RT. EDITORIAL Fill the Barn The Back Mountain Memorial Library Auction needs you—now, more than ever. Time was, when Bill Moss was still alive and working over at the auction barn, that the degree of “filled-ness’’ at the barn was the most popular measuring stick for predicting the auction’s suc- cess. “Barn’s nowhere near filled,” Bill would lament, prodding solicitors to ‘‘get a move on.”’ Or he might say: “We're doing pretty good, now— barn’s getting filled up.”’” When Bill Moss said the | barn was filled, the chances were mighty good that | it would be a banner year for the auction. Well, Bill is gone now, and so is the barn, at | least for the purposes of the library auction. Our | families and friends in the valley have been victims of the nation’s worst natural disaster, and nearly everyone in the Back Mountain Community has been involved in the clean-up in some way. We're tired, and although we're eagerly looking forward to going to the auction, we're not all that eager about working for it. Our hesitancy is showing up at . the new auction barn, where the stock of new and used goods to be auctioned off is rather slim. Instead of waiting to be called by a solicitor this year, why not take your accumulated goods to the new, auction barn behind the Back Mountain Memorial Library on Main Street, Dallas. Barn hours are from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Friday and from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. Saturday. How marvelous it would be if, despite adversity and hardship, the amount of stock in the auction barn would soon reflect our certainty that this year’s auction will be better than ever. State Powers < | | | Mim Matheson and her Flood Victims Action Council, with members scattered through the i greater portion of flood-ravaged Wyoming Valley, he are beginning to learn a hard lesson. That lesson: oe never depend on the State. : | From shaking her finger in anger at Housing Secretary George Romney, to organizing flood ~ victims into a cohesive force of energy, Mim | ‘Matheson has approached the problems of | Wyoming Valley from only one avenue, stated well by a host of her followers: “If you can’t turn to your ge: government for help, where can you turn?’ And with that question lies the problem of the entire | valley. | AlbertJ ay Neck, a prolific economist, writing in i 1935 in his book, “Our Enemy, The State,”’ outlined the problem succinctly: ‘When the Johnstown flood occurred, social power was immediately i mobilized and applied with intelligence and vigour. i Its abundance, measured by money alone, was so great that when everything was finally put in order, something like a million dollars remained.” | ! | “If such a catastrophe happened now, not only is | social power perhaps too depleted for the like i exercise, but the general instinct would be to let the | State see to it. Not only has social power wasted to | that extent, but the disposition to exercise it in that particular direction has wasted with it. If the State has made such matters its business, and has | : confiscated the social power necessary to deal with | them, why, let it deal with them.” The State has said to society that we are either not exercising enough power to meet the emergency, or we are exercising it in what it thinks | is an incompetent way, so our power is confiscated. | Hence when a beggar ask us for a quarter, our | instinct is to say that the State has already con- | fiscated our quarter for his benefit, and he should | go to the State about it. That is precisely what most | Wyoming Valley flood victims, including the | Matheson-led FVAC are doing. State power has not only been thus concentrated | in Washington, Mr. Nock contended, but it has been - so far concentrated into the hands of the Executive | that the existing government has become a per- sonal government. ‘It is nominally Republican,” he wrote, ‘but actually monocratic;’’ a curious entity, “but highly characteristic of a people little gifted with intellectual integrity.” Perhaps with the trials and tribulations many Wyoming Valley victims have had to contend with in the ensuing weeks since June 23, they should | heed the words of the late English philosopher and | essayist Herbert Spencer, who wrote: “The fact is | so notoriously common in our experience, that 5 when State power is applied to social purpose, its 1 action is invariably slow, stupid, extravagant, unadaptive, corrupt, and obstructive.”” And that’s | what Wyoming Valley flood victims are up against. Changes by Eric Mayer Light...and an angry buzzing in his head. Eyes open, blink at cobwebs. Chaos resolves itself into a familiar ceiling. Anchorage. He clung to it with his gaze and the world swung into place. Behind the bedroom windows hung dark- ness, barely diluted by the approaching dawn. At the bedside a lamp still burned and the buzzing continued. He was trying to rouse a hand that slum- bered on, obstinately. Finally it moved, heavily, to the alarm clock and the buzzing in his head was replaced by a throbbing pain. He rolled over, too tired to even groan. The paperback with which he’d been facing insomnia not so long ago hit the floor with a thud. There was something he had to re- member...something..The Kzin are preparing to attack... No. That was the book he’d been reading, or the dream he’d been having, or both. He wasn’t sure. But he knew it wasn’t what he had to remember. Lecture! That was it. Now he did groan. “Time to get up.” he told himself. His legs didn’t be- lieve it. Neither did his head. How much sleep had he gotten? No. Better not to think about it. Miraculously he found himself dressed and downstairs. He swallowed some aspirin, dropped a couple into his coat pocket, stumbled out to the car. The dawn beat him to Ashton where he got stuck in a snarl of glaring car tops. The radio announcer was babbling cheerfully, the same as always. ‘7:55 on this beautiful Tues- day morning. The sun is shining all over...” Late. He was always late. He was out of the car, half walking, half running. The bell and collapsed in a back row seat. He signed the class roster before lapsing into a stupor. The lecturer’s monotone faded into a mean- ingless rumble, like distant thunder. There were other sounds: the squeaking of seats, the TRB from Washington Sitting here in Washington we always think we are lucky. Here we are, day after day, watching the fascinating machinery by which the intricate and unstable US social structure is maintained, with the rich getting richer, the poor getting milked, and the poli- ticians putting on the shadow plays which sustain the whole superb performance. This is one of the great moments of the drama. The President’s popularity is soar- ing; polls show that the public thinks he is sportive, fun-loving and playful. A regular prankster. This is a moment, too, in which they are recycling Vice President Agnéw of whom it was not previously known that he was bio-degradable; he is between images; he is changing his skin; he is about to emerge a portentous man of dignity, worthy and willing to receive the torch from Mr. Nixon in 1976. Did he ever say a harsh word about any- body? Did he ever liken radical-liberals to “those who indulged the Nazi excesses in the late Twenties or early Thirties’? Goodness, no; or, if he did, it was in the inexperienced days of his incumbency; surely pardonable in his new presence. Sometimes performers in the show are a bit incautious. On this Russian wheat deal, for example, it is simply taken for granted that the interested parties, the tycoons, the cam- paign contributors, be tipped off in advance. Not the public, of course; not the wheat grow- ers. In this case, as a perfectly routine matter a man from the Department of Agriculture about 11:30 a.m. on August 23 began tele- phoning exporters: Cargill, Inc., Continental Grain Co., Bunge Corp., Cook Industries, Inc., scratching of pens, pages being turned. Once a book was dropped. He awoke abruptly, heart squirming under his ribs, startled by the realization that he’d been dozing. At last, mercifully, the bell rang. Another day had begun, indistinguishable from all those that had come before. The days tended to blur together. Life ran on without incident. The path ahead looked the same as the one behind and it was leading...nowhere. It hadn’t always been that way. Once, before he knew better, he’d been interested in writing. Now other things occupied his mind- term papers, exams, 500 pages of required reading each week. Occasionally he managed to compose something for the college paper but he no longer took any pleasure in his writ- ing. He did it out of habit or maybe as a ritual by which he thought to preserve some vestige of the hope he had long since lost. Hope had deserted him. It lay in his desk drawers, as dead as the unfinished man- uscripts there. His nerves were frayed, his ” UA Greensireet News Co. amateur novel. Thousands were rejected, un- ceremoniously, every week. All the dreams in the world couldn’t re- place talent. He brooded on that, sipping at time accounted for. It was all he could do, just to get through each day as it confronted him. There was no energy left for delusions. He sat in the commons with a headache and a mood that was as black as his coffee. Almost, he could have reached out and touched half a dozen of his fellow ‘‘writers’’. smoky air toward the ever advancing clock that dictated his actions. Time to sleep, time There were some members of the literary society who wrote symbol-riddled free verse that only they pretended to understand. Weren't all those achingly personal poems simple self advertisements? ‘Look at me,” they said, “I'm sensitive, I'm farout, I'm acquainted with drugs...” The fellow who published his own books was seated in the far corner of the room gesti- culating as he argued with a friend who had recently made the local papers by sending a manuscript to Dour'pday. It all meant nothing. Money could buy you a book with your name on the cover. It couldn’t make you a professional author. And anyone could burden publishers. with their Louis Dreyfus Corp. and Garnac Grain Co. They may have made a few hundred million out of it but who knows? The thing is the government is run for their interest. Like Lockheed, you know, or ITT, or Mr. Con- nally’s Texas oil contributors. That theme runs through so much of Washington. Here's a letter from William A. Powell, president of Mid-American Dairy- men, explaining to a member why dairy organizations had anted up $300,000 to GOP fund-raising committees. As the dairy checks came in, Secretary Hardin (March 25, 1971) suddenly announced that he had reversed po- sitions and he would raise milk price supports from $4.66 to $4.96 per hundredweight (a boon worth about half a billion dollars to the dairy industry). In a confidential letter later made public, Powell said ‘We must have friends in government....Whether we like it or not, this is the way the system works.” Exactly; a wink, a smile, that’s the way the thing works. Dishonest? Well, you can’t prove anything. The new campaign contri- butions disclosure law went into effect April 7; it would. have been terribly embarassing for all contributors to Mr. Nixon’s hoped-for $45 million kitty to have their names in print, so $10 million was rushed in just before the deadline. There’s a jolly audacity about it which any but the squeamish will relish. It was legal, wasn’t it? Mr. Nixon’s so fun- loving; he probably roars with laughter over it. Maurice Stans was fund-raiser for Mr. Nixon in 1968 and knew all the businessmen; then he became Secretary of Commerce, where he knew just what the businessmen | Insights Well yes but then again. We're number one. Richard Nixon keeps reminding us of that. This country of ours is the greatest country in the world. We're on top. That’s a good feeling isn’t it? It gives us a sense of importance and pride. Here we are all of us together in our red, white and blue sitting on the winning team. How are we the greatest country in the world? Well, because we're the most powerful, says Richard Nixon. We can feel secure knowing that if push comes to shove we can destroy any other country in the world several times over. Well yes but then again. The flood I was told had left Wilkes-Barre looking like a war zone. I was sent the pic- tures and received reports on relatives and friends who had been left homeless. But nothing could have prepared me for the de- vastation I saw when I got off the bus at Public Square. And it was six weeks after the flood. The emptiness and cold silence of a town that had once been somewhat alive and busy. Driving home through Kingston and seeing devastation and destruction, empti- ness piled on top of emptiness was more than I had expected. I had seen the pictures, but nothing could prepare me for the reality of the thing. It was indeed frightening. But it couldn’t be like a war zone. Tragic and terrible as it was it couldn’t approach a war zone. For if the pictures of the flood damage could not prepare me for the reality of the thing, then certainly the pictures of the horror of Vietnam could in no way prepare any of us for that reality. Wars are worse. Well yes but then again. The tragedy of Wilkes-Barre was that it came as a Surprise. No preparation. No warning. Everything lost unexpectedly for no reason A natural disaster proving once again the humbleness of the human animal. People left homeless for no logical reason. Whereas a war exists for no reason. The devastation caused by war is not unexpected. It is the nat- ural result of man hating man. It can be justi- fied. It is necessary to accomplish the goal of the war. You have to destroy in order to prove your point. One cannot of course go around comparing tragedies. One cannot say this tra- gedy. is greater than that tragedy and so on and so forth. A tragedy is a tragedy. Tragic things have very little depth. That’s why the tragic color is black. There is only one shade of black. Well yes but then again. The tragedy of Wilkes-Barre is in a way, but of course not in all ways, greater than the tragedy of Vietnam because it was so unnec- essary. The tragedy of Wilkes-Barre didn’t free anybody. The tragedy of Vietnam is in a way less tragic because in the end it’s going to free people. Tragedy is the price one some- times has to pay for freedom. That is why you see the tragedy of Vietnam must contimue. Even though the destruction of Vietnam is 200 times worse than the destruction of Wilkes- Barre, the tragedy must continue. It is nec- essary for our country to continue to create tragedy in Vietnam rather than cope with the tragedy of Wilkes-Barre because the people of Wilkes-Barre have their freedom albeit not their homes, whereas the people of Vietnam have neither their freedom nor their homes. wanted; now he is back collecting funds for Mr. Nixon again from the businessmen. Who can object to that? It’s the way things are done here in Washington, a city where the architecture always seems so much more noble than the people. Who knows whether there was a sly wink in the Lavelle affair? Gen. Lavelle ordered unauthorized bombings in North Vietnam and was subsequently punished; poor chap, he was forced to retire on a $25,000 pension. That will learn him! But why blame the poor sold- ier? In a city where so much is done hy. a nod and a nudge how is he to know when rules were to be obeyed and which broken? Take another example, the delightful public might have got mildly irked over what Stewart Alsop calls ‘‘the scariest and nastiest thing that has happened in Washington since Joe McCarthy was in his heyday.”” How old- fashioned !--nobody gets upset anymore. We have had 10 years’ conditioning by Vietnam in the new morality; remember how we were told about the brave little people in Saigon where they had real elections and freedom of the press and everything? What a splendid little fellow Thieu was made to appear (he rigged the election, abolished self-govern- ment and suppressed the newspapers). A nation that is taught to swallow lies like this, and is willing to spend 50,000 young lives for it, isn’t going to make much fuss over the Watergate bugging. Two former White House assistants were involved in it, drawing part of their funds from the singular Stans bookkeep- ing operation where he kept $320,000 in ‘‘petty cash’ in an office safe. So what? As Bernard we must kill and destroy until the people of the less-than-greatest countries have the same freedom we have. If you're gonna be the most powerful, you also have to be the most fair. Well yes but then again. The government of course has its sympathy for the people of Wilkes-Barre. And the government of course will give whatever aid it can to you people. But as far as the billions of dollars are concerned--no, that has to be put into destroying Vietnam rather than re- building Wilkes-Barre. The United States can continue to be the most powerful country in the world without Wilkes-Barre. It cannot be the most powerful country in the world if it loses a war. Even though winning the war isn’t really going to free many people as evi- denced of course by the actions of the Thieu to wake, time to eat, time to think. phere in the carefully laid out schedule of thé day was the time to pursue his dreams? Looking at all those other would-be writers, he felt contempt. When would they come to understand, as he did, the power that ego wields over reason and see their ‘‘master- pieces” for what they were—hopeless, hack- neyed, devoid of talent, of no interest to any- one but themselves and their similarly de- luded friends? And at the same time he felt sympathy for them, because he had only recently learned the hard lessons that they too must learn. Maybe they would be better off without their burden of fantasies. Those who would climb the stark mountains of American ed- ucation on their way to the pinnacle of af- fluence must travel light. But ther@lreams that have died are sometimes even' heavier than living delusions. Nevertheless, people insisted on dream- ing. Some dreamt of becoming writers, others of acting on Broadway or touring the country with their own band, or becoming million- aires or . . or . . And how many of those dreams were ever fulfilled? How many suffered for dreams that would never see reality? How many aspiring young stars played out their roles in the crowd, forever disappointed, relegated to an office, or an assembly line, to a bitter: banal existance? : 28 From the commons his own future ap- peared hazy, but gray and horribly drab. Pre- sently a bell rang. He got up to leave. He was going through the motions of yet another day. It seemed he had nothing to look forward to. That was the hell of it. Barker, leader of the bugging gang said in an interview in the New York Times, “It’s the way it is. Everybody that does it knows about ° it.” ; Yes, that’s the new morality. Fund-raiser Maurice Stans is quoted as asking business- men for a political tithe of 1 percent gross in- come as a minimum GOP contribution. It’s to preserve free enterprise: “That’s a price to pay every four years,” he is gevied as It takes practice to achieve these effects. In"'Mr. Nixon’s celebrated ‘‘Philadelphia Plan’ he proposed quotas for Negroes in government construction projects bufggew he suddenly denounces ‘‘quotas’’ bicause Jewish groups dislike them. How does he ex- plain the switch? Simple: he didn’t set ‘quotas’ in Philadelphia, he set ‘‘goals”’....Or take welfare reform. Mr. Nixon’s famous 1969 plan would have doubled the number of people on welfare and put a floor under in- come--the silly liberals were ecstatic! But now, presto chango, he denounces income maintenance and says that ‘‘the welfare ethic destroys character.” This is politics at a new level. We have seen Presidents before who ran on their pro- mises, or who ran against opponents’ pro- mises, but never till now a President who ran against his own promises. Only a master in the art could repeatedly moisten our eyes with his story of poor little Tanya, the Russian war orphan, and simultaneously set his B-52 bombers methodically to making Tanyas all over Vietnam. These Tanyas, of course, are dark-skinned. government in Vietnam. Democrighy in Vietnam is defined by President Thieu%and al- though it may not be democracy as we know it, at least it isn’t called Communism. It’s called democracy. Well yes but then again. So you people of Wilkes-Barre being a part of the greatest country in the world have everything going for you. Because you live in America you have the right to start over. You have the freedom to rebuild. And America would help you more if it could, but the greatest country in the world can’t spend all of its money on its own people. It’s undem- ocratic. And if Richard Nixon is re-elected he will see to it that America remains the great- est country in the world. So even though you may not have your homes people of Wilkes- Barre at least you have your security. Richard Nixon will see to that. ¢ Well yes but then again. : Editor emeritus: Mrs. T.M.B. Hicks Editor: Doris R. Mallin News editor: ‘Shawn Murphy Advertising : Carolyn ‘Brennan HONOR ANN NTN IN <n Prd ped Pd pd
Significant historical Pennsylvania newspapers