SINCE it wasn’t billed or structured as a debate,

SINCE it wasn’t billed or structured as a debate, perhaps it is somewhat unfair to say that Karl Hess, admitted anarchist, made the most telling debating points in his “colloquy” last Friday night at Rappahannock Elementary School with James Fitzpatrick, nationally syndicated conservative newspaper columnist.

But , then, “Jack” Kilpatrick seemed to win the argument, at least with a majority of the sizeable audience on hand, and it wasn’t just because he’s a sometime Rappahannock resident, either. It was an audience which simply couldn’t shake the builtin responses of a lifetime of public school education, commercials and “instithtional advertising”—that is to say, free enterprise propaganda.

The initially beguiling premises of Karl Hess against big government, big business, bigness of any kind, and in favor of small scale, neighborhood-level, participatory democracy, were eventually overwhelmed by an abiding American belief that big accomplishments are the sole prerogative of big government or big business, and nothing the softvoiced, persuasive Hess could say could shake those inbred instincts. It is suspected that the bearded and bra-less youths who were sprinkled throughout the audience were as skeptical as the solid Rappahannock Establishment types who almost filled the school’s auditorium, but they’d be the last to admit it.

The “colloquy” between Kilpatrick and Hess was another in a series of programs arranged by the Nethers Community School to provide some summertime intellectual stimulus for rural Rappahannock. Nethers is an experimental, “Hippy” (to use a readily identifiable adjective) school that has been established near Woodville, a small Rappahannock community. The lecture series or whatever you want to call it was organized loosely around a consideration of solar energy, and so far all speakers have been in favor of that alternative sourceeven Kilpatr&k and Hess.