Happy New Year

"The cartoonists," mutters Hal Boyle, columnist, "always picture the new year as a husky infant, cheerfully shouldering the old year off the stage. It is an inaccurate portrait," he concludes testily, "and it is even more inaccurate this year." All of which is most mysterious. We can understand assaults on St. Nicholas, whose ubiquity has cheapened the season's spirit, and on the scrawny puritan that well-fed Thanksgivers are wont to evoke. But why pick on the new year's babe?

He does not, after all, appear Claus-like on every street-corner, his hand stretched out on behalf of one cause or another. Even Hal Boyle will grant this. Presumably, then, the argument centers on his aptness as a symbol of the times, and on that question we must side with the cartoonists.

Look about you: innocence, you will find, is rampant everywhere. Its fresh breath emanates from University Hall where IBM machines have naively arranged for an eight-day reading period. It can be felt along the river among the Houses, particuarly between the afternoon hours of one to four, and it pervades the streets, adorned periodically as they are with flapping tags attached to myriad windshield wipers. Yes, Cambridge alone might justify the babe's symbolism, but his traces are found elsewhere, too.

In New York and New Jersey, his swaddling clothes might be less than clean, but still he is there. Mayors, executives, and union officials, some with names reminiscent of the innocent's heyday, Prohibition, have joined in a prolonged chorus of pained right-cousness.

Further south, the husky infant is poking about the Pentagon, the Treasury building, and other, sites of high-level policymaking, as the new cabinet of industrialists prepares to match its chromium lances with assorted governmental dragons. And who else could be the author of the nation-wide myth which prescribes such a cabinet as the sole cure for the country's woes? Efficiency, perhaps, and a greater measure of honesty are plausible predictions, but only the new year's child could produce the visions of miraculous relief currently fashionable.

Moreover, there is a contest in progress over who can pay the most blatant homage to the sort of political innocence Communism creates in its victims-designate. On one side there is a multitude of groups newly hatched expressly to gain clemency for a brace of convicted spies. On the other, and at this writing far ahead, are those who are seeking to solve the Far East problem by assigning blame for it. Their technique is to serve up a murky stew of half-truth and hindsight, then immerse a handful of Asia experts in it. Owen Lattimore is already up to his neck, and Service, Vincent, Clubb, etcetera have at least had their feet burned. What this will accomplish to relieve tension in the Far East is incomprehensible to us, but perhaps we are the innocents.

Indications of the babe's presence are manifest in out-of-the-way spots, too. He was blandly revealed in Nevada by a deposition of Senator McCarran's where the law-maker admitted to accepting favors from hostelries on a scale not seen since several bureaucrats were heaped with aggrieved indignation for doing precisely the same thing a few years past. Chirrups from Formosa, concerning the future speedy collapse of Mao's regime under the blows of Chiang's battalions, are another instance.

If the criterion for festive symbols is concreteness, then, who can doubt the babe's efficacy? If anything should be assaulted, in fact, it is the ancient who allegedly typifies the waning year. Lately, the only figure shoved around on time's stage by the lusty infant is his own last year's image.