TILTING AT WINDMILLS
TILTING AT WINDMILLS How does the CIA pay off its informants in Morocco? According to a reliable source, who has served in our embassy in Rabat, it is with pornographic...
...I noticed that a disproportionate number were athletes, and I later learned from friends that nearly half of the starters on the football team were dead...
...The enormous profits that can be made in drugs are too tempting to resist...
...A friend of mine tells of recently being in a hospital because of an ailment that among other things left him unable to speak above a whisper...
...One of the better examples of pure chutzpah in recent time is the attempt by the U.S...
...Then the decline set in almost immediately and the bands began to disappear from the theaters...
...Hill workers are outraged that a hamburger with fries now costs $2.55 at the Capitol cafeterias...
...Some years ago someone out of a love for fancy bureaucratic terms bestowed upon them the title of custodian instead of janitor...
...For those on Capitol Hill, it's cafeteria prices and parking spaces...
...Not long ago he decided to do something that I bet few mayors do...
...Plus gourmet meals prepared to your liking...
...Maybe we should abolish tackle football and play the two-hand touch version instead...
...This corruption is no longer a matter of a few crooked cops but of the military, police, judicial, and banking systems of entire nations...
...Perhaps because I was smaller than the other boys in my neighborhood, I thought it was a much better game anyway...
...If the next rung on the ladder they seek to climb is the deputy's job in Nairobi, they want the slot to be there when their turn comes, regardless of whether it serves any practical purpose...
...We're noted for outstanding work in surgery, cardiology, trauma, and interior design," reads the headline on a current advertisement for the Washington Hospital Center...
...They got a refund of $77,604 from the telephone company...
...Personnel sent someone to help out temporarily...
...The State Department has established, according to The Washington Post, "a computerized data bank that will enable U.S...
...These perpetual slots are a major factor in overstaffing throughout the federal government and its military and diplomatic installations here and abroad...
...They liked this elevated status, and they proceeded to procure salary increases appropriate to their new station in life, to the point where today they make from $40,000 to $70,000...
...His whisper went unheard as the question was repeated several times and then the intercom went off...
...At the time I labeled this nothing more than a bizarre coincidence...
...What are we going to do about the explosion of illegal drugs and the addiction, corruption, and murder they breed...
...It just produces a lot of other problems on which we waste immense effort in futile attempts to solve...
...A voice on the intercom said "What is it...
...I remember my first week going to the Paramount to hear one of the best, the Woody Herman group that included Dave Tough, Bill Harris, Flip Phillips, and Chubby Jackson...
...But again, the question is, will the Times expand its inquiry into other regions of the bureaucracy...
...Perhaps at last they will display some zeal in discovering why the District has one of the most overstaffed and inefficient city governments in the nation...
...The trouble is that while you may be able to control the draperies, you can't seem to find a doctor or a nurse when you need one...
...Soon the job of deputy became a fixture...
...Now comes a study of former National Football League players that shows more than coincidence was involved...
...Doesn't the latter support the case for the exclusionary clubs that women and gays have rightly opposed...
...But what is good news for those wives may be bad news for the rest of us, for it is bound to lead to further slot perpetuation...
...For, if there is no longer a real need, there is a need in terms of the career plans of government employees...
...Why has there been little reporting of this matter...
...It won't stop the addiction, but it will stop the corruption and the murder...
...and from my era, the forties, 58.3...
...The slot becomes permanent, regardless of whether the real need for it diminishes or disappears entirely...
...Thick carpeting...
...As a result, drugs are a major source of corruption in well over a dozen countries in Asia and the Americas...
...But my exasperation with government doesn't mean I automatically favor privatization...
...Incredibly, the train crew has sued Willson for the mental anguish that its members have suffered because they ran over him...
...Spacious rooms that can be customized to accommodate your family or your business needs...
...Finally, The New York Times is on the custodians' case and some reform will probably take place...
...The few murders committed by addicts for money would stop with legalization because the drugs would then be cheap...
...We would be wiser to concentrate all that effort on helping addicts kick the habit and in convincing people that it is stupid to experiment with addictive substances...
...Among the items on her resume is that she is the mother of a "pre-school valedictorian...
...For at last they, too, are being hurt...
...Suppose it finally dawns on some official at State that if he can barely justify that deputy's job in Nairobi there is definitely no longer any excuse for the deputy to have a secretary whose title has been inflated to administrative assistant and whose slot is fast becoming as embedded in concrete as her boss's...
...Smithers found he liked the idea of having an aide...
...This reminded me of a similar episode in the 1940s, when the Big Bands, such as Artie Shaw's and Benny Goodman's, that I had liked so much, lost their popular appeal almost overnight...
...We have had some success in doing this with alcohol and tobacco in recent years...
...For those of you who can't decide which of your principles comes first, the Utne Reader of March-April 1988 offers this solution: "Ecofeminism Is an Idea Whose Time Has Come...
...I see hope even among them...
...What about all those fellows who have never been interested, like, say most of the staff of The Washington Post...
...When I read that Klaus Fuchs, the physicist who gave A-bomb secrets to the Russians, died recently at age 76, I thought of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg...
...In fact, almost all are committed by drug dealers motivated by greed...
...It is especially pronounced in the more glamorous posts in Europe...
...from the thirties, 64.2...
...For example, a few years ago Smithers at our Nairobi embassy may have been overworked for a brief period...
...Atlanta-to-Denver flight, Continental Airlines in January achieved a record of being late 100 percent of the time...
...Speaking of my high school classmates, one, Chuck Gardner, is now the mayor of Charleston...
...It is what happens when a job, having once been filled in the federal service, becomes a "slot" that other employees look forward to filling and plan their careers in terms of...
...But if the Corps did that, the general's wife might have to buy her crystal at a local department store...
...According to a reliable source, who has served in our embassy in Rabat, it is with pornographic video cassettes...
...What a tragedy it was that they were electrocuted for the same crime for which Fuchs got off with just ten years in prison...
...District of Columbia real estate assessments are going up by 13.5 percent at a time when inflation is only a third of that amount...
...The study arrived at this conclusion by assuming that Corps officials would charter a commercial aircraft the same size as a Corps plane, regardless of the number of passengers...
...Prohibition didn't work against alcohol...
...Legalize them...
...After a recent meeting with Dukakis, Jimmy Carter told reporters: "I think there's a great deal of compatibility between my basic attitude toward government and that of Governor Dukakis...
...Why then do we permit such advertising of alcohol and cigarettes...
...By the way, when you start thinking about legalization, you realize one thing you definitely would not allow would be advertising that made drugs seem glamorous...
...On its 4:05 p.m...
...Carter, for those too young to remember, was a conscientious manager without ideology or program...
...But if he tries to abolish the slot, he is now sure to hear indignant protests from an aroused spouses' lobby...
...He took a careful look at the city's phone bill...
...Why, then, should sailors in the U.S...
...In gaining approval for his wife's presence on these trips, the general certified that she was "absolutely essential to ensure that all activities are properly planned and coordinated...
...D id you see the television tape of the train running down and amputating the legs of Brian Willson, the peace activist, last fall...
...The Mercedes ad in Columbia Journalism Review I wrote about last month has been followed by a four-page ad in CJR's current issue for the new Lincoln Continental: "Once again, world-class luxury...
...When I arrived in New York to attend Columbia in January 1946, there were three theaters downtown—the Paramount, the Capitol, and the Strand—that regularly offered a big band as well as a feature movie...
...The District of Columbia ambulance service, for example, seems to specialize in getting lost while the injured expire on the sidewalks...
...As for parking, the East Front of the Capitol is marred by an ugly parking lot, but proposals to turn the lot into an attractive park are being vigorously resisted because the lot provides free parking for legislators and their aides...
...It wouldn't work against cigarettes...
...One night, seized by terrible pain, he urgently pushed the nurse's button on his bedside table...
...While I was attending the 40th reunion of my high school class a few years ago, there was a memorial service for the members of the class who had died...
...Army Corps of Engineers plane...
...In order to justify its planes, the Corps has spent $44,000 on a study that purports to show they are cheaper than commercial flights...
...The Post is now on the ambulance case and some reform appears to be underway...
...And in this era of concrete-hard artificial turf and 300-pound linemen, the situation promises to get a lot worse...
...it might have made just a bit more sense had the report compared the cost of flying per passenger on a Corps plane to the cost per passenger of tickets on a commercial airline...
...What exactly is slot perpetuation...
...They began dialing the numbers...
...And it appears that the increases will be greatest in the city's glitzier neighborhoods, where the affluent Post staff resides...
...This," one said, "may make Shay's Rebellion look like a day at the beach...
...And of course it is now beneath their dignity to clean the cafeteria floors more than once a week or to move furniture anytime...
...They found lines to a former mayor's home, to a suburban high-rise apartment, to schools that had been closed for years-110 lines that either weren't being used at all or certainly not for city business...
...There is a new trend toward luxury in today's hospitals...
...The latest example is its authorization of alcohol sales in nudist camps...
...We may have to establish another department, just to keep you abreast of those planes belonging to the Army Corps of Engineers...
...The aide liked the post...
...As for the murders, most are not committed by drug-crazed addicts in a desperate search for money for another fix...
...embassies and consulates to match job vacancies with the education and experience and language skills of the spouses of personnel being assigned to the post...
...The copy continues, "Fingertip-controlled draperies...
...Charles Peters...
...Yes, I know we'll still have addicts...
...The most recent development is a report in The Washington Post that "the wife of the Army's chief of engineers accompanied her husband to more than two dozen foreign countries during the last two years aboard a U.S...
...And UCLA has given official recognition to a lesbian sorority...
...Here in Washington we read headlines like "Area's Justice System Teeters Under Weight of Drug Cases...
...Private businesses can be even worse than the government...
...Albert Gore's endorsement before the Norfolk shipyard workers of the two new aircraft carriers he had sensibly voted against last April was a part of his determined campaign to pass Richard Gephardt in the race for leadership in ideological quick-changes...
...One way is to have the press itself suffer the consequences...
...While we're getting so little service, what issues have aroused our public employees...
...My own view is that, unless the tape in some way distorted the event, the engineer and any other members of the crew who were responsible should be charged with attempted murder...
...If the spouse happens to work in television, they can buy the Continental and the Mercedes...
...An advertisement for Redbook magazine depicts the ideal Redbook woman...
...And I detect quivering nostrils in my friend James Fallows, as he contemplates the fact that for the third straight year the IRS has claimed not to have received from him payments for which he has the canceled checks in his possession...
...It is our best hope with drugs...
...As we have tried to recognize with our Only in California Department, the Golden State maintains a special place on the cutting edge of social change...
...owners of ships registered under foreign flags to get our navy to escort them through the Persian Gulf...
...L ast month I read a sad story in The Washington Post about how bluegrass music has declined to the point where one of the better groups, The Johnson Mountain Boys, cannot get enough work to make a living...
...How do we get the press concerned about bureaucratic ineptitude...
...He and an aide found that the city was being billed for some 400 lines...
...By taking the money out of drugs, legalization could cure all this overnight...
...These hard-to-believe figures contrast dramatically with the generally improving life expectancy of the rest of us...
...Whether we really need that base in Naples becomes secondary to the preservation of slots for all the officers and spouses who have dreamed of spending their weekends on Capri...
...It will be an eternal blot on Dwight Eisenhower's name that he didn't spare the Rosenbergs by commuting their sentence to life imprisonment, which, by the way, is the sentence I think Fuchs should have received...
...One reason is that some bureaucrat decreed that crews should receive only two hours training in the geography of the city...
...On one trip to Belgium that congressional investigators managed to procure records of, it seems that her "activities" consisted solely of visiting friends and shopping for crystal...
...They don't understand that people die from bureaucratic bungling...
...The average age at death of a group of players from the twenties was 77.4...
...I think that, by placing himself on the tracks, Willson chose a foolish way to protest an arms shipment, but I suspect the members of the crew decided to punish him for that foolishness themselves, rather than leaving it to the law...
...Because journalists get to park there, too...
...Such registry—usually under the Panamanian, Bahamian, or Liberian flag—is done to avoid hiring American crews, paying American taxes, and having to follow American safety regulations...
...As hemlines have been going up, cosmetic surgeons, ever alert to the opportunity to put another Jaguar in their garages, have been offering everything from a simple defatting of the knee for around $500 to "a complete lower-body sculpting," including calves, thighs and buttocks, for $5,000...
...There is good news for the wives of foreign service officers...
...But if it is true that Gore and Gephardt change their ideas a bit too quickly, the problem with Michael Dukakis may be that he has no ideas to change...
...The last one I can remember seeing was Lionel Hampton at the Strand in early 1947...
...One reason reporters don't cover bureaucracy is that they think it's boring...
...Remove the money motive and those murders stop...
...But we'll be a lot better off than we are now...
...Designer wallcovering...
...This helps explain why bureaucratic empirebuilding serves the interest of both the supervisor, which is well-known, and of the subordinates, which is not widely understood...
...He buzzed once more, the whole routine was gone through once more, only this time before the intercom went dead, he heard the voice at the other end say, "Who does that guy think he's kidding...
...I have always thought liberals were foolish to protest the Rosenbergs' conviction—they were clearly guilty—but profoundly right to protest the death penalty...
...For a long time the custodians of New York City's schools have been robbing the public...
...And it will never work against drugs...
...The end of these bands was a great loss for American culture, and I hope the same doesn't happen to bluegrass...
...Navy risk their lives to protect these ships...
...If you wonder how journalists can afford such things, you should know that those who work for the major papers and magazines can, with a reasonably wellemployed spouse, enjoy a household income of more than $100,000...
...It featured Illinois Jacquet on the tenor saxophone and the most exciting version I ever heard of "Flying Home...
...Guess what's the latest craze in plastic surgery: knee jobs...
...There seemed to be absolutely no effort to brake the engine even though the crew must have seen Willson on the tracks and the frantic waving of spectators warning of the danger...
...But Fallows, like me, has been a critic of the bureaucracy in the past...
...The important next step is for the Post to expand that beachhead into appraisal of other parts of the bureaucracy...
...Certainly my own interest in the subject has been heightened by Postal Service delays in delivering The Washington Monthly to our subscribers...
Vol. 20 • April 1988 • No. 3
