Historical Newspapers of South Carolina

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Ameri BY WESLEY PRUDEN, JR. Repr~nedwfth permssom. COpyri 1m. ow Jns an C. A pretty young Washington D.C. lawyer, hip enough so that she doesn't mind being thought young and pretty, watched the ghostly image of the old Juan Peron flicker p across her television screen the other night. Her liberal juices boiled. She sighed. Someone in the room snorted an obscenity. "Yeah," said the lady lawyer, who had marched with Martin Luther King at Selma, bivouacked with the armies of the night at the Pentagon, and sent money to make guerrilla war against the Greek colonels, "you're right about that, but I can't do anything about Peron. So I'm going to be against the Alaskan pipeline." In Birmingham, Ala., the man who marched two steps behind King at Selma and who took up his civil-rights crusade when King was slain in Memphis an nounced that he was quitting. "We're just not getting any help from the black middle class," said Rev. Ralph David Abernathy. "The black middle cliss often has it made now, and they're interested in other things." Rennie Davis, who .)rganized t4e antiwar Mayday protests that almost panicked the Government into a breakdown oaly two years ago, is a stranger to what's left of that movement too. He was last seen in Texas, organizing a religious rally for a 12 year-old Hindu guru who has become his personal obsession. The bugles of the morning are calling retreat from the ancient battlefields now, as indignation gives way to resignation. After two Dost-World War II decades of finding problems to fit every SOLUTION, Americans are looking to themselves, searching for modest horizons. Ambitions come in smaller sizes. The important concerns are those of their own bodies, their own experiences. The prevailing view is no longer onward and upward, but inward. "It's the natural and inevitable progression of events and the evolution of people," says a Baptist preacher and p counselor in Chicago. "After you realize you can't save the world, there's a tremendous shock, but after .ise'ulheek wears off you begin worrying about whether and how you can save yourself. So you reorganize your priorities quickly and get on with first things first-and that's self." If the hymn of the 1960s was "We Shall Overcome," the hymn of the current day When you enroll in Air ] you can get more than i a scholarship and a c free flying lessoi You get ataxa month person allowance c Interested? Contact--.. University of South Cai At 777-4134 You'll find more than a scholarshil ROTC. can Viev 'Rennie Davis,who C Mayday protests th government into c years ago, is a stra that mov4 might be "Just As I Am." Grasp becomes more important than reach. Skepticism of others is often the rule, cynicism is no longer the preserve of students and crotchety old men. The gasoline shortage is widely believed to be a hoax or contrived or both. "I know a customer has no place in your scheme of things," a customer was heard to have complained to a supermarket manager in Kansas City the other day, "but could you persuade your butcher to take my order?" When the President of the United States is taken to the hospital with pneumonia, iis constituents discuss r.ot whether he will quickly recover, but whether he is ill at all. So quickly has the word rip-off, meaning to steal ruthlessly, come into the language that ' even Rotai ians use it.un selfconsciously. People more or less expect to be lied to, and listen only t D themselves. 'People expect to be lied to and listen only to themselves. "It's a curious thing," says a young congressman from the South, 'but whei I ge out among the folks I get the feeling they almost expect me to lie to them. It isn't i feeling of disrespect, and there is i.o hostility. It's almost as if thef couldn't I e bothered to care, they've got other things t n their mind." Zorce ROTC i chance at hance at 1P0 for api list 767 ieapg al ($100. olina a in the Air Force Is Now I rganized the antiwar at almost panicked the breakdown only two inger to what's left of Dment too.' The people who might find American "maturity" perplexing are the men and women who run the governments of lands abroad. The American Government, no less than its constituents, is looking inward too. "We shall respect our treaty com mitments," Richard M. Nixon said in his Second Inaugural Address. "and we shall do our share in defending peace and freedom in the world. But we shall expect others to do the same. The time has passed when America will make every other nation's conflict our own, or make every other nation's future our responsibility, or presume to tell the people of other nations how to manage their own affairs." Once upon a time, perhaps five years ago, this would have sounded like isolationism. But the President was only saying what a lot of Americans were already thinking. American diplomats are fond of calling 1973 "the year of Europe," but everyone kn9ws that it is just that, diplomats' talk. Most people find foreign policy a dull and intimidating topic, and after two decades of jet traveling to Paris and London, with more frequency and ease than their parents traveled between New York and Chicago, many Americans find "European unity" a dull topic too. Not long ago, dozens of "Atlanticists" from both Europe and North America met in Amsterdam to talk up unity for people bound together by a common culture and a common oceai. The guest list might have been a ship's manifest for an expensive Italian cruise. Said one participant glumly: "People under 40 just don't seem to care ATTENTI RTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHS the 1974 garnet & black will made .on the following edule. Students may make ointments at the locations ed below or may cali 256 5, 254-8912, or 777-4170. ointments are necessary - SEPT. 4 E.SEPT. 5 HR.SEPT. 6 F'RI. SEPT. 7 M~vON. SEPT. 10 1'UES- SEPT. 11 WED SEPT. 12 THURS- SEPT. 13 FRI- SEPT. 14 MON- SEPT. 17 TUES. SEPT. 18 WED. SEPT. 19 THUIS. SEPT. 20 FRI. SEP. 21 nward Not everyone sees this as a ba I thing. "It might mean that we as Americans Pre growing up," says a tuiversity profmssor in California. "I find 'my students le:s naive than they were only a short time ago. They are interested in experience now not ex position. They will tell you quite quickly, 'just tell me what you know, but spare me your politics, please.' " Some of those who are over fortymight find it painful to adjust, but adjust they probably must. John Connally, the former Treasury Secretary who is thought to be running for the Republican Presidential nomination for 1976 offered some advice for them the other day in a speech in New York City. "There are a lot of people in this country who, I think, live in the past too- much," he said, "Their feelings are hurt because the old days are gone. Well, be that as it may, the truth of the matter is that the, negociating process which always negocia ted the United States down and other countries up should be buried deep and permanent . . .we are not going to get anywhere with gracious pieties-I've tried that. "When I was Secretary of the Treasury, I was sometimes accused of chauvinism being to rough and too crude and too un diplomatic. But let me tell you, we frankly had the task of not only saying to the rest of the world that the old days were gone' and an era had ended and we were entering a new day, we had the problem of convincing our own people."Some people, Connally said, tho ught a little m agic could put things back the way they were. But that was non sense."We can't do it, ana we are not going to do it." Other powerful men are saying the same things, and more. Even now, Congress is debating whether to bring home some of the 300,000 American troops still in Europe 28 years after the end of World War II, even at the risk of damaging the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Such talk not so long ago would have been herasy. "For 25 years," said Sen. Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, the assistant leader of the democaratic majority in the Senate., "American men, machines, and money have played a major role in ensuring the security of Western Europe. The rebuilding of Europe has been accomplished." It's time to come home. (See PROFESSOR, Page 8) ON Note; Please bring $3.00 to your appointment to pay for your picture and reserve your yearbook in the spring. Also Coliseum Rm 1014 in Sept 18 and 19. WHERE TO GO: Russell house-Room 312 Russell House-Room 312 Russell House-Room 312 Russell House-Room 312 Capstone-Keystone Roonli Capstone -Keyswone Room South Building-Lobby South BuildingLobby South building-Lobhv M&N Lounge-Conferenet Rm. Russell House-Room 312 Russell House-Room 312 Russell House-Roonx.112 Russenl i-ouse - Room 312