The Week

chairman mao strikes again: Two Chinese teenagers read about Chairman Mao’s Great Ping-Pong Ploy last week, got themselves an inner tube, filled it with ping-pong balls and floated across Deep Bay to freedom in Hong Kong.

The White House Conference on Youth is the latest in the Nixon Administration’s series of quite unsatisfactory conferences, committees and task forces. Supposed to be a representative sampling of American youth, cutting across ideological lines, the Conference wound up recommending the same things one would expect from, say, a moderate SDS chapter or Charles Reich, and recommending them in the language of the Committee To Abolish Original Sin (e.g., from the preamble to their report: “The high ideals upon which this country was founded have never been a reality for all people from the beginning to the present day”). Among the proposals to which the Conference urged “the government and power structures to respond swiftly, actively and constructively” are the following: All U.S. troops should be withdrawn from Indochina by December 31, 1971; every American should receive health care; the coal industry should be nationalized and strip-mining abolished; the President should go on television within six months and officially denounce racism; the concept and principle of a guaranteed adequate income should be a right of the individual; the defense budget for fiscal year 1972 should be limited to $50 billion; any sexual behavior between consenting, responsible individuals must be recognized and tolerated by society as an acceptable life-style. But after all, these things are expected to be our young people’s most urgent priorities; and, as Dr. Spock pointed out so long ago, children enjoy doing what is expected of them.

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chairman mao strikes again: Two Chinese teenagers read about Chairman Mao’s Great Ping-Pong Ploy last week, got themselves an inner tube, filled it with ping-pong balls and floated across Deep Bay to freedom in Hong Kong.

The White House Conference on Youth is the latest in the Nixon Administration’s series of quite unsatisfactory conferences, committees and task forces. Supposed to be a representative sampling of American youth, cutting across ideological lines, the Conference wound up recommending the same things one would expect from, say, a moderate SDS chapter or Charles Reich, and recommending them in the language of the Committee To Abolish Original Sin (e.g., from the preamble to their report: “The high ideals upon which this country was founded have never been a reality for all people from the beginning to the present day”). Among the proposals to which the Conference urged “the government and power structures to respond swiftly, actively and constructively” are the following: All U.S. troops should be withdrawn from Indochina by December 31, 1971; every American should receive health care; the coal industry should be nationalized and strip-mining abolished; the President should go on television within six months and officially denounce racism; the concept and principle of a guaranteed adequate income should be a right of the individual; the defense budget for fiscal year 1972 should be limited to $50 billion; any sexual behavior between consenting, responsible individuals must be recognized and tolerated by society as an acceptable life-style. But after all, these things are expected to be our young people’s most urgent priorities; and, as Dr. Spock pointed out so long ago, children enjoy doing what is expected of them.