Name of the Game

...He was about a century out...

...Ireland is far more of a pluralist society than seemed to be envisaged in the pope's admonition to its people, such as to "love the land...

...Whoever advised the pope did not take that into account...

...When the train emerges from the tunnel, hauling the long-lost light behind it, surely Jimmy Carter will pop out of a sentry-box and cry, "The Soviet Union will gain no strategic advantage out of continuing a nuclear arms race...

...Can we doubt that they'll do so...

...Patrick" was taxiing on the Shannon tarmac for the flight to Boston, a television commentator was reflecting on the pope's "controversial" statements on contraception and divorce...

...We can therefore reasonably expect a certain amount of built-in special effects to take place when the MX goes rollin' by...

...When the deal falls through," the copy proclaimed, when all about are losing their heads and blaming it onto you, in short, when the executive world is a lot less than it's cracked up to be, turn your back on it and run the toy train around your desk top until you feel better...

...Ireland is rapidly industrializing, and the commercialism and materialism against which the pope warned are challenges which must be confronted rather than escaped from...

...And for the pope to say that "the very possibility of divorce in the sphere of civil laws makes stable and permanent marriages more difficult for everyone" and to call on the Irish always to support marriage "through personal commitment and through positive social and legal action" was seen as a deliberate political intervention of a kind which the Irish bishops themselves would no longer attempt on their own...

...Col., all of whom taken together signify the next half century and, without such a pledge, a continuing raid on the Treasury that makes Harry Dougherty look abstemious...

...He has thus given the principle of collegiality a new dimension which will have major consequences for the church...

...That's what the MX merrygoround missiles are really all about...

...Putting completely out of mind the fact that Lionel trains at one point passed into the control of ~e principal survivor of the Joe McCarthy team, we nevertheless recall that those good ole trains rolled past villages, churches, schools, police stations, all of which lighted up on cue, rolled through mountain tunnels supporting magical chalets of love from which to gaze down on the Jungfrau, rolled around the soft of track Secretary Brown gets himself photographed with for the MX...

...All it takes is one look at the diagrams to know we are dealing with Lionel toy trains of 30 to 60 years ago, but the Joint Chiefs and their spokespersons keep insisting the diagram is that of a "race track...

...And the more we went bankrupt, the less security the new device turned out to have brought us...

...I wonder if we could get that in writing...

...But as with those damnable dominoes, the Joint Chiefs and their front men have got the name of the game wrong...

...The apparent concept of the Irish as a rural and, therefore, ingenuous people hardly fits the reality...

...FRANK GETLEIN Commonweal: 584...

...In the euphoria of the occasion, the religions correspondent of one newspaper estimated that it would be a hundred years before the full significance of the pope'e addresses become apparent...

...On the front page of theN.Y...

...President Jimmy Carter, like Brown a cheerful Charlie McCarthy for the Pentagon's brass and braid, is quoted in the 26 October 1979:583story as saying, "The system will make it clear to the Soviet Union that they will gain no strategic advantage out of continuing a nuclear arms race...

...Somehow, the high costs of each new advance never seemed to have much effect on Joint Chiefs, Captured Nazi Geniuses or Hawk Columnists, all of whom flourished and prospered the more the rest of us went bankrupt to support their impossible dreams...

...The difference is that the diagrams, like the Lionels, have a connecting line right across the middle of the loosely oval overall layout...

...One well-known Irish commentator privately summed up the pope's "mistake" as "his assumption that the Irish religious and spiritual experience is as monochrome as that in his own native Poland...

...The significance had escaped nobody...

...The Irish bishops are, of course, gratified by the success of the visit and by the pope's reinforcement of the views they themselves have promulgated, somewhat less forcibly, in recent years...

...Was this, perhaps, the background to the pope's seeming off-handedness with the Taoiseach, Mr...

...Of several minds: Frank Getlein I I i I lltl NAME OF THE GAME FROM DOMINOES TO lIONEL TRAINS T HEY'VE DONE it again...

...Outside goin'-to-the-levy-and-thelevyis-dry country, however, the Pentagon diagrams, or Pentagrams, printed in the Times are toy train layouts and the realization that they are makes a lot of things clear...

...So here they are again...

...We're all entitled to a bit of unreality from time to time...

...For "controversial" read "startling" or even "shocking...

...The whole panoply of super-arms has always had a toy-train aspect to it for game players like Kissinger, Nixon, interchangeable Joint Chiefs and the unspeakable Haig...

...least of all the Soviets, who must be assumed to be at least as dumb as the Joint Chiefs, which is plenty...

...Well, bless them, dominoes turned out not to be played like that at all...

...We have a more pluriform and variegated religious and cultural background...

...It is not certain that they will succeed...

...At a track juncture, for instance, it is not improbable that the Joint Chiefs will appear as if by magic through a tin door flung open to shower the passing MX with thousand-dollar bills...

...The theory is that as the missile goes round and round, where it will land nobody knows...

...to Lt...

...Handing on the Faith in the Home," designed to encourage parents to share more fully in the religious education of their children...

...They kept lining them up and waiting for someone to make a flick...

...Never occurred to the Pentagon that's how you play dominoes...

...Somehow, those crazy Soviets, instead of recognizing insurmountable superiority when they saw it, saw only a challenge to whomp up their missilery and did so...

...Last time, you may recall, they called it "dominoes," in the curious belief that dominoes was played by lining up the numbered pieces, totally, ignoring the numbers, and knocking down the f'u'st to knock down all the others...

...president, the pope will make another visit there and come again to Ireland en route, though next time to the North...

...I personally think this is fine, a lot more fun than anything I've heard from the Pentagon since the light at the end of the tunnel...

...They were playing Go, the well-known Asiatic game, highly unstructured, in which equally valued stones are placed to surround and cut off equally valued stones of the opposition...

...Exactly...

...No doubt the words "race track" are comforting to those who want to keep the arms race going faster ever faster, and there is no particular reason to believe that race is going to do anything else, but the plain fact is that the diagrams are those of timeless Lionel toy train sets, not those of any race track any railbird would risk two dollars on even across the board...

...Interpreting recent Kissingerian statements as a statesman without a state, one can only befieve he still is waiting for the domino drop, while Ford wants only to be acquitted of knowing anything that was going on in Cuba when he was president...

...They now plan a pastoral program...

...Not from a transient president who signifies fourteen months, at most five years, but from every West Point graduate now ranked from 2d Lt...

...Thank Heaven, at last the President himself has said that with the merry-go-round missiles, the Soviets will as last see that they're in a losing game...

...Times, Secretary of Defense Harold Brown fronts for his band of renown, the Joint Chiefs, explaining how the diagram of three Lionel toy train layouts will bamboozle the dread Russians into not knowing where the MX missiles actually are and thus reduce Soviet adventurism to Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire out of sheer frustration...

...presence in Vietnam, but when it did Kissinger and Ford were still waiting for the non-existent dominoes to drop...

...A small bit of added perspective was added the following day in the Times...

...In the event, that's what happened to the U.S...

...On the back page of the theater section appeared an advertisement for a desk top toy train for the harried executive...

...The pope has shown quite clearly that he believes in strong leadership and that his view of collegiality involves not only recognition that the other bishops share responsibility for the whole church with him but that he shares responsibility for their dioceses as well...

...Dominoes turned out to he played by matching the numbers, one to one, and trying to get rid of all your pieces before the opponent gets rid of his...

...It's so simple the wonder is no one thought of it before now...

...Undoubtedly, the bishops, following .the pope's lead, see this as a way of reviving the traditional forms of belief and the devotional practices which have marked Irish Catholicism...

...Every single missile, according to the diagram, is on a track with some two dozen holes into which the missile may be popped...

...That's Lionel, all right, but it sure as heck isn't Pimlico or Laurel...

...Once more the Pentagon has got the wrong name of the game they're playing...

...Worse, itnever occurred to the Pentagon that the other folks weren't playing dominoes at all...

...In fact, that mid-connecting arm could be the clue as to why the White House thinks of this course as a "racetrack...

...There is a belief in Ireland that ff Senator Edward Kennedy becomes U.S...

...If you just bankrupt yourselves this one more time, you'll never have to do it again, has been the repeated promise with each new advance in missilery...

...There is a form of junk-car racing inthe Southern mountains, practiced by good ole boys between bootleg runs and presidential advisory runs which has exactly that midconnection, put there to allow one good ole car to bang into another good ole car as hundreds cheer...

...Since we pay for their play, our bills will be higher than they need have been to give the generals, admirals and contractor's their salutary workouts...

...love the work of the fields...

...For the CommanderinChief of the Military Forces of the Western World, what better than toy trains loaded with missiles: boyhood's dream plated with adult armor against the real world...

...DESMOND FISHER (Desmond Fisher is Commonweal's regular correspondent in Ireland...

...Jack Lynch, who got less notice than any of the bishops who, in turn, got much less notice than any uncomprehending infant thrust forward for a papal kiss or bear-hug...

...Even as the Aer Lingus "St...

...What the long-term response of the Irish.people will be is another matter...

...By then, the effects of his first visit will be more clear-cut...

...The MX "system," in case you don't see the Times, is that of missiles on a merry-go-round...

...For folks like that, it's all game playing and it doesn't matter much what the game is called as long as you can trade in your chips for new chips when the game changes from, for instance, burglary to memoir-writing, eavesdropping to TV entertaining, the discer~nent of"sinister forces" wiping out Nixon's incriminating eighteen minutes on tape to the discexnment of the dread Russians arriving right here in River City where I'll take the nomination for Senator, President, First Selectman, what you will, to turn back the awful threat...

...Once and for all[ That's been the dream of all of us with each new bankrupting missile the Secretaries of Defense, the Joint Chiefs, the Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs, the Miracle Workers, the Captured Nazi Geniuses, the Hawk Columnists, whoever, have come up with...

...If we could and if we could hold them to it, the price would be cheap, however expensive the MX and its Lionel tracks in Utah and Nevada turn out to be...