Historical Newspapers of South Carolina

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JIM FARRELL EDITOR LUCRETIA JONES DAVE LUNDGREN MANAGING ED AD. MNGR. EDITORIALS U.N. blunder The United Nations has made a gross blunder with the expulsion of Nationalist China and the acceptance of the Republic of China into its body. The U. N. has gained a total of some 700 million people and have lost some 14 million, which doesn't seem to be bothering any of the voting members that voted against the Nationalist Chinese. A two China policy in the U. N. is a very important issue, because the position of the security council becomes a major question. To vote out a member in good standing is pure ignorance. Why shouldn't 14 million people who have shown, w-hether under a dictatorship of not, to be a peaceful nation be represented on a world peace com mittee along with one of the most powerful of the com munist nations in the world? Is the entire U. N. body going blind to the realities of the world situation? The admission of Red China to the U. N. was a good move because a country the size of Red China with the potential power of that country should be involved In the many problems facing the world today. At least questions can now be brought up with all the major powers in on the discussion. But to give up a peaceful nation doesn't make much sense and raises questions of the U. N.'s validity as to what goals it is trying to achieve. Vote Today ! qAs gAs)eN BY rhEr 7mffA7 oi%pV Insight: Stephen 'Friends' (Editor's note: This is the last in a series of three columns by Dr. Stephen Coy of the Theater Dept.) All right. Whither Theatre? Now that I've cleared my throat I'll get to the question. The commercial theatre is largely in the hands of cretins who produce junk because there are so many cretins willing to pay for it. The avant-garde is in the hands of people whose idea of a Grand Opening is their navel. The one thing these two hugely separate groups have in common is disregard for quality in the written word. When these groups agree that the theatre doesn't need writers, what it then doesn't need is enemies; its friends can kill it. Well, maybe not. Because the Harriet Van Horr 'An old BY HAIRRIET VAN HORNE It's better to trust the world and be deceived than to doubt one man's word. And it's better to smile through life, believing and accepting, than to sulk about with a mean, suspicious mind. Two noble precepts, those, now outdated by the fear and cynicism of our time. It hurts to see trust vanish from our society. For with it goes a gentleness, a faith that sweetened the very air and raised us all a little above ourselves. This loss of trust goes far in explaining the oft-heard remark, "We used to be NICER people." We were, we were. Because the world was nicer. To have watched the erosion of trust, over the past 20 years, is to have witnessed a dramatic change in the face cf America. Our civilization is not yet what Ezra Pound once said it was -"An old bitch gone bad in the teeth"-but the candor, the openness, have vanished. One feels sadness for the rising generation that cannot imagine a time when front doors were left off the latch all night. When bicycles. were parked casually under the' Irees. When we walked home in the late night feeling calm and easy, eyes eyes on the stars. Perhaps the most troubling element in the climate of fear Is the Our Times Presi4 BY SMITH H EMPSTONE .Columnist In nominating Lewis Franklin Powell Jr. and William Hubbs Rtehnquist to the Supreme Court, President Nixon set aside a notion which appealed to him both per sonally and politically: Ap point ment of the first woman to the high court. The President's obsession with "firsts" is well known. And the appointment of a woman might have neutralized much of the mounting criticism that his ad ministration is anti-feminist. To give the President his due, two of the six persons he referred to the American Bar Association's committee on the federal judiciary--Judge Mildred L. Lille of California and Judge Sylvia Bacon of the District of Columbia were women. Neither was found smnlif id hy the ABiA for servfce Coy can kill ti "whole world of theatre" that I mentioned before, the very same "rest of us" who are neither ar iistically far out nor financially in deep, don't agree. We live in a theatrical world where realism and belief are very far from dead (The English critic Virginia Woolf announced the death of realism early in this century after reading Joyce's Ulysses. A half-century later Edward Albee wrote a long, very alive and quite realistic play, one of the best we have, and t humbed his nose at Mrs. Woolf in thLtitle.), and where we have not yet learned to stop cherishing the writers of good language, realistic and otherwise. For once, being behind the times is a benefit; and it ie bitch gon growing suspicion we have of our own government. This ought not to be. When ordinary men assume great powers and use them in secret, we are right to fear. When peaceful citizens are spied upon by paid informers, when telephones are tapped and meeting rooms bugged, we are living in a police state. The most basic right in a democratic society-the right to be let alone-is violated all over America every single day. We are right to be fearful. And considering the kind of country we are becoming, we are also right to be angry and ashamed. One of my bedside companions is Montaigne. And one sleepless night last week I came upon this: "The corruption of our age is made up of the individual con tributions of each of us. Those who are influential enough to do so contribute injustice, cruelty, avarice and tyranny. The weaker sort ... contribute folly, futilities and idleness." Like most of us today, Montaigne wishes that the men in the seats of power were wiser and finer than they are. "They are much beneath us if they are not far above us," he writes. "Having promised more, they must do more." And having power, they should exercise it with perfect candor and a delicate hand. lent loses on the Supreme Court. In a statistical sense, it always was highly unlikely that the President could find a politically acceptable woman with legal credentials of the same quality as those of potential male candidates. Of the 324,318 practicing lawyers in the United States, only 9,103- 2.8 percent of the total-are women. Of the nation's 5,000 federal, state and local judges, only about 150 are women. But if he failed to come up with a woman, the Predident did succeed in another of his frequently stated (and perhaps more sincerely held) goals: the- nomination, in the person of Powell, of a qualified Southerner to the Supreme Court. The 64-year-old Virginian,who has practiced law in Richmond since 1931, has the intellectual q44lities one has a right to expect -'.* ira'miem Cot.nnmrineeA1k. ie theatre is because of this that, strident voices to the contrary, writing for i he iheat re is not only not dying but is in one of its great eras. With- the works of Ionesco and Brecht still so much done that we don't think of them as revivals with Weiss and Pinter and Beckett and Stoppard and Albee and Williams and Osborne still writing, there is reason for cheer. And there are some new names worth cheering, too. To name a haphazard but firstrate few: John Guare, Israel Horovitz, Oliver Hailey, Adrienne Kennedy, Rochelle Owens, Jean Claude van Itallie, Lanford Wilson, Paul Zindel, Sam Shepard, Douglas Turner Ward, Herb Gardner and Ed Bullins. Watch for them. te bad' If one were to single out the agencies that have done most to sow fear, suspicion and distrust among our citizens these would come first: the FBI, the Justice Department as directed by Atty. Gen. John Mitchell and the CIA. One might also mention the U. S. Army and the paranoid propaganda mill of the far right, with its hundreds of hours on regional radio and TV each week, hawking hatred, misinforming the simple and setting citizen against citizen. Lack of trust in our leadership has led to another significant change in the American attitude. That is, an open disrespect for the men in power. This trend was first apparent in the Johnson Ad ministration. A great many Americans had viewed President Roosevelt with a blind hate but the hate was private, an un derstanding among friends, so to speak. There was no dramatic equivalent of "MacBird", with the President portrayed as a mur derer. There was no film documentary on the order of "Millhouse" which is totally contemptuous of Mr. Nixon. When Phillip Roth , in his new novel "Our Gang," writes about Trick E. Dixon and J. Edgar Hee Haw, we may find the humor juvenile but we are no longer ;hocked. 'first' Beta Kappa, he was first in his law school class at Washington and Lee Univer ity, holds a mastcr's degree from Harvard and is a former president (1964-65) of the ABA. Rehnquist, who was born In Wisconsin but has spent most of his life (he Is 47) in Arizona, also is highly qualified In an Intellectual sense. Like Powell, he is a Phi Beta Kappa and was first In his law class at Stanford before going on to clerk for Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson in 1952. Like Powell, Rehnquist has a moderate record on civil rights and a tough reputation on law and order. Given his age, Intellectual qualities and capacity to grow In wisdom and understanding, Rehnquist, who is a Republican (Powell is a Democrat), has the potential to become a great judge.