THE WEEK

• By several hundred punks who until now found nothing to do in Chicago, George Lincoln Rockwell has succeeded in increasing his noisy band, and the experts everywhere are shuddering in (delicious?) anticipation of Kristallnacht, the jackboot and the truncheon. A dynamite cache is uncovered in the Philadelphia headquarters of SNCC, an organization actively engaged in disturbing the peace, but federal officers arrest sad little Robert De Pugh, whose Minutemen await Doomsday from mountain eyries out West. Strangely, the arrest is made the same week HUAC conducts its pogrom against civil libertarians and a New Jersey Young Republican group is purged of rat finkery, and one week after Arthur Schlesinger Jr. warns in the Saturday Evening Post of an impending return to McCarthyism. And speaking of New Jersey, wasn’t there a swastika-daubing incident there last week? And so on and on. You get the picture. So do a thousand, maybe more, suggestible souls around the country via press, radio and TV: some of whom immediately start taping themselves with crooked crosses, others of whom fall to their knees at the sight. Like a medieval plague the infection spreads, until what sociologists call self-fulfilling prophecy converts local adolescent rowdyism into the new mass madness. The racism of our Northern cities is bad enough, and worse when inflamed by tactics of “dramatization,” but there is not—hello, Europe!—repeat, not a Nazi revival in this country.

• As an indicator of the direction the political breeze is blowing, Richard Nixon is not a bad weather vane, which is heartening since he is now pointing ever so discreetly toward the Right. Nixon reportedly thinks that domestic issues will dominate 1968, and writes in a recent issue of U.S. News & World Report that public concern is building over disrespect for law and race turmoil. He warns that violence is causing a “growing disenchantment with the cause of civil rights even among its staunchest supporters,” blames a permissive ethos for coddling mob rule, and blames Robert Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey for coddling the ethos. “From mob rule it is but a single step to lynch law and the termination of the rights of the minority,” he concludes. Sound like anyone you used to know back in 1964?

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• By several hundred punks who until now found nothing to do in Chicago, George Lincoln Rockwell has succeeded in increasing his noisy band, and the experts everywhere are shuddering in (delicious?) anticipation of Kristallnacht, the jackboot and the truncheon. A dynamite cache is uncovered in the Philadelphia headquarters of SNCC, an organization actively engaged in disturbing the peace, but federal officers arrest sad little Robert De Pugh, whose Minutemen await Doomsday from mountain eyries out West. Strangely, the arrest is made the same week HUAC conducts its pogrom against civil libertarians and a New Jersey Young Republican group is purged of rat finkery, and one week after Arthur Schlesinger Jr. warns in the Saturday Evening Post of an impending return to McCarthyism. And speaking of New Jersey, wasn’t there a swastika-daubing incident there last week? And so on and on. You get the picture. So do a thousand, maybe more, suggestible souls around the country via press, radio and TV: some of whom immediately start taping themselves with crooked crosses, others of whom fall to their knees at the sight. Like a medieval plague the infection spreads, until what sociologists call self-fulfilling prophecy converts local adolescent rowdyism into the new mass madness. The racism of our Northern cities is bad enough, and worse when inflamed by tactics of “dramatization,” but there is not—hello, Europe!—repeat, not a Nazi revival in this country.

• As an indicator of the direction the political breeze is blowing, Richard Nixon is not a bad weather vane, which is heartening since he is now pointing ever so discreetly toward the Right. Nixon reportedly thinks that domestic issues will dominate 1968, and writes in a recent issue of U.S. News & World Report that public concern is building over disrespect for law and race turmoil. He warns that violence is causing a “growing disenchantment with the cause of civil rights even among its staunchest supporters,” blames a permissive ethos for coddling mob rule, and blames Robert Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey for coddling the ethos. “From mob rule it is but a single step to lynch law and the termination of the rights of the minority,” he concludes. Sound like anyone you used to know back in 1964?