COMMENT
Comment Oh, What a Lovely War President Reagan, who declared victory in the "war on drugs" only a few months ago, now calls narcotics "the foremost concern in our country." Vice President Bush,...
...Governor Michael S. Dukakis, filching a line that the Reverend Jesse Jackson has been using since the first Presidential primaries, proclaims that "the great threat to our nation is not the Nicaraguan government but the avalanche of drugs pouring into our country...
...Government averts its eyes...
...One of those real issues is the social pathology that renders so many Americans—and especially so many young people—vulnerable to the lure of mind-altering drugs...
...Let's impose stiffer penalties...
...The atomization of communities, the purposeless drift of individual lives, the impulse toward thrill-seeking and artificially induced excitement that accompanies a consumption-oriented lifestyle—these are problems that are hardly likely to be addressed, let alone solved, in an election campaign...
...Workers don't have rights...
...Experts on the drug trade generally agree that current interdiction efforts block distribution of about 10 per cent of the narcotics intended for ths U.S...
...In 1985, when one of its subsidiaries lost a Defense Department contract, the company not only declined to make severance payments to 3,000 workers who stayed on with the new contractor but also fought off a workers' lawsuit over that decision...
...But du Pont no longer finds the business of death as profitable as it once did...
...Got a problem...
...Still, the media and the U.S...
...Du Pont says its contract with the DOE calls for the Government to pay all its normal business expenses, including salaries and benefits for employees...
...Asked about the case, Felder says that was "different" because it was a subsidiary...
...The Underwear Flap When police and aldermen seized from the art school at the Art Institute of Chicago a student's painting depicting the late Mayor Harold Washington in frilly feminine underwear, they stirred up a controversy that seems to pit racial equality against First Amendment rights...
...The state of Virginia made a mistake with Carrie Buck—doubtless one of many mistakes among the 20,000 cases...
...Streeter and other Chicago aldermen have made the issue of racism a central focus of the controversy...
...What's more, there is Vivian Buck, Carrie's supposedly imbecilic daughter...
...Harvard scientist Stephen Jay Gould, however, tracked down her school records for 1930 to 1932, the year she died at age eight...
...In the meantime, though, there is something we can do when politicians ask us to join their inane crusade...
...Serious consideration of these issues still waits to be put on the public agenda...
...Renamo—the darling of such American politicians as Senators Jesse Helms and Robert Dole and Representative Jack Kemp—has massacred 100,000 people...
...Speaking on the eve of a White House conference on a drug-free America last February, President Reagan called the war on drugs 'an untold American success story' and said the use of illegal drugs 'has already gone out of style in the United States.' 'The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.' Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1927 Comment Sterile Technique Iowa recently joined the ranks of states where judges may order the involuntary sterilization of mentally retarded adults...
...Before the painting was forcibly removed, the City Council passed a resolution threatening to cut off the Art Institute's funds...
...Writing for the majority, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes ruled, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough...
...The Department of Energy (DOE) will continue to get all the bomb material it wants...
...The Administration has quietly diluted the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and stealthily stacked the National Labor Relations Board...
...Plant-closing legislation doesn't address the fundamental problem of capital flight—the unhampered ability of corporations to take wing any time they feel like it, throwing thousands of employees out of work and devastating whole communities...
...The Mirecki case is reminiscent of an incident at Parris Island in 1956, when a Marine Corps drill sergeant led six young recruits to their deaths on a nighttime punishment march through a swamp...
...She was placed on the honor roll in April 1931...
...Harold Washington, who knew better than to try to gag his critics, would have agreed...
...One instructor allegedly held Mirecki's head under water while other recruits were ordered to sing "The Star Spangled Banner" to cover his screams...
...Not much has changed since...
...Most advanced industrial nations long ago granted this minimal comfort to workers who are about to lose their jobs...
...between the military standards of the civilian world and the radical, violent mores of the Marine Corps...
...Every cartoonist and caricaturist in America had better watch out for Chicago's aldermanic vigilante squad...
...It is the only decent thing to do...
...What's more, it is the perfect all-purpose crusade, providing an opportunity to engage in tough talk against foreign adversaries, spout empty rhetoric about the sanctity of the American family, and display deep devotion to the preservation of law and order...
...But this is Mozambique...
...In 1927, Buck's case went to the U.S...
...It is a severance of du Pont employment," says company spokesman James Felder, "so the employees are entitled to severance pay...
...media routinely overplay human-rights violations by leftists while underplaying such violations by anticommunists...
...The cause of equality is never advanced by totalitarian means...
...The gesture seems less odd when one learns that du Pont intends to send the bill for its generosity—$75 million—to the American taxpayer...
...All it seeks is to provide a little warning before the harsh blows fall...
...Not to worry, though...
...Who could ask for anything more...
...they can't win it, but they won't have to take the rap for losing it...
...He reports they show "a perfectly normal, quite average student, neither particularly outstanding nor much troubled...
...It's easier, safer, and politically far more profitable to talk about drugs than to talk about the enormous sums squandered on the military, the damage inflicted by U.S...
...And, above all, let's not face up to the real issues that make the traffic in narcotics a genuine cause of grave concern...
...Alderman Allan Streeter, who played a leading role in the removal of the painting, made it clear on which side of the fence he stands: "We will not tolerate that picture hanging on the wall, Constitution or no Constitution," he told the press...
...Just as hanging the painting of Chicago's late black mayor is intolerable because it is "insensitive to blacks," Streeter says, a similar depiction of Ronald Reagan would be "insensitive to whites...
...intervention around the world, the loss of industrial jobs, the decay of the urban infrastructure, the crisis in U.S...
...Mirecki's instructors wanted to "teach him a lesson" by brutalizing him...
...It is not the same as the corporation itself...
...The government of Mozambique is left-leaning...
...The war on drugs has already joined the war on terrorism as an all-around rationale for violating due process at home and meddling in other nations' affairs...
...There is a higher moral law...
...From neighborhood pushers to international drug tycoons, the participants in this sordid trade would be stripped of their easy money and driven into other pursuits...
...Government officials and the mainstream media if leftist guerrillas were engaged in similar atrocities: The American public would be feasting on the story at every meal, and the U.S...
...Another real issue is the economic cost of the narcotics trade—from local property theft that sustains costly drug habits to the rising impact of international drug trafficking on the U.S...
...Government would be marshaling an array of military and clandestine forces to wipe out the guerrillas...
...In 1980, Dr...
...The decriminalization of narcotics and their legal availability would instantly take the profit out of this incredibly lucrative business, though it would not address the more difficult question of addiction...
...Silent Massacre Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, authors of the cover story in last month's issue of The Progressive, argue that the U.S...
...For politicians, the war on drugs is the ideal issue...
...Scholars and reporters descended to interview her...
...The five major advertisers on television sportscasts in the United States last year were Anheuser-Busch ($96.1 million), General Motors ($95.1 million), Philip Morris ($89.4 million), Ford Motor Company ($45.5 million), and the U.S...
...Government have scarcely made an issue of what is perhaps the most serious human-rights case in the world...
...But in the small, calcified minds of the Reagan Administration, even this common courtesy would jeopardize the sanctity of free enterprise...
...The police and officials at the art school use the familiar law-and-order claim that leaving the painting on display might "incite a riot...
...And the violence that inevitably accompanies any unlawful but profitable enterprise would come to an end...
...That diagnosis was made by a social worker when the child was six months old...
...The South Carolina facility produces plutonium and tritium for U.S...
...And it's comforting to invoke old and familiar solutions—even when there's no reason to imagine they might work...
...companies do...
...The state law in Washington epitomized the movement's goal: to prevent procreation by the "feeble-minded, insane, epileptic, habitual criminals, moral degenerates, and sexual perverts...
...All of which makes du Pont's announcement that it intends to dole out severance pay to 8,500 employees who aren't being severed seem a bit—well-odd...
...After society gets used to the idea of sterilizing one group deemed defective, the zealots will push on to another...
...balance of payments...
...This relatively limited power is a far cry, of course, from that wielded by states during the 1930s heyday of the American eugenics movement, when thirty-three states allowed the forced sterilization of "undesirables...
...But one thing leads to another...
...There is no other way to interpret Ronald Reagan's decision to veto the trade bill simply because it requires companies to provide sixty days' notice of plant closings...
...Here there is, in fact, a relatively simple solution and one that is beginning to receive some attention, though not from the Presidential candidates...
...Harvey Grossman, legal director of the ACLU, offers a better assessment...
...It is worth remembering, then, that the eugenics movement—which was eventually responsible for the legal maiming of more than 20,000 Americans-achieved its height of respectability by way of a white woman named Carrie Buck sterilized by the state of Virginia...
...quits the Savannah River Plant next year, there will be no plant closing...
...According to the National Law Journal, that makes ten states where high-level courts have held since 1980 that their judges have the authority to grant guardiarjs' requests for the sterilization of mentally retarded wards...
...In case you're wondering whether du Pont is always so solicitous, the answer is no...
...Nowhere is their point more appallingly clear than in the case of Mozambique...
...Many may believe that no state, in this day and age, would go so far...
...in fact, let's talk about capital punishment...
...Like the Parris Island case, Mirecki's death has prompted the military to undertake a "review of training procedures.*' But such tragic episodes are rooted neither in inadequate training guidelines nor in the pathological zeal of individual instructors...
...Oh, what a lovely war...
...Now, in its waning days, the Administration has given up all pretense and is assailing the rights of workers flat out...
...Let's throw our weight around in other countries that might harbor the illusion of national sovereignty—Panama, say...
...Synar, who chairs the panel of the Government Operations Committee with jurisdiction over DOE, points out, "There is no logical or equitable reason for the taxpayers to provide a $75 million windfall to workers who will not lose their jobs or benefits, solely to enhance du Pont's corporate image...
...the patients didn't die and they didn't recover...
...The drowning of Lee Mirecki illustrates once again the unbridgeable gap between militarism and human rights...
...Social workers there decided Buck was "feeble-minded," and so were her mother and her daughter, and so they sent her under the knife...
...agriculture, the grossly inequitable tax system, and other manifestations of injustice and exploitation in our society...
...market, and that an intensification of those efforts—including the use of the military and other draconian measures—might, // totally successful, block another 10 per cent...
...Just imagine what the reaction would be among U.S...
...The "answers" being offered by the candidates, on the other hand, would do little good and much harm...
...A Training 'Accident' The Navy has brought charges against five instructors involved in the drowning of Lee Mi-recki, a recruit who died last March when he was forced to stay in the water in a life-saving drill...
...And practically no one will miss a day of work...
...nuclear weapons, and du Pont has run it for the Government under a contract dating back to 1950...
...du Pont de Nemours & Co...
...Their living standards have dropped and their rights have gone unenforced...
...K. Ray Nelson, director of the Lynchburg hospital where Carrie Buck and more than 4,000 other Virginians were sterilized, found her alive and well and living in Charlottesville...
...How many will Iowa and the other nine states make...
...Representative Mike Synar, Oklahoma Democrat, is exercised over this, even if the DOE isn't...
...If the concept of forced sterilization weren't abhorrent in its own right, the Buck case eventually came to illustrate an insurmountable problem with its implementation: Somebody must decide whom to sterilize, and that somebody will make mistakes...
...Military mores are still at odds with concepts of individual freedom and dignity...
...The Iowa Supreme Court ruled in the case of a couple who want to prevent reproduction by their thirty-three-year-old daughter...
...And the assaults on civil liberties, here and abroad, would multiply...
...Herman and Chomsky explain why: The perpetrators are from the Right...
...In 1956, after the trial of the Parris Island drill instructor, a writer described the case as "the fundamental struggle...
...Since the massacres don't fit neatly into the reigning anticommunist ideology, the media ignore the story and the U.S...
...Supreme Court, which endorsed the Virginia action...
...Generous to a Fault When E.I...
...For the past decade it has been contending with Renamo, a virulently right-wing guerrilla movement sponsored by South Africa and supported financially by the American and Portuguese Right...
...State Department report...
...What they all noticed was that there was nothing feeble-minded about her...
...While racial tension in Chicago is an important concern, he says, "it is also legally and philosophically irrelevant as far as the seizure of the painting is concerned...
...The same military code encouraged the Navy to attempt an initial cover-up of the incident, but Mirecki's fellow recruits broke the code (and Navy regulations): They made anonymous calls to Mirecki's family and disclosed the truth about what the Navy had called an "accident...
...They were operating according to an age-old military code of punishment to instill obedience, literally drowning his individual voice...
...Upon returning the painting under pressure from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Council extracted a promise from the Institute that it would make a public apology, never hang the painting again, admit more black students, and hire more blacks...
...But until and unless they are addressed, the uproar over drugs will continue to be empty blather...
...Armed Forces ($44.1 million...
...Vice President Bush, perceiving a need to put some distance between himself and the President, says he'll take a harsher stand than Reagan against drug pushers...
...The Art Institute, cowed by such bullying, readily surrendered both its own and its students' constitutional rights to freedom of expression...
...This shocking figure comes not from some leftist support group but from a U.S...
...Two major corporations— Westinghouse and Martin-Marietta—are vying to step right in and take over...
...We can just say No...
...Physicians used to say that dermatology was the ideal medical specialty...
...A Plague on Workers Seven years of the Reagan Administration have brought a plague on American workers...
...The remaining 80 per cent would be unaffected, except for an inevitable and damaging rise in prices...
...Let's call out the Marines (and the other branches of the armed services...
...Less odd, but still ridiculous...
...And Congress, frantic lest it be left behind, goes into what Senator Christopher J. Dodd has aptly called a "feeding frenzy" of anti-drug amendments to various appropriations bills...
Vol. 52 • July 1988 • No. 7
