The Daily Times from Mamaroneck, New York • 14

a hS' -n- i i Gannett Westchester Newspapers Tuesday, July 24, 1984 i' i Section I for 1988 is a Forum 1 I )' grand history, -their past achievements 'I for the immigrants, the poor, the needy. But the Cuomo message offers i little for the class which reflects the 'very success of the Democrats past programs growing masses of well-educated, affluent, independent-. minded young independents, sometimes derisively called Yuppies but still the cutting edge of a new politics in the land. Sordid: charade of Miss America HAVING TAKEN off everything Vanessa Williams had no choice but to take off her Miss America crown, too. But what a sordid incident all around.

i i r' i For the producers of the Miss Amen-- ca pageant to stand upon their pedestal, talking about morals and the image of the pageant, is pompous nonsense. The whole point of the Miss America charade is to sell merchandise by way. of a womans body. The rest of it the talent contest, the scholarship money, the squeaky clean reputation is daz zle, which is meant to cloak the whole business in respectability. For Bob Guccione of Penthouse magazine to buy the pictures and publish them, and then to wallow in seamy self-righteousness about i First Amendment I 1 guarantees and his readers right to.

know is so outrageous you hardly know whether to laugh or scream. f' v' i 'For Miss Williams po persist in saying she was enraged' after seeing the photo: graphs and in contending, I never cop sented to the. publication or us of these photographs in any7 manner is terribly naive Is there a. photographer in the world who doesnt show off his pictures? Andls there anyone of the age of reason who doesnt know that? i But the whole story is not what it implies about Vanessa Williams values, or Penthouses values or the pageant officials values. The most pointed question of all is.

this: Whatj does it. imply about the nations (I By Neal R. Peirce SAN FRANCISCO Is' New Yorks Gov. Mario Cuomo, despite the tumultuous reception to hia Democratic keynote speech here last week, the right political figure to lead the Democrats after (die solid defeat most believe awaits the party this November? Right now, a good guess would be even if Cuomo won himself a1 head start for the 88 nomination through his spellbinding oratory. Cuo-mos problem was brought home to me by a Florida Hart delegate and state legislator who quipped that Cuomo had delivered a great rust bowl speech.

Sure enough, Cuomos examples of hardship in America the fate of a disabled man in Boston, a retired school teacher in Duluth, a hungry woman in Little Rock, the abjo poor of Essex County, N.Y. were overwhelmingly from America's trour bled Northeast-Midwest industrial crescent Cuomo's problem is not just geographic! The -deeper problem 'is the New York governor, in his address and, public career, has been an example and spokesman for the Democrats A Los Angeles Times poll of Democratic delegates revealed a striking generational split The vast majority of Mondale delegates were over 40; the overwhelming number of Sen. Gary Hart's were under 40. The toughest to-the-point address the Democrats heard here was a little-reported speech by Arkansas youthful Gov. Bill Clinton.

Clinton invoked memory of Harry Truman, but couldn't have beat more on target for the '80s when he identified the Democrats' central problem: How to attract the millions of Americans who feel locked out and wont vote because they think were irrelevant He noted especially the young an well-educated, who intend to vote against us "'because they think we have no pro-, gram for the future. Clinton was short on solutions, but he had the right questions. What should America do about getting its brains beaten out in international economic competition; about finding work for the millions whose jobs have been lost because of competition from low wages abroad and necessity to automate at home; about coping with sky-high federal deficits? This year of 1984 is like 1948, Clinton said when new realities required new ideas and a willingness to stand up to interest groups both within and outside our party when the public interest demands it Truman would tell us you cant please everybody in tough times and you shouldnt try. Read the 1984 Democratic Platform, you see the recipe for please-everybodyism. Mondales admission of the need for an 85 income tax hike is a welcome exception.

But generally, one listens to him or to Mario Cuomo, and no tough choices are indicated. 1 Thats why many Democratic delegates even Mondale delegates in their candid moments agree that' 1984 is shaping up as a year of disaster for their party. Many fear the negative coattail impact on local Democratic candidates. Many yearn for a more modern, more realistic Democratic vision of the future, one they hope will evolve in the coming four years. There are potential future Democratic presidential nominees who seem to grasp the limits to federal power and wealth, the need for rewriting tax codes, for trimming entitlement programs, for drastic action to stem.

budget deficits even while they'd save the the party's best social-welfare programs. One thinks of governors like Bruce Babbitt of Arizona or Dick Lamm of Colorado, James Hunt of North Carolina or perhaps Arkansas Bill Clinton' one day. Or senators like New Jersey's Bill Bradley or Arkansas Dale Bumpers and other party leaders who may emerge in the next four years. Gov. Mario Cuomo Democrat of past But time could be alarmingly short for the Democrats.

Republicans could move a few shades to the left on issues like environmental 1 control and defense spending, pre-empting the young professionals constituency. A facile analysis says the Demo- crats need, a Sunbelt or candidate, win the huge vote blocks of Florida, Texas and California that would have to be added to a North-east-Midwest base to build an electoral majority. But the more vital question is one of attitude to learn, Harry Truman style, to say "no to some constituencies, to broaden the party's base to rising professional classes, to talk sense on the tough issues Clinton set forth at this convention. A Mario Cuomo could be smart enough to make that transition. But if his performance in San Francisco was any guide, hes a country mile short of the mark today.

For the Democrats, 1984 may be a year of lost opportunity to reshape and broaden their old alliance before it crumbles altogether. Neal R. Peirce is with the National Journal, a weekly publication on government news. If there were no hordes of buyers out there willing to plunk down $4, for titilla-tion, Guccione would not be wearing gold chains and bragging about his 24-karat gold bathtub. It takes a lot of readers and a lot of advertisers to support him in that style, and provide him with the lucre to pay big bucks for dirty pictures.

So before anyone casts any stones, stop and ask why Americans go on applauding girl-next-door wholesomeness, then run out to buy pre-packaged Sen. Bill Bradley Gov. Bill Clinton Democrats cf the future Fanaticism of bound to lead i i 1 Paper purge Walt Whitman Henry Thoreau Opposite triears on anti-slavery violence any stripe to violence Forum tionist fanatic. John Brown, a neer-do-well who was rarely able to keep his 20 children above abject destitution, started his private war a full 10 years before the Civil War began. In 1856 Brown and several of his sons raided a pro-slavery settlement in Kansas, claiming his acts were decreed by Almighty God, and carried out a massacre in which five men were horribly mutilated.

None was a slave owner, and two were German immigrants who had no contact with the South. Yet, even though Brown claimed responsibility for the massacre, some Eastern intellectuals and capitalists refused to believe him guilty, and continued to support his guerrilla activities in a lavish manner Brown never knew in his impecunious life. By 1859, Brown was already calling himself commander-in-chief of a private army as he prepared to launch a raid from Maryland on the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Va. an enterprise which was supposed to signal a slave insurrection but was so absurd, as 'Abraham Lincoln said, that the slaves, with all their ignorance, saw plainly enough it could not succeed." At first the more responsible aboli- THINGS no longer needed or wanted have a way of accumulating in desk drawers, attics, basements and And in government, where what mainly accumulates is paper.

More and more paper means more and more file cabinets and more and more space for the cab-s inets. Which is to say it gets expensive i North Dakota is doing something about this by ordering the 148 state agencies to go through the files and pitch out obsolete material. The first and largest of those agencies has obliged by pitching 19 tons of worthless stuff in the process emptying 435 file drawers and freeing 108 cabinets. The discarded paper is being given to a program called Recycle for Trees, one more beneficiary of the cleanout We heartily commend the North Dakota example to other governments at all levels. But with one caution.

Like clearing a patch of weeds, a single purge of paper is satisfying but illusory. Youre got to stay at it or the weeds or the paper will sneak back and try to choke you. tionists called Brown's raid, which left nearly a score of combatants dead, an act of madness. But when Brown himself refused to plead insanity at trial and invoked the higher law defense, he created a dilemma. John Brown may be a lunatic," wrote a leading abolitionist newspaper in Boston, but if so, then one-fourth of the people of Massachusetts are madmen.

A New York newspaper called the act insane but the motive sublime. From his prison cell. Brown turned out tracts claiming divine sanction for his and gradually, his self-justification be-; gan 'to win the endorsement of the'' leading intellectuals of the day. In his oration at Lincolns funeral, Ralph Waldo Emerson likened Brown's thin gruel to the the Gettysburg Address, and Henry David Thoreau com- By Ray Jenkins Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one. Henry David Thorean Lately the literature of the right-to-life movement has grown increasingly shrill.

A leading monthly newsletter regularly reports abortion horror stories, such as accounts of aborted fetuses found gasping for breath in -hospital garbage cans. Often, hideous depict festuses stacked up like sticks, evoking memories of the ghastly pictures of victims of Hitlers death camps. At times the rhetoric gets so out of hand that retractions must be hastily printed to' avoid libel suits; the current issue of the Moral Majority Report retracts a spurious report, that fetal remains were being used in cosmetics by a leading American manufacturer. And lately there has been a determined effort to liken abortion to slavery, the contention being that, as with human bondage, abortion treats the unborn as if they were not really human beings, but rather as disposable as pestiferous insects. If you believe: that a fetus is a human being, then the analogy is not inappropriate.

Once you have accepted that premise, then it follows that you have a moral obligation to stop the slaughter, and it matters not what the Supreme Court may say, nor how large a majority the Gallup Poll finds in support of freedom of choice. So when the radical anti-abortionists, the Army of God, bombs the Planned Parenthood Clinic in Maryland, as anonymous callers have claimed, they are only doing what they perceive to be Gods west. No doubt the Army of God represents the lunatic fringe to be found in every emotional-movement, and spokesmen for the right-to-life movement thus felt obliged to dissociate themselves from the terrorist, act But while condemning the bombing of the Maryland clinic, the local right-to-life leadership was unable to issue an unequivocal denunciation; the statement had to be coupled with a denunciation of what was taking place in the clinic. In other words, the act may be reprehensible, but the provocation was even more reprehensible! Such a posture is not likely to discourage further violence. In such attitudes we find yet another similarity between the anti-abortion movement and the anti-slavery movement as it sought to deal with the of John Brown, the aboli- terrorism IJVSTUMTIDWf MUMNttlMfiiC pared Browns execution to the Crucifixion of Christ William Lloyd Garrison said every slaveholder opposed emancipation had forfeited his right to live.

Such statements, needless to say," did not escape attention in a South already in the thrall of paranoia and terror over the prospect of slave revolts such as the Nat Turner rebellion in Virginia in the 1830s. In a gripping account of Brown's private war and its vast implications, the historian C. Vann Woodward wrote: Convinced that the South was honeycombed with subversives, Southerners tended to see an abolitionist behind every bush and a slave insurrection brewing in the arrival of every stranger. Woodward related that as the mob spirit spread, an elderly Texas minister, even though a believer in biblically sanctioned slavery, got 70 lashes for preaching a sermon which criticized inhumane treatment of slaves. Significantly, while Northern intellectuals were being swept up in the hysteria generated by Browns hanging, there were two notable dissenters.

One was Walt Whitman, the relentless celebrant of American nationhood, and the other was Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose ancestor had been a judge in an earlier time when hysteria consumed a community the Salem witch trials. i In the South, the zealots of secession could not have created a better ally than Brown, and soon the young nation was engaged in civil war. The method is nothing; the spirit is all, wrote Thoreau in a Transcenden-talist expression of the belief that the end justifies the means if the end is sufficiently noble. The spirit of noble violence is alive and well in Maryland. It thrives when people who would never commit an act of violence themselves feel compelled to justify those who da Ray Jenkins is editor of the editorial page at the Baltimore Evening San.

Gannett Westchester Newspapers MW ROCNIUI ITANOAIMTM MOUNT VMNON DAILY ARGUS MAMAROMCK OAKY TIMES KIT OCHER DMLY ITEM Louis A. Weil III' WHITE KAMI WORTER OtSPATCM YONKERS HERAIO STATESMAN OSSMRNO GTUEN REGOTH TAMmOWN OAKY MWS Joseph M. Ungaro tOKMUKUUUM TIN IK. 4-5152 Lawranca Vic FiaMat, Eautiw Editor 694-5009 Sheldon Lyons Via Knudanl, MorfcOwg 694-5157 Gordon Pratt VSaftmidiiit, Padurti HacMr 694-5161 Patricia D. Nagle 494-5203, Nancy Q.

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