Seventy-three years ago the U.S. connived in the secession of the Republic of Panama from Colombia in return for the privilege of building a canal across the Panamanian Isthmus "on a strip of land leased in perpetuity." Within this 533-square-mile zone the U.S. was to exercise, forever, all those rights that it "would possess and exercise if it were the sovereign of the territory..." Today the significance of that "if" is much debated.

Although Ronald Reagan's campaign position—that the Panama Canal Zone is as much a part of the U.S. as is Alaska—has been deplored by the Ford Administration, it maintains strong support in the Senate.

Recent events in the United Nations have called into question American support for the world organization—particularly resolutions of the Twenty-Ninth General Assembly (1974) giving observer status to the Palestine Liberation Organization, resolutions of the Thirtieth Assembly (1975) equating Zionism with racism, and recent actions of the U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the International Labor Organization. What I plan here, using polling data primarily, is an analysis of the current state of American public opinion about the U.N., and I want to place the current attitude in historical perspective.

In the early years of the organization—roughly from the signing of the Charter in 1945 through the Korean armistice in 1953—the American public tended to have great expectations of the United Nations.

A happy result of the Bicentennial can be increased self-knowledge. The danger, however, is that one may focus too exclusively on the United States, thus magnifying out of proportion both our virtues and our faults.

Such distortion is evident in the current discussion of American civil religion. The turmoil of the late sixties and the self-examination of the seventies have encouraged consideration of the civil beliefs and practices widely shared by Americans. Robert Bellah, Will Herberg, Martin Marty, and Sidney Mead are among those who have recently written on the subject. Too often learned commentators have failed to note that American civil religion is an expression of general social patterns. It is therefore useful to take a look at non-American civil religions in several traditional and revolutionary societies.

With the transformation of Cuba into an obedient Soviet satellite, the Cuban Revolution no longerexcites the imagination of romantic rebels and Utopian dreamers. For the student of politics, however, the early years of the Cuban Revolution remains an intriguing phenomenon, and especially the figure of Fidel Castro, its creator and guiding genius. Castro remains Cuba's Commander-in-Chief, Prime Minister, and First Secretary of the Communist Party. His leadership still plays a role in molding Cuban institutions into the Soviet pattern and promoting Soviet foreign policy, but his charisma is now circumscribed by Soviet-style bureaucratic rationality and the Kremlin's surveillance. Fidel Castro before his domestication was something else.

The painful realization that much is not right with Tanzania is the cause of growing despair both inside and outside that East African country. Tanzania has been the favorite of Social Democrats, Marxists, the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization, Scandinavian governments, and of a host of Africa observers.

Other African states, classified along with Tanzania in the so-called Fourth World of the poorest of the poor countries, have not rated the attention lavished on Tanzania. Indeed, who but the specialist knows the precise geographic location, economic and political orientation of, for examples, Upper Volta, Niger, or Chad? Who can name the leaders of these deprived lands? And who, even within the United Nations or bilateral-aid agencies, feels special affinity with their problems?

Tanzania, on the other hand, has captured the energies, optimism, and increasing anxiety of observers around the world.

An intellectual, the current joke has it, is anyone who can listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger—which should be a snap, after all, for a creature who somehow manages to live life with both a high brow and a pointy head. Yet whatever his dexterity, the intellectual is probably harder to define, gravely or lightly, than any other human variety on earth.

Most dictionaries provide three standard, and inordinately unstimulating definitions: (1) a person with intellectual interests (2) a person who does intellectual work (3) a member of the intelligentsia (which, incidentally, defines nothing, since "intelligentsia," despite its overtones of coffeehouse dialectics, simply means intellectuals considered collectively).

The truth about one of the worst crimes of the twentieth century has long been embargoed. Ten years ago General Suharto's accession to power in Indonesia brought the massacre of nearly a million people and the imprisonment of hundreds of thousands more. Yet continuing allegations about the murders and sweeping arrests that followed receive scant attention. Scattered articles mention conditions in Indonesia, but there is little comprehensive coverage of the ongoing repression by the present regime or of United States complicity. It was only recently that the House Sub-Committee on International Organizations, chaired by Representative Donald Fraser (D.-Minn.), began a series of hearings on the treatment of political prisoners in Indonesia. The hearings will evaluate the legality of security assistance to Indonesia under Amendment 502B of the Foreign Relations Act, an act prohibiting U.S. military assistance where there are gross violations of human rights.

A war is ended ingloriously, the promised honor is missing; a President, overwhelmingly elected, resigns, and the law seems both vindicated and confused; our economy of life appears out of control; and democracy is increasingly out of favor in the world. We are troubled with good reason. We sense our difficulties and doubt we can relieve them safely. Perhaps the beginning of wisdom in dark times is to search for the foundations of propriety and purpose; the alternative is to grasp at straws.