Comment
COMMENT Reagan's Nuclear Shell Game As delegates, observers, petitioners, demonstrators—the hopeful and the cynical—gather in New York for the United Nations Session on Disarmament, President...
...Richard Nixon, reelected by a landslide in the fall of 1972, was forced out of office less than two years later, despite his insistence that he was not a crook...
...The war has a number of constituencies...
...And in Oregon, Keith Putnam of the Department of Human Resources let some 5,000 Indochinese refugees know that "for many of you, the best advice I can give you is to move to another state where your job prospects will be better and where Federal refugee program funding continues to be available to refugees who have been in the United States over a year and a half...
...Revising Central America About the only other events [besides music] drawing such large groups into the sun are religious festivals, revolutions, and ball games...
...Page 21), high and rising levels of Government debt have been unavoidable measures to sustain the U.S...
...There were, to be sure, a few who penetrated the Administration's smokescreen...
...But these were easily dismissed as partisan reactions...
...They have a double and self-contradictory task: to disseminate information, and to make money doing it...
...The world has taken a prurient interest in this war so near the polar ice...
...Under the Refugee Act and the Refugee Educational Assistance Act, both of 1980, the Federal Government has been providing cash, medical assistance, and social services to Indochinese refugees and to Cuban and Haitian "entrants," as they are officially known...
...policy toward El Salvador, almost half did not respond because they didn't know where El Salvador was or which side the United States was on in the civil war there...
...Indeed...
...The Watergate break-,in itself, dismissed at the outset by Presidential Press Secretary Ron Ziegler as "a third-rate burglary...
...The Soviet Union, on the other hand, with about 72 per cent of its warheads based on land, would have to scale back what it considers the pivotal element of its defense by some 3,000 warheads...
...But that has turned out to be a sticky proposition, in more ways than one...
...that if you do not know freedom in the immediate circumstances of your work-life and community, you can at least feel you are still a citizen of a Free Country...
...economic interests...
...Franco Zeffirelli found in his life the makings of the mawkish, syrup-sprayed "Brother Sun, Sister Moon...
...Corporate borrowing to pay off that debt during the current recession and profit squeeze is a larger factor in high interest rates than the Reagan deficit or business expectations of future Federal deficits...
...Persistent deficit spending is a symptom of an economy in structural crisis, but deficit spending is not limited to government...
...When the books ventured beyond Mexico at all, it was usually to offer "just a sentence on the Monroe Doctrine and perhaps a paragraph on the Panama Canal," the researchers write...
...When Nixon, facing inevitable impeachment, resigned from the Presidency and a number of his closest associates were hauled off to the penitentiary, we heard much self-congratulatory chatter to the effect that the system had been proven to work...
...Schemes to subvert the Constitution, the law, and the most elemental tenets of decency involved both the FBI and the CIA...
...Chico liked to work with his hands much better than he liked to work with his brain...
...The press, as usual, helped foster the illusion of good faith...
...The architects of the Reagan plan—in all likelihood Paul Nitze and Eugene V. Rostow—fashioned an adroit piece of deception that managed to convey the notion of a U.S...
...Francis, it seems, has something for everybody...
...they pack such angels of peace as Al Haig off on missions to London and Buenos Aires...
...intelligence estimates credit each superpower with possession of about 7,500 strategic nuclear weapons...
...Again, the Reagan plan would put them at a severe disadvantage...
...They are not covered by Reagan's arms proposal, and the Russians have no defense against them and no weapon to match...
...Nothing could be further from the truth...
...Proliferation has once more become the wallflower issue of international relations...
...The Chicago Tribune found his offer "realistic" and deserving of "encouragement from everyone who is concerned about the precarious nuclear standoff...
...intentions, and an increase in U.S...
...Because welfare bureaucrats and budge-teers are bound to see the hapless newcomers as liabilities rather than assets, our foreign-born Okies, out on the road in search of home and opportunity, will write for us a most shameful travelogue...
...In fact, shortly after Graham's speech, officials in Tallahassee heard from a Michigan member of Congress who argued that Florida's refugees would be foolish to come north...
...The Falklands fighting won't cost 675,000 lives and shake the earth for ten months, as Verdun did, but the contest for those islands beneath the Southern Cross has indeed made life interesting once more, psychoanalyti-cally and otherwise, for many people...
...The Argentine military hasn't fought a war since the Nineteenth Century (except against their own people from time to time), and this outing so close to home looked like a good bet...
...The Reagan proposal does, in fact, suggest that the United States and the Soviet Union each submit to a one-third reduction in strategic nuclear weapons over a period of five to ten years...
...Let's make the most of that opportunity...
...Just as discouraging, and in the long run just as costly, is the fanning of nationalistic fires in working-class breasts in two allegedly advanced Western societies...
...economy since World War II...
...What seems more noteworthy to us is that the current occupant of the White House is not a crook...
...The Reagan "arms-reduction" plan conforms in every detail to this new strategy...
...they can only hurt...
...warheads on bombers, which are not covered by the Reagan cutback proposal, and warheads on submarines in port...
...It can provide the opportunity for all of us to roar a mighty No to the warmakers and war planners...
...Reagan's proposed boosts in military spending, combined with his reductions in corporate and personal income taxes, have placed a balanced budget beyond reach of even the most drastic cuts in social services...
...The war in the South Atlantic puts us in mind of Sigmund Freud's remark after Verdun: Life has become interesting again...
...disserta-tionists on the prowl for Ph.D...
...We are still at it...
...Instead, critics say the Postal Service is veering dangerously close to religion, hooking up church to state...
...The Soviets, already in the early throes of a leadership upheaval, are undoubtedly seized by their own internal debates over nuclear strategy—debates in which their hawks are bound to draw comfort (and persuasive arguments) from Reagan's patent deceptions...
...emphasis is not on numbers of warheads but on their accuracy and invulnerability: Minuteman III missiles are being outfitted with remarkably accurate Mark 12-A reentry vehicles...
...The MX and Trident missiles now in preparation are more accurate than anything the Soviets have or expect to have soon...
...Students of Cuban and Russian intrigue, of Rube Goldberg great-power arrangements...
...But they did little better, dishing up sour servings of rotten weather and rough terrain, and of people crippled by their own lassitude, backwardness, and passion for music: Excitable and changeable, Nicaraguans often pour their energies into fighting...
...more, even, than the 500 or so young men from the slums of Buenos Aires...
...The balanced-budget amendment, which could not possibly go into effect for years, gives him an opportunity to seem to be doing something, and to appease the conservatives who have been made most uncomfortable by the Reagan deficit...
...A further drawback, from the Soviet perspective, is that the Reagan plan would limit the number of land-based and sea-based missiles to a total of 850 on each side...
...Or of one whose hour in the sun it finally is...
...It is a basic human need to feel that you count for something...
...As a "humanitarian gesture," Graham has ordered the Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services to list, in letters to entrants, the ten states where general assistance exists...
...The market sets limits to the publishers' truth-giving powers...
...We have a neat trick nowadays of turning heroes into hood ornaments, of putting principles on greeting cards—of doing everything with ideals but taking them seriously...
...in several other states plagued by extraordinary unemployment, notably Michigan, arriving refugees or entrants can expect more of a bum's rush than a welcome mat...
...documents claimed 9,200 warheads for the United States and 7,000 for the Soviet Union...
...Unfortunately, in at least four of the listed states only refugees, not entrants, are eligible...
...But the current Special Session on Disarmament, providing a forum for the desperate hopes of all humanity, can be a turning point...
...Economic power, military glory—that's the stuff that makes true believers tremble today...
...England-haters the world over, from Ireland to former colonies in Africa and Asia, are cheering on the South Americans...
...True, it is hard to think of a more inapposite representative of the American way than Francis, who exalted poverty...
...For us, the big-ticket item of the war so far is this: The world has found vet one more distraction from the desperately serious business of saving itself from getting blown up...
...Or: How contemptible they are with their bad teeth, pasty faces, unspeakable food...
...Where were all these guardians of pure, rational discourse, these foes of fanciful faith, in May, when the Horatio Alger stamp was issued...
...Littering is a way of life in Latin America...
...Watergate Revisited It was ten years ago—how the time flies when one is having fun—that a gang of hoodlums hired by the Nixon White House attempted and bungled a nocturnal mission against the Democratic National Committee's headquarters at the Watergate Hotel...
...In a May 8 speech, Governor Bob Graham outlined the food, clothing, shelter, medical, and law-enforcement problems likely to result, and said Florida may encourage entrants to resettle in states that have general assistance programs and so remain eligible for Federal reimbursement...
...In Florida, probably the state most besieged by the recent influx of refugees, between 32,000 and 38,000 Cubans and Haitians—90 per cent of them in Dade County—have been deprived of Federal help...
...That bodes ill for their huge and impressionable captive audience: today's children, who will be beset by tomorrow's pollsters asking about tomorrow's El Salvadors...
...Workers of the World...
...Thousands of small, cheap, highly accurate cruise missiles, capable of evading radar, will soon be coming off the assembly lines...
...And from there, we can start looking hard at the economy...
...Stop Me Before I Kill Again' It is an episode familiar in the annals of criminal psychopathology: A homicidal maniac leaves a desperate message at the scene of his latest outrage: stop me before i kill again...
...To make even limited Government intervention in the economy more difficult promises more political and economic grief...
...The anti-junta Peronistas, as thrilled as the rest of the populace with bull's-eye hits on the British flotilla, sense blood either way: If the Malvinas are lost once again to the British, the Galtieri government will certainly fall...
...What was missing was the mass derision and revulsion that should have greeted the Reagan scheme at a time when more and more Americans are deeply troubled by the arms race...
...To commemorate the 800th anniversary, it will issue a Francis stamp in October...
...move beyond SALT II, beyond the idea of a nuclear freeze, to an actual and substantial reduction in the nuclear arsenals of both superpowers...
...Just so Ronald Reagan, having confected the largest Federal deficit in history, implores Congress and the American people to adopt a constitutional amendment that will outlaw deficits and make balanced budgets mandatory...
...sand-table colonels and bathtub admirals: readers of Jane's Fighting Ships...
...The figures are suspect...
...In the Reagan Administration, we're all enemies unless we are among the super-rich, and we're all likely to be left twisting slowly in the wind...
...juvenile books and texts describe Central America...
...Frances Fitzgerald captured "the essential ambiguity of their position" in The New Yorker: "On one hand, they are running what amount to Ministries of Truth for children," she wrote, "and on the other, they are simply trying to make money in one of the freest of the free enterprises in the United States, where companies often go under...
...So now, what of worker solidarity in the global village...
...If you are not one of those Americans who thinks anybody can be rich, you probably think, at least, that it would be nice if everyone could...
...that the' people around him are not vicious sociopaths of the type that infested the Nixon Administration...
...The United States is lusting, as never before, after nuclear superiority...
...Nostalgia, from steerage to cabin class—all have a piece of the Falklands action...
...87 per cent contain wrong or old information), but it sheds some light on why North Americans look at the world the way we do...
...The Government's awesome "national security" apparatus was pressed into service for petty personal snooping and tawdry political advantage...
...Even now...
...Last February, when Newsweek asked 755 adults what they thought about U.S...
...But as John Buell observes elsewhere in this issue ("After Reaganomics, What...
...I have no intention of letting you dismiss me that easily...
...The burgeoning anti-Bomb movement of this winter and spring has not outlasted the attention span of most editors...
...The new numbers were probably compiled by excluding U.S...
...Now those millions are invited to trick themselves into believing, well, if the damned government can't run the show at home, it can bloody well win a goddam war against some second-raters...
...only a few months ago, official U.S...
...Reagan and his advisers understand, of course, that there is no way his proposals could be accepted by the Soviets, or could even form a basis for serious negotiations...
...In London, the equally unworthy Thatcher government has much to gain, and its Labor opponents too, depending on the outcome of the far-away war...
...And Reagan proposes, in a second phase, to move toward equality in "throwweight"—the weight and thrust of strategic weapons...
...Rosa-rio, and Cordoba who have already been killed, or the smaller number of British dead, the Royal Marines and sailors from the dreary Council-houses and borstals of Leeds, Manchester, and Coventry...
...The challenge, therefore, is to establish rules or presumptions that will provide discipline but not a straitjacket...
...Since the Russians lag far behind the United States in the accuracy and sophistication of weapons, they build larger missiles with greater throwweight...
...His proposals deserve serious response...
...Dear Postal Patron Dorothy Day once said, "Don't call me a saint...
...We are stuck in the doldrums, failing year after year to produce at any rate even close to capacity...
...Many a principled socialist, factory-bred or university-trained, fell at Verdun, often at the hands of an ideological brother across the way...
...Now tens of thousands of Indo-chinese, Cuban, and Haitian refugees are rinding out what Reagan had in mind, though it isn't particularly new: They are being told they are on their own, sink or swim...
...For environmentalists, the Pope recently named Francis the patron of ecology...
...If stalemate and United Nations brokering eventually do for the politicians what the armed forces cannot, well, it will still be a great day to be Argentinian...
...When subjected to close inspection, however, the plan turns out to be a program of increases: an increase in Soviet fear and suspicion about U.S...
...Despite its blatant hypocrisy, the President's espousal of the balanced-budget amendment is probably a political plus—at least for the short term...
...Francis of Assisi is a good example...
...The press is bored spitless...
...The Reagan plan would reduce each superpower's stockpile to 5,000 warheads, of which no more than half—2,500—could be on land-based missiles...
...This is how the Reagan plan would work: Current U.S...
...His recent proposal for a reduction in strategic nuclear weapons created exactly the sort of confusion it was supposed to...
...the Soviets, on the other hand, are credited with the number of warheads they are deemed capable of emplacing on missiles, not the number actually emplaced...
...And now even the Postal Service is getting into the act...
...The domestic ruination of Thatcherism on the one hand and fascist gauchoism on the other has kept economic justice beyond the reach of millions of the politically restive at opposite ends of the world...
...Government must finance its debt in the credit markets, and that sends up interest rates and creates problems for housing, autos, and other important sectors of the economy...
...war-lovers, journalists, middle-brow pundits, op-ed page drudges, and everyone aboard H.M.S...
...Florida, like most states, does not offer general assistance...
...But the purpose is not to reduce the arms race but to throw a sop to the growing opposition at home and abroad while buying time for a new nuclear strategy— counterforce...
...The next crook to enter the White House will find the machinery of government more vulnerable than ever to malicious mischief...
...Hear, hear...
...Congress and the Executive gulped down a few placebos in the way of campaign spending "reforms" and curbs on the more repellent practices of the intelligence agencies...
...The New York Times was impressed...
...The United Nations, conceived as an instrument of the big powers, is not likely by resolution or decree to ease this crisis...
...Nixon and his co-conspirators, indicted and unindicted, hatched sinister plots against a relative handful of their fellow citizens whom they regarded, rightly or wrongly, as "enemies...
...There are, first, the revanchists and manifest-destiny crackpots in Buenos Aires...
...The newspaper headlines and the capsule broadcasts proclaimed, president offers to cut nuclear stockpile by a third...
...She may have been on to something...
...But that is not the most important or most dispiriting lesson of Watergate on this tenth anniversary...
...turned out to be only the tiniest tip of the iceberg...
...But it's hard too, to fault publishers who keep serving up the starvation diet of Mayan ruins and grinning tortilla vendors...
...topics...
...This year marks the 800th anniversary of the saint's birth...
...Yankee tunnel-vision can be—and has been—explained in any number of ways, but the subject here will be children's books: the kind of books filled with remarks like those reprinted above...
...No declining power will push them around again...
...But there is more to reckon with than the ignominy of one belligerent (if not, in fact, two...
...The United States, with only 2,152 land-based warheads, fits easily under that ceiling and could, in fact, increase and modernize its force...
...COMMENT Reagan's Nuclear Shell Game As delegates, observers, petitioners, demonstrators—the hopeful and the cynical—gather in New York for the United Nations Session on Disarmament, President Reagan can congratulate himself on pulling off another masterful public relations coup...
...On April 1, however, the Reagan Administration cut back the period of eligibility to eighteen months, forcing about 70,000 refugees and 42,000 entrants nationwide to scramble for survival when all forms of assistance at every governmental level are being curtailed and when the nation is suffering its highest unemployment rate in forty-one years...
...It's hard to blame children who swallow such nonsense with their graham crackers and milk, and then grow into adults who cannot find El Salvador on the map...
...It is time, though, to work up the bill for this vain and pathetic bit of bloodletting...
...The new U.S...
...Twentieth Century Americans send Nineteenth Century robber barons to the White House...
...American military planners are moving rapidly away from the doctrine of deterrence toward a first-strike stance that will make it possible for them to launch a surprise attack on Soviet missile silos, submarines, airfields, and military command posts...
...But that's not what has raised the flap about the Francis stamp...
...And what should be a cause of specific alarm is that now Argentina and...
...Better still, it left many millions here and abroad with the vague impression that the Government of the United States had made an earnest and sincere move toward ending the nuclear arms race...
...We cannot hope to establish any absolutes in human affairs, to create textbook "objectivity" when objectivity simply does not exist...
...If not, as they learn of racial riots in other lands, they will be prompted to fight for what agitators tell them are their rights...
...We can handle tin-pot dictators, what a lot of rotters...
...Total private debt—most of it accu-- mulated by corporations frantically trying to expand when times are good—is about three times greater than the total Federal debt...
...Thank God for the Falklands...
...This aid, distributed through state governments, was to be available for up to thirty-six months after the refugees entered the country—a period thought adequate for them to achieve self-sufficiency...
...Need we say more...
...Who wants a crank like Francis around to recall bankruptcy and weakness—and mercy, and truth— every day when the mail arrives...
...Reagan, it editorialized, "wants to get on with it...
...If they struggled as willingly against rugged mountains, rain forests, and swamps, they might advance more rapidly...
...They were caught, and gradually a lurid tale unraveled—a peculiar pastiche of tapes and taps, "plumbers" and payoffs, conspiracies in the Oval Office and criminals at the highest levels of the Federal Government...
...Without the stimulus provided by excessive Government spending— even in such economically inefficient areas as military hardware—corporate expansion would decline, bankruptcies would increase, and unemployment would soar...
...The burden of assisting refugees and entrants now falls on the states, and it is a burden they are neither eager nor able to accept...
...To reach that level, the Soviets would have to scrap 1,550 launchers, and the United States 850...
...The likelihood is that rather than impose a total ban on deficits, Congress will ultimately opt for an amendment that leaves room for deficit spending under special circumstances and with special authorization procedures...
...Weapons-makers put together their twenty-megaton marvels in a little backwater called St...
...What all this means is that at this critical juncture the arms race is entering a phase that poses even greater dangers than those the world has faced since the dawn of the atomic age...
...The conservatives have a point: Though the damage done by large and growing Federal deficits is often overstated, deficit spending is a factor in our economic malaise...
...We need the kind of economic planning that would encourage production and fair distribution of socially useful goods, but such changes are clearly not in the offing now, and without them deficit-free Government spending can only mean misery...
...That is the talk in the pubs and bodegas...
...It is a discouraging document, a compendium of sins (73 per cent of the books sampled make no mention of U.S...
...after a decade, new revelations are promised by Seymour M. Hersh's forthcoming biography of Henry Kissinger—and it seems certain that the full measure of iniquities in what is called the Watergate Affair will never come to light...
...But we can recognize that biased information is not an intellectual accident but a manifestation of the way publishers deliberately, necessarily behave in our economy...
...Police officers' associations like to embellish their literature with his prayer, "Make me an instrument of Thy peace...
...Glory on the cheap...
...Land of Opportunity President Reagan offered few specifics when he spoke last July about finding new ways to "integrate refugees into our society without nurturing their dependence on welfare...
...Paul Volcker, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, recently told Congress, "I cannot argue that budgetary balance is always appropriate...
...But before that becomes obvious to all, Ronald Reagan will be long gone from Washington...
...Francis, Texas...
...The Old Testament speaks of a universal "lust of the eye...
...Former Secretary of State Edmund Muskie recognized the Reagan proposal as "a secret agenda for sidetracking disarmament," and Senator Edward M. Kennedy noted it "would permit the United States to build the MX missile, the B-l bomber, and the entire new generation of nuclear weapons...
...And the spread of nuclear materials and technology to more and more "third nations" increases day by day the risk of world war...
...that they are, by and large, more or less, obeying the law—and that in their own way they have done far more harm to far more Americans in eighteen months than the Nixon gang did in almost six years...
...Although [the Indians] usually lack political ambitions, the Indians will have to be considered in future developments...
...nuclear superiority over the Soviets...
...There are exceptions, of course, books that paused for more than a moment in Central America...
...The overwhelming majority of American history texts omit any further reference to this part of the world...
...Two researchers from the Council on Interracial Books, Rochelle Beck and Nancy Johnson, have released a report on the way U.S...
...But today, even those feeble remedies are being rejected and repealed...
...Such simplistic "solutions" can't help the economy, though...
...When CBS-New York Times pollsters quizzed 1,545 others, more than half admitted they had no idea what to think...
...say, Brazil will be tempted as never before to press on with nuclear weapons development, to equip-themselves with the ultimate gimcrackery of war...
...Even some conservatives recognize that there are dangers inherent in a balanced-budget amendment...
Vol. 46 • July 1982 • No. 7
