COMMENT

...Two familiar fictions are operating here: one that television news, phrasing opinion as questions, is being "objective...

...The boycott, which was to be directed at sponsors of shows that the Coalition regards as objectionable, provoked indignant rebukes by network executives who insisted—as they always have when the quality of broadcasting has come under fire—that ultimately the "viewers" decide what goes on the air...

...Means exist for organizations and individuals to express an almost infinite variety of views and create a kaleidoscope of entertainment...

...In a statement quoted by The New York Times, she asked, "How do you deal with something that is really a theology...

...In resisting such an interpretation, feminists would do well to point out that the courts—like Congress—traditionally defer to the military's wishes, be the matter discrimination against women, compensation for disabilities, or virtually anything else...

...And the dialogue has cast some light—enough, at least, to show us the dark corners that conceal questions Americans have not yet dared ask about the Bomb...

...This hands-off judicial approach, which views the military as an autonomous segment of the society, was firmly entrenched as early as 1911...

...In fact, feminists all along have been uncomfortable with using the draft as a women's rights issue...

...The five-part television documentary, "The Defense of the United States," which CBS ran in June, threw into sharp relief the twisted sensibilities (and sometimes simple stupidity) of our professional soldiers, who use such words as integrated to refer to a battlefield where nuclear, chemical, and conventional weapons combine to wipe out all soldiers who fight there...

...As Lewis Milford writes on Page 32 of this issue, describing the fate of suits by Agent Orange victims, "The courts are uniformly reluctant to second-guess Defense Department 'military' decisions...

...In minutes, our Government can destroy us...

...They are alienated from commercial television, and a boycott is one way they can express their anger and overcome their sense of impotence—though attempting to limit the range of programming is a potentially dangerous response...

...That is the political issue raised by the Bomb—and one our public commentators have not yet begun to address...

...It is all too likely, unfortunately, that the new technology, controlled by media conglomerates, will deliver television fare as monotonous and uninspiring as that now served up to us...

...Procter & Gamble is interested in funding research because-—quite simply—its reputation and profits are at stake...

...HARD LAW, SOFT LAW Many anti-nuclear protesters arrested in recent months for trespassing or disorderly conduct at power plants or weapons facilities have encountered bond requirements and jail sentences much more severe than those usually applied to such misdemeanors...

...One enduring reality must be recognized if there is ever to be an end to the perpetual crisis in the Middle East: The Palestinian people and the Arab nations are there to stay, and Israel must eventually come to terms with them if it is to survive in peace and security...

...High salaries, after all, confer status...

...it is equal pay for work of comparable value," said a local official of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employes...

...He then wrote, "The case arises in the context of Congress's authority over national defense and military affairs, and perhaps in no other area has the Court accorded Congress greater deference...

...SHOCKINGLY CHEAP The ill-starred Rely tampon has been gone for almost a year, but it is more than a memory to its maker, Procter & Gamble...

...The new decision on the draft follows this tradition closely...

...In Amarillo, Texas, protesters who held a prayer vigil outside the Pantex nuclear weapons plant received sentences ranging from six months to one year...

...they could knock the foundations out from under our stratified economy...

...To keep that from happening, we need more than a boycott: We need positive action by citizens forcing cable systems to give them a direct say in the programming they receive...

...At its most basic level, the question of the Bomb is not.one we can answer in terms of how someone else behaves...

...When we think in terms of using the Bomb to protect ourselves from other people, we evade the question we must face...

...THE UNFAIR MILITARY On the day the Supreme Court upheld male-only draft registration, leading Equal Rights Amendment opponent Phyllis Schlafly was in her glory...

...Indeed, wage scales have other functions than fair allocation of income—other functions, too, than providing incentives for hard work or accumulation of skills...

...At Diablo Canyon, California, when some of the 487 protesters arrested in the August 1978 demonstration at the Pacific Gas and Electric nuclear power plant refused probation, the judge decided he had been too harsh and reduced their sentences...

...For a long time, women bought the idea that they are paid less because they do work that is worth less...

...Fortunately, neither "soft" nor "hard" legal response is likely to deter the activists...

...In Groton, Connecticut, for example, charges were dropped against twenty-one persons arrested for disorderly conduct at the Electric Boat shipyard on the christening day of the nuclear submarine Corpus Christi...

...It would be over before CBS even brought us the news...

...But most remained where they were: 80 per cent of all women who work are stuck in the low-paid clerical and service slots traditionally reserved for them...

...One principal function of wage scales is to keep people in their places: to legitimize the power of those at the top and encourage humility in those at the bottom...

...James K. Todd of Denver, who also received company money, had a different view: "We wouldn't know half of what we do about toxic shock if P&G hadn't been willing to make the financial commitment," he said...

...The decision was "a tremendous victory for everything we've been fighting for," she said...

...If we do not assign wages by gender (or by race or national origin), how shall we assign them...

...Unable to accumulate either the capital or confidence to escape from their low-paying ranks or to demand a more equitable sharing of disagreeable work, those at the bottom keep on performing tedious or dirty tasks for those at the top...

...These "hard" responses to civil disobedience have also generally denied defendants the chance to present their anti-nuclear arguments in court...

...Blacks know, His-panics know, women should know that if they get what they want it will not be because it is "fair" but because they have confronted the system with a credible threat of disruption...

...And so, particularly over the last decade, some of them fought their way into higher-paid male ranks—into coal mines and executive suites...

...In addition to its own studies, the household products giant, has spent $2 million on outside research into the sometimes fatal toxic shock syndrome—research that the company hopes will vindicate Rely and perhaps hasten its release from expensive warehouses and its reappearance on drugstore shelves...

...Rehnquist noted that all branches of the military ban women from combat, and that Congress blessed this exclusion when it exempted women from registration...

...Business Week predicted that "comparable worth may be the civil rights issue of the 1980s," and added, with a shudder, that "it would cost employers billions in payroll dollars...

...Many television viewers do have all too little opportunity to see programming which reflects their tastes and the concerns of their families and communities...

...Had Israeli voters decisively rejected Mena-chem Begin and his right-wing Likud bloc, they would have sent a somewhat conciliatory signal to the Palestinian people, the Arab nations, and the rest of the world...

...even a show with high ratings can be killed if it fails to attract the right kind of viewer— the one who buys the sponsor's product...

...And so they have said to themselves, "Why strike, when anyone could type this letter, when anyone could serve this table, when there will always be someone to replace me...

...Thus, efforts to reform the wage scale are inherently radical...

...By skill...

...If the notion of "comparable worth" were truly to take hold in this country, we would soon see that the assignment of worth by sex, race, or national origin is merely the most blatant of arbitrary assignments—that the custom of paying a corporate president fifty or a hundred times the wage of a file clerk is an arbitrary social decision...

...Can we contemplate using the Bomb against people who have not used it on us...

...But the most perceptive comment on the rationale of the military/industrial complex was made off-stage—by Judith Crichton, one of the producers of the CBS series...

...Otherwise, they may find themselves entangled in absurd and sophistic debates over pay formulas—arguments that are absurd because their very assumptions are absurd...

...Now more than ever, Israel's small, struggling, but courageous peace movement deserves the support of Americans who care about peace and justice—and about Israel...

...Only a month after the Supreme Court ruling, 2,000 city employes in San Jose, California, went on strike over the issue of comparable pay...

...The reason: Judge and prosecutor both said they did not want to make a political forum of the courtroom...

...You are...

...Formidable obstacles to organizing women workers have been raised...

...The Bomb, as Kennan points out, is "the most useless weapon ever invented" because "it is only something with which, in a moment of petulance or panic, you perpetrate upon the helpless people of another country such fearful acts of destruction as no sane person would ever wish to have upon his conscience...

...Quoting an earlier ruling, Rehn-quist wrote that "the gender classification is not invidious, but rather realistically reflects the fact that the sexes are not similarly situated...

...In Newsweek, Meg Greenfield suggested, sensibly if somewhat belatedly, that agreements to control the arms race actually may have raised the level of armaments by providing "ceilings" that became "floors...

...And John Schuchardt of Baltimore's Christian activist Jonah House was recently sentenced to one year in prison for his part in a blood-pouring demonstration at the Pentagon...

...But what of the people whose jobs require little skill but great tolerances for stress...

...So far, the dialogue has been conducted as if "we" were a Nineteenth Century New England village debating the merits of digging a new well: as if "we" were really deciding...

...Can a corporation with millions of dollars at stake refrain from influencing research on its product...

...Procter & Gamble faces 200-odd lawsuits seeking damages totaling more than $4 billion...

...Kennan, an architect of the Cold War who has matured into Elder Statesmanship, also blamed our plight on "the compulsions that arise and take charge of great powers" once they embark on an arms race...

...Earlier this year, a judge told the Plowshares Eight— among them Schuchardt and the Berrigan brothers—"Nuclear warfare is not on trial here...

...But the military system is not fair, is inherently unfair...

...the other that "we"—-CBS and its viewers—have some say in the use of the weapons we pay for...

...That would be unfair even if the evaders were women: Is it ever "fair" to punish someone for refusing to sign up to kill...

...Last November, months before the Supreme Court ruling...

...Eleanor Smeal, president of the National Organization for Women, summed up the ambivalence: "Our organization, and many women's organizations, are actually peace advocates...

...A far better answer would be to create a broader range of programming by taking full advantage of developing communications technology...

...Compared to that, $2 million for research seems slight—and shrewd...

...Advertisers are not just interested in the total size CHARLES WALLER of the audience but in its "demographics...

...Commenting on its decision to pull advertising from some shows—apparently in response to CBTV threats—a Procter & Gamble executive said ad dollars should not be spent in an environment "distasteful to many of our potential customers...

...To be sure, the'Labor Alignment headed by Shimon Peres offered no very fetching alternative...

...that we partly owe the hazard that hangs over us...

...And there's the rub...

...If one girl learned the machinist trade," the men argued, "others would, and soon the shops would be overrun by women, and wages would go down as they have in every trade women have entered...

...Suddenly, the Bomb was a media item, the subject of public dialogue...

...It is to the "blinkered, narrow vision" of these professional fighters, said George F. Kennan in The New York Review of Books...

...But coal miners and trash collectors and steel workers have felt the same way, only to come to grips at last with the Big Lie of low pay—the lie that they were worth little...

...One doctor who received Procter & Gamble money didn't think so: "They do have an influence over the work, because they are funding what they want funded," William J. Brown, associate professor of immunology and microbiology at Wayne State University School of Medicine, told The Wall Street Journal...

...It has given our leaders a power over our lives which no leaders ever had anywhere,, in the most benighted of tyrannical kingdoms—the power to destroy us utterly and without warning, and millions with us...

...We would have no time to protest or revolt, certainly no time to vote...

...It was, after all, Labor's ineptitude and corruption after a generation of virtually unchallenged rule that led to Begin's victory four years ago...

...It will be crucial, with the ruling now behind us, to keep this deference from infecting civilian policy—to keep women's rights from being defined by the military, an institution with little regard for the concept of human rights...

...we have not yet got to the point of considering that we may not be able to control our own leaders...

...Furthermore, sponsors usually demand that programs create the proper "selling climate...

...Elsewhere, however, authorities have pursued a "soft" legal strategy—precisely because of fear that activists might use the courtroom to explain their actions to the public...

...Perhaps no issue demonstrates more clearly the degree to which we have lost control of our Government...

...It's usual to suggest that the problem "we" in America face is that we cannot control Soviet leaders...

...If the protests of network executives smack of hypocrisy, though, the prospect of a boycott raised a substantive issue nonetheless...

...The recent campaign offered little evidence that Labor has purged itself of these defects, nor did it provide Israelis with a clear-cut contrast to Begin's program...

...With every paycheck, women have been told their work is worth little...

...BOMB TALK At first, there were only scattered comments—a wire service story or two, longer articles in magazines of politics and science...

...All that is left, in Schlafly's mind, is for those who oppose equality of the sexes to apply this "fact" to civilian, as well as military, life...

...Do we want as leaders the sort of people who would use the Bomb against other people in our name...

...Conservatives like Schlafly who want women kept in their traditional place have reason to cheer...

...Network profits come from advertisers, not viewers, and advertisers must, therefore, be satisfied first...

...Affirmative action programs of the last decade gave some women more than they would otherwise have had—but only because push came to shove and the institutions in question were afraid they would lose Federal funds or licenses or contract's...

...Can we contemplate using it against people who' have used it on us...

...Will our European alliance be strengthened by a strategy that might force us to destroy Europe in order to save it...

...And after the U.S...

...Atomic Safety and Licensing Appeals Board cleared the Diablo Canyon plant for licensing on June 16, Raye Fleming of the Abalone Alliance said, "Now is the time to prepare for a massive occupation...

...Then, suddenly, as summer began, the subject was everywhere: on CBS, in The New York Review of Books, in Newsweek...

...The issue is not equal pay for women...

...The notion that women who want higher pay for their labor must leave those jobs and move into male-dominated categories is both impractical and sexist, implying that secretaries are paid less than plumbers because they are worth less...

...This is one of the darkest unraised questions in the dialogue on the Bomb...

...We may answer these questions for ourselves, for our individual selves, and then confront another question, this one political: If we decide we do not want to use the Bomb on any people at all, whatever the provocation, what can we do to translate our personal decision into public policy...

...Advocates of comparable pay, who know that secretaries are paid less because they are women, want to get rid of gender as a determinant of wages...

...Nonetheless, a vigorous rejection of Begin would have had significant symbolic value—especially after the reckless air raid on Iraq's nuclear installation mounted by the Begin government less than a month before, election day...

...It may be the impetus needed to create a strong labor movement among women workers...

...As we recognize the difficulty of finding "fair" criteria for determining income, we come up against the possibility that fairness has nothing to do with it...

...Instead, Israelis gave at least half-hearted endorsement to Begin's bombastic rhetoric and bullyboy tactics...

...Of course, our need to know about toxic shock might not be so pressing if tampon makers had not deluged women with super-absorbent, synthetic-fiber tampons and let safer all-cotton varieties go the way of the garter belt...

...The importance of the Supreme Court's recent ruling is basically political: It is a wedge, however slender (the Court did not establish women's right to comparable pay—only their right to sue for it...

...The recent Supreme Court ruling that women may sue to obtain comparable pay for comparable work is chilling news to corporate executives...

...The range of options from which viewers may choose has always been severely limited, and even within those limits viewers have slight impact, at best, on network programming...

...Clout is what counts, and clout comes ultimately not from judges in courtrooms but from organizing, striking, demonstrating—practicing politics in streets and workplaces as well as at the polls...

...But Dr...

...It is tactically important, too, to recognize that the appeal to "fairness," however easy or difficult it may be to determine what is fair, has never gotten any group very far in the United States...

...It is important that women engaged in the fight for comparable pay recSTEVEN GUARNACCIA ognize the radical nature of their cause, and the potential consequences if it succeeds...

...TELEVISION BOYCOTT Since the days of Spiro Agnew's vitriolic attacks on television newscasters and their "instant analysis," nothing has' made network broadcasters and advertisers more nervous than the threat of a boycott organized by the Coalition for Better Television (CBTV...

...In ways we may not yet fully realize, the Bomb has enslaved us to our Government...

...If women join them, in large numbers, the lords of the economy have good reason to fear, as they already know...

...Thirty-seven demonstrators from the Crawdad Alliance in Missouri were asked to post $500 bail each after a trespass action last spring at Union Electric Company's Callaway County power plant...

...Arbitrary—but not without purpose, for the wage scale, whoever fills the various slots, has significant reasons for being: It keeps the work force divided and unable to take control of the workplace, and it prevents an entire class of people from acquiring skills, so they can be more easily controlled...

...When Harry Reasoner asked an American general whether the nuclear weapons we keep in western Europe might not devastate our own troops, the general replied, "Well, Harry, that's a real problem...

...And those in the middle have high incentive to behave themselves and do what they're told, lest they sink to the ranks below them...

...We don't want to be soldiers...

...At least a quarter of a million young men who did not register for the draft during the last round now face prosecution because of the Supreme Court ruling...

...they confirm the importance of those who command General Motors and the Bell System...

...At the end of the CBS documentary, Dan Rather asked a series of questions: "Will we make ourselves stronger by unquestioning faith in new-weapons technology...

...One recent study found that super-absorbent tampons increased a user's risk thirty times over a non-user's...

...we must answer in terms of how we behave: Would we really choose to drop the Bomb...

...Ultimately, it could cost them something even more important: the power they derive from keeping a large part of the work force in its place...

...Emphasis added...

...And if we add stress to the pay formula, what about those whose jobs require little skill and stress tolerance—but because of that very fact are boring and bland and, in some cases, demeaning...

...The spread of cable and the development of new forms of video recording offer potential far beyond the feeble "public access" now made available by many cable television systems...

...What we really wanted was that the system be fair...

...That attack, undertaken as a macho gesture (and, perhaps, as a vote-getting stunt) rather than as a defensive measure, typifies the worst, most destructive aspect of Israeli policy...

...PEACE POSTPONED The prospects of peace in the Middle East, precarious in the best of circumstances, have not been enhanced by the outcome of Israel's recent parliamentary election...

...they know very well why women's pay averages only 59 per cent of men's: The jobs women hold have been systematically devalued because women hold them...

...Will we increase our national security by insisting there is a way to fight a limited nuclear war without mutual destruction...

...To an extent not yet admitted in the public debate, the question of the Bomb and what to do about it is a moral question—not a question of either military tactics or power politics, although it has been framed in those terms...

...they recognize Justice Rehnquist's majority opinion as fuel fpr their fires...

...The raid on Iraq, like other humiliations that Israel has delighted in inflicting on its neighbors, can only postpone the achievement of a settlement...

...Low wages confirm the lack of status, the unimportance and low worth of those who occupy the bottom rungs of the ladder...

...This argument is, of course, disingenuous...