University of Virginia Library

Filibuster

The draft expires at midnight, June 30. So
it goes.

So it goes, that is, if Senator Mike Gravel
(D-Alaska) manages to succeed in mounting a
filibuster engineered to block passage of the
new extension proposal currently in
committee. Aides to Mr. Gravel report that
already he is guarding the Senate floor,
marshaling support even among Southern
conservatives who traditionally object to
cloture as a means of shutting off debate.
Filibuster, as most people realize, is as
Southern as the drawl, good bourbon, and
fertile bullshit.

That an Alaskan should be the one to hit
upon a strategy so rooted in The System - it
might actually work - seems fitting. For the
Alaska wilds (God bless you, too, Wally
Hickel) provided the setting for Norman
Mailer's pariah-land quest: Why Are We In
Vietnam? Now that one need not be insane to
question the generals, there is the chance Mr.
Gravel may be able to find 33 of his fellow
Senators prepared to back his right to speak
at some length.

Along with the Bible, Betty Crocker's
cookbook,' and selections from Paul
Goodman's Growing Up Absurd and Empire
City we suggest for the Senators' edification a
reading of the following lines from Anthony
Trollope's 1862 letter to an American:

My feeling is that a man should die rather
than be made a soldier against his will. One's
country has no right to demand everything.
There is much that is higher and better and
greater than one's country. One is patriotic
only because one is too small and too weak to
be cosmopolitan. If a country cannot get
along without military conscription, it had
better give up - and let its children seek other
ties.

So it goes.