Fair Game

...Yet for all the embellishments on the original Marx, for all the attempts at refinement and adaptation, ideologues of the Left remain confounded by a country where the exploited do not constitute a majority of the population—or, at any rate, where the majority does not consider itself to be exploited...

...Since Lockheed is rejecting salvation at that price, the sum will no doubt end up much higher...

...How much more meaningful it is to drive to the outskirts of town on a sunny afternoon for a car-burying ceremony...

...But, remember, we are dealing here with the Department of Defense...

...The Cubans will laugh at us...

...The unifying principle of the new revolutionaries, when they tire of pretending that the condition of students in America is akin to that of Basques in Spain or Jews in Russia, is self-congratulation...

...The noises you may hear beneath the chants to Almighty Krishna are Marx and Engels groaning in their graves...

...At the very least, the campaign against the machine forces us to look afresh at the mania for gadgetry that fuels so much of our national commotion...

...The "cost overrun" of the C-5a is spectacular...

...The slogan, Power to the People, if taken literally in America, would mean a thoroughgoing victory for middle-class values and the incidental crushing of radical trouble makers...

...Here, as so often, the ideologue would rather ruin his prospects of success in a decent cause than give up a jot or tittle of his faith...

...It is only natural that in the minds of our generals, the present situation should take on the aspect of a problem in military tactics--and military wisdom is evidently being applied...

...Professor Herbert Marcuse has proposed the repression of those who stand in the way of objective progress, as defined for us by Professor Marcuse...

...In an effort to meet just this difficulty...

...By any measure of conspicuous militancy—the pile density of mustaches, the ferocity of slogans, the sales of the Quotations of Chairman Mao—the System is on the ropes...

...But to take the concern over dirty air and dirty water as an occasion to attack the devices we must rely on to clean them up is egregiously perverse...

...right on, Mick Jagger...

...it has forfeited its right to exist in a moral economic universe...

...Lockheed has gained celebrity as the firm that made a balls of its obligation to build the giant C-5a transport plane and some lesser craft for the government, and so found itself roughly a billion dollars in the rough...

...Moreover, in a rational economic order, a customer who has been treated by his supplier as the U.S...

...Around the Pentagon, the ideological rabbit's foot nowadays is called the Domino Theory...

...If Free Enterprise means bankruptcy, then no Lockheed stockholder is going to stand on principle...

...It is Lockheed's good luck, however, to have as its principal customer not another business firm, which has profit and loss columns of its own to balance out, but the U.S...

...So, naturally, there will be a faction that goes all out, at least in verbiage, against technology...

...In the contest of polemics, our more passionate purifiers cannot spare breath to note that the very industries which seem to be killing us piecemeal have also saved the lives of many over the years and made nearly everyone's life more livable...

...And so its turns out that the Defense Department has lately offered to save Lockheed from the bankruptcy it has so fully earned, at a cost to taxpayers--few of whom hold shares in the company--of approximately $757 million...

...A buyer for a retail store who was caught being as familiar with a supplier as our high military officers are with the nation's plane-builders would be smartly canned--and the phrase "conflict of interest" does not begin to suggest the personal, political and commercial intertwinings between America's arms buyers and arms makers...

...Unfortunately, our businessmen and their captive politicians continue to insist on mouthing the precepts by which they do not, as sensible persons, consider acting...

...They are overwhelmed with the appreciation of what a swell bunch of kids they are...

...Freak-out on the Left In the past century, ideology has received more serious attention in the councils of the Left than in those of the Right, probably because radicals, in exile or in jail or in the university, have had more time on their hands than reactionaries, who are out running things...

...Indeed, it takes a heap of rubbing to conjure up the spirit of Free Enterprise from such peculiar dealings as those currently going on between the Department of Defense and the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation...

...Now, the reason advanced for the government's solicitude is that Lockheed is too valuable to our defense posture to be lost...

...While he is ironing out the snags in a program that has worked so brilliantly in Cuba and Albania, the hopes of quite a number of radicals had shifted from the laboring class to the student class, those grievously oppressed children of privilege...

...Lockheed must be saved...

...So, naturally, there will be radicals who will exert themselves to put off everybody within sight or hearing or smell...

...On both Right and Left now, she is being treated like a discarded mistress...

...Similarly, the one condition indispensable to radical change in America is a coalition of many groups, most of whom do not conceive of themselves as radical...

...They are infatuated with one another...

...To adjust our metaphor--streaming into the fresh waters of the ecology movement today are ideological pollutants from the old anti-machine works...

...For if Lockheed falls, might not Boeing be next...

...And then where will the Defense Department get its airplanes...

...business may proceed without either responsibility or risk...

...Goof-off in the Center Like the monster in the myth, ideology is capable of assuming a multitude of forms...

...and for such a sin, the punishment in this world is bankruptcy...

...Ours is a country where the working class is more inclined to chase radicals through city streets than follow them to the barricades...

...instead of delivering 115 planes for $2.3 billion, as originally agreed, the company is now offering 81 planes for $3.7 billion...

...The ideas of foremost radical thinkers of the time now smash their way into the consciousness of our postliterate revolutionary cadre in the form of rock lyrics...

...Unless one allows oneself to believe that Americans can be coerced or cajoled into giving up electric lights, automobiles and washing machines, the one certain element in the whole smoggy field of pollution is the need for technical ingenuity and innovation to stem the damage we have been doing to ourselves, and, with luck, to reverse the filthy tide...

...Now, by the principles of Free Enterprise, a firm that manages to maneuver itself into such a predicament must go under...

...The Czechs will invade our export markets...

...To give a private firm a billion dollars or so and let it continue under the management that led it into disarry or under any other band of entrepreneurs, a good Socialist would surely observe, is to buy ourselves the worst of all ideological worlds: The public supports but does not regulate...

...Government has been treated by Lockheed (and by a number of other major defense contractors) would, at the least, complain to the Better Business Bureau...

...Cries of Bust-The-Machine have been heard at least since the Luddites, and they are not without their attractive side...

...Only the Right in America (and not the distant Right) seems to have learned that there is no profit in ideology...

...What an improvement over their parents...

...How can such satyrs possibly have spawned such Hyperions...

...Since every vice attracts its panders, their cause is being vigorously served by a conglomerate of professors, publicists, novelists, and moviemakers, who keep pumping out news that the kids of today are nobler in reason, more angelic in action, more godlike in apprehension than all previous generations, at least since the American Indian...

...As the reader may have noticed, the student revolution has already been a great success...

...It is an argument that would make sense to a Socialist--but he would be bound to add that if Lockheed is indeed socially indispensable then it ought to be turned into a publicly run operation...

...But now that good luck charm seems to have been rubbed bare...

...Goodbye, Leon Trotsky...

...Although Free Enterprise has for some decades been honored in the breach in America, it has continued to serve as a rabbit's foot for friends of the status quo...

...Lockheed must be saved --and only a billion dollars, more or less, will turn the corner...

...Still, hypocrites, intellectually and spiritually degraded though they are, tend to be less destructive than true believers...

...Failure is a kind of sin...

...Department of Defense, an institution where ordinary procedures simply do not apply...

...Life for a buyer is inconceivable without prosperity for his maker...

...Having been skewered on the Left and battered on the Right, the creature pops up in the Center, fashionably groomed to hide scars and wrinkles...

...But certainly the old girl has seen happier times...

...The Chinese . . . God knows what the Chinese will do...