TABLE TALK
An old man's war
DENTS BROGAN
Washington—I see that the Pacific slope cast of Hair (Mr Kenneth Tynan's version of A Midsummer's Night's Dream I believe), are, for the moment, abandoning their customary nudity and are wearing the black armbands of 'the Moratorium', the movement that hopes to 'pressure' President Nixon into pursuing and ensuing peace more vigorously than he has hitherto chosen to do.
It was not the mass movement, that the squares had feared more than its S'ponsors had hoped for. The Wall Street crowds that welcomed the news that 'the Mets', a recently founded and desperately unlucky or incompetent baseball club hid, -against all the odds, won the World Series, were vaster than empires and more noisy than the protesters against the war. This was human and natural. But I noted that one eminently respectable and prosperous busi- nessman who had his eyes glued to the TV screen as the Mets 'took'. the Baltimore Orioles was wearing the black armband of the Moratorium; and among tb&protesting undergraduates was the son of tht"&cretary of Defence, Mr Melvin Laird. In-deed, the difference between the active heath-of the American forces saving the Free World (or Christian civilisation) in Vietnam and his son was one of the more encouraging aspects of the protest. Not because father and son were opposed, but because the Secretary of Defence defended the right of his son to differ with him (to use the American idiom) and the rebellious son didn't reproach his father for having a different view of the real duties of an American citizen at this troubled time. Mr Nixon could, indeed, have taken a lesson in wisdom and manners from his Secretary of Defence. And he might have been reminded of the wise words of a ruler (so much wiser in words than in action) Napoleon III. 'In politics you must never say "never".'
But the fortunes of war are running against the hawks if not yet running all the way that the doves are flying. Mount Ararat is not yet rising proudly above the flood but for the defenders of the Pentagon and the danutosa hereditas of LIU or poss- ibly trKl. of the series of generals who have
seen 'light at the end of the tunnel' and Secretaries of Defence who have been reluc- tant to admit that the immense apparatus they have presided over or constructed is rather like the gigantic grenadiers of the father of Frederick the Great; ornamental but not useful. After all, as the Grand Duke Constantine said: 'nothing spoils an army so much as war'.
The demonstrating crowds I have seen (not very large crowds in some cases and places' are not like the hippies or the other drop-outs from our corrupt society that I saw parading in Washington and New York and, earlier in California. Last year, it was perhaps a matter of 'being clean for Gene'. Now the parading in fancy dress is left to the elders; to Shriners, to the American Legion (so much less conspicuous than it used to be) or even the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Perhaps the weather has something tcr do with it. It is one thing to run down Madison Avenue in bare feet in eighty degrees temperature. It is another to risk pneumonia when it is forty degrees: among the student demonstrators I saw, only one was clad in an appropriate dress and that was a chilly looking, not very young man, in a blanket which may either have been a demonstration against the wrongs done to the Indians or a cheap means of keeping warm in a biting wind.
The amount of fancy dress has always been exaggerated by nervous squares. I can't remember seeing anybody wearing a Nehru outfit in the United States although I have seen plenty of Nehru suits in Delhi. (I was told by a sardonic Moslem, that the late Mr Nehru's favourite costume was not Indian at all but Mughal in origin. Wearing
it was rather like an indignant Irish G dressing up as a Yeoman captain, a k of Orange bashi-bazouk as the sztrd Irish hero of John Bull's Other Nand Broadbent.) There were flowers and bei but Nehru suits, no.
The boys and girls of the peace pro: were dressed in the latest non-p(liti fashions of the American young. rat More sensible and aesthetically m pleasing than the coonskin coats (male) the flattened chests (female) of the era • John Held, when first I visited the Amen scene in the 'twenties. The contorting unconformity of the protesting young more formidable than the ostentation raffish dress of centres of protest ii Haight-Ashbury a few years ago.
-- Mrs Nixon, I learn from a local ne 1,-paper, is much more insistent on rigours of protocol, white ties and no n, skirts, than the Kennedys or c‘en Johnsons ever were. Perhaps the sobriets dress of the revolting young will impr her all the more that it has its sy appeal' It is not a march of hippies on White House that President Nixon has fear, but a march of the smart children the prosperous and even of the rich. F not the sans culottes. Fear Brooks Brof and the haute couture.
Of course not all the protesters are e moderately rich. I remember asking sardonic friend of mine where his daugh were during a great crisis in Washin last year. 'Well, their mother has t the elder up to New York to buy clot the second is picketing the White Ho and their grandfather settled a mill dollars on each of them last week.' picketer, I learned a week or two aga protesting by working in a bakery and ing to induce her trustees to release of her million for the good cause. The Marie Antoinettes are saying let us bread'. Whether the proletariat likes baked by enthusiastic amateurs I fore to ask.
Yet the American world is mom was asked, recently, to speak at a G - letter fraternity and assumed that. as the past, the students who 'make' fratern are the children of the prosperous and. birth and training, highly conservative. the war has apparently changed that. Nit I spoke all the members bar one we: various degrees opposed to the war problem of tearing up the draft cards going to jail, Canada or Sweden is if not yet a problem for the no d indignant old boys). The only critic of pessimistic assessment of the options to President Nixon ('victory' was among them) was an innocent young who, when I asked where he got some odd information, said 'from the John Society'. His answer got an ironical of laughter and applause. How do you fight a war in vshich young do not believe? With the veterans of the First War or the veterans of the Second and of Korea? Attie 'acid rock' concert that I listen with no musical pleasure on Morato Day designed to be played under the $ _House windows to drive Mr Nixon a his house, his office or his mind? Southern Confederacy, so dear in m to so many of Mr Nixon's southern began to collapse when the magi. Confederate infantry decided that rich man's war. but a poor man's 6 What happens when it becomes a man's fight but an elderly man's \Ng?
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