The Record from Hackensack, New Jersey • 95

SuASijftJ pinion SECTION Qassifled Legals Real Estate Voice of People D-8-31 D-39 5-7 D-J SUNDAY, MARCH 14. 1978 Simeon Stylites William A.J Caldwell Confessions of a closet capitalist Any system based on Man's sinfulness is bound to succeed democracy, investments, banking, irw dustry, technology. Millions are alive, and living longer, because of medicine developed under capitalism. Without our enormous psychic energy, productivity, and inventions, oil would still be lying under Saudi Arabia, undiscovered, un-pumped, and useless. Coffee, bananas, tin, sugar, and other items of trade would have no markets.

Capitalism has made the world rich, inventing riches other populations didn't know they had. And yielding sinful pleasures for the millions. Six per cent of the world's population consumes, they say, 40 per cent of the world's goods. The same 6 per cent produces more than 50 per cent; far more than it can consume. No other system can make such a statement, even in lands more populous, older, and richer than our own.

As everybody knows, hedonism requires excess. Look out, world: The closet capitalists are coming out. You don't have to love us. We don't need your love. If we can help you out, we'll be glad to.

A system built on sin is built on very solid ground indeed. The saintliness of socialism will not feed the poor. The United States may be, as many of you say, the worthless and despicable prodigal son among the nations. Just wait and see who gets the fatted calf. in human goodness; so it never works.

Capitalism is a system built on belief in human selfishness; given checks and balances, it is nearly always a smashing, scandalous success. Check Taiwan, Japan, West Germany, Hong Kong, and (one of the newest nations in one of the recently most underdeveloped sectors of the world) these United States. Two hundred years ago, there was a China, and also a Russia. The United States was only a gleam in Patrick Henry's eye. Wherever you go in the world, sin thrives better under capitalism.

It's presumptuous to believe that God is on any human's side. (Actually, if capitalism were godless and socialism were deeply religious, the roles of many spokesmen in America would be reversed in fascinating ways). But God did make human beings free. Free to sin. God's heart may have been socialist; his design was capitalist as hell.

There is an innate tendency in socialism toward authoritarianism. Left to themselves, all human beings won't be good; most must be coerced. Capitalism, accepting human sinfulness, rubs sinner against sinner, making even dry wood yield a spark of grace. (CAPITALISM has given the planet its present impetus for liberation. Everywhere else they are hawking capitalist ideas: growth, liberation.

By Michael Novak THE DAY 1 heard Michael Harrington, the political scientist and noted say that most liberals are socialists," I knew by my revulsion that I had to face an ugly truth about myself. For years, I had tried to hide, even from myself, my unconscious convictions. In the intellectual circles I frequent, persons with inclinations like my own are mocked, considered to be compromised, held at arm's length as security We are easily intimi-dated. The truth is that there probably are millions of us. Who knows? Your -brother or sister may be one of us.

The fellow teaching in the class next to yours; the columnist for the rival paper; even the famous liberated poe- tess our kind, hiding their convictions out of fear or retribution, lurk everywhere. Even now we may be corrupting your children. We are the closet capitalists. Now, at last, our time has come. The whole world is going socialist.

Nearly 118 out of 142 nations of the world are socialist tyrannies. A bare 24 are free-economy democracies. We are the world's newest, least understood, and least loved minority. It is time for us to begin, everywhere, organizing cells of the Capitalist Liberation Front. I first realized I was a capitalist "Will Mayor Daley have 'clout over the planners?" I asked, seeking a little comfort.

"Or congressmen from Mississippi?" My friends thought liberal-minded persons would make the key decisions. Knowing the nation, I can't feel so sure. Knowing the liberal-minded, I'm not so comforted. Since they have argued that oil companies are now too large, I couldn't see how an HEW that included Oil would be smaller. My modest proposal was that they encourage monopoly in every industry and then make each surviving corporation head a cabinet officer.

Practical discussions seemed beside the point. FINALLY, I realized that socialism is not a political proposal, not an economic plan. Socialism is the residue of Judaeo-Christian faith, without religion. It is a belief in community, the goodness of the human race, and paradise on Earth. That's when I discovered I was an incurable and inveterate, as well as secret, sinner.

I believe in sin. I'm for capitalism, modified and made intelligent and public-spirited, because it makes the world free for sinners. It allows human beings to do pretty much what they will. Socialism is a system built on belief The author is a Catholic theologian whose latest book is "Choosing Our King." when all my friends began publicly declaring that they were socialists, Harrington and John Kenneth Galbraith, the economist, having called the signal. How I wished I could be as Left as they.

Night after night I tried to persuade myself of the coherence of their logic. I did my best to go straight. I held up in the privacy of my room pictures of every socialist land known to me: North Korea, Albania, Czechoslovakia (land of my grandparents), and even Sweden. Nothing worked. WHEN I quizzed my socialist intellectual friends, I found they didn't like socialist countries, either.

They all said to me: "We want socialism, but not like Eastern Europe," I said: "Cuba?" No suggestion won their assent. They didn't want to be identified with China (except that the streets seemed clean). Nor with Tanzania. They loved the idea of socialism. "But what is it about this particular idea you like?" I asked.

"Government control? Will we have a Pentagon of heavy industry?" Not exactly. Nor did they think my suggestion witty, that under socialism everything would function like the Post Office. When they began to speak of I asked, who would police the planners? They had enormous faith in politicians, bureaucrats, and experts. Especially in experts. If it matters, keep it quiet BEFORE ARRAIGNING the candidates for the presidency on a charge of conspiring to suppress the issues, the prosecution should say what the issues are.

Here goes: THE ECONOMY. How do we reinstate full employment, meaning a job in the private sector for everyone willing to work, without rekindling inflation or going to war? THE ENVIRONMENT. How do we ensure a sufficiency in food, heat, power, and raw materials without dismantling government. contols ion pollution, deforestation, strip-mining? FOREIGN AFFAIRS. How do we keep communism at bay without actually confronting Communists and ceding to them the decision whether to adjourn the human race? NATIONAL SECURITY.

How do we safeguard the secrecy and effectiveness of our defenses against espionage, infiltration, and Pearl Harbor II without depriving ourselves of the right to know what our government is up to? L'ETAT C'EST MOI. Considering our willingness to buy the packaging and never mind what flavor is the garbage inside, how do we know any of these products isn't a brand-new, mint-flavored, clean-tasting Nixon? STATE OF THE UNION. If we let the cities go plumb to hell, what do we plan to do with the people who live in them? If we don't desegregate the schools, how do we de-fix the odds against persons whose skin pigmentation is other than pallid? If we haven't money enough to buy colleges and hospitals and law enforcement, how can we afford the National Football League, snowmobiles, Muhammad Ali, "Jaws," and Jackie Kennedy Onassis? IT IS NOT at all surprising, although it is shocking, that the candidates haven't debated such questions. It is not surprising to find Mr. Ford running against Fidel Castro and Jimmy Carter- against experience in government and George Wallace against the Harvard faculty and Ronald Reagan against the Red Army.

What should be surprising is that the electorate in state after state is not only tolerating, not only encouraging, but actually financing the degradation of a campaign, which should be a great educational institution, to the level of an animated-cartoon commercial on the television screen. It is frightening, in one man's opinion, that the President should be undertaking to guarantee that we have no more Watergates by making criminal the exposure of such shenanigans as the Nixon White House's. But he is not being re-' quired to explain how corruption will be deterred by forbidding public servants to report corrupt conduct to their employers, the people. The king who can do no ascertainable wrong is a disease. Why isn't Ford asked whether he is pardoning himself in advance? No answer.

For some of the electorate's nonfeasance one can imagine reasons. Labor wants jobs, and if Senator Jackson's rearmament pro-' gram would generate them, who in labor is likely to ask him whether multiplying by five our capacity to kill everybody on Earth five times over wouldn't be an expensive redundancy? Who's really against Mr. Udall's austerity, as long as somebody else can enjoy the privilege of being austere? Who, except possibly our friends the shif'less n'er-do-wells whose lives depend on federal money, would object out loud to Reagan's lopping $90 billion out of the budget? Let's not censure the politicians. They're busy shaking hands. They haven't time to sit down and write out a systematic, coherent solution for the contradictions that are tearing civilization apart.

And if one of them did, who'd listen? I take it I forgot to mention one other issue: THE VOTER. Does he in fact want his statesmen to talk sense to him? Has he guts enough to want to know the trouble he's in? NOT LONG AGO it was suggested in this space that somebody should nominate for president the United States Representative to the United Nations, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and I proceeded to do so. He had long since made known his position on other issues. I promised to ask him how he felt about abortion, and did. Time for a report.

Dear Mr. Caldwell: How good of you to write such an encouraging letter. I shall have to think about oil that, I suppose, but certainly I haven't done so yet. I have spent thirteen of the last nineteen years in government, and what I really want to do and the only thing I really wont to do is get back to teaching. Whatever happens, it has mattered more than you might suppose to have such letters as yours.

Sincerely. DANIEL P. MOYNIHAN 799 United Notions Plaza New York. N. Y.

I think his signature might interest amateurs of handwriting analysis, but I am not sure that Mr. Moynihan has answered the question about abortion responsively. Shall I ask Betty Ford whether she'd consider the nomination? Moving on from Joplin U.S. history in song i -r Marking Time i 'f Mark A- wv WiffiiSxsM -M l-cY ilipiiP worked with it, Frank was caught up in its charm. I chose Carmen Balthrup who wowed the New York audience, and Frank and I went to work trying to get someone to produce it.

"One of my happiest times was the day it opened in New York. It was the same day my book was published." MRS. LAWRENCE is in the process of changing her lifestyle even more. "I used to live in Pomona, up in Rockland County. Then I decided to do a cultural history of New York in the mid-19th Century.

I wanted to immerse myself in the city. So I took an apartment on the East Side." With a panoramic view of Manhattan south from 57th Street, the 38th-floor apartment can be a breathtaking place at dusk, when the lights come on all over the city. "Isn't it gorgeous?" Vera Lawrence asks, standing by a window. "It's my present to myself after these years of work." The cultural history will be based on the diaries of George Templeton Strong, an authentic man-about-town in New York from 1835 to 1875. "He knew everybody in the arts, went everywhere, saw everything, absorbed so much, and wrote about it so well.

He's what I like to think of as the typical cultured New Yorker, and his views should be considered with care by social historians." A new Lawrence book is about to come out. "It'll be a complete collection of our campaign songs. You know, at one time, songs were the life of a political campaign. Before radio and TV, people participated more in rallies, and songs had to be written to lift the crowd. "The mass media, however, caused a decline in songs for campaign purposes.

Campaign songs are fading, just the way observation-car speeches have disappeared. People stay home now and watch the campaign progress electronically. It isn't nearly as exciting." If anyone can bring back the excitement of stumping, of huge rallies and huge crowds roaring out songs especially written for a favorite candidate, it's Vera Brodsky Lawrence. She may even ignite a new rage for such songs, just as she reignited the rage for ragtime. IF YOU'VE HEARD of Scott Joplin, you should know Vera Brodsky Lawrence.

She rediscovered his music. As a matter of fact, if you know good music, you should have heard of Vera Brodsky Lawrence. Until she quit performing a dozen years ago, she was a familiar and well-received concert pianist. And if you like beautifully written, beautifully produced books about music or American history, you should get to know Vera Brodsky Her "Music for Patriots, Politicians, and Presidents" is the kind usually called a coffee-table book. It's big (9V by 12' i inches, 480 pages), it's expensive ($35 from Macmillan), and profusely illustrated (each of its songs is accompanied by the sheet music, in many cases facsimiles of the original; and it has other historical pictures, as well).

It's also heavy. It isn't, however, the kind of coffee-table book you glance through, then leave for the dust to cover. "Song texts," says Vera LawTence, "make history come alive." Mrs. Lawrence, a short woman with a sense of gentle sadness surrounding her, comes alive when she talks about music history. "The songs of America's first- 100 years were as influential in their time as radio and television are today.

Our forefathers were incited to early resistance by songs protesting tyranny; soldiers were inspired by rousing military marches, and all America was informed of the latest triumphs and tragedies by ballad broadsides, songsters, and sheet music." THE BOOK is her attempt to illustrate this. How did she come to write it? A pianist all her life she was a child prodigy out of Norfolk, Va. she played in con Vera Brodsky Lawrence certs from the age of 14 until her husband was killed in an auto accident 12 years ago. "My life took a sharp turn then. Maybe it was because I wanted to get away from my old life, my old memories.

I turned to music publishing and editing." She never suspected she had a flair for mu-sicology. "It began with a Ford Foundation project to organize a library of contemporary music. We had 73 American composers participating, and the project served 77 schools, offering microfilmed manuscripts on demand. "As I examined the project, I felt we should be doing it for all American composers, not just the contemporaries. So I went to work myself, first with the-music of Louis Moreau Gottschalk." From that project came a five-volume set of Gottschalk's music, the first time it had been collected or published.

Then she turned to Scott Joplin. "I was the first to have all of Joplin's music, but I was turned down by 24 publishers. Finally, I had to ask the New York Public Library to do it." Out of this venture came the current Joplin craze, including the music for "The Sting" and "Treemonisha." Mrs. Lawrence doesn't like "The Sting." She thinks it's hoked up. "Treemonisha" has an interesting history.

It was considered Joplin's bad-luck work. "It was first performed in Atlanta from the music I unearthed. I wasn't happy with it. In 1972, it was repeated at Wolf Trap. I still wasn't happy.

But I'd be damned if this beautiful opera was to continue to be Joplin's hard-luck work. I asked Gunther Schuller to orchestrate it and Frank Corsaro to direct it "Corsaro didn't like it at first. Then as he Sincerely, laeaeL. Daniel P. Moynihan.