The Desert Sun from Palm Springs, California • 12

A10 THE DESERT SUN Pita Spring CiUf TkarsSiy July 12 1879 Editorials Opinions Fvrti FwzrwMtn6R-TRE6R Huuwe Mcn'7 i LISIJS SHOEMAKER Editor EJ GROKER I'iet Preudent and ftblinher Mom's gnocegy gi HavC MO LIMITEP puE TDtSffS pWtWOWK Tunc Strike Stcik vut Tflk KILLING HOT ft1! GOP in need of leadership fOOVl peti Creel I i a late bulletin power failure at the sausage plant It is a measure of Republican sloth and ineptitude that the milestone 125th anniversary of the Party's foundation on July 6 1854 went largely unheralded An occasion such as this should be celebrated It is one of those special introspective times when the faithful should try to enlarge their vision of the future from the lessons and inspirations of the past The anniversary is significant moreover because the Republican Party embodies so many of the triumphs mistakes mediocrities and tragedies of US history If the Republicans should lose touch with political reality become irrelevant and wither away as did the Whigs their predecessors it will be because they failed to learn their history lessons The collapse of the Whig Party in the mid-19th century is pertinent to the critical question of whether Republicanism is relevant to the great national challenges during the waning years of the 20th century The Whigs winked out because the compromises through which they had originally sought a national consensus became meaningless when brought face to face with the issue of slavery And so when the party of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster ceased to stand even for compromise it no longer had a mission and so ceased to exist The Republican Party arose from the wreckage because it became the vehicle for those opposed to the extension of slavery which position the Whigs and Democrats let go by default It stood four square on the issues from the time of its inception first in the small gatherings at Ripon Wise during February and March -1854 and in the formal organization and adoption of its standard four months later And on down the years until eclipsed by the Great Depression a half-century ago and the leadership of a dynamic Democratic president Franklin Roosevelt the Republican platforms managed to express the national will The Republicans presided over Union victory in the Civil War over expansion into the West over industrial revolution in America and over the manifest destiny of world power The Great Depression and Franklin Roosevelt were the paralyzing wound for Republicans that Ute Civil War and Abraham Lincoln had been fbr Democrats And ad with the Democrats the years have at least brought the Republicans out of the wilderness Once more Republican philosophy coincides with the main-stream Of national thought The Democrats in power at the state and national levels seem unable to cope realistically with economics energy or foreign problems The quality of Republican leadership therefore will determine whether the Grand Old Party can lift the American people from their dour dissatisfaction Unfortunately' a modern GOP equivalent of Theodore Roosevelt or Franklin Roosevelt is nowhere in sight to rally anew the national spirit Clearly then the requirement to raise up vigorous visionary leadership looms for the Republicans as an even larger challenge than usual And if history is mostly a byproduct of human personality as some respected historians believe the conservative reawakening now proceeding in America could go awry without leadership to guide it A renaissance of the American dream could be lost It is precisely the lack of a dream the lack of direction that has crippled the Carter administration that calls now for a dynamic Republican leader i I Martin Smith Jerry latest turnabout SALT II position SACRAMENTO Jerry Brown did it again By trying to sound like an apostle of disarmament he demonstrated anew just how flexible his principles are His recent speech in which he moved substantially to the left of President Carter on the issue of military spending won him rousing cheers from an audience of University of California at San Diego students well that they were as young as they were It made them even less likely than most voters to remember just how great a flipflop is represented in latest policy pronouncement on defense Three years ago Gov Brown was trying to gain support from Democratic i Party hawks those whose first choices for the 1976 nomination were Henry Jackson or the late Hubert Humphrey So the governor then talked a conservative line on military spending Today however the party's left wing voters who are up for grabs So Brown cooed like a dove Describing the Carter propos MX missile system as $30 billion perhaps $70 billion boondoggle that will jeopardize not protect the security of the United The governor called for an era of limits in the arms race and conceded the president' only a few points for reaching agreement with the Russians on the proposed Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II) Brown regards SALT II as only a mod- eststep The governor first spoke out on defense spending in an interview with Robert Scheer in the April 1976 issue of Playboy magazine Then Brown was quoted as doubting that there would be: any substantial cuts in military spending costs have gone up and I don't realistically think the budget will be said the governor This year Brown has been hinting as if he would be taking a much softer line on defense than he did in 1976 At the same time however he denied that he would be inconsistent When in an interview last January he was asked1 if he were preparing to back down from I his earlier views Brown responded: think you ought to reread my words I talked about cuts I talked about cuts in a literal sense I didn't talk about cutting gains Someone made the comment that the defense budget would be cut $5 billion I think (my) statements were aimed at negotiating the proposition that there could be an absolute cut at that point in defense all I was Is that true? Let's look at some of the other words Brown spoke in the Playboy interview When he was asked what he thought of the Ford administration's policy of detente with the Soviet Union his reply would have delighted the Pentagon think you can be naive about the said Brown a compet itive place and the strong survive and the weak don't We're still a few generations away from the time when swords will be turned into plowshares and until then we ought to'be ready" against whom?" Brown obviously the strongest military power all becoming more interdependent but we ought to realize that without substantial military strength obviously jeopardizing our security I wonder what exactly will be the consequences of some of the agreements that Kissinger is apparently bringing Scheer "Then on detente less optimistic than some Republican spokesmen about the prospect of peaceful coexistence?" Brown "Well I get the impression that being pushed around a lot and that America has become a big sap for the rest of the countries And I like it We have a lot of strength so I don't see why we should have guilt -feelings and act like always the fall Consider the difference in the tone of those remarks with what Brown was saying in San Diego when he declared: notion that somehow about to lose our strategic credibility That the perception of this alleged weakness will encourage the Soviets to expand their sphere of influence (and) intimidate our allies or our own leaders is purely a dangerous mytH that must be refuted at every opportunity" We readily admit that Jerry Brown is a clever governor with a deft feel for politics But when Mr Brown shifted gears the other day and assumed the role of military analyst and master strategist he fell on his sword Come to think of it Jerry Brown really didn't shift gears at all In his maiden speech on the SALT II treaty the Soviet-American military balance and the MX missile Mr Brown remained ever the artful politician -As part of his presidential strategy Gov Brown has evidently decided to carve out a niche for himself well to the left of President Carter on strategic arms issues That way Gov Brown can appeal to all those young liberals offended by his support for the Proposition 13 trend now second only to that of Howard Jarvis Thus Gov Brown pronounced himself satisfied that the SALT II treaty should be ratified and that it fit nicely into his current of theme Had he stopped right there few might have guessed that Jery expertise on strategic weapons is roughly equal to his enthusiasm for new nuclear power plants To the delighted laughter of his student audience at the University of California at San Diego Mr Brown lampooned the proposed MX ICBM as wasteful transit system for In the next breath he cavalierly dismissed the mounting of documented evidence of the Soviet emerging military superiority over the United States sniffed the governor The kids at UCSD ate it up And as the governor exited to cheers and applause he turned to his Finance Director Richard Silberman and said what the Eastern pundits realize the students are there We could have a great student We get goosebumps just thinking about it California Focus Energy crisis affects farms World Proxm ire erred Seii William Proxmire has had a lot of fun with his awards ridiculing programs and projects that in his opinion were rip-offs of the American taxpayer But the research of the Wisconsin Democrat has itself often been superficial Proxmire in releasing his barrage of barbs at recipients of federal research grants believed himself secure against retaliation because of constitutional provisions of from lawsuits The Supreme Court however has ruled that the senator erred in extending his criticisms in press releases newsletters and interviews that his activities outside the exceeded the scope of the immunity feature' The zeal in exposing government foolishness is commendable The hole punched in the congressional immunity armor will assure that it is also responsible By THOMAS ELIAS California agriculture the 105-' billion industry that underpins the economy has already felt some impacts of the energy crunch Its produce is not moving smoothly to markets in other parts of the nation But one food expert predicts that the diesel shortage and resulting protest will be only the first rumblings of a food transportation revolution which could impact very heavily on California growers are going to have to draw lines eventually to decide what we want to expend energy to said Gilbert Leveille chairman of the Michigan State University food sciences department and past chairman of the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Academy of Sciences When those decisions are made Leveille says their impact will be heaviest on California because it is the largest farming state and its farms are so distant from many id their eventual customers in other parts of the nation Lettuce a leading California crop is one item Leveille singles out as likely to go if a nutritional scale is used to decide what gets shipped East and what does not nutritional contribution of lettuce is Leveille said is 90 percent water so shipping it East has to be a marginal priority You have to eat a bushel for it to make a contribution" views contrast sharply with other health experts who see the fiber in lettuce as a major inhibitor of cancers especially those of the breast and intestine But prediction goes beyond lettuce and vegetables also have high moisture content California will have to find ways to concentrate them for shipment then add water to restore them somehow on the other end" These kinds of energy-agriculture decisions Leveille said are inevitable but they may be several years off Other fori oral Hppicinnn imnartinv on Califor nia farmers are much closer One such decision involves changes in meal patterns mandated by the US -Derailment of Agriculture's Food and Nutrition service New guidelines will be issued this summer for all federally-funded school lunch programs stressing lower fat salt and sugar content There will be no public hearings on the new instructions which all school lunch programs must follow Those guidelines are the first direct outgrowth of a 1969 White House conference on food and nutrition which spawned a congressional select committee headed by Democratic US Sen George McGovern of South Dakota The McGovern committee called for lowered consumption of fats salts and foods containing cholesterol It opposed long-time promotions' like the food approach of the California Dairy Council which maintain that daily food intake should include at least some meat dairy grain and fruit or vegetable products flap (9tf7lbvNEA me a real shocker all right starting off with the price of the tickets Peter Schrag Dangers inherent in any study of violence of the root causes of and possible solutions for crime and The Vasconcellos proposal which easily won approval in the Assembly in June and which is now before the Senate is in some respects radically different from the proposed Violence Center Where the latter placed its hope in various technologies of behavior control AB 23 proposes to deal with root causes of violence" through what Vasconcellos calls gentle for growing "healthy human Thus the commission in three years of study would examine how for example an infant deprived of touching" may develop a personality strikes out to get and how the way a child is raised touched loved rejected by hisher parents may determine that inclination toward The UCLA and the Vasconcellos proposals for all their differences share the ancient dream that the causes of can be determined and the corresponding hope that somehow it will be possible to break human beings of their violent tendencies or better yet to raise than up in such a way that they will have no violent tendencies to begin with Where the promoters id the UCLA center were certain that many violent individuals suffered from severe but treatable neurological malfunctions some deficiency in brain chemistry or cerebral wiring Vasconcellos is much more interested in the effects id birth trauma nutrition and sexual repression But the hope is more or less the same The danger lies in the hope itself in the invitation to well intentioned people to intervene in life to prevent some future disaster possibly to screen or -I test people to see if they show signs or early symptoms of future violence perhaps to retrain or recondition whole population to make it harmless inconceivable 1 that AB 23 has any but the best intentions Yet whenever i such proposals are made hard to imagine them leading to anything that either dangerous or mean-'l ingless For generations such efforts have failed partly because human society and the human personality are too complex' i for such manipulation and partly because even the terms commonly used violence hyperactivity violence-prone elude scientific definition and measurement In the past the best-in tentioned programs to produce good -people nr to purge the bad of their evil tendencies'! frequently led to human torture: We burned them at the sake to save their souls Nowadays fortuhately such attempts lead only to tortured language of protests on the UCLA campus objections in the Legislature a threatened congressional investigation and- a variety of warnings that UCLA was wading into an Orwellian swamp of mind control the promised federal money vanished Partly because of the Violence Center Controversy the federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration announced it was no longer funding projects in behavior modification Now California seems to be at it again this time with a liberal love-and-touch humampotential attempt to accomplish what the Violence Center was supposed to do with its studies of drugs electronics and other heavy technology The new effort sponsored by Assemblyman John Vas-con cellos entails the creation of a 28-member California Commission on Crime Control and Violence Prevention which would among other things study what the enabling legislation (AB 23) calls "the birthing process the parenting process the significance of tactual development healthy- sexual development the effects of television powerlessness poverty and prejudice" All of these studies it is hoped will lead to proposals for immediate implementation especially looking toward the development of a broader and deeper public awareness In his State of the State message back in 1973 Ronald Regan proclaimed the establishment of what was to be called the Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence an institution designed to become part of the Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA and which with substantial federal funding explore (as Reagan put it) all types of violent behavior what causes it how it may be detected prevented controlled and Among the objectives of the violence center were genetic biochemical and neurophysiological studies of violent individuals experiments in the of violence-producing and violence-inhibiting studies of behavior during the menstrual and hopefully the development of tests might permit the detection of violence-predisposing brain disorders prior to the occurrence of a violent episode" The director of the UCLA center Dr Louis Jolyon West also hoped that he could secure an abandoned Nike Missile site in the Santa Monica Mountains as isolated but place in which he and his colleagues could carry out some of their experiments The Violence Center never really got off the ground nor did it ever get the Nike missile site West had asked for Within a few months after speech Watergate radically altered the political climate and in the face.