i Eo | =n 3 2 {7 1. a Cg = Q of EDITORIAL Vandalism Fall is in the air. The leaves of trees have turned color, apple cider is the drink of the day, and evenings grow much too chilly to spend outdoors. Retiring to our firesides, we seek the serene comfort that only these mellow hours of autumn accord. Then suddenly, splat, and the spell breaks fu as a smashed egg oozes down the living room Sh window. ub True, fall is in the air, but nowadays harvest time #* ‘heralds a lot more than the tranquil bounties of yesteryear. It seems the energy bred from these crisp October nights finds a rather annoying, if not ; 2 ¢' alarming outlet in the mischievous activities of the .. vandal. + From soaping windows to tossing eggs, these og pranksters go upon their roguish way, often causing + more damage than they’ jokingly intend. o- This season as the tricksters partake in their “surprise raids on unwary residents, perhaps they should be a slight more cautious themselves. Watch ” out for suspicious looking characters in unmarked & cars. For these men are members of our local Back 3% Mountain police force and you can be certain they are resolved to do their job. Anyone caught taking “ part in malicious mischief will be prosecuted. The |» parents of the children will be held responsible and will be required to pay for any and all personal or property damages. ¢ Whether or not our children have access to other recreational facilities, vandalism nonetheless rates as a very popular substitute. Obviously it is not 7 “cute”, as many people oddly feel, and can only be regarded as a badly chosen resort to fun. So at this especially susceptible time, parents please be | advised: “it’s 11:00, do you know where your © children are?’’ fer The Payoff Natural gas prices in the U.S. ereased $111 ‘million in 1970 and $531 million in 1971. This year’s increases are expected to be much greater, per- haps into the billion-dollar figure. To the Federal Power Commission, which re- gulates the energy source on a national scale, and the oil and gas industry, which: produce. it; the in- rease is the normal result of d“shortage of supply and a growth in demand. But to Sen. Frank Moss : . (D.-Utah) the increase is the result of a pay-off by President Nixon to campaign contributors who wanted the FPC stacked and reshaped into an arm of the White House thay had helped bring into of- “fice. ‘Since then the FPC has been stacked just like the , industry wanted. Now the rewards are flowing in like oil out of a spindletop. The FPC appointments by Mr. Nixon now be- come more interesting than ever. They included Gordon Gooch, general counsel, and Rush Moody : Jr., commissioner, because of their links to Penn- zo0il United, a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate. The company owns United Gas Pipeline, with the * FPC regulates. : 4 Sen. Moss has charged that Pennzoil United fig- © ures importantly in the $10 million raised by the ~ Committee to Re-elect the President before the law equiring disclosure of campaign funding sources ook effect. And according to a recent report by the House Banking and Curency Committee, the com- any’s president said he had determined from chief Nixon fund raiser Maurice Stans that it was ‘‘okay’’ ~ to bring to Washington $100,000 in contributions from Mexico. Later, according- to Sen. Moss, a oung man brought the president a pouch contain- ing four checks totaling $89,000 from a Mexican Bank and 110 $100 bills. The cash, plus $600,000 more in currency were put into a suitcase, Sen. Moss charged, and two Penn- zoil employes took it to a Houston airport. That night they flew to Washington in a company plane and delivered the money to the committee’s office, just 26 hours before the contributions disclosure law took effect. In days gone by Interior Secretary Albert Fall went to jail for accepting less that a $200,000 “‘gift”’ from oilman Harry Sinclair. The Teapot Dome | scandal shook the very essence of the American conscience of the 1920’s and probably played a part | in President Warren Harding's death. In 1972 politics, however, despite the wide ex- posure of such political shenanigans, the voting i public appears either immune or simply tired of such scandals, which might lead one to contem- plate that in the future Americans could be char- acterized as a people little gifted with enough in- J tellectual integrity to govern themselves. hy or a. Changes A MERRY PLAY, IN A MEDIEVAL MANNER, BETWEEN POOR VOTER THE HUSBAND, TRICKSIE, HIS WIFE, AND MR. MONEY, A VESTED INTEREST. The scene is the combined kitchen-dining- living room of a medieval house. A trestle right a door opens onto the street; the door to Poor Voter’s bedroom is on the opposite side of the room. As the play begins Poor Voter comes in through the street door carrying a pie. He is short and rather insignificant in appearance. His tattered, unmended clothes and his worn sandals make it clear that he lacks wifely care. He looks anxiously about the deserted room. POOR VOTER: (addressing the aud- ience) ‘Ere I leave for the fields my Tricksie doth say that she pines and weeps alone all day, thinking of nothing else but me. So today I'm home early. Where on earth can she be? (Tricksie enters from the bedroom door. She is a homely woman with a swarthy complex- ion, a prominent nose and drooping jowels.) TRICKSIE: (breathlessly) Why home so soon, husband dear? POOR VOTER: Remembrest thou not? It hath been four years, since we were wedded, you and I. And to celebrate I've bought this pie. (Tricksie takes the pie and sets it on the table. As she does Mr. Money wanders out of the bedroom. He is wearing little more than a rumpled vest, a bow tie and a haughty air. He and Poor Voter notice each other simultan- eously.) POOR VOTER: (shocked) What!? Comest thou from my bedroom... Thou whore- son dog! MR. MONEY: (cleverly feigning confu- sion) I trow, I have never seen such a fog. It rose in a moment, I swear by the cross. I could not see a thing. I was totally lost. TRB from Washington The biggest change in Washington in 50 years, I think, is the growth of the Pre- sidency. All the talk here now is about war and taxes. The one thing that is taken for granted for both is that the President is ar- biter. He decides. Congress is Democratic but it yields to the Republican President anyway. It didn’t used to be that way. To get a fixed point on the change let’s go back 50 years. All right, it’s 1922. Warren Harding is president. Things moved slowly then. You went to Europe by boat. You went to Los Angeles by train. Little radio; no television. “Back to normalcy,” was the cry. The State Depart- ment and the War Department were housed in one building on Pennsylvania Avenue. Maybe take Coolidge or Hoover if you prefer), but one thing you can say, power wasn’t concen- trated in one man as now, in an aloof mon- archial, puissant Presence (with a capital “P’’) in the White House. There were other centers of power. The change has come almost imperceptibly, but that is the big change. : For example, in 1922 there was a Cabinet with some collective responsibility. There were crooks in it like Albert Fall and Harry Daugherty, but there were also powerful fig- ures like Hughes and Mellon and Hoover, and the president consulted them. How things have changed. The real power is centered not in the Nixon Cabinet but in the executive office of the president, Peter Flanigan, Erlichman, Haldeman; faceless figures, they are the center of government; they decide who sees the president. An amusing example A Greenstreet News Co. Publication POOR VOTER: (rushing toward Mr. Money, shaking his fists) Such lies will do little for thy health. TRICKSIE: (stepping between the two men) No lies! His demeanor speaks for itself. POOR VOTER: Ha! To add two and two—that takes no art. TRICKSIE: Then why aren’t ye rich, if thou art so smart? (to Mr. Money) Tarry, poor soul, Come, have a seat. After that fog, ye must needs eat. (They sit down at the table and begin to eat the pie while Poor Voter fumes. Obviously, he is accustomed to abid- ing by his wife’s wishes.) TRICKSIE: (to her husband) Now dear- est, give our visitor his due...He’s a man of affairs. He looks after thy interests for you. POOR VOTER: (aside) Aye. Of his inter- ests I have nary a doubt. And he can only be in if I be out. (Tricksie leans over and kisses Mr. Money on the nose with a loud smack.) POOR VOTER: (whirling at the sound) By the red on thy nose, I've caught thee in the act! MR. MONEY : (hastily wiping the lipstick off) Nay. My nose is worn red from the grind- stone, and that’s a fact. POOR VOTER: Villain! Wouldst thou liest in my house yet again? I swear there is something between you twain. MR. MONEY : I tell thee plain, thy judge- ment’s unsound. A moderate woman she is, POOR VOTER: Yet her position wilt | Riffs On the front page of last Sunday’s New York Times there was a photo of Quantri, a city recently ‘‘liberated” by the efforts of the Army of South Vietnam and by the grace of American bombs. There it was--nothing but a pile of rubbish out of which stood a single tree, dead, but noticeable in the fact that it was still standing. A whole city reduced to nothing but an expanse of broken buildings, leveled to the ground by months of bombing and shelling, resembling the most wreched deposit of twisted junk imaginable. The South Vietnamese had retaken Quan- tri. A great victory except for the fact that there was nothing to be taken anymore. The people who once lived there are now herded into refugee camps, their homes and lives destroyed by our war. A city is a human en- vironment and cannot be called a city when not inhabited. The South Vietnamese now control a junk pile with a name, but there’s no city there. A great victory. by William Scranton 3rd When Senator McGovern came to Wyoming Valley after the flood he likened it to a bombed out city. Compared to Quantri, Wilkes-Barre looks like Disneyland. At least the flood left buildings standing, some un- damaged. Evacuees live in trailers, not in tin huts. Most importantly, Wyoming Valley was devastated by nature, not by man. The only similarities I can see is that neither nature nor man can give convincing explanations for the destruction they have caused. Somehow the meaning of this war has failed to touch America. We are a country more concerned with business and making money, with the state of our economy, with pensions, fringe benefits, and the Saturday afternoon football games. We are fat and growing fatter everyday, and as we swath ourselves in comfort we suffocate our sensiti- vity to the sacredness of life and the holiness of pure being. We are so busy proving that we are the most powerful and richest and the happiest and the smartest people on earth faulty. Her heels are too low. TRICKSIE: (to her husband) Enough of thy prattle. Thou raisest my ire. Curb thy fool slouches over to the fireplace and begins, re- signedly, to throw logs onto the flames. At the table Tricksie and Mr. Money are whispering and giggling. The pie is almost gong) POOR VOTER: aside) To think'7or four years past she said all she knew was to look to my pleasure...the black hearted = shrew. Cruelly hath she deceived me and hard is the lot of the husband who lacks what his neigh- bor has got. MR. MONEY : (belches discréetly then, in low tones, to Tricksie) I pray thee my dear, some wine have him fetch. thee sorrow! Thou liar! Thou wretch! (he runs toward the table brandishing a poker) thy peace, Poor Voter. Be of good cheer. In faith I would make one thing perfectly clear. May my honor be forfeit if this be not true, Tricksie is faithful only to one. ) POOR VOTER: But was I not a ki##ve! To my disgrace I thought thy guilt as plain as the nose on thy face. I thought he was in thy favor and I was out, but these sweet words abateth my doubt. (repentant. Head hanging for shame. Poor Voter moves back to the fire- place.) : MR. MONEY: (in a whisper to Tricksie, obviously trying to control his laughter) What fables! What mocks! Well said my dear! The fool believes what he wouldst...while we make our cheer. TRICKSIE: (addressing the audience) What a winning sport it be when one ig>lind in a game for three! And the bigger twp?horns that on Voter weigh, the louder the fanfare on election day. was the effort of Republican Senator Percy of Illinois to talk to the President recently in be- half of the Consumer Protection Agency bill. Somehow he couldn’t arrange to lay his case before the President but Bryce Harlow, fight- ing against the consumer bill for Proctor & Gamble, had no trouble with the White House establishment at all. How about the press 50 years 3 higo? The press, in its curious way, has always been a counterbalancing power to the president. In- were Ray Clapper, Clinton Gilbert, Bill Hard and Tom Stokes in 1922, but there has been a loss of power, I think. Fifty years ago Harding instituted twice-a-week press conferences and reporters questioned him closely; Mr. Nixon contemptuously has all but ended. them Supreme Court last year came close to abridging the freedom of the press in its right to publish the Pentagon Papers (and may have a majority on this issue with another Nixon appointee). As this is written, a re- porter is in jail in New Jersey because the court ruled in another case, 5 to 4, that re- porters must divulge confidential news sources (all four Nixon justices voted “yes’’). Is this a trend? It makes us shiver a little. The Supreme Court can be as much of a brake on the President as it was 50 years ago but a powerful President has means of under- cutting it, temporarily at least; he can pack it with men of his own thinking as Mr. Nixon is doing, or he can urge Congress to limit its authority as he has been trying to do in his support of the anti-busing bill, or he can urge a change in basic law. “We would have to move on the constitutional amendment front,”” he warned on busing, Oct. 5. The court does not initiate matters and rarely deals with foreign affairs. So that leaves Congress. The story of the past half century has been the gradual decline of Congress and the rise of the White House. It’s been like a see-saw, one down, the other up. Theoretically Congress has the power of the purse if it will exert it; the Founding Fathers assumed it would be the active agency in Washington. It could be and would be if it put its house in order. For 50 years (and longer) observers have said that--and Congress hasn’t acted. Now comes a show- Why hasn’t Congress, a Democratic Con- gress, acted on taxes? The tax disparity. is outrageous. The tax rate on wages and sal- aries is higher than on income from divi- dends; why should the income from a man who sweats for a living be taxed at a rate higher than the one who cuts coupons? Why should states hawk tax-free bonds like Papal indulgences in the Middle Ages? Under the present law a family of four with an income of $10,000 would pay the following Federal tax: a garage mechanic who earned it in wages, $905; a speculator who sold corporate stocks, real estates or other so-called capital gains, $98; a man who clipped coupons from local or state bonds, no tax. It has been a sorry sight to watch the wind-up of this 92nd Congress. ‘No fault” in- surance was dropped. Health care and tax re- form got nowhere. Two years’ effort to re- gulate private pensions, and three years’ de- bate over the Nixon welfare program, pro- duced no result. Regulations for strip mining and a tighter gun control law disappeared; big retail houses ganged up against the con- sumer protection agency program. The session wound up with Mr. Nixon cracking the whip and demanding his $250 billion spending ceiling and the House supinely going along. In all these years Congress has refused to accept the minimal self-discipline of setting up a budget and squaring income with outgo. Be- cause it would not put its house in'ggdler its powers have leaked away. And it ha¥ had to hear the President lecture it as he did last week. Congress permits the President to take funds ' appropriated for one progran and transfer them to another. In 1971, for ex- ample, the Office of Management and ggdget impounded almost a third of the mon&} ap- proved for housing and increased the Pent- agon’s spending $2 billion above the Penta- gon’s own estimates. The power of the purse is all but gone. Senator McGovern in his splendid speech on Vietnam last week noted that Mr. Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia was ‘‘made without the approval of Congress as required by our Con- stitution.” Where does it end if the old system of checks and balances disappears? Mr. Nixon is not the man-on-horseback type. But if one should come along? As for the McGovern speech, we thought he summed up the election aptly: Mr. Nixon has described the Vietnam War as our finest hour. I regard it as the saddest chapter in our national history.” that we have no time to live, because living requires inner awareness of the whole un- imaginably exquisite process of being, and it is that sensitivity we have lost. Look for a minute at what we are doing. We live in a world supposedly dedicated to the brotherhood of man yet we continually build walls around ourselves until it is impossible to open ourselves up to each other. What are these walls? Democracy, Communism, the United States of America, the Soviet Union, wealth, poverty, intelligence, good, bad, right, wrong, weak, strong, ugly, pretty, and any other man made distinctions with which we label each other and thereby create differ- ences and walls. The United States of America is a fiction, nothing more. As all nations, it is merely a convenience created by man to bring order to life and to serve mankind. Man creates government, man creates national bound- aries. They are not real. Government’s fun- ction is to serve men. Yet all of a sudden America is a god, and we worship the flag and we worship our country and we worship our way of life like it was sacred. We perpetuate unimaginable horrors on the people of a country half way around the world because we are protecting democracy, yet democracy is simply an idea. Suddenly ideas are more important than people, people whom we willingly destroy in the blind preservation of our own fiction. Nationalism separates the people of this planet from each other, and de- mands devotion to something that is actually unreal. The result is that we end up killing people and bombing villages for the sake of honor (or is it pride?) as if honor is something sacred. The brutal truth is that honor means more to us than flesh and blood, and we think nothing of sacrificing a few thousand pea- sants to preserve this god we have created. But none of this seems to matter to any- body. Life goes on day by day. The pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of wealth, the pursuit of power, the worship of winning, the contin- ual contest of man vs. man all for the reward of being better, stronger, richer and more successful. We live on competition, on tearing each other down to build ourselves up, on win- ning the race and dominating our neighbor. It is from the roots of our daily lives that the war in Vietnam has sprung, yet somehow we miss the horror of it all. I grew up in a generation that became so horrified at the war that they took to the streets screaming and yelling their indigna- tion. Only screaming and yelling didn’t stop the killing, and neither did bombing buildings or singing songs. In fact, we just created more madness until we saw that you can’t end violence with violence and you can’t stop bombs by marching. Things are quieter now, but the indignation remains. Little by little my friends and classmates began to deal with the world on their own terms. Some left the country, some became farmers, some be- came lawyers, some became politicians, some play music, some became revolution- aries, some became junkies, some are happy, some are tired, and some are dead. But the war continues, and therein lies the agony. Be- cause no matter what we do the war is still ours. We cannot cut ourselves off from the society that created the war, yet we Ao stop it. We live in this country, play by this country’s rules, consume our system’s goods, pay taxes that buy the bombs. We play this country’s music with this country’s electri- city, we plant America’s seeds, burn Amer- ica’s gas, drive America’s roads, and eat America’s food. We even vote in this coun- try’s elections, and the war goes on. “America, love it or leave it” read( the bumper stickers. Only you can’t leave. You can move to Canada, run to Sweden or America. You can’t leave because the war is still there and you are a part of that war and no matter where you go it won’t leave you. You may even make a separate peace be- tween yourself and your fellow man, but you are part of the body of man and that body is destroying parts of itself. And there 1s no- One thing Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson and George McGovern and Creigh- ton Abrahms and Billy Graham and William Fulbright and Melvin Laird haven't told us is what is the price for destroying Quantri. More importantly, they haven't told us who will pay that price. 2 Some dsy » we will have to pay our dt Editor emeritus: Mrs. T.M.B. Hicks Editor: Doris R. Mallin News editor: Shawn Murphy Advertising: Carolyn ‘Brennan
Significant historical Pennsylvania newspapers