Fair Game
GOODMAN, WALTER
Game BY WALTER GOODMAN On the Road Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious springtime by those sons of the Prophet. Gorged tankers are on the move; garage attendants are surly again;...
...The man is a horror-show, the Spiro Agnew of the '70s...
...Vietnam, black demands, college rampages—all that is ancient history...
...But that's past...
...Whatever public disgust can do to a politician has been done to this one...
...Let billions upon billions go to the upkeep of feudalism, the celebration of fanaticism and the nurture of terrorism...
...He has lured us back to our favorite folly before we had a chance to overcome it...
...They exist to force our memories back to all that waste and turmoil and anguish...
...Will he be mean to Dan Rather...
...Prices may be high, but we're on the road again...
...soon the companies will be having contests again...
...We cannot say an unhedged official good word for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn...
...And the President is in Faisal's debt for giving him something good to report in the difficult month of March...
...But does anybody still care...
...Here he comes again...
...Once they strike, they open themselves up to retaliation, and it's rather early for that...
...More than the impositions of Arabia and the finaglings of Aramco will be required to rouse us to a spirit of do-without...
...Henry, help...
...Ah, we underwent trial by queue for a few weeks, like Londoners in wartime...
...They'd rather take on unmarried mothers and draft evaders...
...Yankee trading...
...We pay fortunes for oil, vast amounts of which we ship to Southeast Asia lest the destruction there cease...
...I am no doubt being unfair to the peanut...
...Richard Nixon plans to go down in history as the Foreign Affairs guy...
...And what are they to do about George Wallace, America's white hope...
...Let them go back to their advertising agencies and their law practices and their big deals, and maybe we won't have to think about them any more...
...Speed limit us no speed limits...
...Perhaps if anti-American Qaddafi had prevailed and the embargo had continued, we would have begun to make a rational adjustment...
...Now we have before us a spring and summer of exhausts and exhaustion...
...That's the main thing...
...Perhaps, then, like the young man who is sent abroad by his family to save him from the snares of an adventuress, we might have been compelled to find other entertainments...
...With gas, we can go driving on Sundays and not have to think about that President...
...But now the oil is again allowing, and that can be accounted another marvelous accomplishment of the Administration in Foreign Affairs...
...Let the oil companies double and treble their profits...
...What does it matter, Richard Nixon or Gerald Ford or whoever, as long as Henry is there to get us our gas...
...Has Dr...
...Quick, everybody into the wagon...
...And we have their promise, to boot, that if we behave they will not stop taking our money...
...Odd day-even day is a thing of yesterday...
...Our wheat goes for peanuts...
...Granted, we must be careful, for they warn that if the West is unable to control inflation, which the soaring cost of oil naturally abets, and the prices of industrial products rise too fast for their liking, then they may be obliged to charge still more...
...Is he on something...
...That suits the President's disposition...
...The President...
...If it is a capping gesture we are after, what is neater than that Nixon should be compelled to play out his occupancy of the office he has disgraced...
...Oh, it's a dreamy time...
...It seems now that he will be impeached...
...The winter has receded, an unpleasant dream—yet not all that unpleasant as our dreams go...
...God bless you, Howard Cosell...
...There he was, scrabbling this way and that, desperate for some exit from the traps he kept springing on himself, and he was hit on the head by a chamber pot...
...Oh, the exquisite tortures of Araby...
...Gadzooks...
...Gas is the serious business...
...Even now that we have been granted Peace with Honor, they won't let the country forget...
...Leave the dirty work to the Senate...
...Just the man for the job...
...If we have to give amnesty, let's give it to Lieutenant Galley...
...As a matter of fact, it was over several weeks before the embargo was lifted...
...Now the crisis is over...
...On bad days, it is all that we have...
...But what the heck...
...What of the country, you ask, leaderless and adrift for another 30 months...
...By allowing us to pay extraordinary prices for their oil, our friends from the Persian Gulf have made up to Henry Kissinger, the champion American fuel user, for all that streaking down there...
...What explanations will he give tonight to clarify those he gave ps six weeks or six months or a year ago...
...Senators are not exactly a hanging jury when it comes to Dick Nixon...
...Go fill the tank and take a ride in the limo till the November votes are in...
...The Ecology Blues, is being drowned out by The March of the Strip Miners...
...we can have traffic jam on Sunday...
...Our cars impotent in their driveways, we were trapped home on weekends with our loved ones...
...William Simon, having turned in so memorable a performance on oil, is ready to take on the entire economy...
...Why turn him in now for Gerald Ford...
...That's safe enough...
...That would remind us of the amnesty that has not yet been given to those who chose Canada or Europe or jail over Vietnam...
...What's that—the shortage still exists, insofar as it ever existed...
...In the autumn of his ruin, the oil embargo came as a piece of slapstick...
...And what we want now are our Sundays on the road...
...We must have it...
...For real power these days, we must look East of Suez...
...Europe doesn't like us any more...
...Will be give his odd grins and do a little jig...
...There's a figure to make the heart sink—our tank runneth over...
...They deserve something for bringing us the Metropolitan Opera and Masterpiece Theatre and all those humorous ads...
...We can afford the oil, and we are accustomed to paying for what we can afford and even for what we cannot afford...
...Yet, see, the tank is full...
...With no one to lead and no one for us to fight against despite those nagging suspicions that we were being had, we merely groused...
...It is guaranteed to reduce the costs of production, and the Lord Faisal is said to be willing to send over technicians...
...Frenchmen are ready to trade off their wives and daughters...
...Congressmen will find a vote for impeachment easier to explain back home this fall than a vote against...
...When he comes before us on the tube, we look for the degree of dew on his upper lip...
...The country is all right...
...Feelgood been in attendance...
...Will his gestures tonight be extravagant or subdued...
...Amnesty for All If we must impeach, however, let's tag on a guarantee of amnesty, in one big gesture assuring bipartisan support and satisfying our sense of justice and mercy...
...Damn the emission controls...
...full sulphur ahead...
...Let the environmentalists go whistle...
...A nasty bunch...
...On which flank is everybody's favorite Populist-racist-opportunist vulnerable...
...A sour period...
...In fact, let's give them all amnesty, the whole Nixonian cabal, all the thugs and moneymen and shnooks...
...We can be sure that he will have no less impact on inflation than he had on the fuel supply...
...Well, it is not becoming for Republican aspirants to show themselves while Nixon can still walk and Ford appears to be breathing...
...Go, Henry, go...
...We can get rid of the man and not have him on our conscience...
...How about a compromise...
...The solution for all may be slave labor...
...Who are the evaders now...
...What is more appropriate than that a man who has spent his life kneeing and elbowing for power should wind up with its simulacrum...
...In the East, that is known as mitigated gall...
...Swell...
...Who needs it...
...That, as a matter of fact, is the sum of every administration's economic policy...
...Never mind...
...For Foreign Affairs, as they tell us and tell us, is the Administration's strong suit...
...We can get gas on Sundays...
...Impeachment is without doubt a momentous business...
...Of course, the word amnesty must never be used...
...Where have all our leaders gone...
...We have our gas...
...Down Ronnie...
...But what does pro-American Faisal care for our moral stamina...
...The Latins are restless...
...we can afford 60 or 70 cents a gallon . . . the roads are busy . . . spring calls...
...We want our gasoline...
...We will take it at any price, and cheer when we find a station that still pumps at under 60 cents a gallon...
...Those who allowed themselves to imagine that the advertised shortage of fuel would inspire us to redeem our land and enhance our lives overestimated our craving for enhancement and redemption and underestimated our passion for the motorcar...
...Better let a good soldier go and so perhaps exorcise Mylai, than let those evaders return to torment us with Vietnam...
...Maybe by freeing them, we can shake loose from the gloom that shadows us...
...We are on the road, the radio is playing, the air is alive with the noise of disc jockeys and sportscasters...
...Well, no matter...
...We have passed many worse nights owing to an excess of gas than we did from its shortage...
...As for the Democrats, they are circling Henry Jackson like Kung Fu novitiates, not quite sure in which direction to kick out and fearing above all to make the premature move...
...Down Nelson...
...Dreamlike...
...the Japanese are prepared to merchandise the mysteries of the Orient...
...Our fuel czarevitches can end their clowning or at least find a different stage for it...
...Last season's hit...
...we can get gas at night...
...They have no mercy on us, so why should we be sparing of them...
Vol. 57 • April 1974 • No. 9
