The Courier from Waterloo, Iowa • 4

Waterloo Daily Courier, Waterloo, Iowa 5 i ion Berry's World: Workaday Woes liditorials Friday, May II, 973 Diet Control Not Big Brother Duty Strictly Personal Why Are Classics Waning? By SYDNEY J. HARMS ONE OK MY sons was profoundly bored by a course on Chaucer last semester, despite all my efforts to persuade him that Chaucer was not only a great poet and a magnificent story teller, but also funny, bawdy, witty, ironic, perceptive, earthy, gutsy and "relevant" to the social flux of his times. It still didn't wash. Maybe the teaching was poor, but I suspect that, even when the teaching is good, youngsters still find Chaucer too "antique" to interest them, even when his language is brought up to date. Modernizing Classics But how can you "modernize" a Chaucer, or a Shakespeare, when what they wrote was so much a part of their age, as well as being (at a deeper level) timeless? Students rarely reach the timeless level, being so put off by the archaic mannerisms of speech and locution.

Scholars and producers have tried to break out of this trap by presenting Shakespeare in modern dress, in a contemporary setting, and even by modernizing the language and getting rid of all the "Marry" and "Forsooth" and "Betimes" and "Gadzooks," that clutter up the meaning. Change Falsifies Yet odernizing" the language of older writers is falsifying it in a way; because, when Shakespeare wrote, the language he used was not enly "modern," it was in some sense ahead of its time. He coined many words and new usages SO LONG AS man clings tenaciously his eternal hope that he can rewrite certain natural laws which link appetites l.tb waistlines, there probably isn't much 'government can do to stem the popularity experimental diets and reducing techniques. But it appears that Congress will try anyway. Sen.

George McGovern, has his Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs investigating two popular diets which the American Medical Association recently branded unsound and potentially dangerous. GOVERNMENT LONG ago made public health its responsibility. The Food and Drug Administration can and should 1 IVJ if Inc. "I'm looking for LIBERATION, for FULFILLMENT! And what do I get? 'Take a letter, Ms. Smith'." ''Listen, my job is just as boring as yours on the assembly line, and I have no identification with our finished product, EITHER!" Columnists Abroad, at Home in this country at a time when most Americans, despite rapid inflation of food prices, have the economic ability to eat just about as much as they please.

THIS CRAZE CAN be attributed to aesthetic reasons as well as the suspected role of weight problems in heart attacks and other illnesses. There is an obvious paradox in a man jogging around his neighborhood in hopes of removing a surplus pound he added to his frame at dinner the night before. MAYBE SEN. McGovern and his committee can help publicize the perils of unproven diets. So can the American Medical Association and public health officials and individual doctors.

Dieting and nutrition is an aspect of medical science which rarely has produced consensus. Publicity for all views at least should alert Americans to the controversies so that each person will move with caution. THE BEST ANSWER past, present and perhaps for always may be this oldest technique of all: Place both hands firmly on the edge of the table and push away! Paternalism should never reach the point where Americans expect or allow their government to do that for them. police the safety of what Americans eat, drink and take as medicines. They Eye Watergate Case Study In Insulation Of President Says Nixon Moral Stand Undermined The policing of dietary and nu- tritional advice in books, magazines and Vther media, however, carries government into sticky territory.

For example, is government now heading toward a proposal that communi-, cations media must borrow a leaf from the tobacco industry and warn Americans 1hat a certain diet may be hazardous to their health? CERTAINLY THERE are questions of ethical responsibility in an era of fad diets and freely dispensed theories about nutrition. Dieting has become almost a mania LAIUIABEE ROCHE SYDNEY J. HARRIS eels modernizing won't revive Israel Still Fighting to Survive either personally or by a proxy piece of paper when 'good news' arrives and to be certain that someone else is present when the news is bad." Protective Devices As Reedy put it, "There is built into the Presidency a series of devices that tend to remove the occupant of the Oval Room from all the forces which require most men to rub up against the hard facts of life on a daily basis." Clearly, the greatest staff problem of any president is that of maintaining his contact with the world's reality that lies outside the White House walls. By JOHN P. ROCHE.

AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France The headline in the local paper tells of the arrest of the former chief of the Marseilles police vice squad for taking a bribe from a classy brothel. Since all French reporting is "advocacy journalism," writer has a field day, noting how for years this particular officer had prided himself on his morality, on being (so help me God) "a cop honest." 'Phony Saint' Now, as the broken man is led away in chains, the journalist is overjoyed another phony saint brought down. Then to the serious business. Le Monde the French newspaper of record where lo and behold we find the same scenario with a different cast of characters. "Le Watergate" has finally blown open, heads are rolling in Washington, President Nixon has done penance, and somehow or other even Daniel Ellsberg has gotten in to the act.

Le Monde, in its own austere way, finds the whole affair confirming i long-standing conviction that the United States of America is a lunatic asylum run by the inmates. Faith in U.S. I have a basic loyalty to and faith in American political in- well as to mark Israel's 25th birthday. Since the six-day war in June of 1967, the world's most specifically the Arabs' image of the gentle, accepting, intellectual Jew has been altered. The spine of every Jew in the world adjusted its posture.

This week Mrs. Golda Meir, Israel's Premier, disclosed that overtures have been made to Egypt to open new negotiations on any terms. There has been no reply. THE IDEAS OF MOSES, Jesus, Spinoza, Marx, Freud, Einstein, and a most distinguished company of other Jews, are fundamental to Western civilization. Surely people so vital, who tenaciously waited 2,000 years to own again the rugged piece of terrain that is Israel, will find a way to co-exist with their resentful neighbors.

The Arab's "Salaam" is only a hair away from the Hebrew's "Shalom." VOL. 115 No. 114 ABBA EBAN once observed that Is-. rael is the only place in the world where a child can dig up a stone 3,000 years old and read and understand everything on it. -v Hebrew, despite fantastic odds, has remained unchanged.

For 25 precarious years Israelis have hung onto the right to dig in their own backyards. I SURROUNDED BY hostile peoples, with only a few friends, Israel can turn I its small standing army over a weekend tinto a disciplined organization of a mil-' lion literally. With a population now of two and a thalf million, it has, from the beginning, had a true people's army. I There are two trained pilots for every Israel has been able to buy. Half of the population is under 25.

LAST MONDAY'S show of force through the streets of Jerusalem, the Phantoms flying acrobatics overhead, was obviously staged as a sword-rattler as Inside Labor and even grammatical formations. When audiences at the Globe listened to his plays, the language struck their cars as fresh and piquant and as modern as tomorrow's headline. Jonson was more the pedant, the Latinist and traditionalist. Shakespeare (like Chaucer) was a man of the people, as often coarse as he was lofty, as much at home in the barnyard as in the royal bed-chamber. Word Not Used Now How can we get this across to young people, when they are asked to memorize a soliloquy filled with "fardels," "bodkins," "contumely," "quietus," "bourn," "orisons" and all those perfectly good Elizabethan words we no longer use or even quite understand? Yet, to use synonyms, like "burdens" for "fardels," or "stiletto" for "bodkins" would distort both the meaning of the speech and the flavor of its context.

Much the same problem has obtained with the English-speaking Bible. The King James version has an awesome grandeur no modern version can duplicate, but it is of'cn cryptic and cumbersome to modern ears, and confuses more than it clarifies. Will Shakespeare some day go the way of Chaucer? It is a troublesome, and frightening, question this prospect that we might eventually lose the greatest literary master the world has ever known. stitutions and perhaps for subjective reasons cannot enjoy the spectacle of the President of the United States (any president) sitting in the dock admitting he had surrounded himself with men of no integrity. Yet the conjunction of the two stories of the "cop honest" and "Le Watergate" struck me as quite remarkable.

For over four years, and particularly since last November, we have been exposed to a torrent of pious rhetoric featuring the "work ethic." Demolishes Pretensions What the Watergate developments have done is utterly demolish the moralistic pretensions of the Nixon Administration, the carefully cultivated proposition that in defeating George McGovern, Nixon received some sort of mandate from the American people to return to the "old virtues." After all, what right do the sponsors of CREEP and the Watergate have to criticize some hustler who took the Office of Economic Opportunity for a few thousand bucks? CREEP'S couriers never seem to have traveled without a hundred thousand bucks in cash tucked in a suitcase. What did they do with all that green? Sympathy Although it must be obvious that I would get a certain grim satisfaction from seeing that bunch of moralistic fakirs at hard labor in striped suits, there is still an odd aspect about the whole affair, one that leads me to feel a sense of compassion toward the man, Nixon. You sec, he really does believe in the "old virtues," the "work ethic," and the other values his praetorian guard have betrayed. final Irony It is inconceivable to me that he was aware of their schemes, which leads to the final irony: "Tricky Dick" delivered into the hands of hLs enemies as a consequence of over-trusting his associates! There are authentic elements of Greek tragedy in the whole appalling business. Now Mr.

Nixon must learn to live with Nemesis. Cedar Falls Banner established 1854. Moved to Waterloo and name changed to Courier Dec. 25, 1858. Waterloo Reporter in 1914 and Waterloo Tribune in 1931 merged with Waterloo Courier.

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New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, Atlanta, Los Anaeles, Story Kelly-Smith, Representatives Son Francisco, Detroit, Syracus Thankfully, more people get autos than autos get people. VICTOR RIESEL By DONALD R. LARRABEE Courier Washington Bureau WASHINGTON For months to come, political scholars will be examining the Watergate affair as a case study in the insulation of the Presidency. While the complicated story is still unfolding, it seems clear that in the last analysis, President Nixon's "Seventh Crisis" was exacerbated, if not created, by a circle of advisers who felt the "Chief" needed to be shielded from reality and outside advocates. He also needed to be protected from bad news.

Kennedy's Point Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, in a rambling discussion of Watergate before the nation's newspaper editors last week, suggested that Nixon was the victim of a new and foreboding phenomenon. "No president," said Kennedy, "can ever again let himself be withdrawn into isolation against himself." The senator makes a good point but the problem is deeply-ingrained in the structure of the White House and the environment, rather than in any one chief executive or any "palace guard" he may have. What has happened to Nixon has happened, in varying degrees, to every president in the experience of this writer over the past 25 years.

The problem and the danger have been studied with great perception by George E. Reedy, the faithful aide, speech-writer and press secretary to President Lyndon B. Johnson. Deep Concern Recdy's own experience left him with deep concern about the very real ability of the men around the President to unbalance him mentally. He touched on it in a small book that received scant attention, "The Twilight of the Presidency." I am not suggesting this has happened but it could.

Nixon's Staff Chief The belcagurcd staff chief, Bob Haldcman, along witli John Ehrlichman and a couple of others, admittedly perceived their mission to be one of protecting the President from disorder and enabling him to make what they considered to be the most effective use of his time. Haldcman candidly told one interviewer months ago: "We do act as a screen because IIutc is a real danger of sonw advocate of any idea rushing in to the President if that person is allowed to do so and actually managing to convince him in a burst of emotion or argument Monopolizing Reedy suggesls that one or two men shield a president by monopolizing him. One of the intimates is present at every meeting. "Basically," said Keedy, "the methodology is to be present Links Flood of Import Goods To Strike-Shy U.S. Workers DENNIS THE MENACE By VICTOR RIESEL WASHINGTON That gaslight-era political "Godfather," I Karl Marx, must be twirling in his London grave.

That is, if he's gotten the message. In America, the class struggle has taken a holiday a brief one but still a holiday. Import Threat It has finally seeped down to the working rank and fils that the threat of imports could be lethal. There is danger in ganging up on the so-called Goliath with regular strikes which will cost millions of "jobs, price the U. S.

out of the world markets, bankrupt unions force multinational corporations to produce elsewhere, such Taiwan, Singapore, Ceylon and soon enough In Communist 'China In partnership with Peking state trusts. Fear of these imports now runs all the way from foreign films to Japanese motorcycles. The country is uneasy. The wags-earners are nervous. No Rush lor Strikes So the uneasy rank and file isn't pushing its leaders for tver more and more, for strikes and noisy confrontations with boss." And as usual, the academicians and some of my own iraft interpret this as the coming of age, the strikeless "society.

Thus a new fad develops and fades like the four-day 'lek thing or the job-alienation kick. Now it's an alleged wave 'tf: self-willed "arbitration." This is not true. 'Where's Joe? 4 Workers in many industries simply are disturbed for the ffloment. It's finally been drummed into tbem by their own labor press and, for example, by the jointly labor-management produced steel industry film "Where's Joe?" which preaches the need for productivity and cooperation to fight off imports. There's the venturesome C.

L. (Les) Dennis, president of the Brotherhood of Railway, Airline and Steamship Clerks (AFLIOj, who took a film strip presentation to scores of rank-and-file railroad workers' meetings telling them what and whom they'd bankrupt if they continued to fight the lines. Rails and Steel So there were early agreements in "rails" and "steel." Virtually everybody appears to have forgotten that the right of locals to strike has not been eliminated. Remember this when the nervousness wears off, the dollar gets stronger and strikes sweep Japan, Germany and Britain again and again. But for the moment, some 75 per cent of union members polled recently approved the statement that "if we don't restrict products coming in from Japan, Germany and other countries, many U.S.

workers will be thrown out of work," American Jobs Lost They have reason to believe this. Auto industry research discloses that, for every lOO.WO cars that are imported, some 20.000 American jobs are sacrificed. So for the duration there is a reluctance to strike, be it in "rubber" or other mass industries. And what assurance is there, after a long, costly walkout, that the final victory won't be cut back by the Cost of Living Council? So you can't make back what it's cost you in lost wages. Fear Remains There's fear.

There's uneasiness over the dollar, savings accounts and the value of pensions and insurance policies. But let's not confuse this with a glorious march of sensible forces into a strikeless society industrially governed by Shangri-la type sages called arbitrators. Karl Marx will stop twirling soon mough. "Did you really ineiiii those nice things you snid about me last nilil when you came in my room an' thought I was jislecp?" "Chief. We've just uncovered a new file of Walcrgulc suspects!" 4.