The Mail SLICK SELL ON CFIA

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

If a neo-colonialist can take issue with a neo-imperialist, I should like to register my disagreement with Raymond Vernon's critique of Richard Hyland's CRIMSON tract on the Center for International Affairs. Hyland's technique was not, as Vernon alleged, a replica of McCarthyism. It was far more subtle and sophisticated-like a quality TV commercial.

Here is the wish-world of the soap opera, where intuition triumphs and the end of the story is clear from the beginning. As in much advertising, there is a testimonial, a laboratory report by an unbiased observer, and ad-man, lab-man who drops the role of impartial analyst to lead the NAC "tour of the zoo" while testing his product. And like the media, the tract appeals to a valued life-style-in this case, a morally superior one. The reporter is even strata-spherically above accepting the University's blood-stained brownies. And consider the drama. The identification of the enemy, for instance: clear-cut, as in a cowboy movie. Or the puffing about being in University Hall last April: a real Marlboro man!

The stamp is unmistakable. It is not the McCarthy-i??, whipping up a petit bourgeois storm of xenophobia by means of innuendo and aspersion. The intimations and half-truths are there, to be sure. But the mood and the mode-the slickness and the manipulation-belong to Madison Avenue. Creating a market that does not exist, pushing a luxury product like revolution fabricated out of cheap verbal plastic: that is Hyland's bag. I for one was disappointed. The issue should have been on glossy paper, and the photos in color.