Here and Now

...And who are the "we" on whom this responsibility devolves...

...Having first agreed that there is nothing in the nature of man which makes war inevitable, they addressed themselves to the problem of what could be done to avoid future wars...

...Naturally, by "we" the speakers meant America...

...This is the political reality we now face...

...But three distinguished members of our intellectual community can get together at this moment to talk about war and, totally ignoring even the existence of the Soviet Union, recall America to her responsibility for keeping the peace...

...instead of wasting our money on a missiles race, we must step up our program of cultural exchange...

...Mead and Mr...

...he is no doubt already discredited by his positions in domestic affairs...

...Especially, we have trained ourselves to confront the modern political reality...

...On whatever side of the political fence and after all these years of incontrovertible proof, we cannot accept the idea that the Soviet Union is an evil with which there can be no compounding but only ceaseless battle on every conceivable front—including, when necessary, the military front...

...No political harm was ever done by the SPCA...

...It is apparently up to America alone, or America in the exercise of her influence upon the world, to take things in hand and see that the innocent children of the world are not annihilated...

...I won't stop here to assess the propriety of the Library's decision, or the strategy of putting what amounts to a pacifist program on the air at this particular time in our country's history...

...the more troubling the reality, the more we feel challenged to confront it...

...We must become militarily stronger than the USSR...

...such primitive affirmations of the familiar world are impermissible to us...

...Now we pay the price for our delusions, and how strange indeed, how lunatic, that even as we approach the final reckoning we still try to comfort ourselves with the same old fantasies...

...The difference is, however, that our automatic thinking has a direct political consequence, and it can be a disastrous consequence, whereas the protests on behalf of a dog have no effect worth noting...

...The outcry on the part of dog-lovers must perhaps be understood as an effort, however automatic and primitive, to keep life recognizable...

...With the Soviet Union demonstrating its extraordinary scientific skill, the time has at last come when we can no longer afford not to arrive at terms of peaceful coexistence...

...Jones would be the first to deride the kind of thinking which, with the future of mankind at stake, concerns itself with the mistreatment of a single dog...

...The talents which we have hitherto used for purposes of destruction we must now turn to peace...

...But this is the moral crisis of our times and we might as well confront it...

...But the gravest political damage has been done, and can continue to be done, by symbolical thinking put forward in the guise of practical political advice...

...all the thoughtful and conscientious citizens of our own country...

...The dog-lover affirms his familiar world by reasserting the preciousness of a dog and by refusing to face the political meaning of the satellite...

...Yet protest against the mistreatment of a dog no doubt has its own psychological uses...

...Although the three speakers seemed to recognize certain differences among themselves, to me there v/as no ascertainable divergence in their points of view...

...It is perfectly clear, said Ellender, that the Russian people want peace as much as we do...

...If America has an external enemy, or if there is abroad a political force which menaces our peace and security, none of the speakers thought it worth naming...

...We define ourselves by our relation to reality...

...if the Kremlin invites us to a summit conference, we must attend in a proper mood of sympathetic understanding...

...Had I ever been told that the day would come when I would be convinced that the first requirement for my country was military supremacy in the world, I suppose I wouldn't have believed it...

...We worry about the political import of this scientific advance...

...Cousins did murmur something about the UN—one gathers that the big job is a re-education of American public sentiment so that it will be against, instead of for, war...

...the speakers did not specify, although Mr...

...How this is to be accomplished...

...For liberal readers, perhaps it is unnecessary to dwell on the remarks of Senator Ellender...

...Thus, it was with the profoundest dismay that I listened the other day to a discussion on the causes and cure of war among three liberal writers—Margaret Mead, Norman Cousins and the novelist James Jones—which was part of a television program called "Faces of War...

...Of course, the bitter irony of the situation is that we would never have been brought to this tragic point had we not blinded ourselves to the truth about Russia through all these long years in which she was building her present terrifying strength and in which we could have done a myriad things to stop her onward movement...

...For the rest, the Soviet Union had no place in the program, not even as a co-conspirator in our animalistic urge to destruction...

...Now I daresay that Dr...

...The program had been devised for Veterans' Day...

...On the same day that this television discussion took place, Senator Ellender, returned from one of his periodic visits to Moscow, where once more he had touched his sensitive finger to the pulse of the Russian people, made his report to the nation...

...Anyway, what most interested me was the forum itself, which was an unprepared exchange of opinion...

...What cannot be ignored, however, is the place where a typical liberal response and a typical reactionary response (for, make no mistake about it, Senator Ellender's view of Russia becomes more typical every day of conservative and reactionary sentiment here) meet—in the refusal of the Soviet reality...

...But most of us function on a higher than dog-loving level of mentality...

...This is no conclusion that any peace-loving individual, and especially a woman and a mother, sets on paper lightly...

...We have only to observe the unalloyed joy with which American youngsters receive the news that their space-toys have become actualities to see the part played by politics in our adult response to Russia's achievement...

...The satellite is Russia, dramatized in all her might and intention...

...Asked whether he thought the Soviet leaders were prepared to keep their word in any agreement reached by negotiation, Senator Ellender blandly assured us that there was no reason to think anything else...

...Even if the speakers had been invited to discuss only whether war is a natural and necessary human activity and, if not, what might be done to avoid it, they were free to speak their minds...

...Surely this bears the marks of lunacy, the fact that, at a moment when the very physical boundaries of our universe are being broken down and the struggle for power is transferred from the familiar world of man to the furthermost reaches of outer space, people can get excited about the cruelty perpetrated on an animal...

...In the entire discussion, Russia was mentioned only once —when Dr...

...And yet we too, of course, have our need for self-delusions...

...Granted that the fate of a dog is but a poor symbol of the human fate, it at least refers to a familiar reality...

...We must discover in ourselves the will and means to stop the devastations of modern warfare...

...Naturally, they resent anti-Communist propaganda on the Voice of America...

...But how much closer to reality is their own thinking...

...HERE AND NOW By Diana Trilling Dog-Lovers, Three Liberals and A Dixiecrat Flee Sputnik Reality Among the strange happenings of the last few weeks, perhaps nothing is so weird as the outcry that went up throughout the free world because a dog had been put in the satellite...

...When the human imagination is asked to cope with more than it is accustomed to, we do what we can to resist the assault—and the successful launching of an earth satellite by the Soviet Union is as close to the unimaginable in its implications for the future as anything with which we have been confronted...

...We are terrified by the sputnik for one reason alone, because it means that our deadly enemy, the enemy of everything we care for in life, is now in a position to hurt us more than we can hurt him...

...as Dr...

...For obviously it is not in itself the successful launching of a satellite which makes the future unimaginable, any more than Lindbergh's crossing of the Atlantic made the future unthinkable...

...We, too, have our automatic responses, many of which may actually be as remote from the reality which presses upon us as the established responses of the dog-fanciers...

...Mead piously reminded us about the Russian children...

...When an earth satellite is launched and a dog sent into space, we don't worry about the dog...

...But this is on the liberal-progressive side, and...

...Cousins and Mr...

...Here is the one big link in the chain of all our political errors, whether these errors stem from the right or from the left...

...Nor did they specify any threat to peace against which we must guard, other than the violence in our own natures...

...We cannot finally accept the idea that Russia recognizes no power except a might superior to her own...

...This is where our responsibility lies, not in undervaluing peace—America has never been guilty of that—but in undervaluing our enemy...

...The American liberal affirms his familiar world by reasserting that it is America which is responsible for everything bad that happens, and by refusing to look at the fact that it is not America but Russia which threatens peace...

...We must understand, they said, that with the development of weapons capable of destroying whole populations we now had the responsibility for the safety not only of our fighting men or even of limited sections of the civilian population but of all the children of America and...

...It is not the penetration of outer space that alarms us...

...We must fundamentally revise our tactics vis-a-vis Russia and, instead of attacking Communism, advertise democracy...

...whatever our specialized concern with the unrealitv of modern liberal-progressive thought, there is also the unreality of our conservative political thinking to take into dire account...

...This is not our only task, but it is the one task without which anything else we do has no meaning...

...And how could there have been excluded from their minds the events of recent weeks...

...Mead added, of all the children of Russia, too...

...If America had launched an earth satellite and we had no sense of the Soviet Union nipping at our scientific heels, what an occasion it would have been for rejoicing over the advances of science...

...It is possible that the program was already in work before Russia announced its intercontinental missile...

...as the newspapers subsequently reported, the New York Public Library at the last minute withdrew its proposed sponsorship of "Faces of War" because of its controversial character...