News from the front

Al Capp

The biggest non-news from the US is that thePresident has, grudgingly, agreed to some

harsh terms with those who want him to save New York City. Yet, no matter how meagre the federal funds he gives to the venture, it will all be wasted and he knows it, and so, I suspect, do those who urge him on. Even Brendan Gill, for all his warm heart and brave words, knows New York is a huge, dying waste. Every week, hundreds of skilled move out, hundreds of unskilled move in. Yet one can no more rail at the skilled who desert than at the dazed and feckless who pile in. The able, even in these times, have a chance in other communities to find work, to bring their kids up safely. The stunned who were living the dreariest of lives on the welfare of their states heard that New York City paid two, sometimes three, times as much. By the time they learned that, at New York prices, they were no better off, that last ray of hope was gone, and some of the original settlers have stayed on, up to three generations, and more coming in every hour.

I am rarely moved by wide-screen battle films of vast armies being decimated by vaster ones.

For example, a year of two ago there were two versions of War and Peace. One, a billion-rouble Russian film; the other, an English TV version, which couldn't have cost more than a few hundred thousand pounds. The Russians dressed half their army in Russian costumes, the other half in French costumes, and mostly from the air filmed every intricate move of every battle. It was as ravishing as a checker game.

Thee English TV version focused on the remnants of a single Russian battalion fighting a ridiculous fight, dying each an agonising, and unnecessary, death. They were peasants, ill-trained, terrified of the French, but more terrified of the displeasure of their officers. You couldn't help but admire the grand sweep of the Russian version; your heart was torn by the English version.

And that is why I won't bore you with the arithmetic of New York City. We need only to look at one street, Times Square. Once again we are reading that Times Square will be cleaned up and restored to its old splendour. And that was splendour indeed. The greatest plays in the world were staged there. A Broadway playwright, a Broadway star, were the aristocrats of the theatre. It is nice to hear that it will all be restored, but when did we hear that before? Last year? The year before that? Every six months during the Lindsay administration? It's been fifteen years now and Broadway grows sleazier and sleazier. Few New Yorkers know it any more, except what they see on their TV screens. It is now an enclave of prostitutes, pimps, porno movies, fast in-and-out hotels. What was once the soul of the City is now its toilet. Yet the City does have 'safe' areas. I use 'safe' here as I would to describe an area which is under enemy commando attack a mere half-dozen times a year, as opposed to one that is totally under the command of the enemy.

And, as the City must tighten its belt, thousands of police officers are being discharged and the 'unsafe' areas grow larger and larger. New York City in another fifteen years. possibly a good deal sooner,. will become a city of office buildings where, at four o'clock each afternoon, the middle class, both white and black, employed in them, will flee to the burgeoning suburbs. At night, the city will be Hell. Those who must come to New York will lock themselves in what hotels remain. What office buildings still house businesses which haven't yet moved will be guarded by cops with machine guns. Those cops will be paid twenty, thirty thousand a year. They will be hard to get.

The Democratic National Convention will be held this summer in New York City and, at long last, the Nation's Liberals will see what they have wrought. Not the tough, city-trained ones, who are whisked through the City in their locked limousines, but the innocents who come to New York to deliver a speech, or accept an award, and then leave the next morning. They will live in the City a week, two weeks. They will be mugged in its streets, stabbed in its parks, their hotel rooms will be sacked. They will, for that week or two, be living the life of the average New Yorker.

This must have an effect on the candidate they'll choose. Can they choose Hubert Humphrey, whose day, everyone has begun to suspect, has come? He might have been an ideal candidate for the city we once knew. The New York City our planners once envisioned as eventually stretching from Washington to Boston, the greatest and richest megalopolis the world has ever known.

We knew we had enemies. Enemies were damned fools who didn't realise what friends we were eager to be. And so, after we licked them, we rebuilt them, bigger and grander. Hubert Humphrey has the toughness of spirit for the fight, and all the decency and kindness for the restoration. It was the American Liberal in his best hour, and Humphrey is the best of the lot, who forced the nation to look at what we had always seen, yet never seen. We were shocked. Pell-mell, we did penance.

Penance was what we thought we were doing. It didn't quite turn out that way. What we did was more what Hitler did. He took over German communications as thoroughly as the Liberals, had long since taken over ours, with nobody much objecting. In a few years he had the Germans convinced that Jews were sub-human and must be killed. Our press saw all that, then went right ahead and did all that. The average American was a monster, and we owed our underprivileged everything. The average American now meekly understood he was a monster, and, with few dissenting votes, he gave the underprivileged everything. But that remorse and decency and kindness, weren't enough. A few years later our greatest city is a no-man's-land; all our great cities are. A few years later, bussing, which once no one dared object to, has become a national curse.

Those of us who lectured at our colleges ten years ago saw it. We couldn't explain it, not in the decent, human way Hubert Humphrey might have. The blacks sat in one section of the dining hall, the whites in another. They didn't meet then, they don't today. It is too late now for the decency and kindness of Hubert

Humphrey. We have seen what it has done to all our great cities. We've lost them. But. its a big country and we are a people of big ideas and tremendous strength. By the hundreds of thousands we are moving out to the suburbs, the suburbs beyond the chic suburbs, att building a new civilisation there. Any giPsY is welcome. But he must carry his own weight. Nobody is going to do him any of the old, open-handed favours. Will the Convention turn, then, to a rather grimmer man, Senator Henry Jackson? We have learned here that one

of the major elements in a political candidate is 'the recognition factor.' Senator Jackson has been in politics all of his life. Yet would anY

American recognise him if he stood alongside,

him in a lift? Or care much if he did? Then, nt course, there is Sargent Shriver. He has never been elected to any public office. But he is married to one of the Kennedy girls. Is that enough? A few years ago a discreet poll was

made of voters in Maryland, where the Shrivers live, and the results were so bleak -Shriver laughingly denied it had anything to do with any political ambitions, but with an entirely different matter, which no one pressed hint about.

Shriver surfaced again for a few weeks, in the McGovern campaign, when McGovern dropped Eagleton, the Convention's choice, for having once had a shock treatment, which is es sinister as an aspirin, and personally asked a dozen leading Democrats to run with him, hitt they were all out to lunch, except Shriver' When asked why he was running now, Shriver said, "Somebody in the family has got to run, which seems today even less persuasive in Massachusetts than it was in Maryland, trie, loyal Irish in Boston having lately tosseu vegetables at Senator Ted Kennedy.

The other candidates, and there are, at this moment, ten of them, are, with one exception, as human and decent as Senator HumPhreY; Actually, Mr Humanity and Decency himsell, Senator George McGovern, announced that while he would make no race for the nomina" tion, he would be waiting in the wings, readY t° soar out, if the Convention couldn't make up its mind -about his imitators and decided to trY with him. There is, of course, a chance that this won't happen — I'd put it at about one chance in a million — and so now we must look at the one exception. He has everything. The toughness; the disdain for such passionate poseurs as Our latest boy orator at the UN; the deePer understanding of the needs of our minoritiesi and our responsibility to give them an equal break, but no more. It is an understanding On, came to him slowly, painfully, as he grew out or being an 'ole country boy' to something approaching a statesman. It is a deePer understanding than those who grew up liberals: never questioned its excesses and now those excesses are growing too perilous to wali' down the street, are moving out of town, or t° Europe.

Since George Wallace was shot, this rip-roaring little man will now be foreve.r5 confined to a wheelchair, his hearing going' hi face reflecting his private agony of the last years. He is kept alive, it seems to me, by Inas passion to be President, a passion that as 5 practical man he knows is doomed, and alwaY,, was. I cannot believe that he doesn't know an! that he is going through the motions becausc_ there is simply nothing else exciting enough ty do to keep him wanting to stay alive. Humphrey is too open a man for these tirn e st' Wallace is too narrow. This nation is in its inns threatened state. We use more oil than anY Other nation. Oil prices have tripled. And there ts nothing much we can do about it. The oil belongs to the sheiks. Free enterprise flowered here. We can't blame them, can we, for being !Ike us? They could double the price of oil 'nrn orrow and morally we shouldn't do anything about it. Except to, dumbly, do what We're doing. Paying their prices. We don't know how to stop. And as our dollars flow to the snellts. life becomes harder here and our workers demand more and more from the Public. It can, of course, lead nowhere but to the collapse of the dollar, the collapse of industry, a nation full of hungry men, a nation no longer ,ahle to feed them. The other day Henry Ford, the auto-maker, said he'd never worried so Today, about his future. His future was Fords. 'oday. he said he is worried. 1.11 1933, Franklin Roosevelt could save us. This ti

Political he could not, because it is not a question. This time we need someone

a laboratory somewhere who will come up With something better than oil, and cheaper. And we need him fast. If we had him tomorrow, It wouldn't matter a damn whether we

Teddy Ford, or any Democratic, including eddy Kennedy, or declared it no longer an unpardonable sin to have been born out of the country and elected Henry Kissinger. As long as we're all right, the good guys in the world are all right. Or maybe it's the bad guys. At any rate, it's the guys we think are the good guys, and anyone can make a mistake. Meanwhile, the Government, made of men as bewildered as we are, is giving us circuses. We had Watergate, which gave us a proof that lock-picking was still going on in this country, as it always had. It gave us a President who lied, same as all Presidents had lied before him. Now we're investigating the CIA and the FBI and learning they were run by men of passions and prejudices, same as ours. We watch Squeaky Fromme, who clearly hasn't got all of her marbles, being hustled off to serve life after one of the briefest trials in history, and Patty Hearst, surrounded by millions, and lawyers only millions can buy, moving to be declared temporarily insane, whisked off to a private sanatorium and then in a few years being declared miraculously sane again, and released. The Government is giving us all this because they're no smarter than we are and while it's going on, let's pray for that guy, wherever he is, in that laboratory.