ustxtxb_obs_1962_11_23_50_00004-00000_000.pdf

Caveat For the benefit of readers who have not burdened their minds with dead languages, we presume to mention that the Latin phrase reproduced above means “Let the buyer beware.” We are so advised by our business manager, Miss Sarah Payne, who taught Latin before she came to this enterprise. ‘Caveat Emptor’ is the title of an editorial in the Dallas Morning News Nov. 18. Let the reader beware; the illustration on this page, adjacent, is not reproduced from the Dallas Morning News, but the News’ editorial so struck our fancies down here in Austin, we reprint it in full: “More and more of our humorless crusaders would tighten the pure food laws so Americans could not spend $500,000,000 a year on food supplements, $250,000,000 for arthritis and rheumatic ‘cures,’ $10,000,000 for reducing remedies that don’t always reduce and millions more for panaceas for whatever you’ve got. “It is obvious that business in this volume is a key part of our economy of abundance and one wonders if the urge for physical improvement is not too deeply rooted for legislation. The first ships that left Jamestown sailing back to England carried huge quantities of sassafras. It soon glutted the European market. Tea brewed from sassafras cuttings was thought e mptor . good for anything from a backache to colic. Thousands still think it is. “Existing laws provide that medication should not hurt and should be adequately labeled. If it doesn’t aid physically, often it can mentally. “A certain perfume or underarm deodorant is supposed to make a woman irresistible, a hair tonic can give the right man the run of the barnyard and the purchase of a particular book will add 6,000 words to your vocabulary. There are correspondence courses on how to become a millionaire overnight. If you legislate into oblivion the hopes and dreams of man and his right to choose and buy, where do you leave him? “After all, what is ‘quackery’? That herb in India which used to be scoffed at by scientific authority later became the base for drugs that helped cure tension. Were the Indians, or the scientists, right?” This, we may be pardoned for repeating, is not an editorial in the Texas Observer, but is reprinted from The Dallas Morning News, a publication that appears at irregular intervals in a northerly city and its environs. `I have a new profitably spurious product for you, boss’ cAveAT MAKUIRSa RAllt RESTogE2_ THAT wosr RESTDREI MANI P4 5 THAT Worer HELP, REIHKIN4 DIETS THAT Worrr \(ZEMKE/ AND LukE -Atjc -THAT WONTLvgE Amyrsumo “IF OUR PRODUCT DOESN’T HELD, AT LEAST IT DOESN’T KILL.” oer Nov DEC 3. This Is This Week’s Dallas News Page Simulated Terror Obfuscates Reds’ Guile AUSTIN One of the sonorous on-the-hour editorials in the Dallas News warning of the terrifying menace from U.S. communists \(who are, of course, thoughts to this subject. When we sense that someone is a Music Man we suspect everything he says. The alarums from the right are so often sung in a psychotic basso profundo, sensible people turn away in disgust. When we realize that an entire movement, such as the American radical right, has become both frumpish and stealthy, we may fail to think through its favorite subject from our distaste for those who make such a blast of it. In the circumstances it is plausible to begin thinking about what one does not think. One does not think that political beliefs of any kind, including the communist kind, should be prescribed in a free country. One does not think that the communist should be denied civil libertie’s; for the acid test of freedom is the extension of its privileges to those whose beliefs oppose it. One does not think that the communist should be outlawed, or punished as a criminal; for good faith convictions are a good thing, even when the convictions are held to be wrong. It is to be accepted that any national state is entitled in the logic of power to take steps to prevent active insurrection against its authority. Communists or any other carbonaros, including, if he is so convicted, General Edwin Walker of Dallas, can have no complaint when, apprehended in revolutionary activities, they are punished therefor. It is clear, too, however, that since World War II, the American traditions of civil liberties have been crowded by splaying fears of communism and that the defenders of liberty are therefore Published by Texas Observer Co., Ltd. Entered as second-class matter, April 26, 1937, at the Post Office at Austin. Texas, under the Act of March 3, 1879. NOVEMBER 23, 1962 Ronnie hugger Editor and General Manager Chandler Davidson, Associate Editor Sarah Payne, Business Manager called upon to be more vigilant than ever. COMMUNISTS CANNOT claim a right to entry as equals into the free conversation and activity of non-communists, obviously, as communists are doctrinally committed to lying and hypocrisy as methods to serve their objectives. There are, of course, Russians who are not so committed. All Russians are not communists. Boris Pasternak, who never wavered in his loyalty to his mother land, has Lara say in Dr. Zhivago that the tragedy began in Russia when people lost the sense of the value of their own convictions; he himself stood for truth within a system committed to shabby constructs of lies and part-truths, and some of the young Russian writers are rebelling in the same spirit and surviving. There are also Americans in positions of power who are so committed. When a high defense official pronounced the doctrine that, during the Cuban crisis, the news was a weapon, he was saying, the truth is a weapon; in other words, the truth can be lied about to make it a weapon. Yet one who has read Marx and Engels and Lenin cannot fail to know that by doctrine the practicing communist is a practicing liar. Adherents of communism are utterly untruthworthy among honorable men of the Western kind. The milieu that Camus called sociability, and Dwight McDonald translated as the dialogue or the conversation, cherishes truth-telling and wordkeeping. One levels. One accepts diminutions of persuasiveness for the sake of honesty. One does not conceal the blemishes on one’s performance, the cankers within one’s ideals. A promise is not made lightly, and made, FPLRITEtt Published once a week from Austin. Texas. Delivered postage prepaid $5.10 per annum. Advertising rates available on request. Extra copies 15c each. Quantity prices available on order. EDITORIAL and BUSINESS OFFICE: 504 West 24th St., Austin, Texas. Phone GReenwood 7-0746. HOUSTON OFFICE: Mrs. R. D. Randolph, 2131 Welch, Houston 19, Texas. it is future action that may be said to have occurred already, so mandatory is it among honorable men of the Western kind that they do what they say they will do. The communist is unwelcome among them not because he is a revolutionaryany reasonable man understands that in some situations, revolution is justified and desirablebut because he is committed to dishonest methods. One cannot speak to a communist at any time with any assurance that he is speaking to the person who appears to be talking to him. One cannot rely upon him in anything he does or writes or paints. A communist man is an ulterior man. THIS IS NOT just a question of Western traditions of honor. Otherwise, why does a woman so resent it when she senses that a man is Qeeking her out, not from regard for her, but in desire for her body .only? Because the ulterior affronts one’s self-respect. It says, you are not fit for a relationship to me as my equal, you are fit only to be used. This is not just a question of Western traditions of honor. Otherwise, why would the Russians name their nrincinal newspaper Pravda, Truth? Even in the instrument that daily expresses their contempt for it they must proclaim its name. This is not just a question of Western traditions of honor. Without the standard of truth there is nothing anywhere. Justice becomes power simply. Idealism becomes deception. Reality itself dissolves into surrealistic images. This is not just a question of Western traditions of honor. Not by intellectual chance does the practicing communist assume that those who do not agree with him should be tricked and manipulated to his purposes. No one can believe that who does not feel superior to his fellow man ; no one who does not believe the people are sheep; no one who does not believe the government is simply the locus of power to be used by the wise men. A man who will come at you with lies and tricks cannot expect, found out, to be received again as an equal. No matter how sincere his devotion to the ideas he seeks thereby to serve, he is a charlatan in practice. Begone -with him. H HOW MANY COMMUN-ISTS are there in Texas? If we are to believe that the Allan Shivers law to imprison communists was a good law, \(he wanted the death penalty, remember, but the Texas legislators it would have been enforced if there were any communists in Texas, we have none. But obviously it is a bad law and has not been enforced, mainly because, although these days they do not speak much of it, Americans still believe in political liberty. One sees figures that there are 15,000 or 20,000 communist members in the United States, which seems plausible enough. Texas has one-twentieth of the national population ; that might mean we have 750 or 1,000 communists. In that event, one out of every ten thousand Texans is a communist. The Dallas News should be mature enough, as Texas’ “oldest business institution,” to restrain its terror ; and the ordinary liberal citizen should not, because of the silliness of the News’ simulated terror, relax the standards of honesty without which conversation is a political act and social action trickery. R.D. Dallas News Prize Offered We are advised objectively by a headline in the Dallas News, “Red ATests Boost Radiation in U.S.” The Observer herewith announces the first annual $5.00 Read Your Dallas News Award for the person who first sends us a headline from the Dallas News that said in substance, “U.S. A-Tests Boost Radiation in U.S.” The $5.00 will be presented in the form of a subscription to the Texas Observer. Forebearing The National Indignation Convention, headquarters Dallas, has mailed out a condemnation of the voters for their decisions this November., “The electorate . . . returned to the Congress almost every man who voted for the Arms Control and Disarmament Act,” says the Convention’s treasurer in a letter Nov. 8. “For the present, we believe that an American citizen who voted for such men did so because he was ignorant . . .” This creates a difficulty for the future of the Convention, since its letterhead specifies, “Advisory Council: The American Public.” THE TEXAS OBSERVER