Books
a decidedly negative view of Pike. There is of course much in it that calls for positive comment upon him, but the negative elements predominated for me. However, when I turned to the...
...Liberal or Marxist, we believed we could create a transcendent politics whioh would drastically alter the human condition...
...The political constraint is that the needed policies--redistributive tax and incomes policies designed to "zap" the corporate rich rather than, as with Nixon's controls, the workers...
...Heller's slim volume--which I like better on political grounds than the Brookings effort----could be dealt with on its own, but I think it more valuable to treat it here in conjunction with the other work...
...Our group," they write, "had been offered a range of opportunities unparalleled in human history . . . . We were free to explore new alternatives in love, careers, living arrangements, and basic values...
...it is asserted, have been bettering their position in Europe and the Mediterranean...
...It is, rather, an exercise in liberal, internationalist crisis manageCHRISTIAN MISSION UNDER AUTHORITARIAN GOVERNMENTS May 3-6, 1977 A working conference on Christian discipleship in relation to political power, with special reference to Chile, South Korea, East Germany, Ethiopia, and the United States...
...And that in itself is worth remembering because there are today many proponents of nuclear power-and many serious, nonfiction writers in the nuclear field--who pretend that it didn't...
...That is the major problem and promise of my generation...
...9 Robed McAfee Brown _9 James Burtchaeil, CSC _9 i b _o_._ . m.r...
...i sheepishly remember grave conversations with Commonweal: 55 high school friends who, like me, wanted to forsake the business world of our fathers, "become intellectuals" and teaoh, but worried whether we could be truly happy on the meager salary of a college professor or the shrunken status of a high school teacher of English...
...But it shows a significant section of liberal theorists moving to the right...
...In contrast, Pike in his life within it and struggle against it stood for a genuine desire for truth and reality, for freedom and generosity, together with a sober recognition of the value of suffering and of the transfiguration it could bring...
...My generation, or at least the affluent suburban section of ~t, was offered an incredibre range of career options...
...But the facts can speak for themselves...
...This means that inflationary pressures emerge in the market for adult males when the overall jobless rate is still high...
...This is not argued in ~be muddled, hysterical spirit of a Ronald Reagan defending Western civilization in the Isthmus of Panama...
...9 . . Many of the Colombians in...
...After hearing Johnson's announcement on TV, we were both crying for joy and cheering...
...Accordingly, this is a rather sad book...
...Past, present, or future...
...They were, as the authors ironically observe, "part of the healthiest, most beautiful, best educated, and most affluent generation in the history of the world...
...In this situation there is no froth of inflationary demand to be skimmed off . . . . " Secondly, Perry and Heller show that fiscal policy contributed to the last three recessions rather than, as in the Keynesian scenario, counteracting it...
...Registration: $40 plus room and meals Speakers: Jos(~ Miguez Bonino John Howard Yoder Thomas Stransky, C.S.P...
...These profiles imply some of the common characteristics of our generation, without slighting its complexity and variety...
...In plainer English, the White House is being told that there is no room for change...
...Getatchew Haile Frederick Bronkema Alfred Krass Choan-Seng Song William Pannell Jim Wallis Joan Chatfield, M.M_9 Joseph Holland Nora Q. Boots Joel Gajardo Sang Jung Park Paul Wee Simon Smith, S.J...
...But neither do they shrink from detailing the uncomfortable anomie which has beset so many of their interviewees...
...Finally, I must confess to being somewhat depressed...
...In that sense it's worth considering the two together...
...Heller is much better on this count, although overly brief...
...In other words, the future of nuclear power really depends on your own assessment of the present----and your faith in fool-proof technology...
...We were going to save Western civilization, and I was going to be part of it...
...Thank God he didn't...
...But one must be watchful and waxy, too...
...Like the authors of Prometheus, Oison spends some time looking into "the future," ending with a sobering quote from environmentalist David Brower...
...Perhaps, then, a careful follower of the nuclear debate should demand that whoever is speaking or writing be specific about sources and tenses...
...5, 1966, that something was wrong at the Fermi plant, and ends with the reactor's condition today: "a ghost that cannot be laid to rest...
...An example...
...Our euphoria during this period is captured by Medved when he recalls his own reaction to Lyndon Johnson's withdrawal from the 1968 presidential campaign...
...A booster, on the other hand, can say that by that time adequate safeguards to protect the material will be designed and installed...
...Those are all perplexing questions for anyone trying to follow and understand today's nuclear-power debate...
...The standard middle class oocupatiom are also well represented...
...I miss any sense of vision, of new possibilities, particularly in the anti-heroic book from Brookings...
...For the editors of that volume the American war in Vietnam was only a deviation, which "led us to venture beyond the limits of feasibili.ty :and good sense...
...questions and concerns that defy literary genre...
...The Prometheus Crisis is a sensational novel about a reactor meltdown that will be made into a movie...
...migrants always have done . . . . Now the new immigrants are doing them, and this perhaps is their great contribution to the host society...
...From a nearly complete innocence of politics, some of us moved, suddenly or gradually, to the position that all of life's problems had political solutions...
...Two million jobless and fourteen million poor people are eliminated by intellectual fiat...
...The authors are quick to note that they've taken "some license" with the design and operation of the plant, "both for dramatic effect and for simplification...
...We now have statistical cretinism...
...It's history...
...The reason is that the theories developed in these two studies are even now being debated by the Carter administration-to-be (.and indeed, by the time this notice appears, some of the Brookings authors may well have been translated to higher--policy --spheres...
...The military uses of the atom are obvious, and chilling...
...yses to help us choose between alternative uses of scarce resources...
...Fiction...
...With so many options to consider, was it any wonder that we had such a difficult time making up our minds...
...They offer, as never before, the potential for human or mechanical error that can lead to catastrophe...
...We Almost Lost D e t r o i t JOHN G. FULLER Reader's Digest Press, $8.95 The Prometheus Crisis THOMAS N. SCORTIA and FRANK M. ROBINSON Bantam, $1.93 U~eeeptable R i s k McKINLEY OLSON Bantam, $2.95 Nuclear Power WALTER C. PATFERSON Pelican, $3.95 WILLIAM J . LANOUET~E Fact and fiction are at odds these days in our nation's energy "debate," and nowhere more aggressively than in the rising rhetoric over nuclear power...
...And one area in which Washington failed to disburse monies that had already been voted was defense...
...Letty Russell Arne Sovik Joseph O'Hare, S.J...
...Now that is a clear indication that the funds should not have been committed at all...
...Setting National Priorities is the product of many minds, an eoonomiesocial tour d'horizon by means of loosely interrelated essays which differ in emphases but have, for me at least, a certain political coherence...
...the Government's infinite opportunities for passing the buck...
...Perhaps, too, we should be more critical of everything we read and hear about nuclear power...
...As George Perry puts it, "Inflation has existed alongside idle capacity, unemployed labor, and no excess demand...
...It seemed only reasonable to predict, as the article did in its subtitle, that they were "on the fringe of a golden era...
...As tohough we were the first generation to discover this elemental truth, we totally immersed ourselves in politics of one sort or another, casually dismissing the more personally- and qulturally-oriented members of our generation, the irresponsible "lifestylers," as hopelessly naive and frivolous...
...Such variety was unthinkable a decade ago...
...If we're wrong we can do something else...
...son have been able to choose solectivel~ among the industry's most serious potentials for catastrophe...
...cal speech writer...
...The idea for this book," wrote John G. Fuller, author of the nonfiction We Almost Lost Detroit, "sprang from a suggestion . . . that there ought to be a dramatic theme for a novel about a nuclear power plant that faces a melt-down crisis...
...I do not know, but the available evidence, including some of the facts provided by Blechman, convinces me that it is not necessary--that it would be wrong--to accept the proposition that defense spending must rise and crowd out social spending...
...Fact...
...So the case for increased defense spending--and the consequent "crowding out" of new domestic initiatives--is very precisely focused...
...His comment immediately aroused my skepticism, for the loose family of pseudo-sociological phenomena known as the "New Consciousness," "The Movement," the "Drug Culture," the "Sexual Revolution" and the "Aquarian Age" has elicited more superficiality, empty counter-cultural jargon, and sheer nonsense from American writers than any other area of our national life during the Sixties and Seventies...
...First, Brookings assumes that real defense spending must go up...
...And as nearly two decades of commercial nuclear power-plant operations have shown, errors can and do o c c u r . But what do these errors tell us...
...BOOKS What R e a l l y / / a p l N . , ~ d 1'o The Class o f ' 6 5 ? MICHAEL MEDVED and DAVID WALLECHINSKY Random House, $10 While browsing in a bookstore recently, I heard an intense young clerk describe this book to a customer as a study of "the Cultural Revolution's impact on the lives of our generation...
...For some of us, as the authors point out, this illusion was destroyed early by the first Kennedy assassination...
...In assessing the fact and fiction of these two books ir possible to find some errors...
...The two novelists were carried away when describing that plutonium---a long-lived radioactive contaminant--has a half-life of 240,000 years...
...Do they burden community services...
...Articles by: yron B. Bloy, Jr...
...When we learned that the Colossus was not going to roll over and play dead the instant we e~pressed our displeasure with it, some of us, in the manner of frustrated idealists in all ages, became embittered cynics whose rejection of politics was as total as our earlier embrace of them had been...
...As his research continued, Fuller wrote, "it became obvious that the story of the life and death of the Fermi breeder reactor [outside Detroit], from its inception to its demise, was a more powerful one than any that could be invented...
...With a few notable exceptions--Marx, Veblen, Galbraith, Leontiev, Myrdal--their accustomed tone of voice is relentlessly fanatically reasonable...
...If Fuller demurred from writing a "scare book," two other authors clearly didn't...
...Since some of them will have Jimmy Carter's ear, that is not at all good...
...There were two more or less distinct (if occasion~lly overlapping) strands running through the "transformed con.wiousness" of my generation: one cultural and the other political...
...it is worse when you consider that the reserve army of the unemployed which is thus accepted will be disproportionately recruited from women, blacks, chicanos and others least able to bear the burden...
...His writing ham appeared in The Nation, The Pm#resaive and tbd Washington Post...
...I would --perhaps uncharitably----summarize the political thrust as a reasonable, liberal plea to Lower Our Expectations...
...its four reactors to begin generating electricity for a national power grid that is suffering brownouts...
...It checked, infected and disorted his intellectual contribution to society and to the enterprise of human liberation...
...Walter Heller, to his credit, remains true to the Kennedy-Johnson domestic values and thus moves left by standing still...
...The new-new economics will have to cope with the problems created by the old-new economics by moving toward the Curt.her shores of liberalism and beyond...
...The Soviets...
...And they conclude: "It is our sincere hope that The Prometheus Cr/s/s is not a scenario for such a catastrophic accident in the near future...
...I should note that in a May, 1975 essay printed in his book, Heller anticipated the 1976 "pause" on general macro grounds...
...Had we not done so, few characters would have survived their adventures and our story would have been very short indeed...
...This callousness is further intensified by the fact that Brookings has apparently joined a new campaign to define poverty out of existence...
...He admrs that the economy has become more difficult to deal with but then insists that more radical planning and government intervention--on the Swedish model--could work...
...Those of us who ,have remained involved, hoping against hope for a somewhat better society, have had to learn to pace ourselves politically, lest we burn ourselves out...
...For there's legitimate dispute about not only what they are, but also what they mean...
...Sehultze halfway contradicts himself by ambiguously suggesting that national health may be an exception to his rule, but he does not explain how...
...tells how their fuel is mined, milled, enriched, used, and (maybe) disposed of...
...But I do not propose to do a global critique of these books...
...looks into the tangles of "legislative warfare," including current voterinitiative campaigns...
...How much "overkill" and how much "pseudo-kill" are we buying...
...But painful, in the way ~hat remembrances of any passage from innocence to experience can be...
...Perhaps because we studied so much history, we continue to insist, to ourselves at least, that we play a role in it...
...Whatever happened to the new man who was going to change America...
...The malice of churchmen against him amounted, as StringfeUow rightly observes, to murder...
...Patterson halts short of either endorsing or condemning nuclear power, but warns that "if we undertake it now we do so for all time," a concern that a recent British Royal Commission raised when it recommended delaying "as long as possible" the spread of atomic technology...
...Fermi was decommissioned by the NRC last year, and its fuel was hauled away to a federal repository...
...After all, it's just as irresponsible for boosters of the atom to predict a glorious future, in which all of today's problems are "solved," as it is for critics to assume that today's problems necessarily will be tomorrow's catastrophe...
...As one member of the Class of '65 put it, The faot that . . . I didn't settle into one thing has made me very happy...
...First, there is the incontestable faat of a new kind of inflation...
...One is classed as "fiction," and three as "nonfiction...
...Thus John Palmer and Joseph Minarik argue that ff "in-kind" transfers to the poor~food stamps, medical care, etc.--are translated into money terms, then with recovery only five percent of America will be poor...
...Sponsored by the Overseas Ministries Study Center in cooperation with IDOC/North America, Maryknoll Mission Institute, and Lutheran World Federation Department of Studies...
...I therefore approach two new books by economists--by a Brookings collective on the one hand, and Waiter HeUer on the other--with some ambiguity...
...Isolated in suburbia, we were originally unaware that political and economic forces exerted any influence on our lives...
...Fuller builds a carefully documented case against nuclear power by describing in much detail the political, economic, and technical pressures ~nd dec.isions that pushed the Fermi reactor to operation, and t6 the edge of a major catastrophe: a partial melt-down of its radioactive core...
...I enjoy the idea that I have absolutely no conception of what will happen to me ten years from today...
...But all four, in different ways, raise questions and concerns about the nuclear industry that must he taken seriously...
...Project Prometheus, a $5-billion nuclear-power station in California, is about to "go critical...
...Like all the other rhetorical "revolutions" of the Sixties, the phrase was devalued by its own hyperbole...
...Perry and Schultz effectively propose that we accept five percent to six percent unemployment as "norreal...
...If they're wrong, we're dead...
...What we needed were facts...
...But, as most of us have been forced to admit, these great expectations have not been fulfilled, neither in our parents' terms nor in our own...
...A last substantive point and then a conclusion...
...The Pentagon, wanting to make a show of toughness, had budgeted billions which it then discovered it didn't know how to spend...
...Because as the debate becomes more polarized some of the crucial subtleties can become simplistic---especially when they're being debated in media-minded election campaigns, as they were this fall...
...Some have been able to live more creative lives by taking advantage of the relative absence of externally-imposed "security" and conformity...
...lously ignores the under.4reporting factors in the poverty definition, e.& that the quality of the meal which is the fundamental unit of computation has never been ungraded even though its cost has been corrected for inflationary distortion...
...Emphasis added) Nota bene: Sehultze's colleague, Barry Blechman (and some co-authors), propose just such a modest rise in real defense outlays...
...Some elements of the current nuclear-power debate are personified as clearly here as they are anywhere: the electric power indostry's preoccupation with maintaining a good public image...
...It is a book whose value lies not so much in its own insights or conclusions as in the sober 21 7a~m'y 1977:54 stock-taking and self-realization it cannot help b~ trigger in younger readers...
...In Nuclear Power Walter C. Patterson, who lives and writes in England, gives the average reader a fundamental briefing of his ~opic...
...and that "nuclear parks" are now being planned that will locate radioactive stockpiles near as many as 20 power plants...
...This unprecedented expansion of culturally acceptable careers (not to mention the "lifestyles" that go with them) has produced mixed results...
...It's only 24,100 years...
...More than anything, it is a book about the process of learning our own limitations, both as individuals and as a collective political and cultural force...
...To many of them the "first" commercial breeder is planned for Oak Ridge, Tenn., in the 1980s...
...Queens are buying homes...
...the engineering community's powerful faith in technology...
...They've put four reactors together under one dome, then placed that next to a reprocessing plan~ laden with radioactive fuel...
...Both Schultze and Heller present utterly compelling data to show that Nixon's widely accepted thesis that the Sixties "threw money" at problems is nonsense...
...All that remains today, besides its concrete hulk, are more than 250 tons of radioactive sodium, the plant's volatile coolant, stored on the site in air-tight containers...
...I was gratified to find, however, that the authors actually managed to THE CLASS OF '65 ED MeCO~I.I,E deliver what the blurb on their book's packet promises: "a remarkable social history of a generation . . . and of the America in w~ich it came of age...
...In what can only be described as an ominous development that could have the most negative influence on the Carter administration, a section of liberal Keynesians, with Charles Schultze in the lead, have acquired a new tolerance for chronically high joblessness...
...For while his work is described as "the only book that tells all sides of the nuclear energy story," its emphasis is really on the atom's most vocal and responsible critics...
...Which is why that given must be rather carefully scrutinized...
...Do not, however, think that justice is secure just because it might be possible to hold the Pentagon at bay...
...First, one ~'rupu...
...With all his personal failings, Pike, not his Church, was the bearer of the Spirit...
...Secondly, Perry has an analysis of why the new inflation has appeared...
...I am thankful that people of such knowledge and brilliance have provided us with a richness of data and speculation about it...
...Against the background of an inauthentic Church his own Christian and human authenticity becomes clear...
...Fuller, too, places the Windscale reactor to the east of England's Lake District, when it's really to the west...
...Any layman who cares to study these facts--and there are a jungle of them--can learn enough to make his own judgment...
...Orlando Costas For applications and further information, write to: Gerald H. Anderson, Director Norman A. Homer, Associate Director OVERSEAS MINISTRIES STUDY CENTER Ventnor, N_9 08406 Publishers of the OCCASIONAL BULLETIN OF MISSIONARY RESEARCH Commonweal: 57 ment...
...What Really Happened chronicles the careers of football players-turned masseurs, artists, anardaist writers receiving public astistance, disgruntled Peace Cof~ volunteers, pushers, cocktail waitresses, actors, models, Hare Krishna people, communal farmers, professors of women's history, Jesus freaks, professional students, etc...
...But the malice of those threatened men sprang from the denial embodied in the narrow institutions of their Church of those values which constitute human liberation...
...And he n~ixes in many scary details of other serious reactor accidents: the SL-I in Idaho, where three men were killed...
...Let's put it this way," Brow~r says of his struggle with the nuclear industry's proponents...
...What Really Happened basically consists of the judiciously edited transcripts of interviews with 30 of the authors' olassmates at Palisades High School in suburban Los Angeles...
...The reactor melts down amid the typical disaster-movie subplots of murder, revenge, sabotage, terrorism, sexual liaisons, political corruption, corporate greed, public panic, and other assorted intrigues...
...The ]geonomg WALTER W. HELLER Norton, $8.95 S e t t i n g N a t i o n a l P r i o r i t i e s EDITED BY HENRY OWEN & CHARLES L. SCHULTZE Brookings Institute, $14.95 MICHAEL HARRINGTON Economists are, professionally at least, a rather dour lot...
...But they also "downptayed the hazards of radiation to the participants of our story...
...However, when I turned to the second part my evaluation gradually changed and I came to see Pike as indeed a flawed but essentially good and noble person...
...How many billions of such dollars are there in the Defense budget...
...They record the stories of individual members of the generation, told in their own words...
...The very existence of this record of errors - - i n the emotional context that the atom has---makes it the perfect subject for both fact and fiction...
...On this count, Heller is much better than Brookings...
...The fourth book also surveys the nuclear scene, but without Fuller's attention to accidents or Olson's concern with the atom's foibles and follies...
...More so, in fact, because the Fermi fast-breeder reactor did, and does, exist...
...So I take these works as an opportunity to comment, not just on economic theory, but on the political praxis it will soon inspire as well...
...The President is using the event to boast that his party has brought the coumry to energy self-sulficiency...
...Third, and above all, one stays in the library and avoids at all costs a trip to the South Bronx or Detroit where 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 caress DAws is C~o~rman of the D~ ~artment of l~ligien at Sir GeorF Wil ares University in Montreal...
...9 . ." Those who write about history in that dessicated--and inaccurate---way will learn nothing from it...
...Brookings simply takes up too many issues for a reviewer to confront in a 'brief space...
...Carter, I think, should be given every benefit of optimistic doubt in the first period of his administration...
...the NRX at Chalk River, Ontario...
...Blechman and his colleagues point out that we can no longer tolerate Pentagon waste...
...And he rejects the notion that there has been a "sudden and dramatic shift in the military balance in Europe . . . . " Moreover, Henry Owen, another contributor, is for pursuing detente, arms control and efforts to limit nuclear proliferation...
...A virtue because we do need hard numbers and rigorous anal...
...Without entering into the details of the heresy charges and of the canonical difficulties surrounding his marriages, I cannot do more here than state my own judgment...
...The citizen in the stree t, Keynes remarked, has a better instinctual sense of the reality of mercantilism than the learned scholars who proved 21 lam~'y1977:56 that state intervention in foreign trade was irrational...
...Should we dismiss them as mere "abnormal occurrences," the way the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the atomic industry do...
...But most of Fuller's other facts are true, and as ominous as the Prometheus reactor's fiction...
...By projecting today's nuclear situation into the future Scortia and Robin...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Abilp~i...
...A most disturbing policy conclusion is derived from this analysis--but not necessarily...
...And for the moment that gives ,both critics and boosters a field day...
...This means a "new head"-a new way of living~a new man...
...American (NATO) credibility might therefore decline and thereby invite Russian adventurism, say in Yugoslavia...
...And, still, a gnawing uneasiness surrounds us...
...Since the given is given, our creditable growl will be effectively financed by not meeting some of the most despera.te needs in the society...
...Somewhere, in all those liberal arts courses, in all those years of reading and thinking about men and movements who changed the course of history, the notion somehow took root that we were too damned good to sell insurance, t h a t we too should be involved in some small way in shaping the history of our times...
...In fact, the book was "novelized" from the film script by the authors of The Glass Inferno, Thomas N. Scortia and Frank M. Robinson...
...Medved and Wallechinsky pull it off by exercising, for the most part, a wise forbearance from the facile analyses and gauche generalizations which characterize so much of the writing on the subject...
...It contains more youth (and, I would add, 21 lanuary 1977- 58 women and minorities...
...Propaganda on .both sides is heavy and loaded...
...Instead, they are often fiercely independent and fall back on their own resources and networks in emergencies...
...It also became apparent that the most dawning evidence against the development of atomic power came not from the critics, but from its most avid supporters...
...And, predictably, it isn't...
...So it was, for example, that academic economists spent more than a century explaining why the crises that periodically crashed down upon their heads were due to undue tinkering with a basically sound system...
...And he can do so without being told what to think by either the passionate supporters of nuclear energy or their equally passionate critics...
...For most, it took the Vietnam war and the draft to force upon us the rude realization that the course of our lives was very much dependent upon the decisions of those in power...
...One of the factors that may have contributed to Gerald Ford's defeat was a slowdown in federal spending which may have been a cause of those falling economic indicators that dogged Ford's trail in the fall...
...The principal difference between these two books, it seems to me, is their perspectives...
...We" are more than a little afraid that it may be...
...It did not help but exacerbated the failings of his character as an individual...
...So, according to the rules long since established by the psychoanalysts of global terror, we must flex our military muscles...
...Has his new consclousnets gotten old to him in the last half-dozen years...
...A case in point that Surfaced since the Brookings book was prepared is quite illuminating in this regard...
...Future Issues will focus on spMtual life In academia, on retlonales for denominational colleges, on religion and the Intellectuals, on religion and the arts...
...Apparently the choice between fiction and nonfiction wasn't easy for at least one author...
...Neither of us is delighted that fact is so fast catching up with fiction," the authors say...
...The third current book, Unacceptable Risk, is a nonfiction attempt by Chicagn-based writer McKinley Olson to review the nuclear power controversy...
...Bluntly, the Episcopal Church in its dealings with Pike showed itself as a corrupt institution, representing a degraded form of human social existence, with a false set of values...
...In selecting the members of this Palisades High senior class as the focus for its 1965 cover story on "Today's Teenagers," Time magazine presented them as exemplars of "the smarter, subtler, and more sophisticated kids . . . pouring into and out of more expert, exacting, and experimental schools...
...And, of those to whom much is given, much is expected...
...He describes in a straightforward and readable way how reactors work...
...Only Heller's analysis points in the direction of a democratic radicalism...
...P, 11115~-entre SL, ~on ~ r e , MA 02159 Commonweal: 59 furore over the atom is understandable, for atomic powermas a new and awesome teclmology----has become a symbol for the uncomfortable tensions between science and society...
...Organized religion was the curse of Bishop Pike...
...So, for a host of personal, political, and economic motives the station begins operation--despi~e the protests of its general manager that it isn't yet safe...
...Medved and Wallechinsky do not indulge in the generational self-pity made popular by Allen Ginsberg during an earlier period of bohemian uncertaint y("I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by m a d n e s s . . . ' ) . They record the satisfaction, even the happiness, of those who have been able to adapt to the rootless, kaleidoscopic milieu of the last few years...
...wlr~.ua~ z. X.~OUETrE is On the staff of The National Observer...
...Up-to-date facts about "abnormal occurrences" and industry defections and unexplained deaths that should give any critical reader the willies...
...and speculates about where modern society's commitment to the atom will likely lead...
...r~ MCCONV~LE has worked as a unior organizer, investigative reporter and polit...
...The labor force, he argues, has changed...
...Second, one applies a foodbased definition of poverty to areas, like medicine, in which it does not work...
...Sharon Parks _9 Elaine Prevallet, SL _9 Robert Rankln _9 Edgar C. Reckard _9 Charles Shelby Rooks _9 Tony Stoneburner _9 Max D. Tlcklln ~ln the NICM JOURNAL, Vol...
...1, Winter 1977 Subscrll~lono: $L50 per year Single copies: t2.00 Back issues avelhlbie at $1.50 each Vol 1, No 1: Higher Education: A SpeciM Concern Vol 1, No 9- Jewish/Christian Dialogue Vol 1, No 3: Ecumenical/Evangelical Perspectives Vol 1, No 4: Retiglous Identlly of Women Each quarterly Issue of the NICM JOURNAL focuses on the theoretical and prectlcal dimensions of a particular concern of Jews end Christians In the "~ academic world...
...Fullers facts create a tension that begins with the terse warning call on Oct...
...public service employment of both first and last resort--are, I suspect, located to the left of the incoming Carter administration...
...Marx used to talk about "parliamentary cretinism," the view that politics was, in and of itself, the decisive determinant of society...
...Or should we accept them as portentous dangers, as the nuclear critics do...
...First, there is the question of efficiency...
...An obvious exaggeration, to be sure, but 21 l ~ J 1977:60 also worth remembering when you consider that there are today factual proposals for building four-reactor power complexes (under separate domes...
...2 No...
...But second, and more to the point, what does this incident say about some of Blechman's--and the Pentagon'~--basic assumptions...
...And this he does brilliantly, by marshaling a vast collection of technical, legal, and political facts in a very readable, though selective, style...
...But beyond the publisher's fiction that Olson's book "Cells all sides" you'll find a wealth of well-researched and clearly explained facts...
...If only Ford, the Adam Smithian, had listened to Heller, the Keynesian, he might have won...
...What changes one's view of Pike is the contrast that emerges between the values he stood for and the values represented by the Church...
...Undoing it will be one of the paramount politicalintellectual tasks of the next period...
...Because if we can't learn from the "facts" of the past and presenr we may be inviting the "fictions" of the near future...
...The Cultural Revolution...
...For it's only if we are careful to identify and admit the problems of the past and the present that we'll be able to avoid the fictions of the future...
...Fuller reports the past...
...In his best-selling 1970 book, The Greening o] America, Charles Reich breathed forth what could be called the Weltansohauung of an era when he earnestly wrote that There is a revolution coming . . . the revolution of a new generation . . . . It will originate with the individual and with culture and it will change the political structure only as its final act . . . . At the heart of everything is what we shall call a ohange of consciousness...
...The second part places him in the context of the Church...
...MeCarthg (C~t...
...Not nihilistic or maudlin, for it includes glimpses of individual success and acts of personal and political courage...
...Thus, Charles Schultze, a co-editor, writes, " . . . without a significant further reduction in the real level of defense spending or an increase in the...
...In part the escalation of fear and COMMUNITY-MAKING AS MINISTRY: a co.ective Inquiry into the meanings, purposes, and strategies of Jewish ~'~'~=~' and Christian community-making, particularly in the academic world...
...Along the way be also resurrects a then-secret debate from the 1960s within the Atomic Energy Commission about the likely fatalities, illness, and property damage from a core melt...
...The question his biography provokes is how to prevent the destructive effects of religious institutions when these are in a state of rot because deprived of an adequate functional relationship with society...
...That is bad enough on the face of it...
...To what degree do the analyses of Russian and American strength depend on watered numbers on both sides...
...Moreover, as Heller points out, there has been systematic miseducation in this area...
...We went down to the New Haven green with about three thousand other Yalies, carrying American flags and singing "Glory Hallelujah" and "God Bless America" . . . I was convinced there was new hope...
...Yet a profound cultural transformation did in fact begin to take place during those yearz...
...The Brookings volume is, as usual, enormously useful for anyone concerned with social policy...
...MICHAEL HAIUUNOTON, Ch~rn11~ Of t~e Democratic Socialist Organi~ng Cc~_anittee, is author of The Other America, and The Twilight o~ Capitalism, among othr books...
...one might see that the elegant statistical theories are wrong...
...The other main theme weaving itself through the consciousness of my generation is essentially political...
...they pay property taxes and keep up property values because for many their homes are an investment . . . . Welfare dependency is minimal, and has changed hardly at Commonweal...
...For instance, Blechman urges a certain reduction in the military commitment to East Asia and the Pacific (including the possibility of some withdrawals from South Korea if that can be done without panicking the Japanese...
...Yes and no...
...But the peaceful uses, too, offer us some spectacular promises and some special risks...
...I SUBSCRIBE TODAY I I Name I Address I I I i Payment enclosed $ ~ I I NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR CAMPUS MINISTRIES Dept...
...That's rather lofty, but it's sincere...
...and the Windscale in England...
...A vic because it is the deepest instinct of these people to accept the given as Godgiven and not to recognize in it a manmade changeable artifact...
...But the more we discussed the idea the more we worried that a fictionai account might produce just a scare book...
...Yet for all its calculated excitement, there is much that rings true in this novel...
...There are, I think, two broad lines of criticism which cart be addressed to this thesis within the framework of assumptions which will themselves 'be crticized later on...
...That is a virtue and a vice...
...His "given" will not permit it, or any other serious increment in the nation's minmal humanity...
...Our energies and idealism have not proved as limitless as we once believed, and consequently, we have been forced to seek a better balance between the personal and the political...
...This means, as Heller notes, that the conservative--and widely believed-theory that inflation is the result of massive federal outlays is a myth...
...Such errors---man-made and mechanical~appear repeatedly in four current books about nuclear power...
...In retrospect his life may be seen as a long struggle to free himself from organized Christianity, beginning with his departure from the Roman Catholic Church and ending shortly before his death with the announcement of his departure from the Episcopal Church and the recognition that the organized Church was a sick--even dyingNinstitution...
...We were, of course, as naive in our expectations as the Reichian cultural revolutionaries were in theirs...
...I've had a lot of experiences that have definitely given me a better understanding of how to live my life...
...He is against having Defense prepare to take on the Soviets in the Third World...
...Indeed, the "eight scientists and professionals" who read the manuscript "to insure its accuracy," a Bantam publicist concedes, are the critics themselves...
...A critic of nuclear power can gaze into the future and conjure up a world in which largescale use of atomic energy will create countless opportunities for terrorists to steal radioactive material and make an A-bomb...
...So the problems of unemployment and poverty are dealt with definitionally in the Brookings vohune...
...He reviews the nuclear industry's yawning "credibifity gap...
...and examines nuclear power's safety and economic problems...
...share of GNP devoted to federal spending, little leeway is left in the next five years to expand domestic programs or to inaugurate large new ones_9 The leeway would be even less, indeed would virtually disappear, if it were decided to expand the real level of defense outlays modestly during the next several years...
...Oecupatinns our parents would be appalled to consider suddenly became culturally acceptable...
...And yet it contains many details and procedures that--if continued and carried to extremes--could approach the scale and consequences predicted in The Prometheus Crisis...
Vol. 104 • January 1977 • No. 2
