The power disease

...The mood passes eventually, but in the meantime we have months of fascinated indulgence...

...They are presented as really new, really fresh, full of messianic promise...

...There is something wrong with a press which is revolted by Jonestown, but finds Henry Kissinger healthy, even exciting...

...But Dr...

...JOHN GARVEY...

...Evans and Novak, in a new book, are calling this a real revolution...

...Their form of leadership has its own set of problems, and they aren't necessarily innocent problems...

...And people who believe that someone must finally take charge of their lives and save them from emptiness are natural victims...

...he doesn't have to offer the world a justification for the fact...

...As long as our political thinking moves from mood to mood, and deeper questions about power and manipulation are not addressed, we are in danger...

...My view is, there exists a group of people in the world that have . . . the 'power disease...

...One of them is medical physicist John W. Gof-man, who has this to say: "Even if you made an agreement to abolish all nuclear weapons, but you left an established power structure in the U.S...

...It is the nature of the press to exaggerate, to play up any possible drama...

...They are like the problems we encounter in a Khomeini or a Jim Jones...

...They can only think how to obliterate, control, and use each other...

...and it was funny to hear a pro-Reagan senator refer to the people on Wall Street as "nervous nellies" the other day...

...What we get as a result of their gusts of self-confidence is Vietnam, or the Bay of Pigs, or monstrous increases in research for nuclear weapons...

...The glow is beginning to fade a little, as interest rates stay high and as it becomes clear that you can't spend as much on defense as Reagan wants to without keeping inflation as high as it is now...

...JOHN GARVEYem...

...The obvious question is, of course, how...

...Conservatives are still glowing with their good fortune, except for the extremists who see in every compromise a betrayal of the faith...

...Society has to reorganize itself...

...It is an indulgence of the lazy press, which doesn't have to work very hard when it can make easy generalizations about how different and new everything is, and it is an indulgence of the nation's leaders, who are given much more than a "honeymoon...

...That sort of thing helped to give a strong impression of American humiliation...

...it must manipulate others to be satisfying at all...

...This will seem like blasphemy to people who revere the Kennedy legend (I met one just the other day, who said she just couldn't believe what they said about Jack and all those women), but the mood in Washington now is very much like the mood that gave us miles of print about Camelot and the New Frontier, and the belief that those best and brightest people could solve all of the problems...

...They are a more important plague than cancer, pneumonia, bubonic plague, tuberculosis, and heart disease put together...

...The press bought the mood - the press buys into the prevailing moods it helps to create the way sickly children catch colds - and enjoyed wallowing in such trivia as J.F.K.'s reading habits (he liked James Bond, which' should have told them something), Reagan's woodchopping, Pablo Casals at the White House, Adam Smith neckties, all of these things are seen as signs of the "new spirit...

...Liberal and conservative critics have interpreted this mood according to their own ideological preferences, liberals generally agreeing that tried and true liberal programs were not working very well, but arguing that Reagan's version of the good society won't work any better and will in fact cause more pain...

...I they'd go on to research mind control or some chemical or biological thing...

...They want to rule and control other people...

...Norton, $16.95...

...There is a book called Nuclear Witnesses: Insiders Speak Out (W.W...

...News broadcasts ended by telling us it was "day 200," etc., of America held hostage...

...Americans were tortured then, during an eleven-month captivity which ended when America apologized-an apology which was not seen as a loss of face, because everyone saw it for what it was: the way to get Americans released from captivity...

...The only good thing to be said for monarchy is that a person finds himself having to take power...

...There are, no doubt, a few exceptions...

...However, the sick desire for power is so prevalent that even monarchies find themselves beset by usurpers, the monarchical equivalent of presidential candidates...

...In it people who have worked with nuclear materials present their thoughts about the influence of nuclear technology in our world...

...The solution is not to replace one leader with another or to have more government...

...The countdown given the American hostages in Iran is a good example...

...In the case of Iran, this had profound political consequences...

...They use people as nothing more than instruments to be cast aside when they don't need them anymore . . . In my opinion, what we need now is to move toward being nauseated by people who want to be at the top, in power . . . Can you think of anything more ridiculous than that the Chinese, Russian, and American people let their governments play with superle-thal toys and subject all of us to these hazards...

...People who seek power over other people are sick to some degree, and people who seek the sort of power which the state confers are probably very sick...

...Charismatic leadership, with its built-in sense that this particular leader is absolutely necessary, can be abused as easily as any other kind-more easily, in fact, since the person who believes that God has chosen him to lead others will stop at nothing...

...Gofman is right to say that it is power-not who has it, but power itself- which is at the center of the problem...

...and the U.S.S.R...

...Maybe we should look less at the conservative or liberal principles which are being advanced or impeded, and more at the phenomenon of mood in politics...

...Reagan is a charmer and a lot of the people around him are zealous and full of the belief that with this election America has turned a corner: now, at last, good things will begin to happen...

...My bias should be clear: I think that people like J.F.K., Reagan, Brezhnev, and Castro are more like one another than they are like normal human beings...

...The problem with the desire for power is that it can only be satisfied when it is not confined to ritual situations, as shamanism is...

...The major difference between the two cases is the way they were handled by the media...

...There is danger in the current talk about a new spirit in America, because people like Reagan and Kennedy and any other leader tend to interpret the faintest glimmer of approval as a solid mandate to act...

...With Kennedy and Reagan both, a lot of people believed that at last something fresh and exciting was happening in America...

...That term used to be applied to people who opposed the war in Vietnam, not to capitalists who aren't willing to put all their faith in supply-side economics...

...Our political system could be seen as a social service, providing a channel for a form of madness, something like the way primitive cultures make shamans of people who in our society would simply be diagnosed as schizophrenic...

...My point isn't to argue that the taking of the hostages was in any way a justifiable thing, but only to contrast it with the capture of the Pueblo...

...The overall tone is that at last someone might be able to make the world work right...

...Despite the tarnish, a lot of people are still excited...

...Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Lech Walesa aren't ordinary politicians...

...There is a connection between the taking of hostages in Iran and the downing of the Libyan jets, and it has a lot to do with a mood which the press helps to create, and then to feed from...

...He is king the way others are black, white, or oriental...

...It led to Carter's defeat, and to the hawkishness of the Reagan administration's first moves...

...The world must be made over into the image of the one who serves power...