S

The American Worker,
reprinted the following
letter which originally ap-
peared in the May 10 issue
of Science Magazine.

Neither a team of ex-
perts nor 1,500 references
-sare required to assess the
effects of 2, 4-D, 2, 4, 5-T,
picloram; and _ cacodylic
acid on the vegetation of
Vietnam (“Defense issues
summary of defoliation
study,” 9 Feb. p. 613.)
One needs only to read the
cautionary labels our gov-
ernment requires for these
products when they are
sold in the United States |
or note the dead vegetation
and the relative absence
of birds and insect life
along the. railroads or
powerline rights - of - way
after these areas are fresh-
ly sprayed with such chem-
icals.

The Department of De-
fense may label 2, 4-D and,
2, 4, 5-T with the honey-
coated word ‘“defoliant,”
but foresters call them
tree killers; farmers call
them weed killers ; and
manufacturers call them
herbicides and _ silvicides.
Doses over 3 pounds per
acre (3.36 kilos per hec-
tare) of the standard mix-
ture of 2, 4-D and 2, 4,
5-T are non-selective —
they kill all the foliage and

twigs they contact, and
when applied as oil basal
sprays they kill the vege-
tation from the ground up.
Many species of plants

other than tomatoes, cot-

ton, and tobacco are killed

by the vapors of these

chemicals. American for-

esters, farmers, “highway

and power companies who

are careless with these

compounds have often

been forced to pay for

crops they did not mean

to kill.

The DOD can raise the
red herring of “long-term”
effects, but there can be
no doubt about the short-
term effects: 2, 4-D and 4,
5-T kill the green vegeta-
tion. When followed by
fire bombs, the dead foli-
age and twigs burn, as
they did on some 100,000
acres (about 40,000 hec-
tares) in the “Iron Trian- .
gle” last spring.

Through the simple pro-
cess of starvation, a land
without green foliage will
quickly become a land
without insects, without
birds, without animal life
of any form. News photo-
graphs and on-the-spot de-
scriptions indicate that
some areas have been
sprayed repeatedly to as-
sure a complete kill of the
vegetation. There can be

no doubt that the DOD is,
in the short run, going be-
yond mere genocide to
biocide. It commandeered
the entire U.S. production
of 2, 4, 5-T for 1967 and
1968 (some 13 to 14 mil-
lion pounds (6.36 million
kilos) according to US.
Tariff Commission reports.
If one combines this with
the other chemicals the
DOD concedes it is using,
there is a sufficient amount
to kill 98 percent of the
above-ground vegetation of
over 10 million acres of
land (about 4 million hec-
tares) — an area so big
that it would require over
60 years for a man to walk
on each acre.

The long-term effects of
spraying such an area may
be imponderable, but the
short-term effects of using
these chemicals are cer-
tain: a lot of leaves, trees,
rice plants, and other
vegetation are dead or dy-
ing; and a lot of incects,
birds, animals, and a few
humans have either mig-
rated or died of starva-
tion. The North Vietnam-
ese are fortunate — they
have only bombs to con-
tend with.

Thomas O. Perry
Harvard University
Forest, Petersham,
Massachusetts

LOVE TO VIETNAM:

Delicate and moving -

LOVE TO VIETNAM: By Edita
Morris. New York: Monthly
Review Press. $5.00.

Edita Morris is one of the few
authentic literary geniuses of
our time.

A Swedish woman writing in
English, she has been able in
many stories and in two notable
novels (The Flowers of Hiro-
shima and The Seeds of Hiro-
shima) to enter the minds and
hearts of Japanese people and
recreate them on paper with such
verisimilitude that they immedi-
ately become intimately known
to the reader.

In this short novel she has
fused her emotional identity
with Vietnam and the victims of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Utilizing a convention that
was first used in the 18th Cen-
tury — the story built out of
\etters—she has linked an atom-
bombed young man of Nagasaki
with a napalmed girl of Vietnam
—and she tears your heart with
their story.

_The letters do not even con-

stitute | a’ Corresponderice’ * be-

a

“PACIFIC TRIBUNE—JUNE 14, 1968—Page 6 ©

tween two people: they are all
written by the young Japanese,
Shinzo Nishina, first to the Viet-
namese girl, then to a girl he has
known in Nagasaki.

The device is so delicately
handled that it would do out-
rage to the story Edita Morris
tells, to relate it in synopsis.

But these two people meet
and come to love each other; and
the girl is dying of her wounds.
So subtly does the author
handle her characters and her
narrative that the poison the
young Japanese gives to Dan
Thanh, the Vietnamese, to end
her terminal suffering, becomes
both a gift and the final proof
of love.

So profoundly will the reader
identify with these two suffer-
ing young people — the outcast
boy of Nagasaki (outcast be-
cause his keloid scars are an
endless reproach to those who
escaped the holocaust of 1945)
— that it is possible for the
writer to make statements that
in any other hand would be

maudlin:

“Finally I said in a resolute
voice: ‘Dan, the Vietnamese
people will win — no matter
what happens. They have lost—
whatver happens.

“yes’) she answered. Then
she added the following words
in her school English: “You are
a Vietnamese now, Shinzo.
Aren’t you, Shinzo?’

“J aml’ I cried this so loudly
that I’m afraid I woke some

sleepers. ‘The whole decent
world is Vietnamese today’, I
reiterated . . . In Japan, in all
countries, men of heart feel

themselves Vietnamese.”

They do indeed. More the
pity, therefore, that Monthly

Review Press, which published ~

this important story, chose to
put a $5.00 price tag on a 92
page narrative. For at $1.50 or
$2.00 it could sell a million
copies in the United States
alone, instead of the many

‘thousands it will sell. Perhaps

the publishers did not feel Viet-
namese enough.

meditation naturally

I have just learned this
week from the current edi-
tion of Maclean’s Magazine
that some 15,000 Canadians
“have been happily meditat-
ing since 1961.” That is
scarcely news. I would haz-
ard a rough guess that many
millions of Canadians were
“meditating” long before
1961, although perhaps not
very profoundly if we take
the present election oratory
as a criteria of our “medita-
tion.”

However this Maharishi
“meditation” yarn in Mac-
lean’s and its estimated 15,000
Canadian addicts is some-
thing else again. .

The, Maharishi Madesh Yogi
hails from India where native
“meditation” on an empty
stomach is an old and well-
established custom, and which
over the years has attained a
very high plane of “transcen-
dental bliss.” This develop-
ment, thanks to a century or
more of exploitation and pil-
lage by the “gentlemen ad-
venturers of England” of the
British East India Company,
who saw much greater pro-
fits in the production, sale
and use of opium, than in-
“trading into Hudsons Bay”
to skin the Canadian Indians
and Eskimos peoples, provid-
ed a fertile ground for some
deep “meditation.”

Thus in India under the
British Raj “meditation,”
transcendental or other, got

“an extra shot in the arm. It

was good that the native
should and did “meditate”
deeply, just so long as his
meditations didn’t harbor any
subversive thoughts on the
root causes of his earthly
hunger, poverty and squalor.
Any other “transcendental
bliss’ he could think up he
‘was more than welcome to.
It took his mind off the more
mundane things such as food,
decent wages, housing,
schools for his offspring, etc.
ad infinitum.

According to Maclean’s the
Maharishi’s “transcendental”
takes
the mind” of all such mun-
dane matters or needs (capi-
talist or socialist). Then when

‘you have “meditated” your-

self away above “the present
level of experience to the
finer state of experience” you
get above mere normal con-
sciousness and “reach inner-
fields of pure consciousness,
of bliss consciousness.”

Quite frequently we note a
habitue of Vancouver’s famed
Skid Road who has achieved
the same pinnacle of “bliss
consciousness” via the rubby-
dub route, and without put-
ting any undue strain on his
meditation faculties in an
effort to fool
others.

Of course that is specifical-
ly the area in which the Ma-
harishi meditation — as re-
ported, demonstrates is super-
ior powers, in that the “bliss”
of “transcendental medita-
tion” can be attained with-

ment

himself or .

out the aid of any drug or
alcoholic stimulant.

The price-list given in the
Maclean’s article for initia-
tion into Maharishi-style me-
ditation circles is beamed
primarily to high-school and
university students — and
housewives, with the fees
listed at $15-$25 and $35
respectively, hitting the house-
wife the hardest.

That set us to doing a spot
of meditation on our own
without even coming within
hailing distance of the “bliss”
stage. Could it be that in her
daily meditation on how to

stretch the family dollar to

take the place of two in the
unequal battle with sky-
rocketing prices at the big
chain stores — with demands
of a rent-gouging landlord,
or the family doctor bill, the
housewife is probably re-
garded by these blissful Ma-’
harishis as the most difficult
to transport into a state of
“transcendental bliss.” Hence
the extra fee? Could be.

The “International Medita-
tion Society” in Canada, we
are told, contains among its
members “loggers from Van-
couver Island . . . fishermen
in Vancouver .. . etc., etc.”
all, of course, ardent devo-
tees of the Maharishi medi-
tation bliss.

Doubtless at this very mo-
in IWA negotiations
for a new 1968 wage contract
—which requires a very high
degree of good solid down-
to-earth meditation, Forest .
Industrial Relations (FIR)
would be more than happy to
see the IWA Coast negotiat-
ing committee go into a me-
ditation seance a la Mahari-
shi; to “take their minds be-
yond the present level of ex-
perience,” (that is, a 50-cent
an hour wage hike plus other
mundane benefits) and trans-
port themselves to that high-
er place of “bliss conscious-
ness” where thoughts of
family pork chops, orbiting
living costs, high monopoly
profits or other such wordly
matters do not intrude upon
their meditations.

“Thought” says Jean-Paul
Sartre, as quoted by Roger
Garaudy in his Literature of
the Graveyard, “when cut off
from action, is sick, This
sickness is sometimes called
mythology, mysticism, ideal-
ism. Today it is called exist-
entialism.” And Maharishi
Mahesh Yogi seems to be
moving up front as its mod-
ern prophet of abstract bliss,
with an alleged following of
15,000 youthful Canadians
looking for solutions to their
problems in self-mesmerism.

First we had the late W. L.
Mackenzie King calling in the
Spooks to solve Canada’s
problems. Now we have the
Maharishi’s ‘transcendental

bliss” to help replace Reality
with hallucination. O Tem-
pora, O Mores. O the times,
O the customs!

’ —Alvah Bessie cufscc