From the editor's desk

We recently happened on the obituary of Oscar Shaftel, scholar of English literature and Oriental studies who in 1953 refused to tell Senator Joseph McCarthy and the Senate Internal Security Committee whether or not he was or had ever been a communist and refused to name his friends and colleagues. For those refusals--as was the custom at the time--Queens College, where he had taught since its founding in 1937, fired him. Obituaries are sometimes wonderful. We learned from the New York Times what Shaftel did tell the senators: "I cannot imagine a capable administrator telling Sean O'Casey he could not teach drama, or Picasso that he couldn't teach art." We also learned that in 1982, 14 years after the last of the laws used to fire him was ruled unconstitutional, Dr. Shaftel was finally given a city pension. At a news conference, he was asked whether he felt he had regained his honor. He looked out into the lights and said quietly, "I never lost my honor."

It's a daily question, this matter of honor. AFSC, using its bully pulpit as a Nobel Laureate, has chosen this year to nominate for the Nobel Peace Prize two who have spoken and acted to protest our government's sanctions on Iraq. This nomination is a richly deserved honor: Halliday gave up his job in order to speak about the sanctions' folly; Kelly risks large fines and prison for taking humanitarian aid into Iraq. They are joined as witnesses of conscience by a young woman who was supposed to be the star of the UC Berkeley commencement. She turned out to be more star than the authorities probably intended when, after listening to Madeleine Albright, she put aside her carefully prepared speech and spoke from the heart.

We took it as a bad sign that our spell checker rejected the word "magnanimity" while we were entering Jim Matlack's report from the Middle East. Writing the day after his return from Jerusalem, he gives a troubling account--of justice long delayed, the future for some Palestinians as bleak as the past half century suffered since "the catastrophe." Honor could play a role--honor for UN resolutions, honor for the right of return. And honor is all mixed up in the tragedy playing out in the Horn of Africa where Ethiopia pursues its latest aggression against Eritrea and where questions of pride obscure a clear view of the mounting numbers of the starving and the dead.

While we were following bulletins from the fire-fighting around Los Alamos, a message on one of the abolition email lists reminded us that "there's no 'controlled burn' of nuclear weapons"--simple wisdom, an old-fashioned caution, one we wish the Pentagon planners, the US Congress, and President Clinton would remember as positions harden on non-proliferation of nuclear weapons and the proposed Missile Defense. Bernice Powell Jackson has devoted three of her Civil Rights Journals to weapons-saturated Vieques. We've pasted them together for you. She shows us a lovely and ecologically fragile island and its determined people. What strange perversion of "honor" requires that the Navy continue to bomb it? Possibly the same perversion that permits the Clinton Administration to quietly resume military collaboration with the dictatorial government of Indonesia, and seek to send guns and herbicides to Colombia.

Betty Zisk, a seasoned political scientist who believes that scholars belong in the political fray and that going door-to-door is an honorable activity, takes a hard look at her chosen party and its presumed candidate. "If the gods had meant us to vote, they would have given us candidates," Jim Hightower says. Zisk hopes that Ralph Nader, a man of proven honor, will learn the rudiments of campaigning, and learn them soon. Victorious nurses in Worcester mastered some of those rudiments. They raise hopes that solidarity, a sound cause, and good organizing--old fashioned virtues, all--can influence national, and international, policy decisions about health care.

What perversion of honor has driven US policy toward that other Caribbean island, Cuba? When we were confronted by photographs of Elian Gonzales being snatched from a rescuer's arms by a helmeted, armed guardsman during the period when we were hearing reports of US Navy ships steaming toward tiny Vieques, and the same Elian at play with a loving father, we turned to Al Boime who has written about icons in American history to sort it all out for us. In exasperation--or is it delight?--he has spun a fancy out of conflicting images. Enjoy.