Public Forum

A G>nservative View

Letters submitted fw Public Forum mtBt be limited to SOOwords.Safire's New Lexicon Is Labor Of Pure Love

To the Editor:

This is to correct the misinformation concerning the National Womens Conference in last Sundays letter by Mary N. Pegg of Winston-Salem. The letter from Alic Wynne Gatsis of Rocky Mount is answered separately.

Five million dollars, less than five cents for each female person in the nation, was appropriated for the Conference, not five hundred million.

The National Plan of Action was not pre-packaged. Recommendations were m^ at each of the state meetings and incorporated with the'^fourteen recommendations presented in the publication To Form a More Perfect Union. Each one was discussed, many in healed debate, changes were proposed, many based on action taken at separate caucauses. and each of the 26 planks was adopted only after a majority vote.

Mrs. Pegg does not document her figures concerning the delegates but. assuming they are correct, they show a favorable trend. If 23 percent of the delegates had annual incomes of less than $7,000, that is remarkable. Usually, people from this group have jobs that preclude their being able to take time off. Often they are unable to delegate home responsibilities so they can become involved in volunteer activities.

The 14 percent from the higher income bracket was not disproportionate. They too, should have been represented.

The most significant trend indicated by Mrs. Peggs statistics is that the majority of the delegates was from the broad middle group which bears the most oppressive tax burden and which is most concerned to have tax money equitably distributed.

We congratulate Mrs. Pegg on her recent election to the North Carolina House of Representatives, one of three Republican women to win seats. We hope she appreciates those women and men who fought for her equal right to vote and hold office.

By JAMES J. KILPATRICK

WASHINGTON Half the fun of writing, as every writer knows, lies in the little excursions and sidetrips that a writer takes through the language. We go picknicking on idioms and we snack on colloquial phrases. And now. this Christmas, we have a whole new smorgasbord spread before usi a third edition of Safire.

Those who live the political game were delighted ten years ago when William Safire brought forth The New Language of Politics It was a splendid collection of words and phrases drawn from our political experience, and it provided a scholarly and sometimes mock scholarly account of how we got to the jargon beloved by politicians and pundits alike. A second edition followed in 1972, and this week Random House gives us Safire 111.

The lexicon now runs to 450 words covering 1,600 terms. It is a labor of pure love. As Safire himself notes, he himself has progressed since the first edition from flack to ghost to thumbsucker. which is to say, he began his career as a public relations man. became a speechwriter under President Nixon, and now bedevils the liberal establishment as a conservative columnist for The New York Times.

Safire follows in a great tradition. Like such essayists as Samuel Johnson. Ambrose Bierce and H.L. Mencken, he is enchanted by language. He makes no pretensions, of course, to the kind of serious scholarship that Johnson brought to his monumental dictionary or Men

cken brought to The American language. Satires touch is lighter; his purpose is equally to instruct and to amuse. His work is definitive; it is also fun.

In an introduction to the new edition. Safire speaks admiringly of the Watergate era as a Golden Age of Political Coinage. In a period of only two years, our political language was enriched by: big enchilada, enemies li.st, hardball. plumbers, Saturday night massacre, smoking gun and stonewalling. Watergate gave us the unforgettable image of someone left "twisting slowly, slowly in the wind.

After that point in time the doldroms set in. Jerry Ford left behind nothing but a WIN button. Mr. Carters principal contribution, thus far. is the three-martini lunch as a symbol for tax reform, and Mr. Carter actually hooked that one from George McGovern. The Carter administration also has given us a political usage for born again, spinning off Bourne again when the White House doctor got in trouble. Satires impression probably is accurate, that Mr. Carter seems not to be trying to coin catchwords in the way that Roosevelt gave us the New Deal and John Kennedy the New Frontier.

A question constantly asked of a pundit on the lecture trail is. What do you mean by conservative? Safire 111 provides the best brief definition 1 have found. A conservative is a defender of the status quo who. when change

Temala A. Grofis

To the Editor:

Pitt County Association of Classroom Teachers members will be celebrating American Education Week, November 12-18 in varying ways in each school. In addition, we wish to congratulate Pitt Countians on having three very fine assets in the county schools. One is a body of children who are becoming increasingly mature and responsible students. They are becoming more concerned for their own educations, more con-scientous in their work and more sensitive to the needs of their families. Another is a cadre of very fine personnel in the twenty schools carrying on the work of educating children. Last years test results indicate that teachers are doing well to maintain near-average scores despite adverse conditions. Third, there are many excellent educational programs in the schools: the parent volunteer program, the summer library program, screening of students so as to better meet their needs, planning time (in some schools) which teachers use to plan, review and evaluate their curriculum, methods and techniques of teaching. These are in addition to the basic subject areas of curriculum the three Rs.

The Association believes that Pill Countians are concerned that the schools continually upgrade the quality of education provided. The A.ssociation members share that concern.

Annette W.MacRae

Facing South

Hybrid Wild Rice Study Excites Biologist

Peggy Coogletoo S^via Ekjhnondson

Evans-Novak . . .

(Cmtlniwd horn page 4)

would bring an instant crisis in detente and put the new SALT agreement in jeopardy

But to accept the presence of the MlG-23 in Cuba, knowing its apparent capability for being fitted with nuclear-delivery, would violate the doctrine laid down by John F. Kennedy during the Cuba missile crisis and by the Nixon-Kissinger strategists in 1970.

In that year, Richard Nixon and his then-national security adviser Henry Kiss-inger delivered what amounted to an ultimatum against Soviet-Cuban construction of submarine pens at Cienfuegos capable of servicing nuclear-missile submarines. That ultimatum was based squarely on the Kennedy doctrine: any

nuclear-capable weapon whether it was actually fitted with nuclear armaments or not was ipso facto intolerable in Fidel Castros Cuba. The submarine pens were not built.

It is doubtful that even a signed Cuban pledge that its new M1G-23S would never be equipped for nuclear delivery would do much to solve Carters political problem in the Senate when the new SALT agreement comes up for debate next year. With the U.S. Southland exposed to attack within the MlG-23s nonstop. 1,200-mile range, the SALT debate might well turn into an antiSoviet free-for-all.

Indeed, long-headed analysts here are hard put to explain the surreptitious deployment of the MlG-23 in terms other than Soviet muscle-flexing, mixed with deterrence. It would seem to provide Moscow with a powerful option to be bran-dished when and if necessary as a counter to American policy anywhere in the world considered hostile by the Soviet Union.

U.S. defense officials say that the MlG-23 model now in Cuba has never btfore been delivered to a Soviet ally. After the Arab-Israeli war in October 1973, Syria received the air-defense version of the MlG-23 - essentially a fighter plane not equipped for tactical strikes against ground targets. The differenceds similar to that between the U.S. F-4 and the F-5E: the F4 has been denied to Taiwan because it

could attack the Chinese mainland; the F'-SE, a plane designed purely for defense, is being supplied instead.

That the Soviets have chosen this critical moment in off-again, on-again detente to threaten the U.S. in its own back yard is a vicious irony for Jimmy Carter. Unless he can conjure up a justifiable explanation for the MIG-23s where none appears today, his hopes for SALTIl nay turn to dust.

LedererCol....

(Continued from page A-4)

joined the Chicago office of architectural pioneer Frank Lloyd Wright at the turn of the century. He worked there as an unpaid employee udlil 1905, when he left to set up his own office.

Practicing in Chicago, Grjyffin built a reputation for designing beautiful houses with modem innovations in the Frank Lloyd Wright manner. In 1912, he entered an international competition to design the Australian capital and the following year his plan was chosen over 136 others to win the $3,500 first prize.

There was widespread opposition to Griffins innovative design, which he once described as a work of art unlike any other city in the worid. One group of politicians tried to scrap it and substitute a strictly utilitarian and unimaginative plan of their own.

Griffin was invited to come to Austraiia for consultations about the proposed capital and accepted an offer to become director of Federai Capital Design and Construction, with authority to build Canberra according to his own plan. Unfortunately, this never happened.

Griffin technicaily was in charge of the project but the government officials he had to deal with were the same people who had tried to sabotage his plan. Contour maps were supplied at the wrong scale, Plans were conveniently lost in the mail and Griffin was denounced in Parliament by Home Affairs Minister William Archibald as A Yankee bounder who wasted his time on grand theorizing, moonshine and dreaming.

SAN MARCOS. Tex. - Dr. Bill Emery, professor of biology at Southwest Texas State University, San Marcos, is working on a research project that is as exciting to him as participating in the Olympics would be to an athlete. He breeds wild rice, hoping that one day a selection from his hybrids will help feed the worlds increasing population.

Fernery is especially interested in Texas wild rice, called by scientist Zlzania toruna. It is a plant with exceptionally high nutritional value, he says. Its protein-building amino acids make it 10 times as nutritious as corn, twice as good as the best wheat, and better than any other variety of wild rice, he explains.

The only place that this rice grew when Emery entered the picture was the spring-fed San Marcos River. When he moved to San Marcos River. When he moved to San Marcos in 1957. be began to observe the rice, which looks somewhat like Johnson grass growing underwater.

During the next 10 years, the population of wild rice declined rapidly In 1967, F]mery wrote an article warning his fellow scientist that rice was in danger of becoming extinct. He listed threats by pollution, river plowing, plant collecting, and vegetation cutting.

Later, when the rice covered less than a quarter-acre in the river, he discovered another problem. Nutria, 10 to 25-pound rodents which had been put into the river to eat water hyacinths and keep the stream clear of other vega-tion, were feasting on tirana One of Emerys colleagues remembers the cry of anguish that went up when Fernery, who was watching the river to see what was happening to the rice, saw a mother nutria and her brood swimming through the area.

Afraid that some catastrophic eventlike oil

being dumped into the river might wipe the rice out entirely, F]mery increased his efforts to get the rice to grow outside its native habitat. In 1970, he succeeded in relocating some plants at the university aquatic station, which has a constant-temperature artesian well. In 1974. he found an even better place at a sluiceway near the station.

He noticed changes in the plants growing habits. In the river, the rice was always submerged and remained vegatation. In the new sites, it grew above water, flowered, and produced seeds.

Seeds pul Emery in a better position to experiment because he could raise his own plants. His next move was to see if he could get the rice to grow in spring-fed sites in other parts of Texas. He has been partially successful at New Braunfels. Del Rio, and Saledo.

With Texas wild rice temporarily safe from extinction, F]mery is working - with other scientists - on crossing it with other species. Besides being highly nutritional, the Texas species is perennial, and it is resistant to disease.

Other species have their strong points. For example, Northern wild rice, which grows in Canada, Minnesota and Wisconsin, is nonshattering and can be harvested by combine. It afSo germinates at 33 degrees and has a growing season of 30 days or slightly longer.

According to Emery, this means that the tundra in Alaska, Canada and other places may some day produce nutritious food for people who otherwise might go hungry Already, he points out, wild rice grows in places not hospitable to corn, wheat, and other cropsfor example, streams, marshes, swamps, and along coastal bays.

He has been doing his research with little publicity. His students find it exciting, he says, and so do the

FACING SOUTH welcomes readers com-ments and writers contributions. Write P.O. Box 230, Chapel HiU,N.C. 27514.

Opinions n Brief

becomes necessary in tested institutions or practices, prefers that it come slowly, and in moderation. A contemporary liberal, by contrast, is one who believes in more government action to meet individual needs. The wickedest definition, of course, came from Heywood Broun; A liberal is a man who leaves the room when a fight begins.

Safire has rewritten large chunks of his second edition and has corrected some minor errors. The little ladies in tennis shoes of Safire 11 are now properly the little old ladies in tennis shoes. The rock-ribbed troglodyte has found a place on the lunatic fringe. The political litmus test has taken on new colorations in the Panama Canal and Humphrey-Hawkins.

In the fashion of every editor and lexicographer. Safire has made some magisterial decisions. His dictionary offers nothing on Deep Throat. He gives no entry at all to my own political party, the Whig Party. Safire has ruthlessly discarded one of his own formations, presumably on the grounds that blowsoft has not demonstrably caught on. It is a splended word, and deserves a place.

In some future edition, perhaps he will consider a marvelous back-formation devised 25 years ago by Wilbur Griggs, a venerable court clerk in Richmond, Va. Scoffing at a political opponent, the old gentleman sneered that nobody was for him except the newspapers and a few disgrunts. It is a great noun. Youll find a thousand of them in Safire III.

IF HE CAN JUST KEEP TIME FROM RUNNING OUT!

organizations he talks to about wild rice. He has been supported in this project by Southwest Texas State .University. But other state and federal agencies that he has approached for support have not given financial backing.

Fernery believes that when the need for food becomes a crisis, the interest of these agencies may change. He points out that, We spend vast amounts of money to save the endangered whooping crane, which well never eat, but not a cent on the endangered Texas wild rice, which could become the salvation of countless thousands of undernourished and starving people.

Its a challenge like climbing the highest mountain...or winning an Olympic medal, he says. We all want to leave a contribution to makind as we pass through the world. Mine may be a piece of research. HEBER TAYLOR freelance Searcy, Alls.

By GAIL MICHAELS

Just staying At is Anything But

Home

Routine

If we are strong, our strength will speak for itself. If we are weak, words will be no help. Pres. John F. Kennedy

It takes all sorts of people to make a world. Douglas Jerrold.

Concealed talent brings no reputation. Erasmus

My husband used to believe that women who didnt work outside the home were protected.

1 know you work hard, honey, but its not the .same, hed say. You just dont have any conception of what its like out there:*the constant stress and pressure, the fear of humiliation, the isolation, the manipulation, the dull routine.

Now, Ill have to admit that staying home with a two-year-old is anything but routine. The two-year-old has a diabolically inventive mind. So I can expect anything in the course of a normal day from having red nail polish dhppetj,all over the green bedroom carpet to having my favorite earrings flushed down the toilet, to having my kitchen cabinets painted with Crisco.

But as for the rest of the stuff, it was he who didnt have any conception of what it is like. Take isolation for example. Isolation is going for two weeks without talking to anyone taller than a doorknob.

And pressure. Pressure is having to come up with acceptable anwers to questions like Why is that a tree?

And for that matter

humiliation. What is more humiliating than having to apologize to the dentist after your kid bites him? Or to the pediatrician after your kid wets him? Or to the man next to you on the bus after he sits down on guess whos chewing gum?

And then there's manipulation. Manipulation is when your two-year-old drops an Oreo cookie into the public swimming pool where it diffuses over the entire surface in 36 seconds flatand the nine-year-old next to you promises not to tell who did it if youll pay him two dollars.

Of course, I explained all this to Phillip, but it never really sank in until 1 had to attend a weekend meeting and he got to keep Meg all by himself for two days.

When 1 walked in the door Sunday night, there were toys scattered everywhere, Meg was in her bedroom screaming at the top of her

lungs, and Phillip vyas sitting on his haunches in the middle of the living room trying to scrub up the results of a toileting accident.

I just grinned. How did it go. dear''"

Well, you know that paper 1 have due tomorrow? She just underlined it with blue crayon

"If thats all that happened, you're lucky.

He looked close to tears. Its not. When 1 got up this morning. 1 found her in the middle of the kitchen floor

So

She was feeding ice cream to her teddy bears. That was an hour before she decided to climb up her dresser drawers and pull the vaporizer down on top of her. Then yesterday there was the toothpaste.

"1 dont think 1 want to hear this.. .

She squirted it into my underwear drawer.

And you still feel housewives are protected? No!

"More like courageous, huh

No. that's not exactly how Id describe it either.

I was puzzled. Just how would you describe us? "More like foolhardy.

Strong Belief Washington Wastes Money

independents

PRINCETON, N.J. Much of the criticism of lederal spen- ^ publics views on the waste of tax dollars, it is

ding is directed not at the validity or purposes of these outlays. National surprising that Americans are highly critical of federal

but at what is perceived to be the waste of taxpayer money. Democrats.... ^ spending per se.

In fact, the public judgment is that as muiph as half (48 Republicans..............................................^ a survey reported this summer, an overwhelming 75 percents) of every tax dollar that goes to the federal government nf each tax dollar that eoes to the cent of the public said the federal gvernment spends too much

in Washington is wasted. This is a median average of all "And how many e waS^ JuS 5 percent said federal outlays were too small and

responses In a .ecenlly completed nationwide Gallttp Poll, govermnent 0^ s sgte^^^^

1 The closer government is to the people, the less critical they Cents Wasted Of Tax Dollar ID sia Median averaae As with views on tax dollar wastage, criticism of govern-

are. For example, when the cross-section of adults was asked ^ ment spending.did not fall evenly on all levels of government,

how many cents of each tax dollar received by the government National ^ a .53 percent majority felt spending by their state government

of their state is wasted, the median average response is 32 I>emocrats was loo high And in the case of local government only 38 percents. And in the case of ones local government, the com- Republicans. cent held the same view.

parable figure is 25 cents. eenfi. of each tax dollar that goes to vour That same survey also showed that by a seven-toH)ne margin

Of particular interest is the fqct that for all three levels of And how many cents of each ^ to 11 oercent) the public favored amending the Constitu-

Bover'imep.. .he hgures cited by Democrats are nearly Iden- local ;l..li,Tet,al/g.he tederal bpdpe. each year,

tical to those Offered by Republicans. Cents Wasted Oil ax Douar Medianaverafle The results reported today are based on personal interviews

F'ollowing are the questions and national results: ^ j 5^13 aduHs, 18 and older, taken in more than 300 scien-

"Of every tax dollar that goes to the federal government in National .............. tificallv selected localities across the nation during the period

Washington, D.C., how many cents of each dollar would you Democrats.......................................

say are waste Republicans..............................................25 Oct. 27-30. ^

'S*