Diary 1963 - Murshid Sam's Living Stream

Diaries 196358 Harriet St.,San Francisco 3, Calif.November 2, 1963Dr. Howard Benninghoff,25601 Oasis,Indio, Calif.Dear Howard:I feel like a playwright completing a drama in which there is a role for you becoming the hero,or leading actor. For my diary and other purposes, I wish to detail everybody. For I believe there is awisdom or justice which can, in the end, terminate events.There is no question, to me, that we live in a world of C.P. Snow’s two cultures, which havebeen called scientific and literary, or humanistic for want of better terms. What my conclusions, Science,the journal of the AAAS seem to bear this out to the full. For instance last week I called on GuyAtkinson who is handling some vast engineering projects in Pakistan and not only was there entireaccord but also agreement that the United States has been sucked into dialectics by communist propaganda,that we are today largely merely anti-Marxist dialecticians and that the American, if notdelightful Jeffersonian and Pragmatic, philosophies have been rejected by the press and journalistsand fiction writers. The Guy Atkinson story can’t be told because it does not fit in with the politicsand polities of either the political parties or the press or even the universities. It is a simple anddirect story.But the success or failure of the Guy Atkinson efforts means largely a geographical transferenceof the problem of salinity. And after long sessions with Dr. Schoonover there is nothing I can add.The difference is that Dr. Schoonover and Prof. Keim have been recalled to India and Egypt respectivelybecause the political-dialectics, Marxist or anti-Marxists, does not works and Milton Firemanand Howard Benninghoff are in lost corners when they ought to be handling vast projects.For it is not even the introduction to this letter that I have been asked for a plan of both engineeringand agricultural procedure by a friend who has been promoted to the top technical post inSind which includes the mouth of the Indus River, while the politicians of all countries concerned,are using piece-meal methods, totally different from that used in the Mississippi Valley, and perhapsbeing forced on us here with regard to the Colorado.In any event I have spoken twice in public, and will speak again on the superior methods of theprivate Foundations as against government, so-called aid or AID, for the letter is disjunctive both inpersonnel and planning and efficiency often ends in adjournment sine die—and I know what I amtalking about.