Comment
COMMENT A Place in History No official propaganda campaign in recent memory can match—for sheer intensity, blatant deceptiveness, or apparent success—the Reagan Administration's whirlwind effort...
...Even as the oil companies dip their hands into our wells, the Department is making it less expensive for them to operate on public lands...
...It's our place in history that has been called into question...
...But, as in other galling acts, the Administration appears to have gotten away unscathed...
...But we, here in the homeland of nuclear terror, have not yet assumed our responsibility...
...Indeed, he appeared to walk off the pages of Hannah Arendt...
...But assembly-line health is not unique to Kaiser...
...We'll seek right away in Geneva to build on the...
...and turned many marijuana smokers to harder but more available drugs, say law-enforcement officials...
...As one candid expert told The Los Angeles Times, elimination of all nuclear weapons would "change the world as we've known it since World War II...
...There was only one major point of disagreement.' —President Reagan at a White House briefing on the Reykjavik summit...
...he's dispensable...
...The case was heard by Federal District Judge A. Wallace Tashima, and late in October he issued a forty-page ruling that was clear and compelling: USIA's guidelines, he held, left the agency "in the position of determining what is the 'truth about America, politically and otherwise...
...Another woman had a vaginal problem, went to her HMO physician for a Pap smear, but never was told of the results...
...If a person is innocent of a crime, then he is not a suspect...
...Law...
...Then he opined that Supreme Court decisions do "not establish a [law] that is binding on all persons and parts of government...
...Information Agency...
...And as for the American people, the Administration had already acknowledged that it was ready and willing to lie to them whenever it served its purposes...
...Nicaragua Today was turned down because the USIA review panel felt it left the impression that "the United States has been the aggressor" in Nicaragua...
...Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome has afflicted more than 25,000 Americans, half of whom have already succumbed...
...Comedian Sam Kinison was in the middle of his routine when the NBC censors zapped him for thirteen seconds...
...Yet the prospects for retarding the spread of the disease or curing it remain bleak...
...What matter that the official version varied from briefing to briefing, that Senators emerged from the same meeting with diametrically opposed versions of what had happened in Iceland, that newspaper headlines contradicted themselves from edition to edition...
...We've heard a few feeble mutterings to the effect that the President may yet agree to genuine disarmament "to secure his place in hisComment tory...
...It also criticizes the Administration for poorly handling the program to develop a vaccine...
...aggresssion against Nicaragua...
...COMMENT A Place in History No official propaganda campaign in recent memory can match—for sheer intensity, blatant deceptiveness, or apparent success—the Reagan Administration's whirlwind effort to disguise what happened when the President met Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik...
...Government is too concerned with pleasing industrial leaders to protect the public interest...
...By his own admission, he was hired to run guns for the contras...
...Public outrage was barely perceptible, and the Administration now seems emboldened...
...It's hard to imagine that the same nitwits are still on the job after more than forty years, but someone has been engaging in high-handed ideological censorship at the U.S...
...But no one is forcing them to send their kids to the public schools, and no one is forcing any adults, who have had a chance to form their own opinions, to read books they don't wish to read...
...There is no escaping the essential fact that the Strategic Defense Initiative is a fairy-tale defense system, as E.P...
...What ever happened to the right of privacy, to basic freedom of association in this country?' —Philip Buechler, a director in the State Department's Nicaraguan Humanitarian Assistance Office, when asked why his card was carried by the pilot of the C-I23K arms-supply flight downed in Nicaragua...
...The native of Marinette, Wisconsin, whose plane was shot down over Nicaragua, was no soldier of fortune...
...Kaiser serves two million people, who must be holding their breath lest they sustain an illness or injury while the labor dispute is under way...
...There was a time when America prided itself on its neighborliness, its compassion...
...More seriously, commentators have noted the chaos that will descend on the nation's school systems if the ruling is upheld by higher courts and followed to its logical conclusion...
...we have, after all, had lots of arms-control agreements, though none of them have diminished the arms race...
...The anguish of people who hold strong beliefs and wish to instill them in their offspring without interference is real...
...dramatic progress that was made in Iceland...
...Thompson is right about the radical changes we are about to witness in the traditional Atlantic Alliance, much of the world is ready to do its part to reverse the mad rush toward global annihilation...
...There's something else at work here, something uglier, meaner...
...But Ronald Reagan's place in history is not at issue...
...What's more, "if there's a wisdom Comment tooth that would be best out, we leave it in there...
...They've taken the pot, there is no more pot," Kinison said during his not-ready-for-prime-time act...
...We heard Secretary of State Shultz declare his deep disappointment...
...Historic gains were achieved...
...petroleum industry...
...The wartime film censors at the Office of War Information felt the movie didn't deliver its anti-Nazi message with sufficient punch...
...We saw Reagan and Gorbachev, grim and gloomy, stalk out of their final session...
...When Congress failed to pass a spending bill in time and the Government was forced to furlough all of its "nonessential" employees for half a day, the Defense Department kept all of its 1,087,893 workers on the job...
...And that's homophobia of a particularly virulent strain...
...To be sure, a minor arms-control agreement may be reached here or there in the months to come...
...No Ounce of Cure When more than 9,000 workers at the Kaiser health-maintenance organization went on strike in October, they brought into focus the huge changes that health-maintenance organizations (HMOs) have wrought in our medical system...
...I'm guilty of everything they've charged," he admitted...
...They didn't consider his drug references negative enough," says "Saurday Night Live" producer Lome Michaels...
...Thompson notes elsewhere in this issue, and a genuine first-strike weapon...
...Regardless of what anybody says, this is Vietnam.' —Senator David F. Durenberger, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, referring to U.S...
...For one thing, if any parent can object to any book, there will be no books for a school to use as a common curriculum...
...He did his work neither for ideology nor battle lust...
...What's more, the Reagan people deem any Government program unrelated to the Pentagon as unnecessary, draining, or un-American...
...If the politicians don't give a damn, why should I?" he asked...
...And just as the Justice Department was trying to explain that Meese didn't mean what he seemed to be saying, the Attorney General showed his devotion to privacy rights: He urged businesses to combat drug abuse by spying on employees in locker rooms, parking lots, and nearby bars...
...This, above all else, the First Amendment forbids...
...Fed up, she sought a private physician who diagnosed her condition as precancerous...
...by word and deed, Gorbachev has left little doubt since acceding to power that he places highest priority on conserving the Soviet resources now squandered on weapons competition with the United States...
...He said that if the United States were to launch its MX missiles, they were just as likely to land in New York City as in Moscow...
...Hasenfus, however, at least had the decency to own up to his involvement after the fact...
...The media are no help, either...
...Contrast Hasenfus's candor with the Reagan Administration's duplicity...
...For a few hours after the abrupt termination of the summit, it was possible to make out at least the general outline of what had taken place: The leaders of the two superpowers had walked right up to the edge of a breathtaking agreement encompassing a prompt end to all nuclear testing and a ten-year schedule for ridding the world of the scourge of nuclear weapons...
...The school board announced an immediate appeal, and much commentary has ensued, a good deal of it ridiculing the Tennesseeans for finding witchcraft, sun worship, satanism (and, of course, vegetarianism) hidden in the lunch boxes of Dick, Jane, and Spot...
...In a recent speech at Tulane University, he ridiculed the notion that the Supreme Court's ruling on school desegregation—the landmark 1954 case of Brown v. Board of Education—is "the supreme law of the land...
...Kinison's crack wasn't appreciated by the censors...
...According to a recent House subcommittee study, however, oil and gas companies that operate on public lands may be underpaying royalties to the Interior Department to the tune of $1 billion a year...
...Clearly the Soviets were ready and willing to make extraordinary concessions...
...The important thing was to put out the word that all is well...
...The proximate purpose last summer was to deceive Muammar Gadhaii...
...If you give us back the pot, we'll forget about the crack...
...It was on a cold December evening in 1982, and we were sitting in a tavern down the block from The Progressive's offices...
...Maybe it's none of anybody's business...
...This scandal has been running for several years now, but instead of halting the highway and byway robbery, the Interior Department disputes the facts of the oil industry's thievery...
...These adages would merely be cause for snickering at world-class dumbness, except that they emanated from the chief law-enforcement officer of the United States...
...He told the American Bar Association that "the Bill of Rights was designed to apply only to the national Government...
...Several dozen nations have agreed that such materials, if certified as educational by the originating countries, will be admitted without payment of import duties...
...The story concerned an engineer who helped design the guidance system for the MX missile...
...Doctors are turning up increasing evidence that the drive to slash costs is degrading HMO medical care, and they fear that its quality may decline further as HMOs continue to penetrate the health market and compete more with one another," a recent article in The Wall Street Journal noted...
...Fortunately, a Federal district court in Los Angeles has just dealt the censors a devastating blow...
...It must get itself out of the business of evaluating films for us—or for the rest of the world...
...The Meanness Among Us We are living in a moment of moral smallness, a curdling of generosity, a collapse of idealism," writes Irving Howe in the latest issue of Dissent...
...When "Saturday Night Live" aired on October 18, it wasn't as lively as the actors had intended...
...That's contradictory...
...Instead of reimbursing workers for medical treatment at facilities of their choosing, companies enlist their employees in a particular HMO at a group rate, and the employees are covered for treatment only at that HMO...
...Obviously, that is a consequence to be avoided at all costs...
...We'll give him fillings instead of crowns when crowns are needed...
...Despite piles of evidence, the unblushing Administration has denied any connection whatsoever to Hasenfus...
...he was as indifferent to evil as a desk top, even as he played his part...
...USIA is appealing the decision, but clearly it must do something else...
...Closed-Book Policy Cheap shots against the fundamentalist Christians of east Tennessee are cheaper than usual these days...
...only that the moral styles, the tones of speech and qualities of symbol which this Administration and its journalistic and intellectual allies encourage are pinched and narrow-spirited and sometimes downright mean...
...It's their problem" or "It serves them right," are common sentiments in the straight community...
...No such luck...
...But the great breakthrough that fleet-ingly seemed possible at Reykjavik is shelved at least for as long as the United States insists on Star Wars, and perhaps forever...
...Parents who want to shield their children from exposure to anything that smacks of "the views of a feminist, a humanist, a pacifist, an anti-Christian, a vegetarian, or an advocate of a 'one-world government'" are easy targets, especially since the parents in question found these vile views in a series of reading texts that include The Wizard of Oz and The Diary of Anne Frank...
...Censors Sent Reeling Film legend has it that Casablanca, the Humphrey Bogart/Ingrid Bergman classic that appears on most lists of the ten best films ever made, came within a sprocket of being withheld from public distribution...
...It can be understood and regarded with sympathy...
...With profound satisfaction, the Administration points to Reagan's high post-Reykjavik ratings in the public-opinion polls...
...And the media, after having been horn-swoggled in public, twitted about the Administration's credibility...
...Clearly, too, Reagan saw an opportunity to reach a significant agreement—if only the Soviets, in their anxiety to come to terms, would let the United States keep its Star Wars ace up its sleeve...
...Since most of the AIDS victims have been gay, the heterosexual majority in the society has been able to avoid confronting the disease...
...The media prefer to disseminate the Administration's lies undetected...
...Live or Dead...
...At first, the Hasenfus affair seemed to offer an opportunity to put the brakes to U.S...
...involvement in Nicaragua...
...You can't get any more pot...
...The parents won the first round in their fight to prevent the public schools of Hawkins County from requiring their children to read the texts when Federal District Judge Thomas Gray Hull ruled the kids could skip the classes in which they are used...
...That reality is what makes a mockery of all the happy talk emanating from the Reagan Administration...
...Meese's pronouncements are the latest chapter in his revised edition of the Constitution...
...Last year, he tried to ditch the Fourteenth Amendment when he announced that the Constitution does not protect citizens from repression by state governments...
...Because even the hint of a possibility of a genuine disarmament agreement was enough to bring out the forces of militarism and reaction in full cry...
...The policy at NBC now is that the only references to drugs must be negative...
...She eventually had a miscarriage she claims could have been prevented...
...The conversation with the man on the next stool turned, as they sometimes do, to the arms race...
...All is not well...
...Meese has a penchant for displaying his ignorance of matters constitutional...
...Royal Rip-Off The ways of the Reagan Administration are mysterious and wonderful to behold...
...But when the chips were down, Ronald Reagan could not bring himself to surrender the fantasy that has cheered his late years—the vision of Star Wars, the Strategic Defense Initiative that is supposed to render the United States invulnerable and, therefore, all-powerful...
...I don't mean to suggest that most ordinary Americans have become morally bad, of course not...
...Someone ought to be worrying about the right of these children to shop in the marketplace...
...Teachers will spend less time on education and more time figuring out which kids' parents want them in the classroom for science and out for reading—or both or neither or vice versa...
...He did it only for a paycheck...
...So much for Hasenfus...
...I was just doing a job," Hasenfus said...
...Thus, certification was denied to a film called In Our Own Backyards on grounds that it "carried an antinuclear message" and "implied that the U.S...
...Without such certification, the small companies that make most documentary films are effectively barred from export markets...
...A few days after his remarks were axed, Knight-Ridder News Service ran the following dispatch: "In cities across the nation, a sharp decrease in the availability of marijuana has sent its prices soaring...
...Washington is considering breaking diplomatic relations with Managua before the end of the year, the Administration is sending late-model jet fighters to Honduras, and contra troops may soon be coming to our friendly shores for training...
...Under the Missile Tow CBS News recently aired a report that was, depending on your attitude, either haunting or humorous...
...Politics and morals held no sway for him...
...Health has become a commodity, not a right, in our society...
...Thousand of films are certified by the USIA each year...
...The engineer's charge seemed plausible, and indeed we'd heard a similar one before...
...The report blames the Reagan Administration for its "woefully inadequate" efforts at educating the public on ways to avoid contracting AIDS...
...Why forever...
...Nowhere is Howe's observation more telling than on the subject of AIDS...
...Hero of Our Times Eugene Hasenfus is a Twentieth Century hero...
...When the corporation that manufactures the commodity cannot reach an agreement with its workers, the commodity becomes unavailable...
...Over the last five years, HMOs have swept the country, meeting business demands for a less expensive way to provide employees with health coverage...
...One dentist who talked to the Journal doesn't send reminders to his HMO patients to get their teeth cleaned...
...And he declared that "you don't have many suspects who are innocent of a crime...
...But the Reagan Administration isn't the only negligent party...
...Faced with record budget deficits, the Government might be expected to ensure that revenues from public lands were being collected properly...
...No matter that Kinison was on target with his comments...
...He didn't really want an answer...
...Though the Right has mobilized to make sure that the hopes that were entombed at Reykjavik stay buried, the peace movement has barely mustered a response so far to Reagan's betrayal of the world's hopes...
...And then, almost instantly, the propaganda barrage began...
...The makers of these and several other films, represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights, took USIA to court, noting that the agency had routinely granted educational certification to films defending industry against pollution charges or urging women to "submit" to their husbands...
...From the Ashes...
...Isn't it about time for Americans to start saying No...
...Some of the sympathy, and the weight of the law, lies with the tradition that our society—including our public schools—is a free marketplace of ideas...
...But today, old-fashioned concern is simply old-fashioned, and compassion fades even to the cemetery...
...Neither in political nor in strategic terms could Gorbachev go home to Moscow with an agreement of the kind Reagan sought...
...Edwin Meese must have slept through constitutional law, and if he were to take the course again today, he'd certainly fail...
...Seems Kinison had offended corporate policy on covering the drug problem, the media's latest hobby horse...
...The Reagan Administration's failings are not surprising, since it has put a premium on social callousness...
...The missiles, he laughed, would never be able to hit their assigned targets...
...If E.P...
...How can I say I wasn't carrying small arms and munitions to their resistance...
...You won't hear about it on NBC...
...The case arose because USIA is charged with granting "certificates of educational character" to films under a 1949 agreement designed to promote the international flow of cultural and educational materials...
...Future generations, if we are fortunate enough to have future generations, may look back on that first weekend in October 1986 as the last occasion when there was a real chance to end the lunacy of the nuclear arms race...
...For weeks after the summit meeting, television news and talk shows were cluttered with Administration shills, not least among them the President himself, giving their upbeat assessments and holding out cheery intimations of agreements to come...
...He seemed to know quite a bit, and eventually he said he had contributed to the study of a plan for deploying MX missiles on a system of railroad tracks...
...their coverage dwells on one question: How quickly is the disease spreading to heterosexuals...
...But that was the one concession Gorbachev could not and would not make—for precisely the reason that Reagan clung to it so tenaciously...
...What Law...
...The Journal story cited some harrowing examples: a pregnant woman began bleeding, and her HMO doctor refused to examine her...
...Beginning in 1990, we will lose as many Americans each year to AIDS as we lost in the entire Vietnam war," warns Dr...
...As Elizabeth Drew observed in The New Yorker, "No one is better than Reagan at putting a positive gloss on things, and he and his aides, after overcoming their obvious shock and disappointment—which was there for the world to see on television—at the failure of the summit, have gone into overdrive in trying to paint the meeting as a great success...
...The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, on the other hand, found that 21,861 of its 21,911 employees—99.8 per cent—were nonessential...
...Members of Congress dutifully trooped to the White House to be briefed, and reporters were weighed down with off-the-record, not-for-attribution, deep-background-only analyses...
...Since the HMO is paid up front rather than for services rendered, it has a great incentive to cut corners on treatment: The less expensive the treatment, the more profit for the company...
...In October, it announced it will reduce rents on oil and gas leases—to "aid the struggling U.S...
...Modern medicine, courtesy of the private sector...
...Frank Press, president of the National Academy of Sciences, which recently issued a major report on the fatal disease...
...But the Reagan Administration, unlike its predecessors, has been applying political standards to determine what is educational...
...We felt the first rumblings of protest from millions of people, in this country and abroad, who had begun to hope for relief from the threat of annihilation that has hung over the planet for the last four decades...
...It's as if AIDS were not a concern until sizable numbers of heterosexuals contracted it and died from it...
Vol. 50 • December 1986 • No. 12
