Comment
COMMENT Putting Congress to the Test Among the hundreds of thousands of Americans who took part in Ground Zero Week actions in April or are otherwise involved in the current surge of opposition to...
...We admit it: We are puzzled by all this to-do about yet another ladleful of mainstream media mush dished out to hardly anyone, according to the audience ratings...
...A thousand dollars, thank you...
...But there is a small, select group of Americans who have it in their power right now to strike a telling blow against the lunatic accumulation of more nuclear weaponry...
...It is repetitious and dense at times, but what the hell...
...We can begin by putting the heat on the 200 endorsers of the freeze, and go on from there to challenge every incumbent and every challenger in this year's Congressional races...
...Deadpan, clipped, detective-story prose would not do the job...
...Would all this really bring jobs back to the devastated cities of the North and East...
...The CBS show held out four people—and the implication that there were many more—who had been done in by Reaganomics...
...And in doing so, it set clear, tight limits on the debate we will be seeing and hearing about the economy...
...Suddenly, the same President who wanted to keep others in his Administration from giving background or off-the-record interviews was chiding CBS for not coming to get his opinion...
...In his inaugural address, Jimmy Carter promised to work for "zero nuclear weapons," but in his four years in office he doubled military spending and negotiated a SALT II treaty that would have added 4,000 strategic warheads on each side...
...on the other, we have a one-time White House flack now elevated to the cutting edge of journalistic inquiry...
...Let's concede a thing or two...
...Cut to Belfast...
...That may mean downing trace amounts of ethylene oxide with our fruit, or methyl bromide with our grain products, or any number of dyes, fungicides, or waxes...
...by now this is conventional wisdom...
...Determined to assert their rightful claim (they say) to the Malvinas (or is it the Falkland Islands...
...Or a few starched Marines...
...Still, the members of Congress who have endorsed it deserve some credit—at least for sensing a profound shift in public opinion and aligning themselves with it...
...Mass marches are silly and dangerous, he said...
...A pastoral scene: Cut to the Islanders tending their sheep...
...No, forget that...
...Schell, who has done much distinguished work for The New Yorker, spent five years on The Fate of the Earth...
...Countless publications have already told the "People Like Us" story...
...It is called Enterprise Zones, and what it is supposed to do, if you'll pardon the expression, is unleash the dynamic force of the free market to revitalize our cities...
...In a more sensible order of things it would be possible to put our enormous scientific and economic resources to work on ways to deliver unadulterated fresh food to the public...
...It will identify you as one of the key group from across the country who have been selected as a top advisor to the bispartisan majority of the Congress...
...If Henry Kissinger could, anyone can...
...The Times assured that back in "the real world . . . there is no alternative to deterrence with some of these awful weapons," positing West 43d Street, perhaps, as the real world and some polite, unshowy, smallish number of warheads as more correct...
...For us, it may ultimately help make all the difference in determining whether we continue to have a planet...
...The swarthy Argentines, handsome too, in their Latin way, emotional, hot-blooded...
...The effect of Enterprise Zones, then, whether as threat or as reality, will be to intensify the pressure on American labor to accept more givebacks in the form of deferred wage increases, reduced wages, or other concessions...
...Measure his pipsqueak critics against that achievement...
...But a fair-minded critic with a nose for the folkways of liberal journalism would also see in the book an achievement enormously threatening to everybody else Schell left napping when he began his research in 1977...
...The sooner we all understand that, the sooner we can put the multinational giants under effective control...
...People like Who...
...The Washington Post's correspondent refers to it, in a dispatch from London, as "this Evelyn Waugh-type of warfare...
...It's Federal budget time...
...The jaunty bagpipers play "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina...
...It just can't be done...
...Maybe a few shepherds will have to die before it's over...
...And he penetrated public numbness and compelled people to confront the unimaginable...
...Schell's essay is not altogether a seamless, wondrous thing...
...Not one of your grim, grubby Middle Eastern confrontations...
...Many an allegedly liberal editorialist and book reviewer has seen fit to muck around the lagoon of Munich, "appeasement," and bottomless Russian evil with mockery and derision for footwear...
...The Senators and Representatives who have signed the nuclear freeze resolution have a chance to act in behalf of both "fiscal responsibility" and nuclear sanity by refusing to vote money for the military unless the appropriation for more nuclear weapons is deleted...
...Just a lot of anecdotes and tongue clucking...
...But for now, the choice for consumers will be couched in terms of a choice between chemicals and irradiation...
...Name tags...
...No nukes...
...IMtWdr At last, a fun war...
...Will he win the Nobel Peace Prize...
...those who belong to the Coalition for Peace Through Strength Caucus...
...Blessed by the Archbishop of Canterbury...
...Time, The New York Times, The New Republic, and The Washington Post have, to varying degrees, treated Schell as a ninny and his "touted tract" (The New York Times) as the product of a thumb-sucking madcap with metaphysical ambitions too broad by half...
...COMMENT Putting Congress to the Test Among the hundreds of thousands of Americans who took part in Ground Zero Week actions in April or are otherwise involved in the current surge of opposition to the nuclear arms race, there is a frequent and urgent question: What do we do next...
...Put out more flags...
...It's a safe war, no matter how it turns out...
...Not an Asian war, interminable, with incalculable casualties...
...some other countries have used it for years...
...As William Goldsmith points out in the March/ April issue of Working Papers, Enterprise Zones can, at best, bring Third World conditions to American cities...
...But it doesn't tell us a thing about what to buy at the supermarket tomorrow...
...For some, at least, it should make all the difference in determining whether they continue to have political careers...
...Furthermore, the process brings to the food sector the whole tangle of questions surrounding radiation: Are facilities safe...
...Still, a fair-minded critic could, in conscience, poke a hole or two here and there...
...The same President who had tried to keep his fumbling press conferences out of prime time now wanted a choice evening spot for a rebuttal...
...The chemical combinations in food are changed when it is irradiated, he explains, and adequate studies have not been done to determine what this can do to humans...
...That could put a dent in the unemployment rate...
...A flurry of activities ranging from lobbying to civil disobedience is planned in connection with the United Nations Special Session on Disarmament about to open in New York City...
...business be persuaded to stay home, or to return...
...The Congressional signers of the nuclear freeze resolution must be shown that their constituents—all of us—are watching...
...There are reasons, of course, for all the additives: Such fungicides as ethylene oxide keep food from rotting too quickly...
...John Gofman, author of Radiation and Human Health, believes that while there is "no way" the radiation can stay in the food, the process could still be risky...
...They should insist on such an amendment now...
...Arbeit macht frei...
...The New York Times, in a lead editorial for Sunday, April 18, day one of Ground Zero Week, belittled The Fate of the Earth for its "numbing length...
...If they like, they can make it contingent on Soviet acceptance of a nuclear freeze...
...Peace through Strength...
...But the toughest kid on the block has to be Michael Kinsley, thirty-year-old editor of Harper's, who brought a bizarre, ad hominem quality to his piece on The Fate of the Earth...
...Time, at its shameless on-the-other-hand best, played its round of the get-Schell game in its May 3 Press column...
...Here's our NATO ally (arms supplied by the United States) eyeball to eyeball with our OAS ally (arms supplied by the United States...
...His was a stretch of brisk, Hedda Hopper-like writing, absolutely dead-broke, empty of anything but neon nasti-ness and illogic...
...Ronald Reagan rejected SALT II because, he said, he wanted a "reduction" in nuclear arms, not just a standstill or escalation, but now he insists that any reduction must be preceded by the acquisition of 17,000 new nuclear warheads...
...People are being very cavalier about saying it is safe to eat," he says...
...10 Downing Street, where Margaret Thatcher swears eternal fealty to self-determination...
...On one extreme, we now have an indignant Administration...
...Only if labor costs are pushed down to Third World levels and kept there can U.S...
...When Alexander Pope exclaimed almost three centuries ago, "What mighty contests rise from trivial things...
...No strategic implications (except for Britain and Argentina, which don't count...
...In this and other editorials on the nuclear question, The Times (and The Washington Post, too) took pains this spring to make sport of the "emotionalism" sweeping the country and screwing up the great weapons argument of 1982...
...Readers can go scare up the May Harper's for themselves...
...One significant response would be a vigorous campaign for the enactment of legislation placing severe restrictions on plant closings...
...There was no room in the CBS heart-tugger for a hard look at the underlying assumption that a free market economy has something for everyone—or that America has a free market in the first place...
...At this writing, after weeks of wrangling between the Reagan Administration and Congressional leaders, no agreement has been reached on a budget that is out of balance by a mind-boggling $100 billion-plus...
...Food is one of the few real things left in our lives," wrote Jim Hightower in Eat Your Heart Out...
...They determine what is news...
...They can't mouth prayers for peace for the television cameras and vote appropriations for war when the roll is called...
...In a simpler order of things it would be possible to eat fresh produce that has not been coated with pesticides, washed with detergents, sprayed with fungicides, injected with dyes, and gussied up with wax...
...Each of these lines of endeavor offers important opportunities to widen the circle of concern and mobilize a genuine mass movement...
...To paraphrase Ronald Reagan's autobiography, Where does that leave the rest of us...
...The principal problem is that the jobs have been exported to the low-wage havens of the Third World...
...Nuclear freeze or disarmament petitions are circulating in many parts of the country...
...This one is for the movies, for musical comedy...
...How can the momentum be sustained and accelerated so that it translates, ultimately, into irresistible public pressure to end the nuclear madness once and for all...
...Hi, I'm Donna...
...How will radioactive materials and waste be handled...
...the Russians have often indicated they would go along...
...Here at The Progressive, we handicapped The Fate of the Earth in the early going—in the first wave of reviews and commentaries—-and decided it was certain to be the object of dismissal and much contempt by the likes of National Review and The Wall Street Journal...
...Obviously, the movement that has been taking shape in recent months is merely a modest beginning...
...A horse-and-buggy war, as Milton Mayer says...
...Yes, yes, and such a silly thing to want to do...
...All of which is instructive to think about, and useful in explaining why we eat what we eat...
...Any other way would mean smaller farms, smaller processing plants, smaller stores—and more of all of them...
...The former (NR, April 30) was in his bitchiest collegiate distemper...
...Consider the task the man set for himself—the far-from-unimaginable prospect of planetary death and the end of our species...
...Not surprisingly, mainstream journalists think it is the White House that decides what we see and think...
...he had a hank of woman's hair in mind, but he might as well have been writing about the notorious Bill Moyers documentary, "People Like Us...
...A number of states and localities will have antiwar referendums on the ballot this fall...
...The Peace through Strength folks, 275 members of the Senate and House, are selling secular indulgences, something like yearly peerages in a weird cult determined to "fight...
...Without these and thousands of other preservatives in our diet, food would be scarcer, costlier, and sometimes even less safe, at least in the short run...
...What it will actually do, if Congress takes it seriously to the point of enacting it into law, is make the cities of the United States subject to the same sort of corporate exploitation that is now directed at the Third World...
...They are the 200 or so U.S...
...In London, a Defense Ministry spokesman announces that captured Argentine officers "were entertained to dinner on board one of Her Majesty's ships...
...As a Senior [$500], Special [$250], or State [$100] Advisor, you will receive a certificate with official seal recognizing you as an advisor to the bipartisan majority of the members of Congress...
...Or a few temperamental Latins...
...Messrs...
...There are continuing efforts, to be sure...
...Recent moves by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to give clearance to irradiated food processing make this a good time to think about why we eat what we eat...
...By killing off insects and microorganisms, irradiation promises to lengthen shelf life and, in some cases, make chemical preservatives unnecessary...
...The Irradiated feast We eat the food we eat because, like Mount Everest, it is there...
...In the long run, multinational investment works no better for the people of the Third World than it does for us...
...Only the governments of the West will be vulnerable to the storms of anti-nuclear protest...
...Peace through Strength...
...Bringing the Third World Home The program has been presented to Congress as the Reagan Administration's answer to urban decay...
...No small factor in that deficit is the more than $20 billion allocated to additional nuclear weaponry for a stockpile that is already sufficient to devastate the planet many times over...
...He has had the nerve to tell us the very worst things about our situation...
...To industrialize food, to make it conform to technologies and systems, is to industrialize ourselves and finally to surrender the quality of our lives to the mass-produced standard of big business...
...It isn't likely...
...In its current depressed and defeatist mood, as exemplified by the auto workers' recent concessions, labor is in no shape to mount effective resistance...
...Buckley and Bartley didn't disappoint...
...Neither the President nor the Congress can turn frogs—or Philadelphians or Floridians—into princes...
...The Enterprise Zones, to be defined in terms of economic distress, would be areas offering business special tax concessions and relief from regulatory requirements...
...Still, for whatever reason, the White House chose to single out the show as a hit "below the belt...
...Another would be an energetic attempt at international labor organizing...
...Consumer groups have registered no organized protest against irradiation...
...If you kept a score card," says CBS White House correspondent Leslie Stahl, "my guess is that it would show that they get their way more often than we do...
...Senators and Representatives who have signed their names to a resolution calling on the two superpowers to end all production, testing, and deployment of nuclear warheads and launchers...
...a well-established, wellCOMMENT organized group of ultra-liberal organizations who, though well intentioned, have been unilaterally disarming the United States and are now trying to keep us from rebuilding our strength...
...II Journalism of Gnats Our colleague Sam Day spoke for this magazine when he wrote admiringly and thoughtfully of Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth in the April issue...
...Between the lines one could get the feel of a deep, deep terror of appearing squishy-soft on annihilation...
...White House Deputy Chief of Staff Michael Deaver has a word about the way the networks set public opinion: "All of us are being managed by the network news...
...And Work Shall Me You Free The Federal Constitution, Article I, Section 9, forbids the Government from getting into the titular nobility business...
...But it was elsewhere along the journalistic spectrum that Jonathan Schell came in for some of the fanciest trashing...
...for his part, Bartley (or his stand-in on The Journals March 22 editorial page) weighed in with the usual anti-everything venom...
...The challenge to the legislators is to break with a long-standing pattern of official deception and hypocrisy about the arms race...
...Said Time, in its cautious, anonymous, pipe-smoking way: "Once reporters begin, as many find it irresistible to do, by evoking images of a fiery doomsday, it is hard to shift readers' attention to cold-eyed consideration of deterrence...
...As we have noted before in these pages, we believe the proposed nuclear freeze is a very small first step...
...Now they have an opportunity to demonstrate that their commitment entails more than mere lip service...
...No way it can endanger us...
...Cut to No...
...In a few years, it may mean eating food that has passed on a conveyor belt alongside long rods containing radioactive Cobalt-60...
...Schell's book, which first saw the light of day in a New Yorker magazine serialization in February, has become the primer for all participants in the wonderfully burgeoning debate on what the author calls "the nuclear predicament of mankind...
...Has the Right gone in for designer politics...
...Picture it: Britain's tall ships, remnants of Empire, steaming majestically to their rendezvous with destiny in the Falkland Islands (or is it the Malvinas...
...The regulatory waivers might entail exemptions from pollution control standards, zoning, or requirements of the minimum wage law...
...Schell, said The Times, was "too worked up to dwell on [the] details" of turning around a world armed with the Bomb...
...A paradox for a Gilbert-and-Sullivan number: The right-wing Argentine military junta, brutal, repressive, cheered on by the Soviets, by Fidel Castro, by its own guerrilla opposition...
...The safety net has holes big enough for a camel...
...The caucus also promises each rube on its list a "distinctive identification tag that will identify you as a member of the United States Congressional Advisory Board at briefings, meetings and receptions...
...For similar sensible reasons, irradiated food, according to one FDA estimate, may soon make up 10 per cent of the total American diet...
...Schell is dewy-eyed...
...Starched Marines—white, Anglo-Saxon, handsome, keen...
...But resistance is essential—not merely to the Enterprise Zones concept, but to the corporate power that resides in the worldwide mobility of capital...
...Nothing gets between me and my paranoia...
...The tax concessions would include lower levies on capital gains and on corporate income—subsidies from the rest of us, in other words, to ensure and enhance the profitability of private businesses...
...But it would also put a dent in the highly structured food system, and ultimately in the corporate economy...
...Methyl bromide keeps the bugs out of wheat and flour...
...The impulse in much of the public is simply to cry out for ridding the planet [of the Bomb...
...From these and other organs of the pro-nuclear Right, the charge against Schell was, generally, that his was a Utopian, emotional, "womanish," overweening, overreaching, softheaded, unrealistic, needlessly apocalyptic thesis: Absent an early commitment to world government or complete disarmament, global ruination, a futureless future—the death of time itself in "a republic of ants and grasses"—are certain...
...Some extremes...
...Here's the peacemaker, General Haig (supplied by the United States...
...Max Lerner, the very soul of American liberalism's hairy-chested school, apparently was assigned The New Republic's dirty work (April 28) in saying of the Schell book that, well, look here, it just plays into the Russians' hands...
...Blessed by the Archbishop of Buenos Aires...
...But there are skeptics...
...Picture David Niven playing host...
...But listen: "As a Chairman's Advisor you will receive an unusually impressive sculptured brass plaque on hand rubbed walnut with your name engraved...
...That may not sound like news to you or us, but the Administration reacted as if Moyers had shouted a top Government secret from the White House roof...
...The United States Congressional Advisory Board...
Vol. 46 • June 1982 • No. 6
