Fair Game

...Fair Game BY WALTER GOODMAN The Heavenly City In the Heavenly City of Community Control, The People will roll up its sleeves and in a miracle of energy, ability and blinding consensus, it will create schools that educate, hospitals that cure, jails that redeem...

...For much the same reason that, we are told, men climb mountains, neighborhood activists set their sights on a hospital, a church, a school...

...Up the Neighborhood Just as there are many kinds of people within a neighborhood, so there are many different neighborhoods within any city...

...It is by the performance of the hollerers, by their ingenuity, daring, persistence, and noise that the neighborhood will be advertised to the outer world...

...if garbage is collected regularly here, it must be collected irregularly there...

...Stokes is Mayor of Cleveland...

...That's a pretty old form of politics, in a thoroughly democratic tradition...

...It was seen as a case of bad neighbors making bad fences, and the problem was taken to city officials, to state officials, to Federal officials, to the legislatures and to the courts, anywhere but to the benighted members of the community...

...In any case, the hollerers, whether inspired or just cracked, become the stars of the theater of Community Control...

...Sometimes the issues seem oddly matched with the passions they arouse...

...Lacking grand jury status or equivalent credentials, residents of our inner cities--for so long the truly silent minorities--have a way of swinging from pathetic apathy to hit-and-miss activism...

...Those who do get caught up in it will include the selfless and the self-seeking, the able and the incompetent, reasonable persons and lunatics, honest men and crooks--which is to say, the diverse sorts one finds on any level of political give and take...

...Still, despite all the foolishness and fraud and cultivation of self-defeating hostilities, the cry for Community Control is an expression of honest yearnings that are felt in suburbs as well as in ghettos...

...Activist demands bear at least superficial relevance to existing conditions--yet often one is left with the feeling that they are an afterthought of the action...

...The rhetoric alone is sufficient for a short trip...

...Against such painful realities...

...Which, I suppose, brings us back to the Heavenly City...

...And there is always the chance somebody will listen...

...The streets will be swept and policemen will smile...

...Now, that is Community Control...

...When a group feels that it is in a position to exercise a real influence on the course of things, it does not need to holler...

...there was Christmas turkey for the community and boodle all year round for the controllers...

...To be sure, residents who can pay their way do tend to make out better in getting their garbage collected...

...Conversely, every incident of random violence common to the slums is at once elevated to the status of a political gesture...

...Most of the people in any neighborhood could manage comfortably under a commissar or generalissimo, an emperor or ward boss, as long as he didn't get personal...

...some will demand more police protection while others are demanding that the cops get off their turf...

...Thus, it was agreed that Jews had a right to move into certain buildings on the East Side of New York no matter what the objections of the residents of those buildings...

...The reason for this is easily grasped...

...Sporadic activism has mostly proven effective in scaring taxpayers and tax-paying companies away from the cities to the outer suburbs, thereby diminishing further the capacity of the municipality to meet the needs of the needy whom the activists ostensibly serve...

...To establish and maintain their reputations, the sidewalk politicians in one neighborhood must be as adventurous as other fellows from other neighborhoods who make the newspapers...

...For them Community Control is a concept of incalculable indifference (Tammany Hall may be regarded as an early form of Community Control...

...Willy nilly, residents will find themselves being spoken for, most vociferously, by persons who have neglected to ask their opinion on any subject...

...Yet the activists thrive, because ordinary politicking holds out no popular satisfaction comparable to shutting down a high school...

...Remote Control...

...They have by and large evidenced a longstanding aloofness, tinged with distaste for big cities and little people...

...The autumn uprisings in several New York City jails may be seen as an episode of Community Control, albeit necessarily of a temporary sort...

...Even today, when all neighborhood controllers are enlightened, difficulties have a way of arising because the various sections of a city want pretty much the same thing simultaneously...

...Moreover, these spokesmen will frequently disagree with one another: Some will be Maoists, others black capitalists...

...Occasionally, too, the victories are dubious: Not long ago a handful of West Side New Yorkers blocked plans to build a department store that would have given jobs to scores of local people and provided a useful addition to the area...

...The activism naturally features hollering, since it is one of the few privileges of powerlessness...

...For years it was an article of the liberal faith that neighborhood control ought not to be vested in neighbors who held unwholesome views...

...One type, however, that is sure to show up in disproportionate numbers in neighborhood politics is the hollerer...

...Nothing unnatural in this--but at a time when the cities are populated so heavily by people who are unable to contribute to the support of public services, the plowing of one neighborhood means that another will be snowed in...

...Recently, a company of responsible Ohio citizens, finding themselves constituted as a proper grand jury with authority to investigate the events at Kent State, indicted a batch of students and teachers who had been shot at and exonerated those who did the shooting...

...Even today, behind all the noise and smoke, the struggle over Community Control has a way of coming down to who will handle the flow or trickle of Federal dollars...

...The protests about education, health, police brutality, have plenty of substance--but frequently they appear to be only rationalizations for a flare-up whose cause is obscure...

...City officials try to use the threat of riot as a way of squeezing funds out of state legislators, but few of the latter are likely to miss a night's sleep over a slum block going up in flames...

...Yet it is Washington, with its hung-up experts, niggling accounting procedures and rigarmarole of every sort, that has made life easier for millions of people in thousands of communities around the country...

...but Newark remains Newark and Cleveland remains Cleveland...

...These many opinions and eccentricities, usually containable, seem to burst into furious life at the scent of power...

...Gibson is Mayor of Newark...

...As the good Dominican friars used to say when peddling indulgences, "Once you hear the money's ring, the soul from purgatory is free to spring...

...What self-respecting militant could support Alexander's...

...As a rule, civil liberties for outsiders get short shrift from neigborhood folks, wherever the neighborhood...

...They all want their streets swept and plowed, for example...

...In recent weeks, the Puerto Rican Young Lords of East Harlem have been wanly trying to come on like Black Panthers...

...The Sidewalk City One nagging difficulty in translating men's higher visions of life into reality is that The People turn out to be merely people, with an exasperating array of temperaments, prejudices, quirks, likes, and dislikes, loves and hates...

...A stimulating form of Community Control in our Southern states, until the Federal government intervened, was the lynch mob...

...If trash can be burned in the streets of Brooklyn, it can be burned in the streets of the Bronx...

...Picketing, blockading, taking-over--such is the stuff of the politics of the street...

...Community controllers inevitably find themselves in competition with community controllers for the ear of the authorities...

...Despite some internal disagreements between radicals and moderates, the movement's goals were remarkably straightforword: The prisons, abominably overcrowded at present, should be made fit for human habitation, and those who are confined there waiting for the courts to get around to them ought to be let out...

...Security breeds courtesy...

...It is a confusing mixture of desires for the material benefits of the system and for a way to beat the system, for a place in the society and for transformation of the society, for personal success, for a say in one's own destiny, and for a shared destiny with others...

...As for Federal officialdom, it has, to be sure, scarred and eliminated many neighborhoods with its mania for highway-building, and it has not always shown much sensitivity to the feelings of the people whom it has been assigned to assist...

...Community Control is the lsd of the masses...

...The demands of activists outside the prison walls are not always so coherent...

...The salvation of the nation's neighborhoods, unfortunately, is to be found not in the City Halls, where the hollerers can have some impact, but at the State Capitols and in Washington, where their main impact is to reinforce cherished stereotypes about ill-mannered minorities...