WASHINGTON REPORT: The Double Standard

...No national debt, just a whopping national overdraft...

...To return to the theater we were talking about, as always in superior drama, there were some ironies missed by all the characters but appreciated, as they are meant to be, by the audience...

...An energy bill would receive then the more favorable action that Carter's plan in fact merited...

...An interesting question, but one probably more apt to arouse envy than rage in the heart of the sports-loving television viewer...

...For television viewers, Lance came across as a lovable rogue...

...Here Percy went beyond the minister to become Cousin Sid interrogating Huck Finn about raftsmanship...

...Was there a double standard being followed, we--and Lance---were asked in having a bank plane fly the banker and his family to these sporting events while the rest of us had to drive and have trouble finding a place to park...

...Football, apparently, is what they have instead of theater and by and large they probably get a better show, plus, of course, the fresh air and sunshine...

...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...

...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...

...It's a chilling moment in the novel because we realize the narrator, jealous of goodness, is stepping into evil...

...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...

...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...

...Anyway, when it was all over, the Senators took the elevators down to their cars in the basement garage, the reporters walked the six or eight blocks to theirs, rejoicing that, on Saturday, they probably wouldn't have been ticketed...

...We parked at store doors, carried out everything and loaded it into the trunk...

...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...

...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...

...Clearly the games would be a legRimate business expense legitimately reimbursed by the bank if Lance just went to them to be able to talk to his customers on Mondays...

...Double standards...

...Exquisite character contrast was superbly maintained in every syllable, every facial expression, as the two 14 October 1977:644 proceeded, step by step, down the aerial itinerary from one Georgia football game to another...

...If statutory crime turns out to be involved--as it might in the use of that plane for political campaign purposes---that's something else, but I must say I was bemused by most of the questions and answers and the underlying assumption that we live in some kind of egalitarian society where everybody's treated alike, gets paid and not much else out of his job...

...The Army and the Church, being ancient institutions, institutionalize these things...

...I know all too little about business and nothing at all about any sport except pocket billiards, but as a professional journalist I have read at least a couple of hundred of this country's newspapers at one time or another and I've never seen one that doesn't automatically put the sports news next to the stock quotations and business news...

...One of the most delightful experiences my wife and I ever had was doing our Christmas shopping straight down Fifth Avenue, from Bergdorf's to Altman's with a side trip to Bloomie's, in a DLP car belonging to a foreign friend then posted to the UN...

...But the task is to conquer these problems, not retreat before them as the dark ages did before pestilence and disease...

...Suddenly and for just about the only time, having an automobile made sense in New York...

...FRANK GETLEIN Commonweal: 645...

...The same bit of information worked no less surely on its audience here...

...American business, conducted in a jovial, hail-fellow-well-met atmosphere of schoolboy democracy, has to be more informal and run through mental gymnastics about increasing a bank's business by flying in a company plane to a football contest...

...One of the best was daringly-and effectively--swiped from Graham Greene...

...We fear the answer will shame it...

...In The End of the Affair, the narrator, in an act of deliberate cruelty, informs his poor, shabby private detective that the hero whose name the detective gave his son and apprentice, Lancelot, was not the one whose strength was as the strength of ten because his heart was pure, but rather an adulterer who betrayed his king...

...Of course we live by double standards...

...The Senate is going to arrive at some kind of energy bill, and may have by the time this is read...

...However the country cannot continue to gobble up energy as if resources were boundless...

...No one minimizes the dangers inherent in nuclear-energy development...

...there are connected with it extremely serious problems of safety, environmental balances and waste disposal...

...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...

...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...

...It wasn't the sense of power or wealth, it was the sense of convenience...

...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...

...On the other hand, if I'd owned some bank shares, Fd have bought more...

...For no question about it, the energy crisis'is quite real in the long range...

...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...

...There is some mystically inner connection between football and finance intuitively understood by managing editors, who, as a class, don't really understand a great deal of anything, intuitively or otherwise...

...All this time I thought overdrafts--overdraughts, actuallyqwere merely a literary device of the 19th century novel, like blushing and fainting...

...They are anything but...

...So of course we view negatively such knee-jerk opposition to nuclear power as that of New Hampshire's Clamshell Alliance...

...Doctors are professional big cheeses and that's why they're allowed to double- and even triple-park along, appropriately, Park Avenue while conducting adulterous liaisons in the late afternoon...

...Big cheeses get the perks they do because they are big cheeses, not because of their beautiful blue eyes...

...But it is going to have to ask its institutional conscience if this bill is all it should be...

...Senatorial questioning developed that Lance and his wife have a partnership company just between the two of them for certain investment reasons--Lance was vague on what they were--and that outfit was called, what else...

...Obviously a Georgia banker looking for Georgia business can do no better than be prominently present at Georgia football games...

...I have to confess that, lover of righteousness that I am, Percy even lost me on that one...

...The business-sports connection is one of those disconcerting signs---like swimming pools and superhighways as national pastimes---that the United States is really the late Roman Empire, but that the connection exists cannot be doubted by anyone who's spent ten minutes in the company of businessmen...

...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...

...Present company, naturally, excepted: Jack Deedy is not spiritually a managing editor, it's just that somebody has to do the job...

...Still the Senate isn't the only problem where energy proposals are concerned...

...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...

...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...

...The company name, of course, can also be interpreted as giving Lance a tot and nobody said that either...

...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...

...Again, the implacable questioner inquired, were all these appearances at football games a legitimate business expense...

...Prescinding from the adulterous implications of the name, thrown into high relief when used for an arrangement between man and wife, we nevertheless note that Lancelot did indeed betray his political chief for the sake of an aggrandizement he found irresistible, namely Guinevere, and that, of course, is precisely what folks around town have been saying Lance himself had already done to Carter by accepting his appointment although covered by all those shadows...

...What's the use of being a big cheese if you don't pick up a little something here and there...

...Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, the Morte d',4rthur is apparently not on top of the bedside table books of members of the committee or of their staff, and nobody brought up the Greene-Malory connection...

...Lancelot and Company...

...the Federal Power Commission, for instance, judges heating supplies adequate even if the 1977-78 winter is 10 percent colder than normal...

...The country can get through another cold winter like last year's...