Kto kovo? according to Lenin, is the fundamental question of politics. "Who's going to do in whom?" Lenin and others plotting against the czar came steadily to this zero-sum conception of politics. One side or the other could win—not both. Though Americans tend to expect a harmony of interests among nations, the zero-sum conception also exists in this country; it is, in fact, a prominent factor in the ongoing debate about Soviet strategic objectives and capabilities—for instance, in statements by the Committee on the Present Danger.

From June 16 until the end of this year there will be 618 individual moments of silent protest in South Africa. That is the number of people known to have been killed during six months of low-level disruption, which exploded a hundred times into full-scale uprising. There is even a published list: alphabetized, date and cause of death, home address, age.

The Conference on International Economic Cooperation has all the appearances of a floating crap game: After the windup of this eighteenmonth Paris conference it moves over to UNCTAD, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. This points up the need for the U.N. to sponsor a permanent international clearinghouse on the exchange of data and the pricing of world goods and commodities. It would function as a sort of securities and commodities exchange commission that remains sensitive to the varieties of economic systems and mixtures, but is somehow able to establish guidelines on the relative values of goods, services, and commodities. Such an institutionbuilding process was a major recommendation of the Second International Conference on Environment and Society.

Speaking before the United Nations, President Jimmy Carter declared that "The basic thrust of human affairs points toward a universal demand for fundamental human rights. The United States has a historic birthright to be associated with this process." He was reiterating his inaugural day commitment: "Because we are free we can never be indifferent to the fate of freedom elsewhere."

The study of time in personal perceptions and social lives is hardly a new enterprise. A rather large body of literature on these subjects exists, and much of the material is utterly fascinating. People have examined orientations to the past, present, and future, the tempi of living, cycles, biological and social rhythms, the meaning of expectation, and of course memory. One of the more popular areas of research involves categorizing people as past, present, or futureoriented. These so-called temporal orientations are associated with various personality traits, as for example the heightened past orientations of anxious people, or the characteristic future orientations of highly achieving people. It has also been common practice to label according to various social classes within a society: the poor, present-oriented; the middle class, futureoriented; and the affluent, past- or, more precisely, tradition-oriented.

In accepting the Democratic presidential nomination in July of last year, candidate Jimmy Carter said that when the United States was founded its commitment to certain moral and philosophical principles "created a basis for a unique role for America: that of a pioneer in shaping more decent and just relations among peoples and among societies." He sketched the task facing us: "Nothing less than a sustained architectural effort to shape an international framework of peace, within which our own ideals gradually tend to become a global reality" (emphasis added). In his inaugural address of January 20 President Carterelaborated upon the concept: "We will not behave in foreign places so as to violate our rules and standards here at home, for we know that this trust which our nation earns is essential to our strength." He remarked that a new spirit now dominated the world: "People more numerous and more politically aware are craving and now demanding their place in the sun—not just for the benefit of their physical condition, but for basic human rights."

Already the term "recombinant DNA" comes easily to the lips of legislators and television commentators. A few of them can even manage "deoxyribonucleic acid," which is what DNA stands for.

DNA is the genetic material, the miraculous selfreplicatirig double helix of Watson and Crick, the marrow, soul, and substance of all earthly life. Molecular biologists have been tinkering with it for a couple of decades now, and only recently have they learned to slice it up and then stick it back together in new ways: hence recombinant DNA. Scientists have also discovered ways to transfer it from one living thing to another: to put genes from one kind of animal into a different kind, from bacteria into plants, or to put the newly spliced genes into just about any living cell.