For the Record

■ Ring out the Sixties: The radical group Berkeley Citizens Action got swamped in the Berkeley municipal elections last week. . . . Also repudiated at the polls, black activist Mark Allen, a columnist for the Communist People’s World, running as an independent, despite a last-minute endorsement by Rep. Ron Dellums (D., Calif.), perhaps the most radical member of the congressional Black Caucus. . . . Allen had also been backed by Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda’s Campaign for Economic Democracy, which will, hereafter, be housed in the half- million-buck pad the Haydens are buying north of Santa Barbara. . . . Most encomiums for retiring West Coast Longshoremen’s Union chief Harry Bridges mention not that he has repeatedly been identified as a Communist Party member, nor that he continues parroting the Party line—e.g., about the Soviet dissidents: “One thing I notice about the Russian dissidents or defectors—there’s not a single working stiff among them. They all seem to me to have been treated pretty well by their own country in terms of education, good jobs, homes etc. [not to mention paid recreational stays in Gulag].” . . . Angela Davis, in a Le Monde interview, refused to answer most questions on the dissidents (“[If I did] you can bet I’d make page one of the New York Time” )but did comment that Solzhenitsyn, besides being a “racist,” was such a “reactionary that even Gerald Ford would have nothing to do with him.” . . . On April 30, some lucky New Yorkers were able to catch the film April in Vietnam in The Year of the Cat, which was made by Cuban director Santiago Alvarez in celebration of the second anniversary of what the Maoist Guardian euphorically calls “the liberation of Saigon —the complete victory of the Vietnamese people over U.S. imperialists.”

Taylor, Punch Rothco

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

■ Ring out the Sixties: The radical group Berkeley Citizens Action got swamped in the Berkeley municipal elections last week. . . . Also repudiated at the polls, black activist Mark Allen, a columnist for the Communist People’s World, running as an independent, despite a last-minute endorsement by Rep. Ron Dellums (D., Calif.), perhaps the most radical member of the congressional Black Caucus. . . . Allen had also been backed by Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda’s Campaign for Economic Democracy, which will, hereafter, be housed in the half- million-buck pad the Haydens are buying north of Santa Barbara. . . . Most encomiums for retiring West Coast Longshoremen’s Union chief Harry Bridges mention not that he has repeatedly been identified as a Communist Party member, nor that he continues parroting the Party line—e.g., about the Soviet dissidents: “One thing I notice about the Russian dissidents or defectors—there’s not a single working stiff among them. They all seem to me to have been treated pretty well by their own country in terms of education, good jobs, homes etc. [not to mention paid recreational stays in Gulag].” . . . Angela Davis, in a Le Monde interview, refused to answer most questions on the dissidents (“[If I did] you can bet I’d make page one of the New York Time” )but did comment that Solzhenitsyn, besides being a “racist,” was such a “reactionary that even Gerald Ford would have nothing to do with him.” . . . On April 30, some lucky New Yorkers were able to catch the film April in Vietnam in The Year of the Cat, which was made by Cuban director Santiago Alvarez in celebration of the second anniversary of what the Maoist Guardian euphorically calls “the liberation of Saigon —the complete victory of the Vietnamese people over U.S. imperialists.”

Taylor, Punch Rothco