A Memory and a Contrast
Steinfels, Peter
It was early on July 14, and the sans-culottes of my neighborhood were not storming the Bastille. They were looting a jewelry store. Earlier, when the lights went out we were amused. We...
...There was the excitement, of course...
...The police carried on admirably...
...For New Yorkers that was where, the real destruction took place...
...granted as to have elicited almost no comment...
...WA 99~8 or phone (S09) 328...
...Only gradually did the irregular shouting, the crash of glass and metal, filter into our candlelit sphere of enforced relaxation...
...STEVE LAWSON, a Contributing Editor of Yale~Theatre, is Literary Advisor to both Circle in the Square and the Williamstown Theatre...
...no longer the exOOOOOO 000 REVIEWERS IVAN SANDERS teaches in the English Department at Suffolk County Community College in Selden, New York...
...He may have been describing ours...
...They failed to report to duty as ordered...
...0016...
...RONALD CHRIST Corrections In Marilyn Moorcroft's article, "Floundering With Grass" [July 81, the paragraph on page 435 beginning ".No matter...
...In the last paragraph (p...
...they are now the affluent...
...cluded minority but the majority...
...but one can think of many other plausible, and some more admirable, reasons...
...Precisely because I am aware how easily errors infiltrate publieations, I was scrupulous not ot attribute any blame and went on to say that the "off-notes," of which I gave two examples, were "easily correctable by a copy editor...
...This was nothing compared to the devastation in the Bronx and Brooklyn...
...SISTER MARIE AUGUSTA HEAL, S.N.D., is a professor of Sociology at Emmanuel College in Boston...
...There may have been a few canny criminals who spotted the main chance and struck...
...Commonweal: 543...
...Surely the affirmation of and resistance to the Church's stand on peace, poverty and human rights--the themes of Pacem in Terris--had an impact on some of the Catholic population, especially those with college education on the one hand and those with Third World identity on the other The operational definition of favoring Vatican II changes is weak, as is the evidence that people accepted Vatican I I changes...
...Armand Nigro...
...He held a club in his hand...
...We gathered flashlights and walked down a few floors to enjoy a beer with a friend...
...for the country as a whole it occurred, as usual, on television...
...It was this, not distress at the theft of wrist watches 'and television sets, that inspired the common designation of looters as "animals...
...Yet in 1968 I had learned A MEMORY AND A CONTRAST PETER STEINFELS something, that what were termed rioters did not necessarily act like the unthinking, crazed "mob" of counterrevolutionary and (through it) psychological literature...
...An armful of clothes that are the wrong size, an electrical appliance they don't need and which, like the jewelry, will go to some Harlem fence for a pittance...
...If there was a group feeling it was precisely the consensus that group life had broken down...
...VILLA MARIA provldes a year-long opportunity for serious discernmeet with daily Mess and preyer, rel|gous community llvlng, theological renovtal end spiritual direction, in cooperation with _9 JESUIT UNIVERSIT...
...for the young, the element of risk, of dare...
...That it happened this way said something more, something not to be measured even in physical damage and years o f savings lost, something as appalling in the case of ten stores looted on Broadway as hundreds elsewhere...
...The evidence is convincing that Catholics of European background in America can no longer claim that they are the oppressed poor...
...end to offer good reading material to prisoners free of charge, Funds end correspondents needed...
...Weinberger's self-admitted "smug smile" is another matter...
...The Paris demonstrators labored intelligently, informed by a group cause, an d consciousness...
...Prisoners' Magazine In process of formation: Rosebud International Magazine...
...But deep in the news reports there was a fact about the police that bears notice, and not because it reflects on them in particular but on many of us who were n o t looting...
...Washington, D.C...
...When Hobbes warned what a thin skein of civilization separated us from the war of all against all, he may not have been describing, as he thought, all societies...
...Most looters I saw were caught up in a mood that precluded any real decision...
...Yet "seized" is too dramatic, too strong a word for these pathetic forays...
...I thought of demonstrators tearing down street-signs, prying up paving stones, gathering scrap material for their barricades...
...To the Editors: In my review of Michael Grant's book, Saint Paul (Commonweal 104/14 [8 July 1977]) an editorial embellishment of the text has made me sound disparaging to "sociologists," and I should like to correct that...
...I went to see, and south of 96th the mood was almost as it was in 1965...
...Law-and-order...
...If order was on the demonstrators' side, could law be far behind...
...but that was all much the same thing: given the opportunity, this was simply the behavior to be expected, the acting out of some of those bits of proverbial wisdom...
...As a matter of fact, Ms...
...SIC, thirteen times, Twelve words minimum...
...Minn...
...Despite or because of religious beliefs they are as achievement-oriented as any other Americans...
...JOSEPH A. FITZMYER, S.J...
...Hitler . . ." and ending " . . . Nathan Hales of her country" was Moorcroft's statement, not Giinter Grass's...
...We were about to learn that blackouts, too, are not what they used to be...
...and that this should be so is far enough taken for (Cominued on page 543) 19 August 1977:520 tendance and participation...
...They're looting up and down Broadway," another neighbor told me when I got outside...
...It was precisely the moment of greatest community vulnerability, when human solidarity should have been strongest, that the looters seized for their own advantage...
...Levine only of performing in the past with "grace and wit" and of not always being "in good voice at this l~rformance...
...The social contract went with the electric power...
...The darting movements on the street, the spontaneous work "teams," and above all the sound of metal giving way and glass Shattering, recalled Paris in May 1968...
...REV...
...ISIDORE SILVER iS a professor of Constitutional Law and History at John Jay College of Crimnial Justice in New York City...
...Bodies, lit like a flickering movie in the headlights of passing cars, raced along the far side of the street...
...Write: AOULT VOCATIONS Box 41N, Commonweal C l a s s i f i e d RATES: 60c a word, one tlme...
...Levine's work as a translator needs no defense from me: I have praised it orally and in print many times...
...Weinberger will also reread what I have written--this time with something more than occasional attention to the language--he will learn that I have, to use his word, "accused" Ms...
...444) I originally wrote, "But in the last analysis, it [Grant's book] is Paul for the sciolists:" If that sends you to .the dictionary, then my point will have been made--unless, of course, it was a printer's devil...
...The social contract in our cities hangs by a thread of copper wire...
...For box numbers add S0c per ln~[ertlon...
...WRITE: Fr...
...Disgruntled" over working conditions, explained one sergeant...
...What remains to be seen is where the newly affluent and successful majority will lead once it has achieved the power and prestige...
...Department of Biblical Stueles The Catholic University of America e e e e e e e e e Stetnfets (Cont...
...Make hay while the sun shines, strip a store while the power's out...
...It should not have appeared therefore in quotation marks...
...563QI...
...In their way, they were orderly, and it was this order, in contrast to the disorder of the rampaging riot police, that won so much sympathy...
...In the early hours of July 14, while 8,000 of New York's police officers struggled with the worst of an overwhelming situation, another 10,000 police who were neither on vacation nor sick leave, stayed at home...
...They are no longer those who can holler when stepped on by middle management, for they are middle management...
...S.J., Gonzage University, Spokane...
...Objective: to encourage prisoners worldwide to turn to Jeusus for kelp love, etc...
...Having seen neither, perhaps I did not attend the same event...
...ADULT VOCATIONS special program for men over twenty-one...
...S4c, seven times...
...I experienced the same shock--at the furious energy, the noise, the apparent violence to the furnishings of the city...
...What I saw, however, was enough...
...monthly in advance for more than three times...
...These are more than technical points...
...R e l i g i o u s Life FOR FORMER RELIGIOUS (men and women) who seriously consider re-entrance into religious life, end for delayed or late, blooming religious vocations (inCluding previously married...
...4420...
...Moreover, the Church's radical stand on the development of Third World people, beginning with Populorum Progressio in 1967, again called to public attention in the Call to Action of 1971 and the bishops' synods of 1971 and 1974 and implemented in the Detroit Call to Action Conference of 1976--ten years of intense action and reflection--is not among the variables measured at all...
...In the elevator shaft, a trapped neighbor could be heard exchanging reminiscences of 1965 with her would-be rescuers...
...OOOOOOOOO CORRESPONDENCE (Continued /rom page 515) eluding the botched metaphor), I see none of the harshness Mr...
...some more were broken into on Amsterdam, where an abandoned building was set ablaze, and on Columbus...
...To the north, the number of stores hit could be counted on your fingers...
...Before this decline is attributed wholly to dissatisfaction with the birth control encyclical, however, it should be noted that the Gallu~ poll trend line published in Religion zn America shows this steep descent beginning not in 1968 but in 1957...
...Before the flashing lights of the police cars they darted, like small swarms of carnivorous fish, back into the shadows, only to regroup and emerge and dart at their prey again~and all for what...
...Though the personal losses for the small shopkeepers and merchants were heartrending, there are many ways such losses are incurred in this life: a freak fire, a weekend traffic accident, a tragic illness...
...they raise problems about what is in fact measured by the items used...
...Cloud...
...Not half so much restraint and good judgment would have been exercised by the members of New York Civil Liberties Union...
...The fact remains that in their case, too, community allegiance, even the bond with their fellow officers, counted for relatively little...
...Classified payable with order...
...Weinberger discovers in it...
...COMMONWEAL, 232 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y...
...And nothing like the brutality in his letter...
...If Mr...
...How different on Broadway...
...T h o u g h spread throughout a section of the city, they were disciplined enough to stand by their barricades for a night of negotiations with the government...
...7c, three times...
...ROnERT PHILLIPS' Lewis Carroll study, Aspects of Alice, has just been re-issued as a Vintage paperback...
...Address Dale hrthon, Rosebud International, Box B.~I6S, St...
...In fact, they were not looting up and down Broadway...
Vol. 104 • August 1977 • No. 17
