While she agrees that the unemployment rate is high in the ghettos, she believes there are jobs available--not pleasant ones, true, or those offering much chance for promotion, but jobs are there, and it's the fault of the unemployed that they turn to easier, faster, illegal ways of making money.

The looters, she writes, "were doing no such thing as expressing rage... They were having the time of their lives." The looters' behavior arose, she argues, out of the moral chaos that has resulted from liberals' misguided efforts to ameliorate ghetto conditions. All the liberal reformers have really managed to do is persuade the youth of the ghetto they are somehow disadvantaged and therefore cannot be held accountable for their actions.

Decter's evidence for her thesis seems to be a car ride through Harlem and Bedford-Styvesant. Certainly she doesn't seem to have talked to any of the people to whom she so glibly ascribes motives.

One is tempted to ask whether ghetto blacks and hispanics--who live in a world of burnt-out buildings, dismal employment prospects, and a welfare system that breaks up families and degrades recipients--really owe much allegiance to the moral system espoused by white intellectuals like Decter who live on the West Side by the river. How can she argue the looters are not angry at, not frustrated by the society that keeps them in the ghetto--particularly when she's never talked to them?

Black and White in Color

We always said Newsweek didn't need an editorial page because its opinions are so richly blended into its news stories. That bias now seems to have reached the magazine's extremities. Newsweek's cover for the story on the Bakke case: a black and a white male playing tug of war with a diploma. Not precisely the way supporters--or opponents--of affirmative action policies view the issue.

Of Rice and Men

Fox Butterfield, The New York Times' East Asia correspondent, is well known for his penetrating analysis of events in China on the basis of such salient symbols as Chairman Hua's hair style. He outdid himself this week, though, with a story on Vietnam apparently culled from a month-old speech by that country's prime minister.

Vietnam faces a serious rice shortage this fall, Prime Minister Pham Van Dong reported. Butterfield expands on that point, but in discussing the reasons for the shortage he points to "a combination of factors--a prolonged drought this year, government mismanagement and resistance to collectivization." In addition, Butterfield says, "with the end of the war in 1975, Vietnam lost large amounts of food aid to the South from the United States, and to the North from China."

While all of these factors are probably involved in the food shortage, Butterfield only hints at a significant one: the country is undergoing a transition to peace after three decades of war, and such transitions are rarely smooth. No one blamed the postwar food shortages in Germany on "government mismanagement"--certainly the Allies rushed in with aid. Blaming Hanoi for the problems it now faces seems, at best, somewhat narrow-minded, coming as it does from a citizen of the country that destroyed vast areas of South Vietnam's once-fertile fields.