The Week

■ “Land grabbing!” say the Hopi Indians. They speak of years of “broken treaties,” of “terror tactics” by outsiders who “have burned Hopi homes, emptied desert water tanks, and killed Hopi livestock.” The baddies are —the Navajo! Seems this Hopi reservation in Arizona is smack in the middle of a Navajo reservation, and there’s an age-old dispute over the borders. The Navajo dismiss the Hopi charges as nonsense. “In days long ago by,” a Navajo spokesman says, “Navajos may have conducted raids into the Hopi area, as they did to us. But that, as I say, was long ago.” Long ago, perhaps, to “spokesmen,” “spokesmen” to the Eastern papers, papers by the Big-Sea-Water—but the Indian changes slowly, changes slowly from the old ways; old ways very well remembered, days when happy Indians slaughtered other Indians with abandon, slaughtered them for generations, long before the white man’s coming, long before the Great White Father.

■ After the President’s State of the Union message, the New York Times deplored his proposals for domestic spending, especially as regards “social programs”; what it amounts to, deplored the Times, is “a reversion to the do-nothing Federal Government and every-man-for-himself ideology of the Hoover era,” back when, it will be recalled, life in America was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Which prompted reader Paul Manheim to observe: “I see from the budget figures, which the Times commendably also published, that the total of such expenditures amounted to $100 billion last year, that they are being cut back to $109 billion this year, and that Nixon now proposes they be cut back further next year to $122 billion. If such cutbacks continue, it won’t be long before they are down to $200 billion.”

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William F. Buckley Jr.

■ “Land grabbing!” say the Hopi Indians. They speak of years of “broken treaties,” of “terror tactics” by outsiders who “have burned Hopi homes, emptied desert water tanks, and killed Hopi livestock.” The baddies are —the Navajo! Seems this Hopi reservation in Arizona is smack in the middle of a Navajo reservation, and there’s an age-old dispute over the borders. The Navajo dismiss the Hopi charges as nonsense. “In days long ago by,” a Navajo spokesman says, “Navajos may have conducted raids into the Hopi area, as they did to us. But that, as I say, was long ago.” Long ago, perhaps, to “spokesmen,” “spokesmen” to the Eastern papers, papers by the Big-Sea-Water—but the Indian changes slowly, changes slowly from the old ways; old ways very well remembered, days when happy Indians slaughtered other Indians with abandon, slaughtered them for generations, long before the white man’s coming, long before the Great White Father.

■ After the President’s State of the Union message, the New York Times deplored his proposals for domestic spending, especially as regards “social programs”; what it amounts to, deplored the Times, is “a reversion to the do-nothing Federal Government and every-man-for-himself ideology of the Hoover era,” back when, it will be recalled, life in America was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Which prompted reader Paul Manheim to observe: “I see from the budget figures, which the Times commendably also published, that the total of such expenditures amounted to $100 billion last year, that they are being cut back to $109 billion this year, and that Nixon now proposes they be cut back further next year to $122 billion. If such cutbacks continue, it won’t be long before they are down to $200 billion.”