editoradmin
Believe It Or Not
The “silent” burglar alarm sounded in the University police station and a squad car was dispatched at once. The alarm had been rigged to a vending machine complex which was robbed frequently.
The police found a lone man in the vending machine area. A cloth bag he carried contained $200 in coins. He was arrested. A body search turned up numerous vending machine keys and an assortment of lock-picking devices. The suspect was jailed.
Armed with a search warrant, police went through the man’s car. They found another bag filled with coins. Detectives found the suspect’s fingerprints on the cash box of one of the rifled vending machines. Back at the station, the man was confessing to a series of vending machine robberies.
But, believe it or not, the man was not brought to trial. An assistant district attorney moved successfully for dismissal on the grounds that police arrested the defendant before they knew that in fact a crime had occurred.
Ad Policies and the Press
From a Columbia Journalism Review letter to The New Yorker, which had chided CJR for accepting cigarette advertising.
How does a magazine’s dedication to free speech stack up against its assuming the role of protecting readers from ads for a product which the ads clearly label as a hazard to health?
Could we justify rejecting cigarette ads but publishing liquor ads, as does The New Yorker? Or should you and we either accept both, as do most publications, or reject both, as do Reader’s Digest, The Christian Science Monitor and Seventeen?
(After all, there is substantial medical opinion that use and misuse of alcoholic beverages damage Americans’ health at least as much as do use and misuse of cigarettes. American Medical Association publications point out alcohol’s role in cirrhosis of the liver, ulceration and internal bleeding, brain-cell destruction, myocardium damage, injury to heart muscles, and sometimes cardiac arrest, liver damage, pancreatitis, Korsakoff’s psychosis, Wernicke’s syndrome, and damage to unborn fetuses.
They report that countless social drinkers slip into alcoholism each year, that alcohol-dependent persons probably number six to nine million in the United States and have a life expectancy some twelve years shorter than others. They add that alcohol consumption has been found to play a role in 50 percent of fatal auto accidents, 64 percent of homicides, 34 percent of rapes, 30 percent of suicides, and 60 percent of child abuse cases. In brief, alcohol, far more than cigarettes, is implicated in very major harm to others than the user.)
What about the solid research indicating that cigarette advertising rarely influences decisions to smoke or not to smoke but that its effect, and purpose, is to influence the choice of brands? Probably the same is true of liquor advertising. (It happens that the only cigarette advertising in the Review to date has sought to induce smokers to shift to low-tar, low nicotine cigarettes. And unlike liquor advertising, it has carried a prominent warning of dangers to one’s health. Incidentally, the Review’s cigarette ad pages in the past year – four in all – averaged about one-thirtieth of The New Yorker’s pages devoted to liquor ads.)
Isn’t a much more fundamental issue involved? This nation, after careful consideration, repealed its prohibition of alcoholic beverages, and so far Congress has rejected prohibition of cigarettes. Are we to take it upon ourselves to decide from which legal products we are to protect our readers? If not, must we accept firearms ads? Yet if publications once start the process of selecting ads, might it lead some into the treacherous area of excluding advertising for any product subject to abuse and ultimately any product, book, play, or idea of which they happen to disapprove?
[We] refuse advertisements involving clear factual misrepresentations or gross bad taste. Just how far beyond that should [we] go to “protect” adult, intelligent readers…?
The Moon
by Walter H. Brovald
I
It had rained all day in the city, stopping only after the shops had closed and the rush of people to their homes was over. The sidewalks were beginning to dry, next to the buildings first and then in patches further out. The tires of passing cars still whistled in the moisture, the friction of rubber against asphalt scorching tire tracks dry. Seen in the light of the street lamps, the dry streaks in the street looked like uncoiled snakes stretching as far as the eye could see, the disappearing wetness around them the stream in which they swam in growing numbers.
Above, the early sky of the autumn evening was dark, not quite black. Stars shone where grey clouds, racing to catch up with the storm, did not cover them.
Close to the horizon was the moon, itself unseen, but its light feathering out around the edges of the flying clouds.
The air between was pregnant with the freshness of recent rain. It was cool and clean and breathless, no kin to the breeze aloft that hurried the clouds along. The only other movement was of the cars whistling by and a scattering of figures hustling along the sidewalks.
The moon rose higher, now and then unclouded, large and round and as fresh as if it, too, had been washed by the rain. It moved slowly, indifferent to the wisps and chunks of cloud that scurried past its face, until it neared its zenith. Then it seemed to pause in bright relief against the black sky; the clouds that had passed it by were far ahead; those that lagged behind were at the start of their course.
The moon seemed to hang there then, luxurious in its solitude, proud at last without rivalry.
Suddenly the banks of clouds, racing up, threatened it. Taken unaware, the moon seemed to rouse itself to movement just ahead of the gliding clouds. One side of the moon was caught up in a cobweb of cloudy mist and all the heavens seemed to tense to the importance of the race.
For several minutes their positions were unchanged: the moon half-shrouded, the clouds only half-victorious.
Then it seemed as if the tenseness suddenly broke. The burnished moon seemed to start, then falter. The clouds jumped forward, as with a giant’s breath. The foremost, thinnest cloud slid across the moon, diffusing and dimming its brightness. The clouds, satisfied with that for the moment, slackened and patiently gathered force for the final siege.
(To Be Continued)
My “Gay Rights” Vote
I was among those here who voted to retain the language of a “human rights” ordinance specifically including homosexuals as coming under protection of the law. (My viewpoint did not prevail.)
Only once was I tempted to vote for repeal. That was in reaction to constant demagogic appeals by gays’ supporters to vote for “gays’ rights” and “against Anita Bryant.”
(I must regretfully report that the pro-repealists were equally demagogic; it was a dirty campaign.)
However one voted, tar and feathers were waiting. The voter was either a “bigot” or one indifferent to immorality.
Well, my vote was for human rights. I do not want the homosexuals’ praise; I was not approving a deviant lifestyle. I reject with equal fervor the labels the moralist on this issue might give me; I was not alarmed by their predictions of community catastrophe.
Regular readers of The Gryphon know that I do not understand why, under our Constitution, any particular group needs legislative definition of its human rights. But when the occasion arises, the affirmation of human rights admits no alternative.
Notes from a Journal
Let there be no mistake: “The Moon,” which begins on page four of this issue, is fiction; the front page article is not.
The unexpandable print shop space in the Brovald basement was put to a severe test, but I managed, with much pushing and shoving, to squeeze in another 24-case cabinet, with all cases full. I now have 149 different sizes and styles of type in 66 different faces. And enough new piece-border and dingbats to keep me busy sorting all summer.
“Curses!” I said to myself upon discovering that the copyright on my first published book expired two years earlier. With all of those poems now in the public domain, I expect they’ll be popping up everywhere.
The Gryphon
A hobby journal, hand-set and printed
by Walter H. Brovald
St. Paul, Minn. 55105