Capitol Ideas/Cold War Vistas...Guerrilla-Chic...One Grant, One Vote...Newsweek Gas
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS COLD WAR VISTAS... GUERRILLA-CHIC... ONE GRANT, ONE VOTE... NEWSWEEK GAS by Tom Bethell The strategic arms limitation debate, which will preoccupy the U.S. Senate after the August...
...But of course material comfort doesn't bring a sense of fulfillment to anyone, let alone to a nation...
...We cannot announce or make these awards until Congress takes final action on the FY 1980 Appropriations Bill...
...We are indebted to Rep...
...Henry Luce's house has been captured, no less surely than Somoza's...
...Nevertheless, a decisive rejection of the treaty might precipitate an end to detente, certainly a desirable outcome for the U.S...
...As we look back over the past ten years it is hard not to be struck by what has happened to America, after working up through the Sixties to that concentration of energy [the moon landing...
...It will be instructive to peruse the coverage of Latin American turmoil after a similar lapse of time...
...Perhaps a team of them could get together and apply for funding from the Ford Foundation...
...Erlenborn's remarks here in the admittedly forlorn hope that one or another of our Crusading Dailies will take note and set forth on he investigative warpath...
...This figure not only belied the text, but was in fact pure nonsense, deriving from the editorial failure to explain that the 10.7 years referred to "proved reserves," i.e., merely to gas inside wells that have already been drilled...
...People are only really happy when striving to achieve something difficult...
...But the truth is, as Reed Irvine pointed out, that Nicaragua was a country which permitted "free elections, a free press, free circulation of foreign publications, freedom to move around the country or to emigrate or to travel abroad, freedom of speech, freedom of association and freedom to strike...
...Senate after the August recess, purports to be about throw-weight, megatonnage, and other such technicalities, but in reality it is more metaphysical...
...Erlenborn commented that "if a businessman or union representative approached a member of Congress with a similar proposal, there would be no doubt of its illegality....There are laws on the books which prohibit departments and agencies from lobbying members of Congress...
...We are all aware that this law is winked at, and we are lobbied constantly...
...If they represented themselves as proposing to do a study of American perfidy in the Far East, there is little doubt they would get the money...
...The dismal forecast under a downward sloping graph headed "Natural Gas" was: "10.7 Years Left...
...in its present pusillanimous state...
...That is why detente has turned out to be such a blow to this country...
...At the bottom of the attachment there is a warning that this should not be made public, because it might not come to pass...
...In truth it is not the "human rights'' of foreign citizens that attracts the attention and sympathy of our fashionable journalists, but a dimly felt sentiment that people who hide in mountain retreats, style themselves "freedom fighters," dress in the Che Guevara mode, denounce the United States, and fight "the system" deserve all the support that the press can muster...
...1975...
...Speaker," Erlenborn said in June this year, "it has come to my attention that at least two executive agencies have begun the practice of offering grants to our constituents in return for favorable votes on appropriation measures...
...Ultimately, however, it seems fairly certain that America's decline will not be reversed, although there may be brief periods when it will seem to be halted...
...In the long run, of course, it may make very little difference whether the treaty is agreed to, because something as intangible as detente- the result of a decision by the American people no longer to regard the Soviet Union as its enemy-cannot be preserved merely by signatures on a piece of paper...
...These two instances, however, have opened up an entirely new realm of activity...
...Let us look back at the headlines in some of our leading newspapers at the time of the American departure: "Communist Rule Will be Disciplined, Moralistic"-New York Times, April 27...
...Unfortunately, the Senate is likely to approve the treaty for this very reason, because in the end the required number of senators will pull back in fear from the abyss that would face them, and the nation, were they to reject the treaty: an unknown future, fraught with the prospect of having to "stand up to the Russians" and the uncertain vista of "cold war...
...Surplus revenue which might have been spent upon cruisers and colonies has been allocated to pensions and perquisites, housing and health...
...In the text of the article the argument was made that "all price controls on natural gas should be lifted immediately Since gas is a clean and efficient fuel that may prove plentiful, every effort should be made to speed production...
...Again, to quote Parkinson: "As anyone must know who has seen troops inactive in camp, morale rises with the order to march, not because the effort is pleasant, but because it renews the sense of purpose...
...That is guerrilla-chic...
...Meanwhile we are confronted by the boat people fleeing for their lives from that People's Paradise in Vietnam, liberated only yesterday from American tyranny...
...Something the English writer C. Northcote Parkinson wrote recently, describing the British in earlier decades, is apposite here: "Their efforts have dwindled and turned inward and all their talk has been of social progress...
...Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington columnist and Washington editor of Harper's...
...It would be best undertaken by some newly arrived boat people...
...However, this information about our intent may be useful to your constituent institutions for planning purposes...
...One wonders how many of these freedoms will still exist a year from now...
...The truth is that a nation can only achieve greatness, politically and culturally, if it possesses some external purpose...
...Vicious attacks on the CIA, for example, would not have been possible, or even thinkable, in an earlier period when the country was perceived as facing an external threat...
...So, too, a revived perception of the Soviet Union as a dangerous and hostile force would improve American morale, arouse us from our listless dreams of material security and risk-free living, and might even provide us once again with a sense of external purpose...
...The most obvious symptom of this decline has been a similar turning inward: a new preoccupation with "social justice," a new divi-siveness, the merchandising of resentment, the emergence of a class whose leadership has consisted of little more than the nurturing and dispensing of grievance, and, of course, a renewed emphasis on the materialistic promises of socialism: If only we can provide adequate housing, equal pay for equal work, free school lunches, guaranteed jobs, lifelong security, and indexed pensions, then the populace will at last find fulfillment...
...After those climactic efforts of the Sixties, America has more and more come to seem like an exhausted giant -the collapse in Vietnam, Watergate, the resignation of Nixon, the ghostly milk-and-water presidency of Jimmy Carter, and now the energy crisis itself...
...Guerrilla-chic fills the air in the aftermath of the Sandinista triumph in Nicaragua...
...A recent Newsweek cover story on the "energy crisis" suggests to me that these newsmagazine surveys of current events are put together in Rube Goldberg fashion by a group of writers and editors with ideological and even factual disagreements which remain unresolved in the story that is ultimately published...
...On an accompanying sheet there is listed an institution in my district which, it is implied, would receive $365,000 if I vote the right way...
...In some way we cannot yet fully perceive, the remaining decades of this century probably belong to the Soviet Union, just as the earlier decades were America's golden years...
...Speaker, shortly after receiving this offer from the National Endowment for the Humanities, I received a similar offer from the Department of Labor.'' Rep...
...The real question before the house is: Should detente survive...
...Newsweek was guilty of a similar omission in an energy cover story in 1973, at which time we were said to have an 11-year supply...
...It is just one symptom of America' s loss of faith in itself...
...How much simpler to continue along the familiar path of the past decade, with its small appeasements and seemingly unimportant accommodations...
...A good many of our American elite today undoubtedly regard Communism as more "moralistic" than capitalism, because Communism does not permit "profits...
...To me, the most striking word there is "moralistic...
...John Erlenborn of Illinois for disclosing, in the Congressional Record, a remarkable technique now being used by the executive branch to "purchase" the votes of recalcitrant legislators...
...The energy once expended on distant colonies has been turned, at half pressure upon slums...
...None of these Freedoms exists in Cuba, after all, and there has hardly been any great outpouring of journalistic indignation on behalf of the Cuban citizenry...
...It was as though the country had emerged from a coma," Time magazine noted in that style of fulsome panegyric that is now regularly employed by most American journalists when describing those casually clad, Cuban-armed revolutionaries whose exploits they admire so much...
...Mr...
...This problem showed up in News-week's July 16 issue...
...These letters are naked, unashamed attempts to influence my vote, and the vote of every member who received a similar letter...
...Considering how common this kind of amateurishness has been in the mass-circulation press, is it any wonder that public confusion about the energy crisis is so .widespread...
...1 have received a letter from Joseph D. Duffey, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, which stated in part: Please find enclosed a confidential list of institutions in your district which are tentatively scheduled to be awarded Challenge Grants by the National Endowment for the Humanities...
...That is why Averell Harriman, that aged defeatist and distasteful specimen of American diplomacy, reminiscent of Neville Chamberlain, feels he must warn us that if we don't ratify the treaty the Russians will be even tougher with us next time...
...I excerpt Mr...
...These words apply very much to the catastrophic American decline in the 1970s...
...Somoza's regime had been "despotic," Time wrote, thus legitimizing the enthusiasm of its left-wing scribes...
...By then, no doubt, the America-haters of the press will have moved on to doting coverage of the latest "resistance movement," operating, with any luck, out of the Rocky Mountains...
...Last week Christopher Booker wrote in the (London) Spectator...
...Saigon and Its Conquerors: They Smile and Wave at Each Other"- Washington Post, May 15, .1975.' "Indochina Without Americans: For Most A Better Life"-New York Times, April 13, 1975...
...Mr...
...A detailed study of the Indochina coverage by our high-class press during this dismal period of American history would be a worthwhile and revealing project...
...But at the beginning of the article there were charts claiming that "at present rates of consumption, America's oil and gas will be gone within a decade...
...You can be sure that if they are eliminated our heroic corps of journalists will not be greatly upset...
Vol. 12 • September 1979 • No. 9
