WASHINGTON REPORT: Ends and Beginnings
Getlein, Frank
WASHINGTON REPORT ENDS AND BEGINNINGS The great new thing to be recorded for the new year is, of course, the new realism in the Mid East, manifested at first solely in President Sadat of...
...Earl Butz, the old loose shoes man, used to denounce the dread delivery men at the supermarkets, claiming that their costly insistence upon bringing the bread into the market and placing it on the shelves instead of just dumping it on the curb was what made the price of beef soar to such Butzianly gratifying heights...
...WASHINGTON REPORT ENDS AND BEGINNINGS The great new thing to be recorded for the new year is, of course, the new realism in the Mid East, manifested at first solely in President Sadat of Egypt, at this writing possibly discernible in Jordan's Hussein and some of the more conservative sheiks, to be perceived not at all in the cheerleader Arab states and ambiguously in Syria...
...Did the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover ever seriously try to bring a lynch gang to justice...
...If the farmers aren't getting enough and the consumers are paying too much, it follows as the day the night that someone in the middle is knocking down more than normal breakage allows...
...Even were that cause to be won, the Israelis driven into the sea and all that, it is hard to see what gain there would be for Egypt in the victory...
...Suppose, instead, the people in the pit were allowed to gamble legally on some sort of numbers game...
...On the other hand, it can be argued that the Israelis ' are better soldiers because they are fighting first for survival, second for a society in which each individual soldier has some solid stake, some expectation of a decent life, some hope, some promise, while Egyptian and Syrian soldiers have been fighting for a country outside their own and for a society which, so far, has given or even realistically promised very little indeed to the ordinary people whose sons, there as elsewhere, make up the mass of the soldiery...
...The reasons for this are many and may be open to argument...
...Choose one...
...Somehow, it wasn't all that beastly to the United States Government when the United States was doing the same thing...
...It's hard to say...
...Is it that the bounty must be restricted, the hunger promoted, the pit propitiated...
...Is no one willing to consider the possibility of dealing the pit out...
...The numbers could come out of a random-base computer of the sort now employed by the IRS to harass citizens...
...That may have something to do with it...
...it hardly matters which...
...That would take care of their principal interest in the problems of agriculture and hunger and remove their frivolous and disturbing presence from a vitally important human concern...
...Did it ever happen...
...With the Sportin' Life types thus insulated from serious problems, the serious problems could be faced on their own terms: how to feed the greatest number of hungry people and how to ensure that the farmer shall be justly paid for his labor and investments...
...The action could be as fast or as slow as the players wished, easily as fast as the roulette of hunger and farmers' livelihoods now played by the gamesters...
...Is a match between hunger and bounty simply out of the question...
...Sadat realized that the Israelis fought well and would fight well forever and that Egypt had simply spent too much in the lives of its young men, in the hopes of its society and in the over-mortgaged treasure of its people's future for a cause that could not be won...
...What the realism is based on is the perception that after 30 years of doing their damnedest, the Arab states have not moved Israel one measurable iota toward destruction in the sea or any other way...
...Is it possible that serious people are contemplating the solution of the farmers' problem as the driving of prices still higher on the one hand, the restriction of crops and harvests on the other...
...A third and final Janus door onto the new year is provided by South Africa, or, more accurately, not really South Africa so much as American reaction to the apparently sudden discovery that South Africa is what the United States was for so long, a racially unequal society...
...Where are the Right-toLifers here where they're needed...
...Those Arab leaders who got their kicks out of watching Egyptians get killed in the hope of destroying Israel were and remain disappointed, but since they have never shown any great taste for fighting Israel themselves outside the realm of warlike rhetoric, their dissent will probably mean little to the actual coming of peace to the region and that's a blessing for the new year...
...Neither a blessing nor a curse but a confusion is the farmers' strike, if that is what it is...
...The great leap foward in perception in the last month of the old year was that the perception suddenly became clear to the leader of the Arab state which had borne the principal share of the burden of the Holy War, Egypt...
...Wasn't he regarded by government officers as an enemy of the country...
...Shock and horror, he said, roughly, indicating that he just hadn't been paying attention when he was growing up...
...It was unfortunate, for instance, that the State Department spokesman on the South African court finding on the death of Stephen Biko was the Mississippian, young Hodding Carter...
...or the only slightly less disconcerting pair of facts of our own agricultural plenty and hunger in the United States...
...It's a demonstration, that's sure, and what it's demonstrating is that the farmers are unhappy with what they're getting out of the prices the consumers are profoundly unhappy about paying for produce of all kinds...
...But it would be nice to hear some journalist or official say, Yes, we used to be that way ourselves, even worse, but now we've been forced to see the light and we wish you would, too...
...All of that, however, seems irrelevant, even frivolous, beside the two towering facts of world hunger and our own agricultural plenty...
...The just relationship between farmer and consumer does not seem all that difficult to find if Sportin' Life is firmly relegated to the shooting craps and flexing those loose shoes with Uncle Earl...
...Can that be true...
...What was the general official American reaction even to Paul Robeson, who contented himself with simply speaking...
...So, Sadat said, simply, let us have peace...
...On the other hand, Butz's friends and supporters at the commodity exchanges may have something to do with it, too, although don't wait up for Earl Butz to tell you so...
...FRANK GETLEIN...
...The results do seem to be that farmers sell in what amounts to a free market, seeking its lowest price, but their produce is sold in a cartel market, seeking its highest, with the friends of Earl Butz cutting the game in the pit...
...Was it an illusion of some kind...
...It does seem faintly possible that middlemen who buy low and sell high may just have something to do with low prices for fanners, high prices for consumers, perhaps even as much as delivery men...
...It can be maintained correctly, for example, that there is no Arab equivalent of the Daughters of Hadassah or the United Jewish Appeal in this country and that's why the Israelis are such good fighters, the Arabs, vastly outnumbering their opponents in troops, weapons and money, such poor ones...
...Assuredly there would not have been a Palestinian state as a result of such a victory: the Arab states had not created such a state when they had conquered and occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip for 20 years, why should they do so in the event of such a victory...
...At this date, of course, hard to say...
...Was that all so long ago...
...That boy has no notion of his Mississippi heritage, something should be done...
...Of course it is beastly of South Africa to beat up blacks, kill blacks and so on, as they do...
...If the government has to spend money to keep farmers solvent, then can it be unthinkable to spend that government money to feed the hungry rather than to abort crops...
...This news was received with shock and horror by any number of American journalists and officials who, one would have thought, were long familiar with the kind of situation now apparent in South Africa, long evident in, let's say, Mississippi...
...The Israelis fight back and, on the record, fight back better than the Arabs fight forward...
...Whatever the preferred explanation, the brute fact of Israel's superiority at defending its life against Egyptian and Syrian inferiority at ending that life has been clear for some years to most observers...
Vol. 105 • January 1978 • No. 1
