Editorials
LAST OF THE BIG SPEECHERS IN THE DAYS when Ronald Reagan was making movies rather than national policy, Hollywood films with pretensions to seriousness were likely to climax with the Big Speech....
...If they are growing skeptical, we can't blame them...
...Predictions of less growth and even greater budget deficits continue to appear...
...There are times when I think that the paper traffic that crosses my desk in a week could fill a big city phone book...
...It bombed...
...And what do they have in common...
...But "that's what destroyed millions of American jobs...
...And I know it can be tempting, listening to some who would go back to the old ways...
...attitude is anything but militantly hostile to the Nicaraguan revolution...
...Reagan makes the Biggest Speeches of all, the last of them a few weeks ago on the state of the economy...
...Shanker's statement did not sit well, however, with one correspondent to the AFT publication On Campus...
...Reagan was able to persuade the public that his policies promised quick success...
...And while a bankrupt El Salvador enjoys something like $400 million in credit from international banks and lending agencies, Nicaragua-which has so far met all its...
...Sure, the economy may eventually recover,'' a lot of citizens are beginning to ask...
...THE HONDURAN CARD Will there be a war between Honduras and Nicaragua this month or next...
...Ronald Reagan took office claiming that there was a relatively quick and easy way to turn the economy around...
...No, the president will give it to you straight: "It isn't an easy job, this challenge to rebuild America and renew the American dream...
...Shanker declared, "I deeply regret that a careless expression of my personal regard for prayer might misrepresent or offend those teachers who strongly feel that prayer is not fine, or could inadvertently encourage prayer by linking it to the AFT's prestige and proven political effectiveness...
...Which led our imagination to take wing: PRESS RELEASE: WASHINGTON, Nov...
...That was a good number of Big Speeches back...
...Maybe that's it...
...be with people who are keeping our frontier spirit alive, people who work the soil but still have time to dream beyond the farthest stars...
...Certainly his version of the effect his program has had on the economy poses problems of credibility...
...What the Fed has done may be exactly another of those "quick fixes" the president derides, in this case a justifiable quick fix, but still no solution to the underlying problems...
...And to Mr...
...He was one cut below the stars that did...
...He kicks shyly at the good earth with his boot...
...25-Albert Shanker, president of the American Federatiori of Teachers, announced here today that he has formally retracted his earlier statement that prayer is fine...
...Indeed the Nicaraguans have every reason to wish to avoid a war...
...bidding excluded Nicaragua and spent a good deal of its energy condemning the Sandinistas...
...Washington no doubt hopes that this deteriorating economic situation will erode the regime's popular base...
...The question of fairness brings to mind another of the president's Big Speeches, this one given last September in Kansas...
...What they are getting in its name, however, is a smoothly mixed brew of stock images, half-truths, and deliberate distraction...
...Tensions have definitely eased in the past month," says the October report of Managua's Jesuit-run Institute Historico, "and the imminence of inevitability of a war...
...This is not spiritual revival...
...The cover of the London Economist for the following week carried a huge headline, "THE CRASH OF 198...
...And yet there is some reason to believe that for much of the public the whole performance is growing thin...
...It lacked credibility...
...payments on its foreign debt-has been cut dead by the World Bank, IMF, and the Inter-American Development Bank...
...It is not the official position of the American Federation of Teachers," he protested, "that prayer is fine...
...I refused to play in it...
...Reagan's credit, it must be added that he makes as much of an effort to explain his own particular theory of the sources of America's economic difficulties as do any of his opponents...
...But hardly anyone else agrees...
...Reagan spoke in the Ahearn Gymnasium at Kansas State University, but moviegoers could imagine him leaning against a tumbled-down wooden gate while the prairie stretched out beyond...
...Even without the credit boycott, the Nicaraguan economy is in trouble...
...Covered-wagon passes by, full of sturdy Homesteaders...
...In which case it will not need to bring in General Alvarez to launch a coup d'etat...
...We ought to pray in our homes and churches...
...As Big Speeches go, it was a good job...
...Now he's trying to sell them Bonzo Goes to College...
...As the promises of 1980 and 1981 have been repeatedly revised and diluted, however, the question of how tax cuts, government benefits, and unemployment get distributed has begun to strike home across the population...
...And the foreshadowing statistics are continuing to come up negative, suggesting that the turn is not even in sight...
...no time to play party politics or seek "quick fix...
...One of the themes of the Big Speech in Kansas was that "the American people are hungry for a spiritual revival.'' Families, neighborhoods, spirit of friendship, caring for the needy-all are mentioned, along with expelling God from our classrooms, the Ten Commandments, and the "Man from Galilee...
...They're Americans who love this country of ours...
...AMEN FOR ALL SEASONS Department of Self-Destructing Secular Humanism, or How to Promote a School-Prayer Amendment: When Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, announced the AFT's opposition to a school-prayer amendment, he added, "Prayer is fine...
...Despite Undersecretary Thomas O. Enders's conciliatory August 20 speech on Latin America, there is little sign-in deeds-that the U.S...
...We doubt it...
...Perhaps filmmaking provides the clue here, too...
...and the story inside provided little reassurance...
...Who could believe a chimp could go to college and play on the college team...
...Make no mistake,-" he declared...
...Shanker's retraction was made at a press conference held at union headquarters on Thanksgiving morning...
...They have met twice with the Honduran government to set up border patrols to prevent violence and stop the arms flow there-and failed to get Honduran cooperation...
...Well bolstered by our arms, he can do it in his own country-and if the recent upsurge in Honduran internments and disappearances is any index, that process has already begun...
...Last year's coffee and sugar crops were record highs, but when the drop in commodity prices is considered, it will mean a loss of $140 million in foreign ex-change...
...Reagan is right: the American people are hungry for a spiritual revival...
...You know," the president said, "sometimes living in that big white house in Washington can leave you feeling a little fenced in and isolated...
...This is bad cinema...
...We need only the courage to see it through...
...Alas, Mr...
...So far, the Sandinistas have not snatched the bait...
...No, they were usually forced into it, fed up with chicanery or moved to eloquence by dire emergency...
...Reagan, you see, remembers the Depression, the Christmas Eve when his fattier learned he'd lost his job...
...The very same week, Business Week was writing: "The facts indicate that recovery still has not begun and that business conditions were still worsening as the fourth quarter began...
...Here words like 'entrepreneur,' 'self-reliance,' 'personal initiative,' and, yes, 'generosity' describe everyday facts of life.'' At that point, the movie version would probably begin the closing credits...
...But once they began, well, it all came out, the unvarnished truths that everyone knew, the just-plain common sense that happened to roll forth conveniently wrapped in the well-made phrases and emotional images of Hollywood rhetoric...
...But the president's credibility has not only been eroded by his claims of imminent success...
...According to the president, "The strengthening of spiritual ties, binding of families, and coming together of communities is making America whole again.'' We are not sure where he gets his information...
...It has also been eroded by his claims to fairness...
...They literally can't afford it...
...But behind those statistics "are millions of individual lives: young couples struggling to make ends meet, teen-agers looking for work . . . older Americans . . . small-business men...
...They're brave, hard-working people" They "stand for the values of hard work, thrift, commitment to family, and love of God that made this country so great, and will make us great again . . . after so many years of mistakes and neglect...
...Not that the Big Speech came easily to the male stars of that period, marked as they were with down-home sincerity and manly reticence...
...Last summer's floods left damage amounting to $350 million, worse than the 1972 earthquake...
...People could believe in it...
...The president managed to get the public to believe in his Washington version of Bedtime for Bonzo...
...the question of how the necessary sacrifices would be distributed could be dismissed as the special pleading of professional liberals or those whom White House spokesmen prefer to sneer at as "tribunes of the poor...
...Shanker, the correspondent concluded, "ought to retract the quoted remarks...
...Of course, Mr...
...That is, if the Sandinistas will only retaliate for one of the bombing raids or armed forays staged by former Somoza guards or exile Miskito Indians...
...That's the one big difference between the recovery America is headed for today," said the president," and the shaky, temporary recoveries of the recent past-this one is built to last...
...State Department position papers still pounce upon internal Nicaraguan tensions, and in a highly misleading if not plainly false manner-with Miskitos, the press, and the church...
...Disgruntled Somozists still train within our borders...
...This is no time to point the finger of blame, said Mr...
...Most recently, the Honduran president, refused to attend a reconciliation meeting with the Sandinistas in-Caracas on October 14, while the October4 meeting in Costa Rica of Central American governments assembled at U.S...
...I was a scientist who raised a chimp as a child in my home...
...the White House text only notes, "(Applause...
...Taken one by one, there's little doubt that his bogeys and catchphrases and ritual evocations of national virtue remain as much the sentimental favorites of the public as ever...
...But will I and my family...
...But then the studio decided to make a sequel called Bonzo Goes to College...
...Under last minute pressure from the State Department last summer, Alvarez backed off from two preemptive air raids against Nicaragua-but reliable sources in the Honduran military say an invasion is planned for December...
...America is recovery-bound and the world knows it...
...is not a foregone conclusion...
...Although he granted the right of any AFT member to express personal opinions, confusion was likely to result when a union official presented "personal views on controversial matters...
...As long as Mr...
...You must have credibility," Ronald Reagan once declared in explaining, of all things, the success of Bedtime for Bonzo...
...Look here, friends, he said, we're all confused by these facts and figures...
...pressure, and that private banks like Chase have also been subjected to it...
...The whole range of statistical information currently emerging clearly points to an economy in deep trouble...
...Today, things are different...
...Film buffs tell us that Ronald Reagan didn't get to make the Big Speech very often...
...Although buoyed by the Federal Reserve's loosening of credit and Wall Street's surge, numerous business analysts are quick to point out, as a later Business Week does, "it is not clear that a downturn in rates will produce a...
...Indeed, the Federal Reserve's move has not threatened renewed inflation precisely because a vigorous recovery is still so far in the distance...
...sustainable advance in the economy...
...By blaming every act of subversion in neighboring states on the Sandinistas, and by increasing military aid to General Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, the rabid anti-Communist Honduran miliary chief, Washington seems to have let loose a Frankenstein it is having difficulty controlling...
...But there is a tonic: Visit a state where tall wheat and prairie grass reach toward a wide open sky...
...Together we've chosen a new road...
...Are the Nicaraguans paranoid in claiming this cut-off is due to U.S...
...I realize that whether prayer is okay is a highly controversial matter in this society and one on which the AFT has no official position...
...The American dream (five times), Thomas Jefferson, federal spending out of control, special-interest groups, a better future for our children-they were all there...
Vol. 109 • November 1982 • No. 19
