At Miami Beach last summer Norman Mailer decided that George McGovern is “the first tall minister I ever really liked.” He was so carried away by this discovery that he used the word “tender” when he spoke to McGovern about the mood on the night of the acceptance speeches. Before he reached that pitch of endorsement he had worried repetitiously about McGovern's undersupply of “charisma,” regretted the Methodist candidate's insufficient use of metaphor and found the convention that nominated McGovern boring because it lacked drama and there was not enough evil in the room. In these past twelve years Mailer has often seemed to be judging American politics by one criterion: whether it provides the right sort of material for his writing.

The Return. I once wondered how it would feel to arrive back in Anomabu (home of Aggrey and Robert Gardiner) and be referred to simply asvKodwo's wife rather than as the American, wife of … ! For I am black, twelve years married, dress in fhe traditional Ghanaian “cloth,” speak a bit of the Fante language, have features generally indistinguishable from my in-laws, and I have lived and worked for eight years in West and East Africa. Politically I am firmly aligned with those working toward a genuine economic and political liberation of black Africa. Nevertheless, for the likes of me in Africa, “black” does not yet fully mean “belonging”

In his study of U.S. Vietnam policy, The Limits of Intervention, Townsend Hoopes ruefully admitted that “nothing is more difficult to confront than the need to outgrow conceptions that have had undeniable validity—have been in truth basic reference points for thought and action involving the life of the nation. It is a difficulty that persists even when one is intellectually aware that familiar conceptions no longer fully square with the facts.” Hoopes intended his strictures to apply to the cold war tenets which for so long provided the guidelines for U.S. foreign policy. They apply with equal force, however, not only to either official policies and orientations but to the conceptions of their critics.

A remarkable series of events in the first half of this year altered the customary pattern of relations between Africa's Arab nations and its black African states.

Suddenly events suggested that the Arab nations might manage a resurgence of their influence in black Africa. They broke the normal pattern in which feelings of indifference, and sometimes distrust, are submerged in the name of continental unity and in the practice of a you-scratch-my-back-I'll-scratchyours kind of Third World solidarity. Even more, it appeared as if conditions south of the Sahara might favor this resurgence of Arab influence.

I take this opportunity to correct at least a few lingering misunderstandings of my old book. I am sometimes asked whether race relations in America, rooted in centuries of tragic and often hideous history and still injecting its peculiar bias in all social, economic and political relations in the country, could be “resolved” like a mathematical problem or an engineering project. Even after another thirty years we will be living with it, though it will have altered. I do hope that changes will proceed more rapidly than in the last five or seven years and that they will more consistently move toward a greater fulfillment of American ideals and aspirations.

For the first time since Yalta Europe is in the process of being fundamentally reorganized. The bipolar world of U.S. USSR hegemony is rapidly passing. As Europeans, we can no longer evade the task of defining the distinct European reality. In the first part of this essay I described some of the new definitions being proposed by those who envision a united and socialist Europe. It is not enough, however, simply to expose the dangerous fallacies in the proposals set forth by others. Conservatives are called upon to clarify the assumptions on which they would build an alternative definition of the European reality.

The ideal preparation for Theodore Roszak's new book is to read again Wordsworth's sonnet “The World Is Too Much With Us.” After lamenting the “getting and spending” that lays waste our spiritual powers, the poet declares he prefers to be a pagan “suckled in a creed outworn,” sustained in a universe still mythic and sacral. Wordsworth, like Roszak in Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Postindustrial Society (Doubleday; 492 pp.; $10.00), complains about the spiritual depletion resulting from the scientization of culture and the disenchantment of the world. Since Wordsworth, says Roszak, the situation has simply gotten worse, so that Blake's “May God us keep/ From Single vision and Newton's sleep” sounds more than ever like a desperate prayer.