Out There in America

...The consequences of these nonviolent protests were sometimes serious, particularly for the three arrested at the Defense Secretary's home on Albemarle Street, in a quiet neighborhood just over the District of Columbia line...

...the black man in the cities was poorer and didn't have any jobs at all forty years ago — and there wasn't any heroin...

...But southeastern Idahoans wanted the dam, and with the help of the entire Idaho Congressional delegation, they got their wish in 1972...

...At public hearings held in the early 1970s, environmentalists complained about loss of wildlife habitat...

...I fear Abraham Lincoln was the last member of his Party who could crack a joke...

...Within a week after their arrests on August 26 and 27, thirteen members of the Atlantic Life Community, as the protesters sign themselves, were out of jail...

...NICHOLAS VON HOFFMAN (Nicholas von Hoffman is a regular commentator on the CBS Radio "Spectrum" series...

...The bill was sent to the House by the Senate late in the legislative session...

...Their civil disobedience in late August grew out of intense and thoughtful discussion, throughout the previous week, about the arms race and the perpetual and increasing nuclear threat to survival...

...The march was organized by an unusual group called CASH — Citizens Action for a Safer Harlem...

...There's another of Jerry Ford in his White House swimming pool, and there's a really hilarious one of Jerry and Nelson Rockefeller smiling...

...CASH's employes include three black ex-policemen and five "street people" or "community activists," at least two of whom have, at one time or another, been arrested by the NYPD...

...You never had blacks who needed to have a march in their own neighborhood in order to stop us from killing us...

...For others, already arrested in related incidents since last Thanksgiving, the protest against the production of nuclear weapons continues, in risky direct and symbolic actions...

...By July, only the Idaho media found the aftermath of the dam break newsworthy...

...The rest of the story is tragedy: A fifteen-foot wall of water raced through the upper Snake River Canyon, then inundated Sugar City and made its destructive way downstream...

...The measure started out as an attempt to put teeth into the state's ancient and unenforceable statute regulating lobbyists...

...Sugar City, Rexburg, Firth, Blackfoot, and Idaho Falls briefly became names in the national news...

...Attempts to stem the leak in the huge earth-filled dam failed...

...District Court in Virginia had told the Atlantic Life Community earlier this summer that the Government is impressed by their persistent and sincere effort to make their point, but determined to see that they don't succeed...

...PETER KOVLER (Peter Kovler, a free-lance writer in Washington, has written for Harper's Weekly and The Village Voice...

...The book is an anthology of funnies by Republican worthies...

...the dam might break...

...And all the king's sand-blasters and all the king's men could not return the pillars to their original color again...

...And for the families who lived there, it was a horror: After school the children couldn't even get back into their homes...

...An inexorable sea roaring through Rexburg, houses floating downstream like broken toys, and people sandbagging the Snake River at Idaho Falls made for fascinating news photos and copy...

...The good Senator offered this laffo-baffo to the anthology: "I enjoyed the statement: 'An office holder who loses contact with his constituents soon goes from Who's Who to Who's That.' " Nor can it be honestly said that women Republicans lack funny bones...

...The drugs and the murders are all around and Harlem — after losing three generations to the dope — has become like a leper colony...

...whether the unusually high spring runoff that filled the dam in eight months (it was supposed to take two years) was the problem...

...The bloodstains remain on the Pentagon pillars, in other words, as fitting reminders to Bicentennial tourists and the military and civilian employes of the place's principal business: war, weapons systems, and nuclear policies...

...Republican Humor' The True Believer Award for 1976 goes to Stephen J. Skubic and Hal E. Short, who have come out with a book entitled — I swear, I'm not kidding—Republican Humor...

...in digging illegal graves "to warn of the legal mass graves prepared by the war makers...

...And instead of filing reports quarterly, lobbyists would be required to file only twice a year...

...whether the grouting was insufficient...

...But by the work of CASH and by highlighting the problems in the newspaper, we got the police to move them...

...Nearby towns were alerted and evacuated...

...They could also alter power relationships, so that the special interests had less power and the people more...

...Watergate provided the climate, but Ohio's harvest has been sparse...

...seventeen miles of the Teton River, excellent for flyfishing, would be gone...

...We want to show that it isn't hopeless and that we can make inroads...

...The Senate embraced the House bill, casting aside its own more stringent measure, and Ohio now has a lobby disclosure law that promises to disclose little...

...Furthermore, it was too expensive for the minimal flood control and irrigation benefits...

...There's one of Jerry Ford talking to his dog, who isn't listening...

...A blue-ribbon investigating team was appointed to examine the causes of the disaster: why wet spots appeared two days earlier...

...4) to establish a community patrol corps...

...The Teton disaster was eclipsed by even more devastating and awesome flooding in Mexico, the daring Israeli commando raid in Uganda, and Jimmy Carter's nomination...

...No one can miss the tragic irony of defending an empty icebox," the leaflet continued...

...MICHAEL TRUE (Michael True, a professor of English at Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts, is on a fellowship at Columbia University this year...

...But Frank DeSilva, another CASH street organizer and a drug counselor in Harlem for fifteen years, replies: "We are, probably most of all, looking to make an attitudinal change...

...Kenyatta says he joined CASH because it was the only community group that was directly attacking the problem...

...But House members were not about to take the rap for failing to pass a "reform" bill, particularly in an election year...

...CASH Director Eddie Waith says there may be as many as 30,000 drug addicts in Harlem, and where there are so many addicts, there are powerful people with an enormous interest in keeping people addicted...

...Further information on the activities of the Community is available, however, and statements from the trial testimonies often appear, in full, in recent issues of Year One, Jonah House, 1933 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland 21217...

...Reports of heroism were common, and the people of southeastern Idaho acquitted themselves admirably...

...The ominous brows of the portico, that monstrous mind, has produced tragedies more stupefying than classic Greece...

...The geologic composition of the site was soft, porous, and fissured...

...They have passed legislation dressed up as reform that does little more than maintain the political status quo...

...But in Ohio, politicians have managed to defuse whatever impetus for reform existed...

...Behind the extraordinary physical losses lurks a fear that "those people" — the government planners, the multinational corporation which contracted the work, and the engineers in whose hands our lives, as well as our dams, are entrusted — are just like the rest of us: They live in houses that are built poorly with faulty systems, drive cars created to self-destruct, experience a man-made world designed as a temporary solution...

...Yet major questions gnaw and remain...

...The disaster has left people in this part of the country worrying that the myths which have nourished the West — progress and freedom — no longer hold...

...It was neither a bad nor an original idea, for that is exactly what the Pentagon was initially designed for...

...The Republicans stood in opposition because business objected...

...In a leaflet distributed at the time of the protests, the thirteen people stressed this point by citing a Cleveland news account: Police discovered a man there who had died of starvation, "a knife in his hand, refrigerator open and empty, yet with a kitchen stocked with firearms and ammunition...

...The target area cleanups have been the most noteworthy success so far...

...2) to organize clean-up drives which "focus on crime-ridden blocks identified by the community...

...Without such information, it is impossible to ascertain whether a conflict of interest exists...

...As catastrophes go, the Teton disaster was only moderately sensational: eleven deaths, more than 100,000 acres of crops ruined, more than $1 billion in damages...

...In 1973, the legislature passed an ethics bill aimed at conflicts of interest by public officials...

...But it does not require them to list the amount from each source, so there is no way to know whether an official owns ten or 50,000 shares of stock in a firm doing business with the state...

...five others (Joe Rastatter, John Regusa, Dan Shaw, Jim Ma-cera Jr., and Hank Sipser) were accused of willfully injuring and damaging "property of the United States in a sum not in excess of $100...

...3) to operate a confidential crime information center to which victims and other citizens may report crimes...

...Cynical observers said the Senate went along with the strict provisions, which were the handiwork of Common Cause, because its members thought the bill would never emerge from the House...

...Usually a major scandal is needed to create a climate for reform...

...Among the various suggestions mentioned in their August 25 leaflet, "Resistance Is Hope," the Atlantic Life Community offered this peaceful alternative to the violent status quo: "A sane people would convert the Pentagon into a hospital...

...The bond for his uninvited guests was set at $500 (for Scotti and Hersh) and $ 1,000 (for Berrigan), with a trial date of November 15, in Montgomery County Court, Bethesda, Maryland...

...Scotti, Ed Hersh, and Philip Berri-gan) were arrested in Bethesda, Maryland, when they attempted to plant signs labeled "The Future of Our Children" and "Life on Earth" in the front yard of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld...

...Like the time a relatively unheard-of magazine nominated him one of the ten dumbest men in Washington and our brilliant Senator called a national media news conference to deny the accusation...

...We've got to help the people on a block who say that they want their area to be cleaned up...

...They were eventually charged with the destruction of private property for removing a six-by-three-foot section of turf from the Rumsfelds' lawn during a fifteen-minute dig-in...

...It contains a foreword by President Ford, and wittier words have seldom been written: "In my remarks to the Congress after being sworn in as our thirty-eighth President, I said, 'Truth is the glue that holds government together, not only our government, but civilization as well.' I believe this with all my heart...

...For years," says James Hicks, the executive editor of Harlem's newspaper, the...

...either we resist the insane talk of limited nuclear war, counterforce, and first strike capability, or we are silent accomplices in the designs of our own destruction (and that of the world...

...But the bill imposed no limit on campaign contributions...

...So they hustled a bill through to passage — after raising the reporting threshold to $150 instead of the $25 called for in the Senate bill...

...As Daniel Berrigan said recently of these protests, for once at least the Pentagon looked like itself, the stones sweating blood...

...And so a bill was passed that enables fat cats to maintain their disproportionate influence in Ohio politics...

...These symbolic actions by the Atlantic Life Community will obviously not, by themselves, stop the arms race...

...I give you Estelle M. Stacy, of the Republican National Committee from Wyoming, who gives you this chestnut: "I often define a committee this way: the unwilling, recruited from the unfit, to do the unnecessary...

...ALVIN P. SANOFF (Alvin P. Sanoff is editorial page editor of The Dayton Journal Herald ) After the Flood Boise, Idaho On the morning of June 5, a portion of the rear wall of the nearly completed Teton Dam, in southeastern Idaho, ruptured and the waters rapidly opened and enlarged a hole...

...Only five months ago you couldn't walk on the sidewalk, you couldn't even see the sidewalk...

...There's a marvelous contribution in it from Senator Hugh Scott, who functions as the Minority Leader when he's not demonstrating that he didn't take any naughty money under the table from Gulf Oil Company...

...The call had gone out for this summer meeting, and for three prevjous ones involving other people, in late spring...

...There are some exceptions to the Potemkin Village erected by the state's politicians—most notably a "sunshine" bill passed in 1975 that seems to have made it difficult for government bodies to meet routinely behind closed doors...

...Ironically, the same people who are most suspicious of the Federal Government wanted the dam and suffered the consequences...

...Today, there is even a block association there...

...ALAN MINSKOFF (Alan Minskoff is the editor of Idaho Heritage Magazine, published in Boise...

...the self-blinding of rulers, crimes by design committed off stage (ob-scaenum, obscene...

...It was not as big a crowd as the late Adam Clayton Powell used to draw, but the procession managed to spread out over a block and a half...

...Neighbors described him as a recluse who was terrified of thieves...

...Initiated from Jonah House, the Baltimore resistance community, the call proclaimed that "the concept, Disarm or Dig Graves, illustrates well the options before us all...

...When the organization was formed last February, CASH had six basic goals: 1) to have a representative in each of Harlem's five police precincts...

...Amsterdam News, "it was at Eighth Avenue and 126th Street where you had wall-to-wall junkies...

...Except for Alaska, Idaho contains the largest primitive area anywhere in the United States...

...The Ohio Senate, after much delay and over the objections of powerful lobbyists, passed a bill requiring lobbyists to file quarterly reports on how much they had spent on a legislator and for what purpose once they had spent more than $25 on that particular legislator in a year...

...Actually it's a little red ant...

...Waith and others in CASH fear that it "could come to the baseball bats and the guns" — that people in the community will run out of patience to wait for peaceful and lawful efforts...

...Yet this is precisely the Pentagon's role — defending the empty icebox which is the United States — empty spiritually, chocked with property belonging to the world's poor...

...Several of them returned to their daily occupations as teachers, part-time workers for co-ops, urban or campus ministers, and similar vocations for social change...

...5) to conduct a program to teach teenagers about crime, and 6) to provide information to Harlem citizens about crime insurance programs, crime victim compensation, and other crime prevention programs...

...And, says Kenyatta, "I suppose that when a government has failed to do its job, the people in the community will have the right to protect themselves...

...The opportunity to initiate major reforms in government comes along relatively rarely...

...But the people were successful in labeling the Pentagon "a Temple of Blood" with their blood...

...In appearances before the U.S...

...No one ever expects disaster...

...Waith concedes that CASH, alone, may not solve the problem...

...DeSilva adds that "this is the only way we are going to get the crime problem out in the open — the first step toward solving it...

...One of the street people is Charles Kenyatta, a former bodyguard and close associate of Malcolm X. "In no other time and in no other place has our community been in so much trouble because, now, we're killing each other," says Kenyatta...

...CASH does have its skeptics, however, who claim the anti-crime efforts are meaningless because the junkies just move on to other streets in Harlem...

...And you never had it in the South or in the rural areas...

...The prosecutor for the U.S...

...Reform' in Ohio Dayton, Ohio In the wake of Watergate, the climate for political reform seemed superb...

...Harlem Marches against Drugs New York About 250 citizens marched on Eighth Avenue one Saturday early last June in Harlem's first organized protest against crime and drug addiction...

...The only provision of lasting value is a requirement for detailed reports on campaign contributors...

...The Teton Dam is simply the consummate example of the get-it-done syndrome, a glaring reminder of how prevalent incompetence has become in our society...

...Still, there are formidable obstacles in CASH's path, and one of them is the sheer magnitude of the problem...

...And it has got to be done now because we have gotten back to the old basic thing — survival...

...The other senatorial Scott, William L. of Virginia, has been known to be legitimately funny...

...But more characteristic of the kind of "reform" Ohio has been getting is the lobby disclosure bill passed by the legislature earlier this year...

...In 1974, the legislature produced the shell of a campaign finance reform bill...

...The $25 threshold and the quarterly reporting were widely regarded as effective disclosure devices that would make the public aware of any excessive wining and dining...

...It is a mountainous, spacious, sparsely populated state where people cherish old virtues, are suspicious of government, and believe in man's — especially America's— perfectibility...

...The Democrats, including then Governor John J. Gilligan, opposed effective limits because the unions were against them...

...Thus far, except for a few brief notices, the press appears, intentionally or unintentionally, to be cooperating with the Government...

...OUT THERE IN AMERICA Digging in on the Potomac Alexandria, Virginia The brown spots, where the protesters dug holes in the lawn near the River Entrance to the Pentagon, have practically disappeared...

...Substantive reform laws would bring about no magic transformation of politics or politicians, but they could reduce skulduggery by opening some windows on parts of the political process that have traditionally been closed to public view...

...And it's not just being blacks in a white society...

...In fact, Life magazine had called it the most dangerous block in the country...

...The law requires officials to list sources of income in excess of $500 and stock holdings worth more than $1,000...

...It has funny pictures in it...

...The frontier is closed and progress is expensive...

...One Ohio legislator has accurately characterized the bill as "a farce...

...but the bloodstains on the pillars at the front of the building, where chauffeured militarists arrive each morning, are there to stay...

...One of the Senator's contributions to this treasury of his Party's funniest moments reads as follows: "In debate, one of my favorite words is 'pismire.' Everybody thinks it's a dirty word...

...Rumsfeld was in at the time, but the call for police was made by an assistant secretary of defense...

...The measure would enable any lobbyist to spend up to $20,000 every six months on the 132 members of the legislature without the public being any the wiser...

...District Court, Eastern Virginia Division, five men and women (Jim Clune, Sarah Potts, John Springer, Liz Reiley, and Joan Burds) were charged with "throwing upon the Pentagon building a substance, red in color, which appeared to be blood...

...The Grand Old Party has come as close to humor as it's going to with this year's platform...

...On the same day, three additional diggers (Vincent J.P...

...Work began in 1974 and was 90 per cent complete by June 1976...

...Among CASH's mixed bag of sponsors and supporters are the New York Police Department and the black police officers' organization, the Guardians, as well as the National Urban Coalition, the Amsterdam News, the local NAACP chapter, the Black Muslims, and various Harlem politicians...

...in reminding us "that time grows short for truth, life, resistance...

...The Teton Dam had been a questionable project from the beginning...

...Passage of the lobby bill marked the third time in three years that sham reform has been foisted on Ohio...