystery of a powerful art spawned in a political revolution. Only later did doubt creep in. Where do young Mexicans go, I wondered, to find out about Botticelli or El Greco or Rembrandt or Degas or Picasso or de Kooning? Later, at the small Antonio Souza Gallery, the American manager discussed her related problem. The gallery displayed numerous canvases by Leo Rosshandler, a Dutch painter living in Mexico, who paints huge, frightening birds in thick blacks, browns and whites. Although visitors gazed long and quietly at them, sales were meager. “The Mexican public has not been educated beyond Mexican nationalistic art,” the manager said. “They want the usual paintings of the Indian woman with her rebozo and little child.”During my stay, a brisk controversy in the newspapers, stirred by José Luis Cuevas, has emphasized the significance of the gallery’s problem...

IT IS fashionable in literary circles to snicker at Arthur E. Summerfield, the former Chevrolet dealer who may have produced one of the most publicized cases of poor judgment in the history of criticism. But the Postmaster General merely carried the logic of traditional Post Office procedures to their proper conclusion. Through the years, these procedures have led to the seizure of Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata, Boccaccio’s Decameron, Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and Caldwell’s Tobacco Road as obscene literature, and Sholom Aleichem’s Bewitched Tailor, abolitionist pamphlets, discussions of the French Revolution, the Economist (London), and a Russian chess book as political propaganda. Vested with these traditional powers of censorship, Summerfield, a man who admits to reading little fiction, decided that D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover “taken as a whole, is an obscene and filthy work”; literary critics and at least one federal judge decided otherwise. Snickering at this difference in judgment seems like misplaced energy. Rather than examine the critical faculties of Summerfield, it would make more sense to examine the censorship powers of the Post Office...

MEXICO CITY’S Concordia, a restaurant doubling as a playhouse, introduced me to Mexican theatre. As I approached the place, several young people were milling about on the street in front, including a huge ruffian with a black eye. Spotting him, I thought that excursions to the Mexican stage were perhaps not for me. But, suddenly, he pushed open the door and jumped into the restaurant, the others rushing after him. My ruffian and his friends were actors waiting for their cues during the evening’s first performance of Las cosas simples (The Simple Things), a play by a twenty-seven-year-old Mexican, Hector Mendoza. Inside, watching the second performance, I discovered that mistaking actors for spectators was part of the production’s charm. The play was about life in a diner near a college, and the Concordia looked just like that. The actors performed around a luncheon counter and five tables in front, while the audience munched their supper and followed the play from the other twenty-five tables. At times the actors moved into the audience to borrow a napkin or ask for a match — on one occasion, to kiss a bald patron on the head. The Concordia and Las cosas simples, which evoked a Saroyanesque atmosphere, are not entirely typical of Mexican theatre, but they offered a promise that the Mexican stage bristled with vitality. Several weeks of theatre-going have fulfilled that promise...

A potful of hot water gurgled down on us as we waited, caught in a giggling, shoving crowd, outside Washington’s Coffee ‘n Confusion Club, a beatnik haven marking its first Saturday night of business in the nation’s capital. An irate neighbor in an upstairs apartment had tossed out the hot but not boiling water. The sprinkles from above alighting on the sprinkle of beards in the crowd symbolized one of the oddest clashes in the history of this clash-ridden federal town. For several months now, the prudery of Washington has been at war with the rebellion of its youth. The war started when a 24-year-old self-styled poet, William A. Walker, decided to open his club. Following the style of shops in San Francisco’s North Beach, it would sell coffee, pastries, biscuits, cream cheese, bagels and poetry. But Walker and his wife, Ruth, a 22-year-old graduate of Vassar, erred strategically in their first attempt by failing to consult officialdom before opening. Zoning laws promptly descended upon them, and police shut down the shop. In their second attempt, the Walkers, moving gingerly, followed every step of the law. They found an abandoned cellar restaurant at 945 K Street, Northwest, rented it, decorated it, and applied for a license. And then the smug traditions of Washington, sensing that the venture might succeed, began to stir and swat at this pesky, tiny threat of non-conformity...

For many years Howard Fast the Communist obscured our view of Howard Fast the writer. Flaunting contempt at Congress, issuing tracts against "bourgeois, decadent" authors, rallying sympathy for the Soviet Union, he stood between us and his books and kept us from a special insight into the intellect of an American Communist. Fast, who has left the party, may have represented, in some ways, the essence of America's own brand of communism. The clues to understanding him as a Communist lie in understanding him as a writer. Fast's novels had tremendous circulation in the Communist world after World War II and, in fact, enjoyed much popularity here until the press advertised his link with the Communist Party in the late 1940s. His Soviet popularity ended when he left the party in 1957. Although his resignation helped reopen doors to American publishers and movie producers, most of the fiction of his Communist period has remained unread here. We have slipped Fast into our stereotype of the ex-Communist and perfunctorily welcomed him as one more defector who finally has seen the light...

THE FIRST Inter-American Music Festival opens April 18 in Washington. The festival originally had been scheduled for April of last year, and New Orleans, which aspires to be the modern hub of the Americas, was the site chosen. The selection aimed to blend the old musical tradition of the city with the more recent Latin American hue that has covered the port commercially. But several months before the scheduled opening, with almost all commissioned music completed, officials mysteriously called everything off. And the music has marked time for a year. In calling off the event, the authorities concerned mumbled an odd excuse: the postponement was due to a delay in construction of an outdoor concert stage near the shores of Lake Pontchartrain. This was the first inkling most New Orleanians had that anyone ever contemplated building such a stage, and since then there has not been another scrap of information about it. Last December 8, The New York Times, while discussing the upcoming event in Washington, offered a more logical excuse: the festival was postponed last year so that it would not conflict with the program of the Institucion Jose Angel Lamas in Caracas and the Casals Festival in Puerto Rico. But this, while justifying a change of time, does not explain the change of place. Both the initial announcement and the Times interpretation were too polite to hit the mark. New Orleans did not have a music festival last year because its businessmen, who have spent quantities of money and energy in the last fifteen years to attract Latin American trade, did not feel like wasting either to attract Latin American culture. The roots of the difficulty stretch to the nineteenth century, when New Orleans was the center of French Opera in the United States...

“NOBODY outside of New Orleans gives a hoot about Ewing Poteet,” claims Ewing Poteet, a smiling, rumpled ex-fiddler, as he goes about his business of trying to whirl the excitement of theatre into the heart of New Orleans. He plies one of the odd American trades. About 1,500 miles from Broadway, Poteet, drama critic for the New Orleans Item, covers the waterfront of theatre — the amateur clubs, the touring companies, the college shows. He covers the stuff few give a hoot about. No one seems to care if Poteet dulls or excites taste for theatre. No one cares if he is foolish or brilliant, if he upholds theatre or sneers at it, if he knows how to write. Yet most Americans turn to writers like Poteet when they want news and comment about theatre. At least 140,000,000 Americans do not read Brooks Atkinson every morning. The words of the New York Times drama critic or his Broadway colleagues make no impression on millions who, by harsh chance, live outside metropolitan New York. The forty-four-year-old Poteet, in his seventh year as Item critic, is more than just his newspaper’s theatre man. Most non-New York critics are the drama-music-movie-radio-television-nightclub-book-phonograph-art editors of their outfits. While Poteet does not dabble in all these beats, he does have an added chore: he spends half his journalistic hours covering the civil courts of New Orleans...