Comment
Comment Out of Control Terrible disasters often bring out the best in people, sending individuals soaring to unsuspected heights of heroism, creative intelligence, and selfless devotion to the...
...The next accident may occur abroad or in this country, at a gleaming new facility like the Shoreham plant waiting to come on line on crowded Long Island or at one of the 100 or so aging reactors now falling into decav around the country...
...We nodded in sympathy when depressed English professors complained that it wasn't their job to teach basic literacy...
...The Sentry Speaks Plowshares activists—the demonstrators who hammer on nuclear missiles and otherwise protest the war machine—can take pride in their success...
...It's nice to be appreciated...
...Truth in Packaging Two-and-a-half years before the 1988 Presidential election may be too soon for bona-fide campaigning...
...It was able, with barely any effort, to stir up fits of approval for its violent act...
...Fortunately, though, the First Amendment, applied to Virginia through the Fourteenth, lets Meese's minions indoctrinate forty young Americans...
...On April 15, you can deduct every dime...
...That was in 1983...
...Supporting a President who will "do something"—however brutal, ineffective, or counterproductive—against terrorism becomes a way of vicariously affirming some control over one's life and one's identity...
...What is dead certain is that there will be another great nuclear accident—and perhaps many more—before this lethal technology is laid to rest...
...In California, LaRouche candidates are collecting signatures for a referendum to quarantine AIDS carriers...
...The Reagan Administration immediately seized on the opportunity to engage in crude and laborious Cold War exertions...
...In most other countries, nuclear programs have faltered, especially in America, where the near-disaster at Three Mile Island was a gift for the antinuclear lobby...
...In the last twelve days of December, it committed 100 per cent...
...Your corporation can play, too...
...it takes only a signal from the President to bring it out into the open...
...at Three Mile Island, it was falsified—to the point where even the governor of Pennsylvania complained that he couldn't trust Federal officials to tell him the truth...
...Almost from birth, Americans are taught— in the schools, churches, movie houses, on television screens and radios—that ours is the greatest, most righteous country in the world...
...Every other source of empowerment—in the community, the workplace, the marketplace, the voting booth—seems stripped away, leaving Americans to clutch at the red, white, and blue straw...
...Campaign America...
...Supreme Court decisions with the actual intent of the framers," paying particular attention to the Fourteenth Amendment...
...Everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm...
...authorities dealt with their own Three Mile Island disaster seven years ago...
...The effect on governments, as a rule, is quite the opposite: Public policymakers and their bureaucracies tend to react to great calamities with timidity, stupidity, and reckless indifference to the greateftgood...
...They're doing everything they can to neutralize the Office of Investigations...
...times contradictory, and wholly insufficient in light of the natural anxiety felt by the Soviet people, their European and Asian neighbors, and the entire world...
...But if the Soviet government deserves condemnation for its pathological and obsessive secrecy, the Government of the United States did not exactly cover itself with glory in responding to Chernobyl...
...and in West Germany, where the Greens are too numerous for the big parties to ignore...
...I ventilated that thought recently," Buckley mused in his National Review, "and have got angry denunciations from the people one would least expect, namely gays...
...In March, a helicopter piloted by a foreign employee of the CIA was shot down by Nicaraguan soldiers near the Honduran border...
...response particularly obnoxious was the fact the Soviet authorities dealt with Chernobyl in no worse a fashion than U.S...
...The nuclear watchdog has not even a bark...
...Some questions would be better discussed in a closed meeting than an open one because it stifles a full and frank discussion...
...But unfortunately that only happens once in a blue moon, once a year, once every six months.' CNN had its largest audience ever on the day of the attack...
...For example, a buying center in Georgia placed three-fourths of its whirlwind orders as "un-definitized contractual actions...
...The victims of the next disaster, like those at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, will have had no voice in determining whether this inherently threatening technology is worth the risk...
...Give as much as you like...
...The Interstate Commerce Commission, for instance, which had held twenty-three meetings in 1979, convened publicly only once in 1981 and chose to forgo meetings entirely in 1983...
...AIDS has increased the exposure of the gay community as human beings," says Jeffrey Levi, political director of the National Gay Lesbian Task Force...
...Consider the Air Force...
...Instead of sharing intelligence data that might have helped relieve tension, it peddled rumors and fueled fear...
...and on the buttocks" to safeguard common needle users and homosexuals, Buckley proposed in a New York Times oped piece...
...The Attorney General contends that the framers never intended for the Bill of Rights to apply to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment...
...Anti-Arab sentiment will probably recede, if and when the Middle East crisis is resolved...
...even then, the Air Force usually obligates only half the maximum amount...
...And it wasn't a member of the Politburo but the chairman of the U.S...
...They all serve as easy enemies for whatever Administration comes to power...
...Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger used to be known as Cap the Knife, but that was when he was chopping away at domestic welfare programs...
...to revive a favorite practice of the Right: branding undesirable minorities...
...then it insisted that the chopper was just on an "intelligence mission...
...Those attending the week-long seminar will "compare U.S...
...Secretary of Education William J. Bennett, proclaims that college students don't know right from wrong and it's up to their universitites to tell them...
...Cross your fingers...
...Black Americans may have recognized the racist appeal of much of the rhetoric—and action—against Libya, for among U.S...
...Others are choosing not to meet at all...
...Congress has prohibited the CIA from providing the contras with any military guidance, so the helicopter incident presented the Administration with a little problem...
...It's good for ratings/ Turner said...
...Partner in Crime Julian Greenspun just wanted to do his job...
...Sure enough, Northern Virginia Law School ("the first weekend law school in the United States") has invited forty students to the first Summer Program in Conservative Law, cosponsored by Citizens for Reagan, the Fund for a Conservative Majority, and the Center for National Labor Policy...
...When our trigger-happy President talks of also bombing Syria and Iran, he is simply affirming the theory that he can get away with more brutality against members of the Islamic world than against other potential targets...
...Whatever Administration finds itself in power at the time will then have to spin the globe for another foreign devil to fill the blank in the American psyche...
...Teach them "moral values...
...Another CIA employee, also a foreign national, was aboard but apparently escaped uninjured...
...Watergate hasn't taught these people a thing," he explained...
...He protested to the NRC: "While the power companies, which are not charitable institutions, have their lawyers to represent their interests, the public has no one to represent theirs in this area of such vital concern to them, except the NRC, the Department of Justice, and the United States Attorneys' Offices...
...Representative Richard Gephardt of Missouri has something called the "Effective Government Committee...
...And "Americans for the National Interest" turns out to be Americans for Bruce Babbitt, the governor of Arizona...
...Point them to "the good things, the noble things, the exemplary things...
...Just Snooping While Congress debates aid to the contras, the CIA takes to the front lines...
...Now the nation's highest education official, U.S...
...Back to Basics It was bad enough when they told us college students couldn't read and write...
...Still, homophobia, the most stubborn of prejudices, thrives in America...
...It is fashionable these days to be anti-Arab, and portraying Qaddafi as the devil incarnate comes almost as second nature to the media...
...It would be nice if the United States would bomb someone every day/ Ted Turner, the owner of Cable News Network, quipped after the bombing of Libya...
...Again, the Hot Iron Leave it to William F. Buckley Jr...
...Easy Enemies Nuke Qaddafi, read the banner at the Braves-Dodgers baseball game in Atlanta's Fulton County Stadium on April 19, five days after U.S...
...The "Committee for Freedom" wants freedom for evangelist Pat Robertson to tell us what to do...
...The Ukraine will be the first republic in the Soviet Union to have a commercial nuclear power plant for heat and power...
...U.S.A., U.S.A.," the students chanted at a University of Iowa rally supporting the bombing...
...And—best of all— the foundations don't have to tell where the money came from...
...Meeses to Pieces One is bad enough, but forty Ed Meese clones...
...Green-spun depended on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for referrals, but the NRC showed "reluctance, if not resistance" to developing criminal cases, he observed a few years ago...
...And so a demonology settles in...
...The "Fund for America's Future," for example, is really the fund for George Bush's future...
...That is, to get plenty of nuclear plants built and then to accumulate, year after year, a record of no deaths, no serious accidents, and no dispute that the result is cheaper energy...
...they all serve to shore up our narcissism...
...Democracy's a pain...
...The money was for spare parts, so the Air Force Logistics Command simply decided to buy some—a billion dollars' worth in the last twelve days of December...
...The order told buyers to "continue to operate within the constraints of law, directives, prudence, and bona-fide need rules," but it added that if this directive "constrained" buyers' ability to spend money, they could "pursue one-time waivers...
...Chernobyl confronted the West's nuclear apologists with a special problem: They had to depict the catastrophe as a peculiarly Soviet event to allay the fully justified apprehensions of the rest of the world...
...The heat from its exhaust system will be used in growing vegetables, fruit and mushrooms, fish and poultry farming, and irrigating fields with warm water.' —Soviet Life, February 1986 The Economist's glib political cliches notwithstanding, nuclear power is imposed on people, in the West no less than in places which need not worry about voters...
...The possibilities are endless...
...Ever sensitive, he waxed bewildered when the suggestion wasn't better received...
...The pilot was badly injured, reports Alfonso Chardy of the Philadelphia Inquirer, and might lose a leg...
...citizens surveyed by the polls, they were least supportive of the Libyan sortie...
...They will have exercised no option...
...It might, indeed, be argued that the Soviet performance was superior: At Chernobyl, information was withheld...
...Unpriced orders are supposed to be used only in emergencies...
...In an editorial headed "The Charm of Nuclear Power," The Economist of London declared in its issue of March 29: "The Russians, the Taiwanese, and the Chinese, who do not have voters to worry about, have pressed ahead with their nuclear power programs...
...ative candor, immediatefytffvfcfted to went by without any official aster, and it was only after extraordfi levels had been detected in Scandinai Kremlin acknowledged something was amiss, then, the information released was scanty, som...
...This is for Muammar's Mom, ran the inscription on a Sidewinder missile aboard the aircraft carrier America...
...These jolts of jingoism accompanying the U.S...
...What made the U.S...
...It filled the information void with vague and unsupported assertions that subsequently proved to be totally unfounded...
...Evidently, the straight community hasn't gotten to know gays and lesbians very well...
...And even on the heels of the recent American space fiascos, it was alleged that Soviet technology simply isn't up to snuff...
...An Unconstrained Billion Just because we haven't heard much lately about outrageous spending sprees in Washington (we are, after all, in the sixth year of an Administration that promised to balance the budget) doesn't mean spending sprees are extinct...
...Some 70 per cent to 80 per cent of the citizenry endorsed it, boosting Ronald Reagan's overall approval rating to record heights...
...With allies like these, who needs enemies...
...Now he's the last of the big spenders...
...The Soviet government) which had begun, under the leadershipof Mikh< Gorbachev, to build a welcome new iri&ge of rel...
...At almost every turn, the so-called "sunshine" law of 1976, which required Government agencies to conduct meetings in public, has been eclipsed...
...In the case of Libya, a newer, perhaps more pernicious, element may also be at work: racism against Arabs...
...For more than six years, he worked at the Justice Department prosecuting nuclear utility companies that were endangering public safety...
...The Reagan Administration reads the American mindset better than most previous Administrations...
...The more they get to know us, the more acceptance there is...
...A few more such missions might thin the CIA's ranks...
...Go Ronnie...
...Still, Greenspun was encouraged in 1982 because the NRC established an Office of Investigations in response to the outcry following the disaster at Three Mile Island...
...Streeter, writing in Security Management magazine, urges his colleagues to "devote as much planning and attention to the new peace movement's direct action activities as they would to any other subversive activity...
...Government operates massive uncontained nuclear facilities in South Carolina and the state of Washington...
...So says James Streeter, supervisor of security investigations at the General Dynamics Electric Boat Division in Groton, Connecticut...
...The "Campaign for Prosperity" provides for Jack Kemp's well-being...
...Fortunately, such barbaric measures don't seem to be gaining much support...
...But it's not too soon to raise money, and the method of choice is a committee wearing a cute disguise...
...While Buckley reaches for the hot iron, Lyndon LaRouche and his band of frenzied followers clamor for a roundup...
...Even as these words are written some ten days after the beginning of the Chernobyl accident, next to nothing is known about the cause of the disaster or its dimensions...
...They will be destroyed—perhaps along with their children and their children's children—by machinery that is beyond their control and by authorities who recognize no power but their own...
...According to a recent poll, only 11 per cent of the people are "very sympathetic" to gays and lesbians, and only 36 per cent say they should be allowed to teach elementary school...
...And it's certainly too soon for anyone to own up to being an actual candidate...
...This year, several "noncandidates" have added a new twist: They have foundations...
...Yet the case for nuclear power is as strong as it has ever been, and getting stronger by the day...
...By now, such PACs are standard devices to skirt the limits on giving and spending in Presidential campaigns...
...Comment Out of Control Terrible disasters often bring out the best in people, sending individuals soaring to unsuspected heights of heroism, creative intelligence, and selfless devotion to the well-being of others...
...In fact, however, the Western nuclear apologists were touting the Soviet system right up to the day when Chernobyl erupted, for they were trying, as usual, to persuade us that we were "falling behind the Russians...
...Leaders of this predominantly Hispanic city began working on plans today to donate hundreds of police-confiscated weapons to anticommunist rebels fighting Nicaragua's Sandinista government' —Reuters dispatch from Hialeah, Florida, April 23...
...It first tried to deny the helicopter had been hit...
...Call it Campaign Robert Dole...
...The "Republican Majority Committee" seeks a majority for Howard Baker...
...The Economist went on to say that "the nuclear industry has always known that there is only one way to prove to the public that nuclear power is cheap, safe, and environmentally benign...
...Greenspun plugged away until Comment last April, but finally resigned his post...
...Then we were told that Soviet plants are carelessly built because "human life is cheap over there"—an assertion the Russians have been known to make, with at least equal reason, about our society...
...Anyone who opposes us is, by virtue of that fact alone, not only suspect but downright evil...
...Draw the Blinds Let the sunshine in" is not a popular song in the Reagan Administration...
...Never mind that in the good old days children were allowed to judge for themselves the difference between right and wrong by about age seven—remember the "age of reason...
...It makes our business much more cumbersome than would otherwise be the case," complains Terry Calvani, head of the Federal Trade Commission...
...Bennett, by the way, hasn't bothered to explain who would decide what is good, noble, and exemplary, but we can guess...
...The damage inflicted by these actions, both in destruction of property and in embarrassment, has caused many facilities to make costly additions and adjustments to their existing security systems to prevent such incidents from recurring...
...in Britain, where the Sellafield waste treatment and reprocessing plant has sprung several much-publicized (if harmless) leaks...
...It was having trouble last fall getting the Government to release fiscal 1986 funds because too much old Air Force money was sitting around gathering dust...
...Nuclear Regulatory Commission who wished aloud that there were no such thing as freedom of the press...
...These proposals—evoking yellow armbands, pink triangles, concentration-camp numbers, and leper colonies—mark the nadir of anti-gay sentiment that feeds on the AIDS epidemic...
...His hope waned when the NRC formed an advisory panel to the Office—a panel that included attorneys for the atomic industry...
...asked one perfervid demonstrator at a rally in Ken-nesaw, Georgia, where French designer jeans and Spanish goods were tossed into a bonfire...
...bombers struck Libya...
...raid reveal and express the untidy psyche of the American people...
...When the Command told its buyers to get busy, one official assured nervous onlookers that the order "won't cause people to do dumb things...
...That means the Air Force promised to buy things at prices to be named later...
...This is the Meese Method of legal analysis...
...So they rushed into print and onto the airwaves with the news that the Russians had failed to encase their reactors in containment buildings— Comment until it transpired that the U.S...
...The devil of the moment is fungible...
...it doesn't matter, really, whether it is the Soviet Union or Castro's Cuba, the Ayatollah Khomeini or Muammar Qaddafi...
...He was wrong...
...To get around the law, some—including the Nuclear Regulatory Agency—are redefining the term "meeting" so they can conduct business in private...
...Who needs it...
...He wants to end Federal court protection of individual rights...
...Just so you won't be fooled when the direct-mail appeal arrives, the Center for a New Democracy is a tax-exempt front for Gary Hart, the Fund for an American Renaissance is Jack Kemp's, and American Horizons, Inc., is Bruce Babbitt's...
...The nuclear catastrophe tbat'occurred late in April at Chernobyl in the Soviet Ukraine was, unfortunately, no exception...
...Old-fashioned chauvinism is never far from the surface of consciousness...
...These are all political action committees (PACs), and two of the main contenders are out of step: Gary Hart actually calls his "Americans for Gary Hart," and Mario Cuomo hasn't got one...
...In the wake of Chernobyl, such cheery assurances seem indefensibly foolish, if not criminally insane—as absurd, in any event, as the Soviet claim, in the February 1986 issue of Soviet Life, that "the odds of a meltdown are one in 10,000 years," and that such plants as Chernobyl "have safe and reliable controls that are protected from any breakdown...
Vol. 50 • June 1986 • No. 6
