He also found that the Ag Dept, had covered up a trichinosis epidemic in St. Louis that had been caused by poor meat inspection. In fact, the Ag Dept, had information showing that meat inspection standards were already far too liberal, yet they were preparing to liberalize the standards even more.

With New York City, America has fallen into its own nightmare. The day after the revolution, eight million people will be in the streets, tearing it down with sledge hammers. America presents New York to the world as the model of how millions of people can live together. Every American city tries to look as much like New York as it can-high-rise towers of plate glass and steel.

But New York is nothing more than the most efficient way of stacking corporations one on top of another. The most efficient color seems to be grey. What New York efficiency has given to the country is the color grey. Grey streets, grey buildings, grey skies, grey smoke, grey cement, even grey snow.

The separation of life from work sends millions out to parasite communities around the smoking city. The rest have to work in boxes, travel underground in boxes, and live in boxes. The horror of the City pushes people even farther into themselves as they walk down the street. All of the buildings weigh on your shoulders as you touch the sidewalk.

A FRIEND picked me up at the San Diego airport last Christmas and drove me 15 miles to where I live. As I got out of the car, I saw my little brother watering the green grass under a blue sky.

My brother is now a freshman at Berkeley. In his last year in high school, he invested the $500 he had inherited from my grandmother and made a couple thousand dollars in the stock market.

When he saw me, he smiled and chanted, in Chinese, "Long live Mao Tse-tung!" As he chanted he punched through the sky with his right fist three times.

We talked for a while about the war, and then he turned down the garden hose and laid it in a trough he had made around a lemon tree.

"Jesus, Larry, you've become a raving anti-imperialist!"

He looked down as he began to talk. I looked down too.

"I saw Felix Greene's Inside North Vietnam, " he said. "I went to see it every night for a week. There was this one scene where a buffalo boy got machine-gunned by American planes as he was trying to push his buffalo to cover."

As I looked up, I saw that he was searching my eyes.

"I swear, Dick, all he was doing was pushing his buffalo to cover."

About the war. In April, the Man, the President, promised that we would not have to worry, that there will still be 225,000 troops in Vietnam in July 1971.

The actual number of soldiers does not matter much. Marines back from the war explain that the U.S. has built massive fortified bastions at places like Cam Ran Bay and Da Nang. The U.S. Army isn't fixing to leave.