EDITORIAL
cultural styles) of "the Sun Belt" and "the Snow Belt." It has gotten to the point that when Peter attacks me I know I must be onto something, even if I get there too early. Peter always ends...
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...the Federal Power Commission, for instance, judges heating supplies adequate even if the 1977-78 winter is 10 percent colder than normal...
...It was the deregulation possibility that brought on the threat of presidential veto...
...l , 1924, to date available through University MicroBIms...
...The "new class" has elites in both the Republican and Democratic party...
...there are connected with it extremely serious problems of safety, environmental balances and waste disposal...
...he was helped in this by a faint recollection of Huey Long in both face and accent, but even so that's quite an achievement for a banker...
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...I had analogous words about the new class on the right...
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...I was describing--accurately, I be(Continued on page 667) CORRESPONDENCE: G42 EDITORIAL: G43 WASHINGTON REPORT: The Double Standard: Frank Getlein 644 AS ! IVAL~ SAYING . . .: Peter Steinlels 646 UNEQUAL RUT FAIR: Da.niel C. Maguire 647 AN ACADEMIC PROFILE: Eleanor B. Wymard 652 TIIi~ PRESS: Mark Rudd Returns: Thomas Powers 657 THE SCREEN: Colin L. Westerbeck, Jr...
...It is not surprising...
...The Senate must realize this, yet it proceeds as if nothing greater were at stake than the effect of daylight saving time on the cows of Wisconsin...
...An energy bill would receive then the more favorable action that Carter's plan in fact merited...
...Microfilms from Vol...
...650 VERSE: John Fandel 660 PHILOSOPHIZING ON THE PAST: John P. Sisk 661 ROOKS: Ralph Whitehead, Jr., Daniel Aaron, C. Peter Ripley 662 ILLUSTRATIONS: [ront cover, Rita Corbin JAMES O'GARA: Editor JOHN DEEDY: Managing Editor RAYMOND A. SCHROTH: Associate Editor ANNE M. ROBERTSON...
...All of which is to say that there is nothing wrong with the Carter energy plan that went to the Senate except perhaps its timing...
...The setting wasn't a White House drawingroom, and the costume wasn't a cardigan sweater...
...S~ecial two-year rate $29.50...
...For no question about it, the energy crisis'is quite real in the long range...
...The complication is in the natural resiliency of the individual...
...Like it or not, energy is not a fair-weather issue, unless of course there is some queueing up at gas stations, which there happens to be none of at the moment...
...Single copy 75c...
...WASHIINGTON REPORT I I I II IIII THE DOUBLE STANDARD The questioning came abruptly to an end late Saturday afternoon, perhaps to give everybody a chance to salvage what there was left of a particularly lovely Washington weekend...
...I wrote: "A useful historical name for the organized political movement of the left might be the Know Everythings...
...The Senate is going to arrive at some kind of energy bill, and may have by the time this is read...
...300 H. Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Mich...
...But it is going to have to ask its institutional conscience if this bill is all it should be...
...The 'new politics,' calling itself leftish, actually represents established power...
...When the gavel came down, Senator Percy had just finished saying, as he had been saying for a couple of hours and a couple of days before that, that what worried him was that it looked as if Bert Lance as a banker employed and benefited from a double standard, one way of banking for the customers, quite a different way for banker Lance, including life in a fiscal Potemkin's village with an awful lot of money that really wasn't there...
...Exquisite character contrast was superbly maintained in every syllable, every facial expression, as the two 14 October 1977:644...
...Well he might have pleaded...
...It's true that if I'd had a hundred dollars on deposit with Bert Lance's bank, I'd have run right down and got it out...
...Many of them are in affluent professions, secular in their values and tastes and initiatives, indifferent to or hostile to the family, equipped with post-graduate degrees and economic security and cultural power...
...The two were probably at their paired best when the Senator was taking the witness through his extremely interesting history of air travel, including the utterly delightful sequence of buying and selting the same aeroplane back and forth to and from a couple of banks, each transaction turning a personal profit as the machine's value, like that of some wine and all members of the Senate, increased with age...
...Even the New York Times implicitly acknowledged the dullness of the energy story, when it moved it off page one for a few days and back: to the business/finance section, as if the energy story qualified as news in terms of dollars and profits--which it does, although not primarily...
...The House had done well by his program, but the Senate had gutted utility-tax reform, the "gas-guzzler" tax idea, and coal-conversion requirements, was moving in on proposed taxing of industrial usages of oil and natural gas, and had launched into a filibuster for deregulation of natural gas prices...
...The country can get through another cold winter like last year's...
...No one minimizes the dangers inherent in nuclear-energy development...
...Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y...
...For television viewers, Lance came across as a lovable rogue...
...Peter always ends up being dragged along into the present: In his recent column, he urges that "the new class" be given the respect "ethnics" have won...
...Just as Peter wrote, the Democrats were holding a $1,000-a-plate dinner at the Waldorf--the Democrats...
...In the Star column in question [Aug...
...Yet as Carter's strategy seemed to be taking form, it was dropped, almost as if the administration sensed the futility of what it was about...
...Oo0"oooooooooooooo0 THE SEHATE AHD EHERGY For a quick few days in late September, it appeared that President Carter was about to go to the public on behalf of his energy program...
...On the other hand, if I'd owned some bank shares, Fd have bought more...
...We fear the answer will shame it...
...The finger of criticism can be pointed up and down the board, from industry at one end (the pressures exerted by oil and gas companies against the Carter energy plan border on the scandalous), to vigilante, anti-developing groups at the other which see energy salvation through windmills, firewood, solar-energy converters and the like--all very quaint, but with the possible exception of solar energy, all geared to life in another century...
...However the country cannot continue to gobble up energy as if resources were boundless...
...No national debt, just a whopping national overdraft...
...10016 Telephone: (212) MU 3-2042 A review of Publlc Affairs, Literature and the Arts...
...I relied rather heavily on Jeanne Kirkpatrick's brilliant, long study, The Presidential Elites, which I cited...
...The public would have yawned more...
...Still the Senate isn't the only problem where energy proposals are concerned...
...But the task is to conquer these problems, not retreat before them as the dark ages did before pestilence and disease...
...Here Percy went beyond the minister to become Cousin Sid interrogating Huck Finn about raftsmanship...
...It should have reached there on a winter day, when thermostats were set at 60, and when even senators had to blow on their fingers for heat...
...On still a third hand--triple standard, no doubt--if Lance has made himself a millionaire largely by transmuting what for most of us is debt into what for him is a bunch of overdrafts, he may have been just what this country needed .in its budget management...
...Foreign $19...
...Where was he when "ethnics" needed him...
...They are anything but...
...The first sunny"-days of spring whisk away the sting and the memory of winter Commonweal: 643 shortages, and people by and large tend to relax through autumn in a comfort that is seasonal and in the long run illusory...
...But if symbolism was subdued, urgency was not...
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...Carter was threatening veto in West Virginia, cajoling in Washington, pleading in effect through camera's eye to the great beyond in defense of the wide-ranging proposals intended to relieve shortages and ease American dependency on foreign energy resources...
...11709.] My subject was the gap between political elites in the Democratic party (and in the Republican party) and their constituencies...
...Energy is rather a cold-weather issue, as it is then that supplies are the most vulnerable to demand and when the public feels most directly the effects of a shortage of any sort, as last winter when gas and heating-oil supplies dropped to emergency levels in many parts of the country forcing schools to close, factories to shut down, and businesses to curtail operating hours...
...His principal antagonist, Senator Percy, meticulously created exactly the opposite character the star part required, the austere, even chilly advocate of righteousness, a pallid, implacable clergyman of some impossibly unworldly, inteUectual sect...
...For anyone who wishes to see the full text, I will be happy to supply a free copy of the EMPAC newsletter #10---Box 48, Bayville, N.Y...
...I am as aware as Peter that many of the nation's top intellectuals are critical of "the new class," particularly of its more radical fringe in the Democratic party, and more exactly of its disproportionate role in the Democratic nominating convention...
...29, 1976--over a year ago!I, my subjeer was not "the new class" but a new alignment both in the Republican and in the Democratic parties...
...The principal target of the latter groups is, of course, nuclear power and those scary plants that now provide 2.5 percent of the nation's total energy supply--not much, although it could be 11 percent by 1985 and appreciably more soon thereafter...
...I did use the sentences Peter cites, but not quite in the context or with the tone he gives them...
...Forefc~n S33.50...
...So of course we view negatively such knee-jerk opposition to nuclear power as that of New Hampshire's Clamshell Alliance...
...All this time I thought overdrafts--overdraughts, actuallyqwere merely a literary device of the 19th century novel, like blushing and fainting...
...I was not generalizing about all educators, professors, or intdlectuals...
...Editorial Assistant COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR.: Movies JOHN FANDEL: Poetry FRANK GETLEIN: Washington BRIAN WICKER...
...There was no question here but that Lance turned in by far the best performance, which was fair enough since he certainly had the star role and incomparably the best director and play doctor, Clark Clifford...
...But the matter of the moment is not in Seabrook, N.H., but Washington, D.C., ~-d in the spotlight is not the Clamshell Alliance or facsimile thereof, but the United States Senate...
...and Rook Review Digest...
Vol. 104 • October 1977 • No. 21
