Gatherings

Every four years, the nation develops a fetish for meetings. Smoke belches forth from numerous rooms, buttons sprout like the artificial green carnations of March 17, and purveyors of the Teleprompter wax fat. This year, meeting-goers spat out their melange of denunciations in greater quantity, greater volume, and into a greater number of ears than ever before.

It wasn't the severity of the orations, however, nor even the multiplication of smarting ears which makes this year's crop of gatherings worthy of editorial note. Rather, it is the incongruity involved in what at least two of these bigger-and-better-than-evers produced. State conclaves may have endorsed the Jenners, the Cains, and the various hotheads on the other side--men less well-known but equally intransigent--but the national conventions topped off their bouts with Satan (and among themselves) with the most moderate contenders for the Presidency seen for some time.

This trend has shown up elsewhere as well, in places where hostility is less gaudy and more lasting. For instance, the band of squabblers which comprise NATO have developed some measure of amiability, even though progress toward their goals has faltered somewhat. On the other side of the globe, the Japanese Peace Treaty, and its attendent promise of a pacific pact of the North Atlantic variety, are healthy signs of agreement at a time and place where agreement is rare.

Granted, there have been and will be meetings where the worst of the oratory is matched by will, whose occurrence is and will be a pall on the free world's get-togethers. A few thousand delegates from the winters of Democratic Centralism will soon sojourn in Moscow to applaud Comrade Malenkov's paean to production, and their unanimity will please no one this side of Workers' Heaven. And the fact that the snarls at Panmunjom have given way to terse announcements of adjournment, and that these brief ceremonies have shifted from a leaky tent to a wooden structure, does not make the news from that quarter any more delightful.

But despite the paucity of fruitful gatherings, it remains that more tolerance, more sanity, more hope has come of this year's meetings than anyone could have imagined several years ago. In fact, a comparison of the seven years following World War 1, when glibness and myopia swept the country, and the years since 1945, when the only reminder of the bad old days is the Scnate's nortorious Class of '46, adds a shinier gloss to what few blessings there are.

There is more to that gloss than the sort of shoe polish applied during the twenties under the name of Normaley. And despite the uncertainties and vigorous predictions of doom hatched by a limited war, this glimmer gives a liberal education more meaning and purpose. At least, those who spend four years here studying, seeking agreement on broad issues without resort to staves or oratorical orgies, can take hope from it that the wall separating them from the world at large is not so thick as it seems.