ustxtxb_obs_1968_07_26_50_00014-00000_000.pdf

I BELIEVE IN Fatherhood of God! Brotherhood of Man! BUMPERSTR IPS 5 for $1 100 for $10 1,000 for $50 Box 8293 Austin, Texas 78712 Observations The Wittliffs while increasing their own profitsthat’s what the sales tax is all about. Finally, the time is long past for liberal publications to avoid dealing with important problems facing our society by red-baiting those who raise the issues. I don’t much care for Progressive Labor, but I very much prefer their honest attempt to make this country a place worth living in for all the people to that most dangerous form of witch-hunting this country has known. Surely, Mr. Dugger, you have been called a “communist” often enough to knew better. LAWRENCE CAROLINE, Dept. of Philosophy, University of Texas, Austin, Tex. In the July 12 issue of The Texas Observer, Ronnie Dugger urged members of the Students for a Democratic Society to take an “acute personal interest” in the New Republic’s report of the recent SDS national convention. The source of his concern was that “candidates for two of the top three SDS offices ran unopposed, and both were communists.” Rarely has such flagrant Red-baiting been condensed into a mere three paragraphs. Such noisome tactics and allegations demand a reply but not a defense. From the preamble to the national constitution of SDS. “Students for a Democratic Society is an association of young people of the left.” Article II, section 1 of the constitution reads, “Membership is open to all who share the commitment of the organization to democracy as .a means and as a social goal.” Yes, SDS is non-exclusionary. If Mr. Dugger had perused his New Republic more thoroughly, perhaps he would have seen the following passage: “A likely reason for the scarcity of national candidates is that they face a year of fighting holding actions against PL” because the national office staff must exist on $15 a week in the slums of Chicago, work incredibly long hours, etc. Mr. Dugger asserted that the third national officer, Fred Gordon, “was elected with the support of the Progressive Labor party, a Peking-oriented, disciplined party.” Yet the New Republic stated he received PL backing “because he opposed the national office candidate \(Gordon is portion of the NR article also referred 14 The Texas Observer MEETINGS THE THURSDAY CLUB of Dallas meets each the Downtown YMCA, 605 No. Ervay St., Dallas. Good discussion. You’re welcome. Informal, no dues. CENTRAL TEXAS ACLU luncheon meeting. We’re moving again. Spanish Village. 2nd Friday every month. From noon. All welcome. AUSTIN WOMEN FOR PEACE/WOMEN STRIKE FOR PEACE meet twice monthly. Call GR 6-3755 or 477 -1282 for more information. ITEMS for this feature cost, for the first entry, 7c a word, and for each subsequent entry, 5c a word. We must receive them one week before the date of the issue in which they are to be published. to by Mr. Dugger? Maybe he felt the validity of his “case” would have been seriously weakened if the readers had been asked to believe that a pupil of Herbert Marcuse which Fred Gordon is, as NR pointed out is a pawn of a Maoist Marxist-Leninist party! You asked, Mr. Dugger, what has become of the SDS that used to be. If you are speaking of that former conglomeration of anti-war protesters nursing at the breast of American liberalism, they have weaned themselves and now stand as independent, serious radicals. Based on your interpretation of the convention elections, you said the Students for a Democratic Society has made a farce of its name. How ludicrous of you! Surely you are more imaginative than that. If Austin Bill and Sally Wittliff have conducted their Encino Press from their own home for two years until now they have a small, but sound and serious publishing house. The other night 5,000 of their books burned up in an Austin warehouse fire, and because of a quirky situation, insurance did not cover the loss. Shaken, but the game kind of people who make a difference in the world, the Wittliffs are going right ahead. Bill is one of the two or three finest book designers in the Southwest, and he is just 28. EP soon will bring out a book of essays by Larry McMurtry, in which, I gather, some sacred cows will be pronounced available for human uses. Salinas in Hardback Porfirio Salinas is a very good painter; his landsdapes portray South Texas and the hill country as we who love it know it. There is, about his romantic-realistic work, some a the magic of Monet: I cannot say why, but it is there. If I were a medical doctor or an oilman, for any of half a dozen Salinases I would gladly pay the $6,000 or $7,000 I’m told is the going price. you have other axes to grind, grind them. As for the New Republic’s being “a part of the bourgeois enemy,” I really do not know anything about that. .. . BARTEE HAILE, JR., member, SDS national interim committee and regional coordinator, Texas-Oklahoma SDS, Box 1941, Dallas, Tex. 75221. Dugger replies to Mr. Haile: Although Mr. Haile seems to have missed the statement in my short comment, I did, indeed, point out that “NR says, however, that Gordon is not affiliated with that [Progressive Labor] party.” This, however, is secondary to the main fact, reported in New Republic: Candidates for two of the three top national offices of SDS ran unopposed, and both were communists. Pemberton Press has published, at $14.50, a book of 48 Salinas paintings, convincingly reproduced in color, with a preface by Salinas’ canny promoter Dewey Bradford,. a pleasant and candid introduction by Joe Frantz, and five Western short stories thrown in for mood and filler. I value this book for the reproductions themselves, and also for an idiosyncratic reason: I know that when I feel trapped in town, I can pick it up and sense again the quiet nearby Texas places where the spirit takes ease and strength. “I paint,” Salinas says, “what people will appreciate.” Progress by Failure For years, the Observer has been imploring the legislature to pass an industrial safety law. For God’s sakes, a thousand workers are killed on the job every year in Texas and another 200,000 are injuredwhy won’t the politicians transcend their self-serving connections long enough to set up enforced standards of job safety? Texas has no excuse: here, states’ rights is an empty shell. Senator Yarborough is now presiding over hearings for a federal job safety bill, telling his senate colleagues that 14,500 industrial workers are killed every year in the United States, while 2,300,000 are disabled to some extent. Perversely, we can take heart that this backward state has produced a US senator who knows what the problems are. On Being Reasonable Larry Caroline, the let-out assistant philosophy professor at the University of Texas, is now quoted predicting a “reasonably non-violent socialist revolution,” which he also describes as “reasonably