Historical Newspapers of South Carolina

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JIM FARRELL EDITOR LUCRETIA JONES DAVE LUNDGREN MANAGING ED AD. MNGR. EDITORIALS Another year DEAR SANTA: Well, we made it through another year. Now I want you to know a lot of people have their own definition of good. So, when those state legislators start telling you how bad we have been, you ask them about the hunting reserve and those conflict of Interest cases on the public works com mittee. And when student government starts griping about some of our editorials, you ask them what happened to the elections, and if they still get the best seats at the ball games. I don't think that Pres. Nixon will say anything bad about us, so we would like for you to leave him about four tons of help. God knows he can use it. And, oh yeah, if you could arrange to have a little snow fall in Vietnam I'm sure there are a lot of people who would appreciate It. Everybody is so concerned about the economy, they've forgotten those poor guys. There have been no drives this year to send presents to the guys over there, so maybe you could drop a few. And all those people we use for case histories in our sociology classes, don't forget them either. Well, Santa, I guess we haven't asked for anything for ourselves. To tell you the truth, we don't really need it. We have so much now that it's hard to use it all in a year. Maybe you could give us a little something to remind us of our responsibility to inform and entertain our readers, to be the watchdog of our governments, to be the conscience of all those who read us. ONE MORE THING, TAKE CARE OF EVERYBODY WHO IS LEAVING. There are a lot of nuts on the road. See you the 24th and MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM-THE GAMECOCK Our Times Third w BY SMITH HEMPSTONE Columnist In Kashmir, Pakistani gunners in Russian-built T-59 tanks ham mered away at Indian armored formations composed of British Centurion and American Sherman tanks. In the skies over Bangla Desh, Indian pilots in MIG-21s dueled Pakistani airmen flying American F-104As (and longing for the swift French Mirages held in reserve in West Pakistan). Which is by way of making a rather simple point: All the wars of the past quarter-century have been waged in the Third World; and more than 90 percent of the hard ware to fight those wars was provided by four nations. It once was an accepted canon of the liberal creed that munitions manufacturers, "merchants of death" as they were dramatically called, instigated wars to spur the sale of their produce. Now, with world arms sales largely under government control either through nationalization or a system of licensing, the robber barons of private industry can no longer be singled out for blame. Nor can it be maintained that socialist morality is more refined than that of the capitalist world: While the United States, with 1970 arms sales of $2.7 billion, remains the world's biggest huckster of military hardware, the Soviet Harriet Van Horin Phob BY HARRIET VAN HORNE Columnist The news that a Phobia clinic is flourishing in Westchester hardly surprises us. If the state of 'the national psyche is a true index of need, there should be a phobia clinic in every block, open evenings like laundromats and delicatessens and those seedy storefronts with the beaded cur tains and the discreet sign, Reader & Adviser. Now, I happen to have been a Reader & Adviser for many years. That is to say, Iread alot and I freely advise anybody who'll pause in his mad folly and just Listen a Minute! That includes President Nixon, the Paris Peace conferees and the man who is supposed to be doing something about my kitchen linoleum. All phobias are ridiculous and stupid--except to the person who has a phobia. The woman who is too terrified to ride to the second floor in an elevator pities her absurd friend who is terrified of cats. All of us who fancy ourselves phobia-free tend to clap our hands smartly in the presence of the sufferer and say, "Willpower, now! Just tell yourself it's all nonsense." All phobias, the psychiatry books tell us, begin as free-floating anxieties which then become fixed on one object or situation. The phobia can be dispelled only when the poor soul who's got one un derstands what lies behind his fear. I once had a friend whose phobia was escalators. She walked, rode the elevators or stayed firmly on the ground floor. Escalators terrified her, she said, because the mechanism pr.opelling them was inpviaible. ,AlaQ.. the. a~sendine. orld agair Union (with 1970 sales worth $2 billion) is fast closing the gap. Until Egypt failed in 1955 to obtain Western arms on satisfactory terms, the Soviet Union was not a major supplier of arms to nations of the non Communist world (the Chinese still are not). Since then, Russian arms deals have been made with 29 Third World nations. By the middle of the 1960s, the Kremlin was pumping more military hardware into the underdeveloped world than the United States. While the Soviet inventory has covered the gamut from detonators to destroyers, there has been a heavy emphasis on aircraft, with more than 1,600 planes of the MIG family poured into the Middle East, Asia and other parts of the world. At a time when Indians and Pakistanis are killing each other with imported arms, it would be comforting to assert that the United States and the Soviet Union have only to come to an agreement to halt the proliferation of lethal weapons around the world. But experience shows that this is not the case, that.arms embargoes do not work, that when there is a market for military hardware, a supplier will be found. Take, for instance, the case of South Africa: In 1963, the United Nations Security Council imposed an arms embargo on South Africa. Yet jas and p, motion made her dizzy. Interestingly, this girl who cowered before the escalator once flew through a blizzard in a Piper Cub. She saw no peril in a single engine plane whose pilot carried a flask and was known to have the Hell's Angels approach to aeronautics. Who knows, she might have conquered her escalator fear had this daring chap consented to pilot her up to the second floor of Bloomingdale's. In this day of botulism and mercury-poisoned fish, it was fated that Americans would develop food phobias. Health foods are a billion dollar industry now. What's often overlooked is that these natural, untainted foods with all their locked-in goodness, often spoil quickly for the simple reason that they contain none of that nasty spoilage-deterrent. Let the food faddist beware. A brilliant and estimable woman used to visit my house frequently, bringing with her the most tiresome phobia of all: a i'ear of germs. This woman drove her husband and children mad with her compulsive scrubbing. Her husband claimed to have originated that old complaint, "You get up in the night for five minutes and when you come back she has changed the sheets and laid out clean pajamas." We tried, with many a jest, to deter this lady from her all-out germ warfare. She was not amused by my imitation of Lady Macbeth crying "Out, damned spot!" She was not amused when her husband gave her a beautifully wrapped can of Dutch Cleanser for Christmas. She regularly fired maids because they demurred at shampooing the velvet coat ist itself South African arms imports rose from a value of $1 million in 1960 to $41 million in 1969, more than the rest of sub-Saharan Africa taken together. Pretoria needs were met largely by the aggressive arms salesmen of France, which sells 45 percent of its arms -production abroad. Despite the French embargo- on arms sales to Israel (which ab sorbed 37 percent of France's export production of military hardware prior to 1967), French sales in 1970 were worth a whop ping $1.3 billion, more than double fourth -place Britain's $648 million. Again, France's arms sales were weighted heavily in favor of air craft, with 700 of the great Dassault works' 1,300 Mirage jets being sold to 13 foreign nations. In all, an estimated 70 percent of France's arms sales are aerospace products. Although London's arms exports have more than doubled in value since 1964, the British have been unable to keep up with those of the French, which trebled between 1969 and 1970. All the same, 2,500 Centurion tanks have found their way abroad and Hawker Hunter attack fighters are in use with 12 other air forces. With the ap pointment of a sales director at the Ministry of Defense, the British hope to do better. Copyright 1971, 'Te Washington Star ho bias I've always had a special liking for Henny Youngman's mother-in law who was so tidy she put clean paper under the cuckoo clock every morning. But patience with my germ-phobic friend finally snapped when she used three guest towels in the course of a one-hour visit. "This has to stop," I murmured, handing her a psychiatric text on phobias and compulsions. I suggested she might like to take it home and study it. She did. Later she told ma that "all that nonsense about guilt and toilet-training and compulsive neuroses" didn't apply to her because the case histories in the book dealt with people who are mentally ill. And she, of course, was a heigh-ho, average, normal female except that all the per fumes of Arabia couldn't have sweetened those littie hands. Phobias in our time reflect the tensions of a troubled world. People who have always been terrified of flying are more so now that skyjackers are directing planes to Cuba, Cairo and other st ops not on one's ticket. A psychiatrist, Dr. David Hubbard, has made an intensive study of skyjackers and says they are paranoid schizophrenics. Instead of two sky marshals on every plane we probably should have a psychiatrist and a male nurse. There are phobias behind many of our social failures. It's a racist phobia that makes middle-class residents howl in protest when a low-cost housing project goes up in t heir neighborhood. It's a youth phobia that turns college town residents against students. It's a poverty phobia that makes each one of us uneasy about the Nixon price freeze. Mass phobias can be just as dest ruc tive as pr.ivat,e qiqes..