The cold war is over." By 1972 this phrase has become a cliché, perhaps especially among knowledgeable people. In other times there would be nothing very wrong with this: for there are many clichés that are by no means untrue. (Where there is smoke there is fire.) Unfortunately, the movement of ideas has become so predictable, because of their total involvement with publicity, that clichés no longer merit even partial trust. (Where there is smoke there is smoke; and where there is fire there is fire.) For years I have borrowed Wilde's admirable aphorism about people who pursue the obvious with the enthusiasm of a shortsighted detective, until I found that, no matter how funny, it is no longer applicable: for the public cogitators and public prophets of our time have captured the obvious with all of the calculation that a farsighted young associate professor, in pursuit of a profitable academic career, can muster.

The Bible has hard words for people who miss the time of God's vigitation. The fault is not God's, we are told, for he long ago warned us his spokesmen would appear in unlikely places and improbable disguise. The task of discernment is ours. History's record is one of missed visitations, from Jeremiah to Franz Jagerstatter, not to mention Jesus of Nazareth. Among those who take this business of discernment seriously the rumor is now about that God has done it again, this time in the form of a youthfully middle-aged Jesuit poet, priest, and prisoner. The less serious have picked up on the rumor, and excitement spreads. The way to Calvary is littered with books, magazine articles, T.V. specials, and a smashingly successful off-Broadway play (soon to be a major movie!), the offerings of a cheering crowd hungry for heroism.

More car for less money" might be the salesman's pitch for the diplomatic bonanza promised in the Nixon Doctrine. The focus on partnership with friendlv nations will lower America's cost in meeting her obligations, we are told, but the saving is not at the price of an inferior product. On the contrary, it assures a superior one. There is, to be sure, a reduction of America's load, but without damage to our vital interests or to world order. Indeed, the reduction is intended to further those interests and that order.

Aformer "church-in-silence" is babbling anew. After the silence of most of the 1960's, religious Cuba is speaking out. Many of us may not be ready for what we hear.

Our unreadiness flows from a variety of sources. One is that the United States policy of isolating Cuba not only isolates Cuba but also isolates us from it. Another source may be the traditional expectation that a church in a Communist country stands in unrelenting opposition to the government—or else retreats into the catacombs. Many Protestants, Roman Catholics and Jews in Cuba have rejected (or are rejecting) the two traditional alternatives of sabotage or withdrawal to silence, even though both alternatives were tried, to one degree or another, for the bulk of the past decade.

That Bernard Malamud passes as a Jewish author is a commentary on the cultural and theological illiteracy of our times. Jewish by descent, his literary themes and values are Christian, echt Christian, sometimes nauseatingly so. "Malamud's themes," Stanley Edgar Hyman informed us long ago in The New Leader, "are the typical themes of the New Testament: charity, compassion, sacrifice, redemption…." He added: "these Christian themes are thoroughly secularized." Malamud's central theme, with variations, is not merely redemption, but redemption through love, through sacrificial, universal, altruistic, agapic, Christian love. His heroes are Christ figures. But the d£cor of his novels and their characters are largely Jewish. And that's where the confusion begins.

Remembering the role writers and intellectuals played in the Hungarian revolt of 1956 and in the Czechoslovak liberalization from 1966 to 1968, the Soviet authorities are determined to see that Aleksander Solzhenitsyn's works, as well as those of a number of other Soviet writers, bring neither increased turbulence at home nor decreased prestige and power for the Soviet Union and its leadership abroad.