The Washington Post Writers Group, by George F. Will

The Carter administration is still a cloud on the horizon no larger than a man's hand. But already persons who profess to know the shape of things to come say the administration will have a shape very like a whale.

Or maybe a weasel. Or perhaps a camel. Which is to say that much of the current speculation--a deluge of words and a drizzle of thought--calls to mind poor, dotty Polonius when Hamlet was making him look ridiculous:

Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?

Polonius: By the mass, and 'tis like a. camel, indeed.

Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel.

Polonius: It is backed likd a weasel.

Hamlet: Or like a whale?

Polonius: Very like a whale.

The Carter administration will be a very smart whale. A New York Times article about Jack Watson, a Carter aide, says that Watson’s undergraduate record indicates that he has a "formidable ability to excel at almost anything." Gosh, "formidable" hardly does justice to an ability that would have been the envy of Leonardo da Vinci.

These are breathless days for many gentlepersons of the press. Some of them recently found themselves noisily displeased with Carter’s press secretary because he was, they thought, insufficiently forthcoming with details about the Carters’ Thanksgiving menu. This struggle for the "public’s right to know" about the cranberry sauce corresponds to the "English muffin" phase of press coverage of the Ford administration. Similarly, The Times’ apotheosis of Watson corresponds to the heady discovery, 16 years ago, that the Kennedy administration was going to be uncommonly bright.

Such monomania about the trivial details of a President's life, and childish exaggeration of the virtues of the persons who orbit around him, are symptomatic of the prevailing conception of politics and history.

According to this excessively "voluntarist" conception of history, human volition--will power--determines social realities. Thus, the history of a nation is merely a record of "decisions" made by politicians, or about politicians by electorates, exercising free will.

Unfortunately, the "voluntarist" concept of history exaggerates the extent to which social realities are alterable by "decisions." So it is a doctrine of the perpetually disappointed. But some of the giddy journalism of the current "transition" is undeniably attuned to it. The transition is a period when people choose to ignore the fact that relatively little of a stable nation’s life and destiny actually changes when a tiny fraction of its government’s personnel changes.

The education of Presidents almost always consists in large measure of altering their excessively “voluntarist" view of the world. That Carter's education has begun is apparent in his much tempered post-election expectations for lowering unemployment in the near future.

Already some of his followers are beginning to think as Robert Strausz-Hupe does: "Whenever a politician-in-office says that the situation now calls for realism, he is about to ditch those who voted for him because he appealed to them in the name of idealism." But the "problem" is only that Carter is now face-to-face with responsibility. That tends to concentrate one’s mind on what one can and cannot be (airly blamed for not achieving.

Journalism is, inevitably, part of the process of apportioning blame. It is frequently said that journalism is "history written as it happens." But journalism is, understandably, preoccupied with the vivid present and, thus, with politics.

The best history is distinguished by an awareness that there is much more to the lives of nations than the free decisions of politicians and electorates. Such history, and the best journalism, is sensitive to the fact that free will matters, but within the narrow limits of given physical and intellectual forces, and beneath the weight of accumulated traditions.

Presidents begin by encouraging and profiting from "voluntarist" journalism, which exaggerates their range of freedom. But they come to long for a "historical" journalism, which would convey the fact that history is a rolling river that can be resisted but not controlled. Soon enough they feel threatened by writing that does not portray their administrations as they know them--more shaped than shaping.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

The adult consensus is that two year olda are among the thorn and thistles of life because they lack the more subtle social graces. But exposure to two year olds teaches much about Life, and Our Troubled Times.

I work and eat lunch at home, often with Geoffrey Will, 2, whose luncheon tastes run to onion soup and chocolate doughnuts. On a recent day, the intellectual conversation was waxing when suddenly Geoffrey stared across the kitchen like Cortez first seeing the Pacific. "Gorilla!" he shouted.

Such a shout might cause you, gentle reader, to drop your chocolate doughnut. But I already knew that the Will house, every nook and cranny, is infested with imaginary beasties--mostly porcupines and gorillas, an occasional yak, and a profusion of "monsters."

Usually Geoffrey’s sangfroid makes the world seem agreeable, even when the east wind blows. But periodically he gives rein to his powerful imagination, and his blood turns to flame. Youth is resilient, and he quickly recovers from these storms of emotion. But such storms, when gorillas sometimes appear in the kitchen, are one facet of the "terrible twos"--an age when there is much turbulence in tiny vessels.

The monster a child sees under the sofa, like the monster be wants to hear about in scary fairy tales, often is (in the words of Bruno Bettelheim) "the monster a child knows best and is most concerned with: the monster he feels or fears himself to be." Bettelheim defends and recommends fantastic and scary fairy tales, such as Grimms', in which evil is as omnipresent as virtue. Fairy tales, such as those from the brothers Grimm, need to be defended in "progressive" opinion.

"Fairy tales," Bettelheim notes, "underwent severe criticism when the new discoveries of psychoanalysis and child psychology revealed just how violent, anxious, destructive, and even sadistic, a child’s imagination is." The tales were blamed as an external cause of the inner turmoils of children. Nothing dies harder than the myth that society is the source of all human imperfections and anxieties.

'There is." Bettlebeim says, "a widespread disinclination to let children know that the source of much that goes wrong In life is due to our own natures--the propensity of all men to act aggressively. asocially, selfishly, out of anger and anxiety. Instead, we want our children to believe that all men are inherently good." Only the theoretically inclined can believe anything so contrary to intuition and experience. Children know better.

Once--only once--I advised Geoffrey that there was no porcupine in the pantry. Geoffrey pulled himself up to his full height (96 inches), fixed me with the stony stare of an earl about to address an earthworm, and then just shrugged in weary disgust. He will not tutor anyone who is too dim to realise that the monsters children see at the head of the stairs and the foot of the bed often are projections of the passions children arc afraid they cannot control.

Bettelheim says frightening fairy tales, chock full of evil and strife and fear and trembling, arc good for the half-formed soul. They enable children to ponder their real fears about a really difficult world. Bettelbeim thinks that people raised on goo like "The Little Engine That Could" may believe that all difficulties really will yield to anyone who chants "I think I can, I think I can, I think I can..."

That book is a child’s version of 'The Power of Positive Thinking." It docs nothing to help a child clarify his emotions as experience begins to teach him that earnestness and good intentions are unavailing against many of life's difficulties. But the story has been an American favorite for years. No wonder there are so many Democrats.

I have been slow to understand that the contrariness of the "terrible twos" is the bloodimindedness of little people trying to get a grip on their partially formed selves. I used to think that a two year old's father needs only what a Washington columnist needs: the ability to look perfectly grave no matter what nonsense is being spoken to him. But I no longer think that wbat two years old say is nonsense. When Geoffrey shouts "Gorilla!" I know that, in a sense, there really is a gorilla in the room.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

When police, responding to her call, arrived at her East Harlem tenement, she was hysterical: "The dog ate my baby." The baby girl had been four days old, 12 hours "home" from the hospital. Home was two rooms and a kitchen on the sixth floor, furnished with a rug, a folding chair, and nothing else, no bed, no crib.

"Is the baby dead?" asked an officer. "Yes." the mother said. "I saw the baby's insides." Her dog. a German shepherd, had not been fed for five days. She explained: "I left the baby on the floor with the dog to protect it." She had bought the dog in July for protection from human menaces.

She is 24. She went to New York three years ago from a small Ohio community. She wished to be on her own. She got that wish.

She was employed intermittently, until the fifth month of her pregnancy, which she says was the result of a rape she did not report to the police. She wanted the baby. She bought child-care books, and had seven prenatal checkups at Bellevue Hospital. Although she rarely called home or asked for money, she called when the baby was born. Her mother mailed $25 for a crib. It arrived too late.

When labor began she fed the dog with the last food in the apartment and went alone to the hospital. The baby was born on Wednesday. When she left Bellevue Sunday evening, the hospital office holding her welfare payment was closed. With in her pocket and a baby in her arms, she took a cab home. The meter said $4 and the driver demanded a $1 tip. When she asked his assistance in getting upstairs, he drove off.

The hospital had given her enough formula to feed the baby three times. Bather than spend her remaining dollar that night on food for herself and the dog, she saved it for the bus ride back to Bellevue to get her welfare money. Having slept with the baby on a doubled-up rug, she left the baby and dog at 7 a.m. It was 53 degrees, too cold, she thought, to take the baby. She had no warm baby clothes and she thought the hospital had said the baby was ailing. She got back at 8:30 a.m. Then sbe called the police.

Today the forces of law and order and succor are struggling to assign "blame" in order to escape it. Her attorney and Bellevue are arguing about how she was released, or expelled, on Sunday evening. Welfare officials are contending with charges that they are somehow culpable for her failure to receive a crib before giving birth, and for her living conditions. (She was receiving payment of $270 a month; her rent was $120.) She has been arraigned on a charge of negligent homicide, bm no one seems anxious to prosecute.

Late in New York's U.S. Senate primary, Daniel P. Moynihan, talking like a senator prematurely, said that the case dramatizes weaknesses of the welfare system, and indicated that it also dramatizes the need for him in Washington. Perhaps.

But because cities are fluid collections of strangers, they are, inevitably, bad places to be poor. Not that there are good places, but cities, being kingdoms of the strong, are especially hellish for the poor.

Cities have their indispensable purposes, and their charms, not the least of which is that you can be alone in a crowd. But that kind of living alone is an acquired taste, and not for the weak or unfortunate. They are apt to learn that no city's institutions can provide protective supports like those of an extended family or real community. No metropolis can provide a floor of support solid enough to prevent the bewildered--like the woman from Ohio--from falling through the cracks.

Through those cracks you get an occasional glimpse of what George Eliot meant: "If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the glass grow and the squirrel's heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence."

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

In the acid rain of sexual accusations against congressmen, and the non-denials from the accused, there has been one remark of more than prurient interest. Rep. John Young (D-Tex.). discussing a former secretary’s charge that he paid her a handsome salary in exchange for sex, delivered a sermonette on the folly of great expectations:

"When a man is holding public office, the greatest thing they can say about him is that he's a man of the people. Then when they find out he is, that's when the trouble starts."

Actually, "the trouble starts" not when the public learns that a politician has led an other than blameless life, but when they learn that his personal comportment has been base enough to make his public piety even more hypocritical than they had hitherto suspected. The interesting thing is that so little trouble starts.

Rep. Young’s lament is an expression of the vertigo he evidently is feeling. Poor him. His vocation is to be a "man of the people." But now some people, in their perversity, have rounded on him and suggested that he should be a gentleman. Rep. Young intimates that something about this is unfair.

He has half a grip on half a point. The point, put in a way Young undoubtedly would prefer not to have it put, is this:

A nation that feels a democratic imperative to celebrate the lowest common denominator sooner or later will get the lowest common denominator everywhere, including its legislatures. The empty-headed celebration of the common man will produce many "leaders" who are, to be polite, common.

Americans have never insisted that their leaders satisfy Scriptural standards by being wise as the serpent and harmless as the dove. But there was an era, albeit brief, when the premise of American government was that uncommon men should rule.

Today Americans wonder how it came to pass that a tiny collection of 13 loosely related communities, with a population of about three million free persons, could produce the generation of American founders who, at Philadelphia in 1776 and 1789, accomplished history's most stunning feat of political creation.

The answer is not, or at least not primarily, that an accident of history blessed the colonies with an extraordinary number of sage and decent men. A better explanation is that there was then a habit of deference to excellence in public life. After all, the remarkable thing is not that the Founding Fathers existed, separately, but that the political process brought them together in Philadelphia.

But there have been changes in the theory and, hence, the practice of American democracy. The changes began with the "Jacksonian revolution" in democratic thinking.

In his first message to Congress, in !829, President Andrew Jackson said:. "The duties of all public offices are, or at least admit of being made, so plain and simple that men of Intelligence may readily qualify themselves for their performance."

The duties of public office are "plain and simple" only if government problems are only problems of administrative technique. But such a simple-minded conception of politics is blind to the political virtues of judgment, prudence and courage.

The devaluing of the political vocation has been followed in our century by a related degradation of the state. Today the state exists to be "responsive." Politicians exist to respond like simple mechanisms to impulses recorded from demanding constituencies.

This "plain and simple" task requires no uncommon virtues. Indeed, to be vigorously servile to all demands, a politician should be (in Rep. Young’s words) "a man of the people," prepared to serve democracy by representing its common denominators, including (perhaps especially) the lowest.

The modern servile state possesses, at most, utility--never dignity. Not surprisingly, the public evidently thinks it would be unreasonable to expect dignified politicians, and that, anyway, dignity is irrelevant to the politicians' low function. Perhaps that is why early indications are that constituents of Rep. Wayne Hays and Rep. John Young will not cast them into outer darkness but instead will cast them back into Congress.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

ROME--White tunic, white helmet, white gloves on mesmerizing Toscanini hands, the policeman at the center of the piazza directs traffic as though he is directing Verdi. He is the only graceful manifestation of the Italian state. But he is a fitting symbol of the state: He is irrelevant to the traffic that cascades heedlessly around him.

Since Mussolini Italians have bad governments galore, but not a state capable of governing Italy's dynamism. The election June 20-21 will produce the 39th government since fascism, and Communists may participate in it. Their growing success Is a product of Italian success--and failure.

At the end of the war, Italy was possessed by a primordial urge to transform itself from a predominantly rural Mediterranean society into an industrial society. Its economic miracle was fueled by the movement of large numbers of persons from low-productivity agricultural employment to high-productivity industrial employment. The astonishing dynamism of Italy's recovery from war and fascism has inflicted on the nation a vast population movement, from the land to the cities, from the stagnant South to the booming North.

Few things are more frightening to a peasant society, based on family solidarity, than the son who spurns life on the land for the promises of the city.

Thus, in the Middle Ages, a father could lawfully break the leg of a son who proposed to leave the farm. Since 1945 the number of Italians living in cities has tripled.

The Italian constitution begins with the firm declaration that Italy is "a democratic republic based on work." But the workers who poured into congested cities like Milan and Turin were signally ill-prepared for Italy's urbanization. And the ancient cities were not equipped to receive them.

As late as the beginning of this decade, more than one-sixth of the Italian work force was illiterate, and nearly two-thirds had not gone beyond elementary school. These people stepped from northbound trains into cities that have an average of less than three square yards of green space per capita, compared with 30 square yards in London, 20 in Amsterdam, 18 in New York.

Public services are things of shreds and patches. The judicial system requires a decade to resolve the average civil case. In a recent school year there was a 40 percent shortage of classrooms. Most hospitals and health insurance programs are deeply in debt.

Peter Nichols, a Briton by birth and a Roman by vocation, writes about Italy with the true friend's mixture of affection and dismay. He believes the condition of the state is both a cause and an effect of the role of the family as the strong atomic unit of Italian society. "Italy has not yet reached the point where it is safe to attempt to live one's life without the family dose at hand ... The readiness of the family to help any of its members in trouble is one of the reasons why governments have done comparatively little governing and why there is less pressure than there should be on the politicians to introduce social reform."

After 30 years in power, the Christian Democratic Party has no discernible idea but anti-communism, and no public purpose but the retention of power, which, of course, is not a public purpose at all. The reaction against the Christian Democrats is now almost revulsion, a reaction as much esthetic as ideological. The party's primary efficiency is in dispensing ad hoc favors to compensate for the comprehensive failures of the government it ostensibly runs.

Luigi Bartini writes of the Italians' "absurd discrepancy between the quantity and dazzling array of the inhabitants’ achievements through the centuries and the mediocre quality of their national history." One explanation for this is that Italy, although an ancient civilization, is a young nation. In slightly more than a century since unification it has not produced an Elizabeth I or a Bismarck, a powerful energizer of the state who left behind the ligaments of national authority.

Even Mussolini's fling at totalitarianism was, as a critic said, "a tyranny tempered by the complete disobedience of all laws." Whatever else the Communists offer, they offer something that, increasingly, Italians crave--a sense of a state.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

Peter De Vries, America’s wittiest author since Mark Twain, has published another comic novel, and that is no laughing matter. De Vries could sue American life for plagiarism: For 25 years it has imitated his satiric art, which makes his "1 Hear America Swinging" ominous as well as hilarious.

Bill Bumpers, the protagonist, is a failed scholar whose doctoral dissertation ("Causes of Divorce In Southeastern Rural Iowa") establishes him, alas, as "the Ionesco of sociology" because it reaches the academically unacceptable conclusion that there are no useful generalizations about divorces. So he becomes a marriage counselor in an Iowa town infected with Advanced Thinking.

There, a college girl’s pregnancy is an academic event: She "takes" pregnancy as a credit course during her "non-resident term." Another student becomes a call girl ("She's majoring in sociology, after all"). As De Vries has said, "A hundred years ago Hester Prynne of 'The Scarlet Letter' was given an A for adultery. Today she would rate no better than a C plus."

Avant-garde art flourishes in this Iowa town. There is a sculpture exhibit that consists entirely of empty pedestals "from one to another of which art lovers strolled reading catalogue copy which ran: 'In his mature period, Kublensky has aimed at progressively more dramatic refinement of the principle of minimal form. "Thus an area of virgin space unoccupied by anything save what the viewer himself might imagine it to contain, rather than what the artist has arbitrarily imposed, came to represent to him the ultimate distillation of linear values."

Et tu Iowa?

Many previous De Vries novels are set in suburban subdivisions named after "what the contractors had to eradicate to build them,” like "Birch Hills" or "Vineyard Acres.” The residents say things like: "I think I can say my childhood was as unhappy as the next braggart’s. I was read to sleep with the classics and spanked with obscure quarterlies."

They have thoroughly modern children who consider a mother "a wad of contributing factors," and who "carry their chewing gum in their navels as a protest against bourgeois values." They are partial to art that expresses social concern, such as ballet that depicts "the installation of high tension wires through valleys in which people have hitherto lived in peace."

Their churches are modern enough to consider making divorce a sacrament because "you only get married the first time once." Their pastors coin theologically inventive aphorisms: "It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he does not exist in order to save us." The Rev. Mackerel of the People's Liberal Church, speaking from his freeform pulpit ("a slab of marble set on four legs of delicately differing fruit-woods, to symbolize the four Gospels, and their failure to harmonize") offers this prayer during a flood: "Let us hope that a kind Providence will put a speedy end to the acts of God under which we have been laboring."

For 25 years De Vries has been making gentle sport of America’s anxiously avant-garde middle class. He is an anthropologist of intellectual faddishness, the instability of a society tolerant of all ideas except old ones. And be has a nice sense of the origin of such tolerance: "When man was thought to be a little lower than the angels he was quickly censored for the slightest offense. Now everything about him is regarded as a cesspool but nothing is deplored."

But De Vries's message is rarely that obtrusive, and he is always fun. He has perfect pitch for the comedy that explodes from common speech: "I wish you wouldn't eat in your undershirt," she said. "It's so common. Nobody does that." And a man disgusted by masochists says: "They need a good kick in the pants."

Be warned: Persons steeped In Del Vries's works occasionally lapse into De Vries’s drollery.

Recently my two-year-old was on a creek bank exercising his single skill, throwing things in. I tossed a fallen branch. The splash elated him, and he demanded that I find another, quickly. Alarmed by this incontinent pleasure-seeking, I admonished him that instant gratification is not always possible. "Branches," I said, "do not grow on trees." Such bona mots produce parricides.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

HOUSTON--Restlessly swiveling in his chair, occasionally pacing the confining width of his modest office 21 floors over what passes for downtown in this freeway city, John Connally doesn't need to say what's bothering him. His manner--an excess of energy over opportunity--says it.

He served three terms as Texas governor. He was Treasury Secretary during the bruising collision between the U.S. and its trading partners over currency revaluations. But now he feels like a sequoia that has been transplanted into a flower pot.

Like P.G. Wodehouse's butler, Jeeves, Connally enters a room as "a procession of one." He is like George Eliot's Adam Bede, "a cock who thought the sun had risen to bear him crow." He is one of the few politicians whose speeches are worth rising for, because he is a cataract of ideas.

He favors a single six-year term for Presidents, four-year terms for members of the House; but a limit to the number of terms congressmen and senators can serve. These proposals are designed to prevent the existence of a stable, professional political class. He thinks such a class is preoccupied with re-election, and is a luxury that the nation cannot afford in a period when the important decisions must be politically difficult.

He does not covet the label ''conservative" and he does not fit the conventional understanding of the term. He thinks there is something feckless about much conservative rhetoric against "big government."

Sure, Connally takes the obligatory swipes at nuisance government, citing the chicken farmer near the Connally ranch who must report to 27 government agencies. But he is more interested and interesting when advocating more aggressive, active government working in cooperation with the private sector developing what he thinks are the sinews of national strength--energy, food, and research.

When he speaks of a "tripartite relationship" between government, business and labor, he means (although he winces at the words) government planning and capital allocation.

He would use food as a diplomatic weapon; hence he favors expanded government planning of production and exports. He favors mandatory energy conservation, and energy development involving increased government investment.

Connally was the foremost Nixon administration advocate of the Lockheed loan guerantee. And last autumn he strenuously advocated federal aid for New York City. In both cases he was advocating capital allocation--government measures to cause capital to flow in a direction that it would not otherwise flow.

He wants business and labor interests presented in U.S. embassies, for the aggressive promotion of U.S. commerce. He wants mandatory national service for young Americans. Obviously Connally has scanty trace of the anti-statism that has been the most conspicuous feature of conservatism as preached by Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.

Connally’s political problem (aside from the fact that he is all dressed up with no place to run) is that he advocates something that many people feel we already have enough of--collaboration between government and large economic interests.

The policies he favors reinforce the widespread suspicion that Connally is an incorrigible wheeler-dealer--that he is too Texan by half.

Many Americans regard Texans the way G.K. Chesterton regarded Americans: "There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong." There is a widespread impression that Connally is the embodiment of Texas ideals, and many Americans find that scary.

He has made a lot of money, much of it from oil. And he is the only man in public life who feels called upon to defend himself aginst the accusation that he wears $400 suits. Today he jokingly checks his label to verify that he is wearing a suit bought off the rack, the Hickey-Freeman rack.

Connally insists that his reputation as a sharp operator is something he got "by osmosis" from Lyndon Johnson, Connally’s early and continuous sponsor. Perhaps. But the political fact is that many people suspect that his past is not as pristine as it ought to be. This, more than the peculiarities of his "conservatism," is the major impediment to his return to the public stage.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

NEW YORK--If God warned humans to fly, He would not have created the Eastern Airlines shuttle to express His disapproval. It is an instrument of torture that moves people between Washington and New York, back and forth ... and back and forth ... and back and forth, world without end, amen. As businesslike as a sardine tin, it offers neither food nor drink for the businesslike people who link the capitals of government and commerce, often to the detriment of both.

The routine bad news has just been announced by a disembodied voice from the cockpit. (Do airlines select pilots for their voices? Do pilots go to Gravely Voice School?) We will circle Wilmington, Delaware, until the winds subside in New York. Such announcements arc part of the warp and woof of campaign life for the party up front, Sen. Henry Jackson and aides.

At about this time Jimmy Carter also is headed for Jackson's destination, the St. Patrick’s Day parade. There, the two will exchange the glaciating smiles of contestants who are, from now on, in a zero sum game: One man’s happiness means the other’s sorrow.

Jackson’s next stop is a press conference in the kind of hotel room that usually is called something like the "Rousseau Salon." Every hotel has a room like this, heavy with chandeliers and busy wall coverings, and furniture rendered in a style that is, approximately, Louis XIV via Las Vegas. Today it is the scene of an anointing. The vanguard of the proletariat, in the form of seven labor leaders, will endorse Jackson.

Deployed in a heavy, stolid row, the labor leaders look like something assembled by the same firm that built Stonehenge. They, like the candidate they favor, are not given to snappy one-liners. They are as basic as the room is gaudy, and they bestow their political blessing with the delicacy of a drop forge.

When questions arc invited from the press, up pops a sweet young thing with long amber hair and an elaborate grievance against bourgeois civilization. She has a multi-part question-cum-statement that promises to run slightly longer than "Moby Dick," and she delivers it in the sing-song diction that is the distinctive style of the well-bred radical.

The gravamen of her charge is that Jackson is an instrument of some conspiracy (run by the Elders of Zion? the Bavarian Illuminati?, she tantalizingly doesn't say) to make New York City a pawn of jockbooted capital. As she does her number, the mighty men of labor are getting restless, and several of them seem disposed to place their rough labor leaders’ hands around the young lady's indefagitable larynx.

But nothing perturbs a veteran of the Eastern Shuttle. Besides, Jackson has been hearing congressional testimony for 35 years, so he has learned to endure nonsense spun by experts. Eventually he says, as politely as possible and as firmly as necessary, "You don’t know what you’re talking about." She sits down.

Great God of Battles! Is it legal to talk to children like that? What a lovely moment. The young lady probably was raised by thoroughly modern parents who applauded her every solecism. She probably attended an impeccably modern college, where the faculty would have endured slow torture unto death rather than let logic impede the free flow of her soul.

And now, at last, and not a moment too soon, she has encountered a proper adult. Never let it be said that presidential campaigns lack educational value.

By evening the candidate is speeding through the illimitable tracts of Queens to a restaurant overflowing with men in dinner jackets adorned with green carnations. They have gathered to drink Scotch and eat ravioli and honor an Irish saint.

Around a small table in the middle of a large adjoining room, a group of matrons is standing, indifferent to the political transactions next door. Their stances arc midway between attention and prayer, listening as a recording echoes through the room. First, the disembodied voice of a balladeer sings nice thoughts about Ireland. Then another recording, the disembodied voice of a monsignor, pronounces grace. It is a strangely affecting tableau; the saint would approve.

The candidate has come and gone before the ravioli is gone. He is churning toward the Polish Community Center in darkest Yonkers, world without end, amen.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

EDINBURGH, Scotland--This is a city of histrionic geography. At its center an enormous eruption of rock is a pedestal for a dominating castle. The city is located on the Firth of Forth, where the ferocious North Sea slices into Scotland's narrow waist. In a heavy sea mist the city resembles the prow of a ship beating east.

For Scotland, eastward the course of empire takes its way, eastward into the North Sea, where 50 foot waves and 70 m.p.h. winds are common. There you see the oil rigs crouched on the rolled sea like spindly-legged waterbugs. And if you sail on cast you reach Norway, which is an incitement to Scottish independence.

Because of oil, Norway (population 4 million, 1.2 million less than Scotland) soon will be the richest (per capita) industrial nation. It is an example not lost on Scotland, which has many links with Norway.

The Shetland Islands, an archipelago 130 miles north of the Scottish mainland, belonged to Norway until the 15th century. Scottish regiments were used (ill-used, actually) in the 1040 invasion of Norway. Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University, with a strong curriculum in oil economics and technology, attracts many Norwegian students.

An independent Scotland, a "tartan Norway," would be larger in population than three Common Market members (Denmark, Iceland, Luxembourg) and much richer. But there is a problem. Most of the oil is not under what would be independent Scotland’s waters. Most of the oil would be Britain’s if, as seems certain, the Shetlands refused to join Scotland in secession.

(The Shetlands are inhabited by 250,000 clever, industrious sheep that arc busy producing sweaters, and by 19,000 humans who have the equivalent of a G.N.P. of $13 million, most of it from scrumptious herring. To get a sense of scale, note that oil companies are spending $1 billion for terminal facilities that may make Voe, a Shetland hamlct, into Europe's largest oil port, larger than even Rotterdam.)

But rather than appear rude, the British government talks only about "devolution," a ghastly name for a plan to create a Scottish assembly with power to do not much, and no power to do anything that London disapproves. As an attempt to dish Scottish nationalists, it is inadequate. It is more apt to whet than slake the thirst for independence.

The resurgence of Scottish nationalism began in the 1960s, before the discovery of nearby oil. But separatist sentiment was checked by the fear that Scotland, heavily subsidized from London, could not go it alone. Today nationalists argue that Scotland cannot afford not to go it alone. Otherwise, oil revenues will flow through London, and Scotland will have missed its chance to escape the downtow of Britain’s sinking economy.

Scotland was a separate kingdom until 1603. In 1707 the Scottish parliament was dissolved. It was a hard year, 1707, with snow in summer, crop failures, starvation and a lot of bribery of Scottish politicians to grease the skids for absorbing Scotland into the U.K.

In Tom Stoppard's play "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," currently running in London's West End, a character wonders if England is not "just a conspiracy of cartographers." Scottish nationalists believe Great Britain is a conspiracy of English cartographers.

Certainly Britain remains splendidly unhomogenized. If you doubt the resilience, not to say chewiness, of Scotland’s national identity, remember this axiom: Cuisine is destiny. And spend a few unforgettable hours at table in one of my favorite European restaurants, Edinburgh’s Cafe Royal.

Begin with Hotch Potch (mutton broth) or Partan Brec (a fish soup) or Cock-a-leekie (fowl simmered with leeks) or Cullen Skink (broth made with Finnan Haddock, fish smoked over peat fire). Next try pancakes Mary of Lorraine (diced chicken, sweatbreads, Drambuie liquor, folded into a pancake with butter sauce). Or try Stoved Howtowdie wi' Drappit Eggs. (It is too complicated to explain.) Don’t miss Rumbledethumps (boiled potatoes and cabbage that arc well thumped together).

Always, there is Haggis, the pluck (including heart, lights and liver) of a sheep cooked together, then mixed with suet and oatmeal, stuffed into a sheep’s paunch, boiled, and served with--sometimes drenched with--Scotch whisky. And it is not the watery blended stuff Scotland sells to America, but robust malt whisky. I hold this truth to be self-evident: With or without oil, people who pour malt whisky on oatmeal are people to be reckoned with.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)