Washington Report: Equivalence and Equivocation

...Just as the nation has never been able to bring up the oil from its own oil-rich land reserves without an elaborate system of leasing the land to the oilmen for tokens and then buying back the oil they bring up at full prices, so it would be heresy for the government even to think about using solar power for its own purposes, worse, perhaps, for the private citizen to do so...

...In Defense, as in snowmobiles and motor boats, the system operates for total waste...

...Shortly thereafter, we learned a lot of things about old W. W.-Roman-Numeral-One that retroactively dismantled the esprit-de-corps James understandably thought inherent in war...

...Job training efforts and serious attempts at remedial education can well be taken as indications of good intentions that make imposition of a quota system unnecessary...

...There is no energy return for the energy expended...

...Califano...

...And despite the protests of some segments of organized labor, when you find unions with a long history and a continuing practice of lily-white membership and hiring practices, a quota may simply be unavoidable...

...It is only later that we discover some have been more equal than others, some, in fact, have made a bundle out of the universal sacrifice...

...Waste is inherent in all systems and the prudent manager studies to keep it as low as possible...

...What he really meant, Mr...

...Correcting this state of affairs will take positive action on every level, educational and economic...

...The main objection to the moral equivalency of war stuff, however, is the anachronism of it all...

...Throwing a nickel-a-year per gallon tax rise on gas may indeed cut down on joy riding and drag racing--although that remains to be seen...

...Even as they spoke, however, tycoons in black pajamas would be silently spreading through the land, raising the prices at the pumps...

...Califano's amendments seem to have taken the heat off him, at least for the moment...

...Secretary for what they saw as an intention "to discriminate against whites and males...

...General Brown, who had never been de-cycled and thus didn't have to be re-cycled, would reveal in an off-therecord speech that the Rockefellers had all been Jews anyway, so what the hell...

...Here, we are starting out putting those bundles for biggies to one side of the national offering and somehow it casts a shadow on one's enthusiasm for close order drill...

...Taken aback by the furor, Mr...

...Califano cited the Harvard Medical School's program of giving several months of pretraining to members of disadvantaged minorities before they entered medical school...

...FRANK GETLEIN Commonweal: 293...

...At the top of the equivalency program, Brown and Westmoreland together would announce that they had ascertained, through reliable body count methods, that all oil tycoons had been eliminated and the world was now safe for snowmobiles...

...At that point Mr...

...For helping to clarify this fact, we can thank Mr...

...In short, the first thought should not be a quota, but it should not be completely unthinkable either...

...American society has long been permeated by racism and sexual bias, and verbal acknowledgement of this fact cannot cure the resultant evil effects in our society...

...More recently, of course, we have been through a quite different kind of war and it is that war that the word stands for in the minds of most Americans...

...Obviously, this exercise could go on for some time without running out of material, but you get the general idea...

...but if you are a four-star joy rider 13 May 1977:292 in the wild blue, a gold-braid drag racer in the Eastern Med, you've got a permanent credit card and the bills never do come in...

...But if the heat is off Mr...

...In wartime, we are routinely and emphatically assured that we are all in this together, sacrificing equally, nobody gaining and so on...

...General Westmoreland, recalled to active service, would announce that we had to destroy the Rockefellers in order to save the Rockefellers...

...In a program aimed at the conservation of energy, obviously such a system is the prime target...

...Maybe what we really ought to be looking for, in energy and elsewhere, is a moral equivalent of peace...

...Henry Kissinger, an expert in the field, would be recalled to public service to order telephone eavesdropping taps placed on the reporters, editors and rewrite men who do those editorial advertisements Mobil is always running in the papers...

...Such has been the main line of objections to the dim sketch of the energy policy of the President...

...Meanwhile on the equivalent military front, the Pentagon might do a little surgical bombing on the Houston Petroleum Club, preferably at Christmas...

...the profits have to be higher ever higher and then higher than that to get them to move and grant us the heat, light and power we need to keep those snowmobiles destroying the wilderness, those stink pots destroying the peace and quiet of a day on bay or beach...

...In it he conceded that he had made a mistake when he said he advocated racial and sexual quotas as a means of redressing past discrimination...

...We are willing to grant to Mr...

...The FBI would infiltrate gas station operators, instigate wildcat price rises at the pumps and then haul their instigated wildcatters off to trial for conspiracy, proving to the nation that an alert force of peace officers was maintaining the peace...

...The same thing can be said in the cases of universities and colleges with only token blacks or women on their staffs or in their student body...

...Indeed, perhaps it would be better to talk in terms of "goals" rather than quotas, and in general affirmative action that "casts a wide net" is preferable...

...Califano's critics that quotas should not be the tool of first resort...

...WASHINGTON REPORT I I EQUIVALENCE AND EQUIVOCATION There have been moments following President Carter's address to Congress on the energy crisis when it has seemed that the main obstacle to solar energy flooding the land is that it's hard to make the sun a monopoly of the oil trust or your local light and power combine...

...Either because of past or on-going discrimination against minorities or women" there should be "affirmative action to rectify the situation...

...That being so, it follows inexorably that these painful moments at the pump are not going to produce the results in morale, the formation of esprit-de-corps, that poor old James imagined might be done...

...I object to the President's re-cycling of Will James's old cry for a "moral equivalent of war" in the nation's coming to grips with the energy crisis...

...Thousands of others would flee to Canada or Sweden to avoid working on the pipe line...

...By that, he said, he meant special training courses and an effort to reach out and find deserving people, but not quotas that would require the admission of a certain percentage of blacks or women...

...It is not difficult at all--and not very inspiring--to guess at what the moral equivalent of Vietnam might be in the energy crisis...

...It is not, the subject hasn't been mentioned...

...As for our doing something ourselves, without paying tribute to the cartel, it's an unthinkable thought...

...Rest assured, it won't...

...Califano tried to calm things down by giving the Times another, corrective interview...

...The first is simply that it has so far entered no one's head that by far the largest institutional user of energy of all kinds in this country is the Defense Establishment...

...When James got off the line in the first place, the war in question was The Great War, which was still genuinely understood in terms of The Dreadnought Boys and George M. Cohan...

...It must if we are serious at all about the dread crisis...

...At the very start, of course, Carter has blown the equivalency by announcing the war in advance...

...In the first place, of course, paying a nickel more for gas, even, eventually, half a buck more for gas, is a far cry from the sacrifices young men are asked to make on the field of battle or even in barracks-room life...

...Califano said, was equal opportunity for all...

...As an example of what he meant on this score, Mr...

...My own objections have been more capricious...

...Liddy and Hunt, recalled to active service, would break into the Rockefellers' towers of trade, jiggle with the ballast systems and cause those two monuments to topple into New York harbor...

...The fact that the chief energy conservator is a former Secretary of Defense may or may not be a coincidence, but that experience may well have rendered him incapable of thinking those unthinkable thoughts that need thinking...

...With only all-time record-breaking profits, such as those recently enjoyed by the oil cartel, the cartelians dare not take the risk Of doing anything at all...

...The thing about normal energy systems is that they return the energy used in a different form and, usually, slightly lessened by normal, irreducible inefficiency: you use energy to get to work, but once there you produce a given number of blivets which represent energy in a different, more costly form...

...Eventually, thousands of young men would be drafted to work on the pipe line--if you have to ask what pipe line, you're not ready for moral equivalency...

...How to restrain the gas guzzlers known as the Joint Chiefs is a question that hasn't come up...

...Indeed, the effort must be made, if we are to believe half the arguments about energy now being advanced...

...Private enterprise is the foundation of the whole system, but it had better not get too private...

...My other objection is rhetorical, I guess...

...But when you find, for example, a police or fire department in an overwhelmingly black area with no blacks, a quota may be the only answer to begin to deal with the problem...

...The CIA would put a mail drop on the chairmen of the boards of the oil cartel...

...Indeed, the preliminary acknowledgment of the profit motive as essential to the great task just about cancels out that martial moral equivalency all by itself...

...Of quotas he now said, in a clear understatement, "It's obviously a nerve-jangling word...

...For this we are glad, for the Secretary's general remarks on discrimination show that his heart is in the right place, whatever protests that followed...

...No doubt the effort will be made...

...Public television stations would be broken into by burglars from both the CIA and the FBI because public television is always running BBC programs sponsored by Exxon...

...A huge public clamor immediately ensued, with assorted unions taking large newspaper ads to protest against any suggestion of quotas and with 44 leading educators calling on President Carter to disavow his H.E.W...

...For a long time," he said, "I didn't think quotas would work," but experience had changed his mind and he now favored them...

...If this were a true moral equivalency, he would be inching into the war, placating the generals every few months with another 50,000 troops while assuring the nation that nothing out of the way was happening at all, that we should all concentrate on leading the good life even better...

...Califano, the national argument over quotas will not die, and should not...

...Califano discovered that "quota" is an explosive word...