Editorials
THE PASTORAL & THE NEW MOMENT THE BISHOPS' pastoral letter, overwhelmingly approved at their Chicago meeting, speaks of nuclear arms as confronting humanity with "a new moment." Today, we seem to...
...The farm crisis of the twenties helped to bring on that Depression, and many people fear the current farm crunch will do the same thing...
...and Yuri Andropov's genuinely promising proposal on counting European warheads...
...But there is no warrant whatever for depicting the seventies as politically inert...
...The decades of the sixties and seventies illustrate the inevitable trouble...
...Some observers even fear that the total could reach $ 18 billion...
...Nor were they impressed by the fact that thirty million of us quit smoking...
...It's been messy, a balkanization of American politics some would say, and surely so many competing interest groups have strained the old pros of the system...
...the ominous talk of placing Soviet missiles in Central America to counter the deployment of Pershing IIs in West Germany...
...Which is one reason there were almost nine times more black women lawyers and psychologists in 1980 than there were back in 1970...
...they differ from the fifties precisely in that the classic American quest for self-fulfillment was, during these twenty years, extended to a broad spectrum of citizens previously trapped by poverty and negative cultural images...
...Well, not only have nearly half the nation's domestic servants moved in the last decade to better paying blue collar work, but between 1960 and 1980 the college student population grew from 3.2 million to more than 11 million - the increase in enrollment coming largely from minorities, working class, older people, and women...
...The cost estimates for the current fiscal year have not been substantially affected by the administration's new payment-in-kind program, in which farmers will be given surplus grain or cotton now in government-controlled storage if they leave up to half their cropland uncultivated...
...This is three times what was expected when the budget was originally prepared...
...population, but last year they produced record grain and cotton crops while exports declined...
...Certainly it was not without significance that hordes of us were renewing William James's search for varieties of religious experience...
...yes, it is, in places, complicated...
...This increase in supply in turn depressed prices and evoked increased federal supports...
...Discussion of that letter will certainly continue in these pages for a long time...
...Yes, the pastoral letter is not brief...
...President Reagan's sudden and ill-considered "Star Wars" proposal...
...But the administration was also forced to confront the limits of what the American people and the American economy will allow it to do by way of arms spending...
...There is the pastoral letter itself, which not a few observers have described as a watershed event in the history of the U.S...
...The freeze movement demonstrated the political viability of arms control, which had been put in doubt by the derailment of SALT II...
...Assessing the seventies THE ME DECADE FALLACY 'DEMOCRATIZATION OF SELFHOOD...
...But cannot we at least make a start at creating such a program, one that will help the U.S...
...government pays farmers not to produce food while millions go to bed hungry every night and children grow up deficient in mind and body because of grossly inadequate diets...
...Part of the problem is the miracle of American farm productivity itself...
...After 1945, when thousands of working class students poured into aristocratic European universities, you heard the same complaints of deteriorating standards - so what else is new...
...Fueled by a five-fold jump in the GNP between 1940 and 1960, the sixties generated expectant visions which, at least for intellectuals...
...On the one hand, new life is being pumped into the movement for arms control...
...The seventies deserve a better image...
...Instead, social critics for the most part deplored the smorgasbord of heterodox therapeutics the nation experimented with...
...DAVID TOOLAN (Father David Toolan, S.J., is assistant editor of Commonweal...
...For critics on the left, apparently, we should have continued the crusades of the sixties...
...One might have thought that activist Americans could well use a respite of inward-turning...
...and, second, in the long run all fixed land-based missiles will prove vulnerable...
...The American revolution continued to move on during those years...
...For many Catholics, the message of the pastoral will have to be mediated through homilies, pamphlets, discussion guides, film strips, and what have you...
...Will the two superpowers continue to stall for advantage-the U.S...
...In other words, "elders" of American defense policy were reexamining what they themselves had so long been associated with...
...the reports of Soviet missile testing that may or may not have violated the unofficially observed bounds of SALT II...
...We have no sweeping, detailed agricultural blueprint to offer...
...for many others, there is no reason, save motivation, why they can't tackle it outright...
...Paul Nitze, well known as a hard liner, achieved an informal agreement with the Soviets on new missiles in Europe, only to be disavowed (as was the Soviet negotiator) by his home government...
...In the last fiscal year federal costs for farm price supports zoomed to their highest level in their fifty-year history, and they are expected to become even higher this year...
...But that can also be said about income tax forms and auto maintenance manuals...
...agricultural policy is fundamentally unsound, and that this has been the case for a good many years...
...McGeorge Bundy, Robert S. McNamara, George F. Kennan, and Gerard Smith called for consideration of a "no-first-use" policy in Europe...
...Of course true believing Freudians have always preferred self-sacrificing Oedipal struggles to the idyls of Narcissus - though on what basis except that it's better for the economy of psychiatrists it's hard to say...
...until we've pursued our current buildup or demonstrated our will by Congressional approval of the MX or deployment of the missiles in Europe next December...
...started to reduce supply by killing little pigs and plowing under cotton, thus raising farm income...
...The politics of dissent did not fade when the New Left dissolved in its futile antipolitics of revolution...
...One of the few discouraging moments at the Chicago meeting of bishops came when Archbishop Szoka of Detroit spoke of priests who had indicated their reluctance to read such a "long" document...
...Caspar Weinberger provided Congress with a report on U.S...
...I suspect Clecak is right - and the continuity goes back beyond the unsettling egalitarian vision of the founding fathers, back in fact to that biblical understanding whereby those who never could have made it into the pages of Homer except under the guise of farce - namely the lowly and forgotten - got treated with the high seriousness worthy of Ulysses and Penelope...
...Add to this the very fact of the Soviet change of leadership...
...editor of Commonweal...
...Nonetheless, we are convinced that U.S...
...Today, we seem to stand at a new moment within that moment...
...The same basic paradox exists today on a worldwide basis...
...The decade of the seventies has had a lousy press - much of it as credible as a National Enquirer front page...
...Equally important, the Soviet leadership appears to be reaching parallel conclusions...
...Consider some of the developments of the last year...
...On every side of the nuclear issue, we are seeing new uncertainties and a sense that everything must be thought through again...
...We cannot claim great expertise on farm problems-a fact some of our readers will probably be quick to point out...
...Census Shows Gains in Jobs by Women and Blacks in the 70's...
...The farm support program adds up to a lot of money, but farmers are an essential part of our national life, and if such a program were a must in order to sustain them, it would be worth every penny...
...Thus the frontpage headline of April 24's New York Times...
...Henry Kissinger, another "elder" of defense policy, has proposed, as did the Snowcroft commission, reversing the policy of equipping missiles with multiple warheads...
...But remember that most of these single-issue groups are composed of people who were only a short time ago invisible and ignored...
...Yet despite such payments U.S...
...farmers are currently facing their worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and the days of The Grapes of Wrath...
...The pastoral letter is, in fact, equivalent to about an issue and a half of Commonweal...
...for the right it was that we failed to save, invest, and produce...
...The future, we were told, appeared suddenly nasty, brutish, and short...
...What should be done...
...And the European peace demonstrations revealed the political costs of not pursuing arms control...
...Selfishness and narcissism, he thinks, have been side-effects...
...the Soviets until European peace demonstrations take their toll or America's '84 presidential election is over...
...Strains on the system, educational and other, were to be expected...
...Increasing the money return for hard-hit farmers at a time when corn was selling for thirteen cents a bushel was certainly a good idea...
...The good news came shortly before a national commission warned of a "tide of mediocrity" imperiling U.S...
...farmers and the starving people of the world simultaneously...
...DOWN ON THE FARM Let us put our cards on the table right from the start...
...it proliferated...
...Consider first the dollars and cents of the question...
...Under then-Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace the U.S...
...The Me Decade (Tom Wolfe), a time of narcissism (Christopher Lasch), decadence (Jim Hougan), a period of political incoherence and reaction (Henry Fairlie) and the decline of all forms of authority (Richard Sennett, Daniel Bell...
...It was appropriated by thousands of unmeltable ethnics, welfare mothers, prisoners, gays and lesbians, gray panthers, the handicapped, feminists, consumers, environmentalists, born-again Christians, and big corporations...
...education...
...It's a promise which invites equivalent strain on the system for every gain in its realization...
...For now, we need only express our appreciation for the bishops' work, and our hopes that as many Catholics as possible immerse themselves in this document...
...Their political epiphany in the seventies represents, in part, the redemption of America's great promise of participation...
...The "dense pack" scheme for basing MX missiles came a cropper in Congress, and the Snowcroft commission, set up by the president to deal with the problem, came out and said the unsayable: that, first, in the short run the "window of vulnerability," which so much recent strategic thinking was designed to close, is, as critics have charged, a figment of overactive strategic imagination...
...Enlarged psychic expectation is entwined with material and public expectations - of more goods and services, wider opportunities, adequate private space, beauty in public surroundings, more leisure, and richer cultural offerings...
...What we witness in them, Clecak maintains, is nothing short of a "demonstration of selfhood" - a real amplification of subjectivity which demanded and got social change...
...Indeed, as Peter Clecak argues in his new book (America's Search for the Ideal Self, Oxford), these two decades show a remarkable continuity...
...defense plans that seemed to project a dangerously expanded notion of the role of nuclear deterrence...
...the U.S...
...church...
...Correcting this imbalance would not be easy, and it would require international cooperation on a scale we have not yet attempted...
...Farmers make up just four percent of the U.S...
...But one of the most distressing things about the whole agricultural question is that the spending of all these billions has done little to ease the worst farm recession in fifty years...
...the fact remains, however, that this was done when millions of Americans did not have enough to eat...
...events of the seventies - Vietnam, Watergate, and OPEC's economic squeeze - crushed...
...This year estimated support costs will run over $15 billion, compared with $11.9 billion last year...
...The pastoral letter is not, however, the only reason for speaking of a new moment within the new moment...
...On the other, there is also the danger of irreversible steps in escalating the arms race...
...The danger is that both capitals will drift right by the present "window of opportunity.'' The bishops' appeal for reasonable but nonetheless bold initiatives to counter the arms race could not come at a more appropriate time...
...But we do have the conviction that the nation has been going at the problem in all the wrong ways ever since the days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt...
Vol. 110 • May 1983 • No. 10
