The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

...All that is required when conditions are ripe is the promise of the Truth, whether Moslem, Marxist or manic, and the singling out of The Enemy, Satan in the form of America or secular humanism or the Jeworthecapi-talist class, and onward...

...Price, if you act now, is only $ 100 billion...

...Have you not heard...

...When the Pentagon phrases planning in terms of "scenarios," it enters the realm of fiction or, anyway, docudrama...

...The ships, to be named for living Secretaries of Defense, can be brought on line for $ 180 billion apiece...

...Then there is no missile or missile system that we do not need...

...For everybody knows or else should know That if nothing drastic is done Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out, Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in Until the town lie beaten flat...

...It can be done with the gibberish of National Socialism or with the elegant formulations of Marxism, that religion of the intellectuals...

...Our scenario creators get the chance to play variations on all the ambitions of all the leading personalities around the Kremlin and all the constraints on them...

...At Lebanon," as Lessing's Saladin observes, "it is no longer safe...

...The taste for blood can be whetted by swastikas as well as by crucifixes, by high slogans like Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite and Peace, Bread and Land, as well as by crude ones like White Power...

...Since science-fiction has always featured super futuristic weapons capable of reducing the foe to ashes or at least immobility in an instant...

...Relations between the Soviet Union and the United States—full of multilayered motives, open-ended opportunities, confounding contingencies, the ploys of power, psychological quirks—invite this kind of fun...

...What does it do to a man to go through life as a Caspar...

...And they can be depended on to break down...

...The only sure way to make such a subway too dangerous for the Russians to tamper with is to put it in the charge of New York's Transit Authority...

...it can make weakness seem like strength...

...And, indeed, if one accepts the premise that the Soviet Union is out to get us, is on unblinking alert for weak spots, capable of moving on them directly or through its surrogates everywhere, then it follows that we need a three-ocean Navy and a four- or five-continent Army, as well as a mobile force for incidental incursions...

...The Sermon on the Mount draws no hurrahs around Capitol Hill these days, and in pious mobs everywhere the words of the gentler prophets are drowned out by cries of "Down with...

...and since our generals and admirals, those big kids to whom we must look for counsel on such matters, have every incentive and professional predilection for getting their hands on the newest, the biggest, the most powerful, most ingenious, most "refined" weapons...

...Hitler and Stalin did it on a grand scale, substituting up-to-date icons for the ones they smashed...

...And conditions seem ripe, in varying degrees, in many places today—including, in an incipient form, Washington...

...The chants and the raised arms and clenched fists remind us, chillingly, of other movements, nonreligious, antire-ligious, which have stirred similar passions...

...Imagine the committees of Kremlin psychiatrists brooding over the perspiration on the upper lip of our Secretary of State...

...For, as this century has learned at such pain, it is not only belief in the Almighty that can make men mad...

...If the cost means a further deterioration of an already deplorable economy, well, they can always plant a story in Pravda about how steel production in Irkutsk is beating all the norms...

...The Administration's fulminations often presuppose the existence of a Soviet Satan...

...Or, what dimension of nuclear threat will it take to keep the Russians from employing their nuclear threat to gain advantage in the unending universal struggle for economic, political, psychological, ideological advantage...

...Now, to stand up against Satan one must be armed, cap-a-pie, tooth and claw, and the Administration's obsession with arms, which incidentally, threatens to undermine its own economic plans, will make best sense to those who are in absolute possession of the unequivocal truth about Right and Wrong, who believe that "Better dead than Red" is a statement of principle...

...And the Soviets will answer in kind and we will build a bigger missile and they will go on maneuvers in Poland and the scenario writers will work their heads to the bone...

...The striking thing about the religious impulse when it turns political is its selectivity...

...The Russians must have a bigger library of scenario books then the CIA...

...the game is endless, requiring second-by-second revisions to account for every possible reaction to every possible action and counteraction that we might take, whether real or as perceived by the Soviets...

...The only draw back of these remarkable machines is that they are so advanced that when they break down nobody can fix them...

...To say no to any scheme that emerges from the Pentagon would be a form of appeasement, an invitation to defeat in the great game...

...Given the problematic temperament and improbable syntax of our present Secretary of State, it is not easy to get a fix on his views...

...The Soviet bosses, unencumbered by public opinion, can make their weapons decisions without fuss...

...But no sooner have you licked your ballpoint than in zooms a squadron of Air Force generals with their ultra ultra plane that can fly higher than a shuttling space ship, burrow deeper than a mole and destroy everything it passes under or over while the pilot reads the collected works of Antoine de St...

...Gone are the teachings about universal brotherhood and turning the other cheek and not casting the first stone...

...The shade of John Foster ("Liberation") Dulles is afloat...

...Barnum, Savonarola and Caliban...

...The Strong and the Weak Let's say, forgive me, that you are Caspar Weinberger and a couple of four-star generals come to the door one day, with a couple of three-star generals carrying their attache cases, and they are all excited about this swell new tank which gets 42 miles to a gallon of unleaded gas and is capable of achieving victory without adding to the pollution problem around the Kremlin...

...Unholy fervor is just as murderous as the holy kind...

...Ex-upery...

...Does Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger know anything about foreign affairs...

...Just when we secular humanists thought we had things all our own way, that the world was progressing inexorably out of dark superstition into the light of science, peace and generous cooperation among mankind, up pop the Godly, muscles flexed, banners aloft, cries for blood drenching the air...

...Faith can work dangerous miracles...

...and since numbers of legislators can find benefits to groups of their constituents in the prospect of any new arms buildup, it becomes difficult to invent a plan that will not seem desirable, ay, essential even if it involves chopping up a couple of states to build a subway system for missiles...

...One hates to beclass-ed among the defeatists, but perhaps it is not entirely unpatriotic to urge, as defense appropriation time draw s upon us, that legislators whose notions of Good and Evil are not limited exclusively to the U.S.-Soviet standoff consider thedangers to peace of a new surge of weapon-building and the effects on this country's position in international affairs of an arms-burdened domestic economy...

...The Right and the Wrong The advent to power in Washington of persons who know the difference between Right and Wrong, even if, like Major Barbara's brother, they don't know much else, is disquieting...

...and "Death to...

...Honest, it is such geo-psycho-politico scenarios that are the basis of plans for the development of new weapons systems...

...And here, in our own evolutionary Eden, we are witnessing a Fundamentalist upsurge dedicated to saving the rest of us from the hell fires that await people who watch sexy TV shows and read dirty books...

...It's as though William Jennings Bryan had returned and hooked up with P.T...

...The matter has always been muddy, what with scenarios about first-strikes and response times and all the rest...

...Is this Haig person stable...

...it would be comforting if he were reporting to an Eisenhower, a man with a knack for smothering passion on any subject but golf...

...Anchors away...

...The commandment is "Do unto others before they do unto you...

...Our planners create their own science-fiction and then respond with real-life expenditures—policy imitating art...

...But just as you're about to sign for the installment payments, up the Potomac comes a boatload of admirals with news of a super duper submarine capable of patrolling all the world's oceans simultaneously and fitted out with pleasant quarters and no-cash bars for touring Congressmen...

...Needless to say, the Russians are simultaneously building up their library of scenarios about us...

...Take a basketful...

...The greatest triumph of the present religious resurgence has, of course, come in Iran, where the ayatollahs are confirming everything we were taught as youths about the blessings of the separation of church and state...

...belief in the all-mighty individual or the all-mighty class or the all-mighty idea can do it just as efficiently...

...Punks like Mussolini and Franco were able to do it without a coherent idea between them...

...Our leaders, beset by critics who point out that vast sums poured into goods which do nothing to satisfy consumer demands or desires must divert cash away from investment in things like houses for young families, thereby exacerbating inflation, can only respond with variations on the theme of Beat the Devil...

...Some miles away, in Israel, Orthodox Jews preach beating ploughshares into swords...

...Since the arrival of the nuclear bomb, a large part of what is fondly called strategic planning has been given over to a single question: How to use The Bomb without actually having to use it...