VERSE

...FRANK GETLEIN 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 FREDERICK MORGAN SUSPIRIA Take them, death--take whoever belongs to you: your likeness is stamped inwardly, on the plasm...

...Yet the odd thing is the government has been into providing jobs for a long time and its doing so in one big area is regularly lauded by lots of the people who fear the same thing if done for the unemployed...

...Surely it is time we put it on a rational basis, figured out how to get the jobs without the whiz-bangs and use the money saved to get enough jobs to go around...

...Hence, the government is, and for a long time has been, in the job business...

...The single life blossoms, fades, drops to the earth, as the tree lives on in the dream by which it is remembered...

...As for procurement officers, let's say that for every thousand unemployed put to work, five procurement officers get a free duck hunt on the Eastern Shore...

...In that instance, almost alone, it didn't work, but it is time we realized that, thanks to the arms merchants, this country has long been committed to government spending to provide jobs...

...The mass of flesh and bone absorbs into the soil...

...Commonweal: 777...

...That area, of course, is military spending...

...We can easily legislate, for example, that for every unemployed person hired by the government, David Rockefeller gets a hundred smackers...

...Well, it may surely be time we did that, but we surely aren't going to do it the way things look now...

...What are you, against employment?, it is regularly asked of citizens and congressmen expressing doubt about the latest high-priced whiz-bang...

...How could we...

...The final push for the B-1 was based on distributing jobs around the country in such a manner that practically every congressman of consequence got at least some for his district...

...The rival can operate, but only if the original man gets his established cut...

...It's something like running a crap game...

...Traditionally, we provide the jobs in order to get the whiz-bang and thus save Pocatello from the Red Army, but the whiz-bang finally flies on the jobs argument...

...If this scheme seems fanciful, it is much less so than expecting Carter-Humphrey-Hawkins to get anyone a job...

...consciousness, too, is renewed, pale in its billion cells...

...It's not that he needs the money, it's just that he and many like him feel that nothing is really legit in this country unless he and those like him get a cut...

...naturally you don't want some two-bit rival like the United States government operating its own down the street...

...Whenever the Joint Chiefs' procurement officers and their once and future employer-corporations come up with some new, incredibly expensive miracle weapon, the lack of which will insure the landing of the Russians in Bismarck, North Dakota, Tuesday at noon, the ultimate argument is that the thing will create jobs...

...Our national thinking at the moment seems to be that the only legitimate way for the government to create jobs for people is through the trickle down theory in general and specifically through handing billions to the weapons merchants so they can pass much of the money on to workers, with normal breakage or a little more than normal going to the merchants and their bankers...

...If we really want a jobs policy, therefore, we should program procurement officers, arms merchants and big bankers into it...

...Let Lockheed and Northrop bid on leaf-raking in the South Bronx-more accurately, no doubt, let them decide between themselves which one will put in the "low" bid this time--and you'll be amazed at the speed with which congressmen, Pentagonians, even the Carter administra= tion will rally round the program to end unemployment...

...Similarly, the jobs program could as easily be run by the arms merchants as by anyone else...