The Libertarian Editorials (Feb. 1980)

On December 12 the North Atlantic Treaty Organization authorized a five-billion dollar program to produce 572 long-range cruise and Pershing ballistic missiles, capable of striking Soviet targets from bases in Western Europe. The Soviets had launched the usual propaganda campaign against the weapons, but Soviet President Brezhnev also made the unusual offer “to unilaterally reduce the number of medium-range rockets stationed in the Western part of the USSR” if NATO would forego deployment of the new missiles. Even more significantly, the Soviets announced and began to carry out a unilateral withdrawal from East Germany of 20,000 troops and 1000 tanks—15 percent, albeit the bottom 15 percent, of their entire East German tank force. Some pundits (eg: the editors of the Los Angeles Times) claim that the Soviet eagerness to stop the NATO missiles proves that it would be a good idea to produce them. This does not follow, as we shall see.

NATO currently has some 7000 nuclear weapons available for use in a European war, twice the number possessed by the Soviet Union and its allies. Most of the NATO weapons are short-range bombs, missiles and artillery shells (and even a few land mines), meant for use against targets in Eastern Europe or Soviet forces on Western European soil. By contrast, most of the Soviet warheads are mounted on medium-range ballistic missiles based in the USSR itself. (The advantages to the Soviets of keeping these weapons out of reach of the East Germans, Poles, Czechs and Hungarians should be obvious.) But NATO also has “theater-nuclear forces”—weapons that can hit Soviet targets from European bases, or vice versa—of its own; about 1800 warheads to 2200 for the USSR, according to the London-based Institute for Strategic Studies.

What of the dread SS-20, the mobile, multiple-warhead missile whose deployment by the Soviets is deemed to require a response from NATO? Since 1977, the USSR has been replacing its SS-4 and SS-5 medium-range missiles with the SS-20. As Congressional defense analyst Fred Kaplan points out in the December 9, 1979 New York Times Magazine, “the feared SS-20 represents nothing fundamentally new . . . Europe as a general target is no more or less under the nuclear gun that it was two decades ago.” NATO expects that the Soviets will eventually have about 200 SS-20s, according to the Washington Post, and will respond by deploying 108 Pershing-2 ballistic missiles and 464 Tomahawk cruise missiles capable of striking the Soviet Union, and phasing out 1000 nuclear devices—including those land mines—which are not.

The NATO missiles, then, “would radically alter the strategic situation on the continent,” just as Brezhnev says. They would represent a fundamental shift away from a defensive nuclear strategy towards one based on attacking the Soviet Union, which would be very dangerous for the United States. For it seems impossible that American missiles—and the Pershings and Tomahawks would be both built and controlled by the US—could fall on Soviet soil without Soviet missiles falling on the United States. This strategy would also be costly even in peacetime. Besides prompting the Soviets to deploy even more medium-range missiles (as they have virtually promised to do), it could ruin the prospects for limiting theater-nuclear forces in SALT III (it is estimated that as many as 100 of the new missiles will be deployed so as to be “un-verifiable”). The expected effects on domestic European politics, and on the European countries’ relations with the Soviet Union (especially on West Germany’s Ostpolitik), lead some commentators to predict that the missiles will never be deployed. It is worth noting that while the member nations of NATO were unanimous in approving production of the missiles, they were less eager to commit themselves to deploying them. Over 90 percent of the total cost of the missile program, and all of the production and development costs, will be borne by the United States; by the time the deployment date rolls around in 1983 the European countries may have indeed backed out on the program, leaving the American taxpayer holding a five billion dollar bag.

Taking all this into consideration it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Carter administration should kill this program immediately; indeed, that it should start listening to those heretics who hold that NATO should be stripped of its nuclear capabilities, or even dissolved altogether. Unfortunately this does not seem very likely. With no Democratic or Republican candidate willing to speak ill of even the most lunatic “defense” scheme (excepting Jerry Brown, who’s so far out of the running that he can afford to indulge in sanity on occasion), our reelection-crazed President can hardly reverse himself on this issue. As Alan Wolfe, writing on these matters in The Nation, put it: “Europe’s future, and ours, is in the hands of men who are dangerously unable to see past the next election.”

—BB

Anger therapy

It looks as if, once again, doctors are trying to make the idea of shock therapy respectable. Articles in recent issues of Time, TV Guide, and U.S. News and World Report tell us that psychiatrists are claiming that, whatever the public saw in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, this “treatment” is effective, safe, and humane.

Effective? Most of us tend to assume that doctors know what they are doing. With electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT, as it is called, they don’t. Patients have been convulsed since 1938 at a rate which is now estimated at 100,000 people a year, and still, as the article in Time magazine delicately puts it, “no one is exactly sure how ECT works.” Indeed they are not. Since a frequent result of the process is amnesia after the “treatment,” a British survey which said that “fully half of those who had undergone it fear ECT less than going to the dentist is hardly persuasive. All doctors know is that one result can be that some people who were depressed seem to be less so (at least temporarily) and that it does destroy memories.

Safe? It’s a non-fatal form of electrocution. They strap a person down, attach electrodes to his or her head, and send 80 to 100 volts of electricity through the brain, causing a paroxysm which in turn causes convulsions. Psychiatrists are now proudly announcing that injecting the patients with muscle relaxants can minimize, but not eliminate, the chipped teeth and bone fractures that can result from the convulsions.

Humane? Most of the people subjected to ECT are inarticulate, and, as noted above, many of them don’t remember what happened to them. But ask the writers. Ernest Hemingway, who (coincidentally or not) later committed suicide, felt that the resulting memory loss ruined him as a writer. Poet Sylvia Plath, also a later suicide, remembered her ordeal. In her fictionalized account, The Bell Jar, she wrote:

“Something bent down and took hold of me and shook me like the end of the world. Whee-ee-ee-ee-ee, it shrilled, through an air crackling with blue light, and with each flash a great jolt drubbed me till I thought my bones would break and the sap fly out of me like a split plant. I wondered what terrible thing it was that I had done.”

If you get mad at a radio that doesn’t work, and kick it, nobody says that is effective, safe, and humane, even though the radio may sometimes start up again as a result. Nobody says it is scientific, either.

Shock treatment is exactly the same idea—shake up the brain, kick it, and maybe it will function differently for a while—except what is being punished is not an inanimate collection of wire and parts but a living human being.

Let the doctors take out their anger on something else.

—JKT

Freeing up the market in radio

I was so excited I could hardly believe it. It was my first chance to produce a half-hour public affairs interview program, and for the top-rated radio station in Los Angeles. It almost didn’t matter that my program would be heard at 3:00 AM on Sunday, or that all the station’s other public affairs programming, of which I was in charge, aired in the wee hours too. When, six months after my program went on the air, a 7:00 AM Sunday time slot opened, I breathlessly rushed into the program director’s office to ask if I could move my program into that time period. “What?” he joked, “So you want to be on in morning drive?”

Four years later, when I began producing and host-essing a half-hour interview program for an independent Los Angeles TV station, my program had virtually no budget. Furniture was donated, and I brought pillows and plants from home to dress the set. I was paid only 70 percent of union scale for my work because the show was categorized as public affairs and was aired without commercials.

Over the years, as I worked for other Los Angeles radio and television stations and freelanced as a public affairs consultant, I met many public affairs producers, news directors and program directors from all types of stations. And always the cry was the same: public affairs was the step-child of entertainment programming; it got no money, no support, no motivation. Public affairs was done at all just to fulfill FCC commitments, to keep the station from losing its license to operate. The quality of the programming was generally considered unimportant.

But every now and then a show would succeed with the audience. And when it clicked, other stations somehow came up with more money and more support—enough to produce imitations of the successful shows.

There is a moral in this story for those who are now arguing against dropping the FCC’s public affairs requirements. If public affairs programming is stronger today than it was a decade ago (it took nearly that long for “Sixty Minutes” to become the top-rated show on TV), that strength is attributable to the increased interest of the American people in public issues, and therefore in public affairs programming. It is attributable to the efforts of broadcasters to satisfy their audiences, not to satisfy the FCC or to serve better the “public interest.”

And now comes a proposal by the Federal Communications Commission that it loosen its own yoke on radio stations. The FCC has been engaged in public hearings for the last several months on the idea of removing regulations which limit the number of commercials a station may play and which require production of news and public affairs programs. And citizens groups are yelling. A petition has been filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Consumer Federation of America, the National Citizens Communications Lobby, NOW, the Pacifica Foundation and several other such organizations. The petition asks the FCC to present its evidence for deregulation more fully to the people and in a manner easier for them to understand. The impression the citizens groups apparently have is that broadcasters are trying to pull the wool over the public’s eyes and jam a kind of proto-deregulation down American throats before the populace knows it has been hoodwinked. The media groups claim that without the FCC, public affairs programming would soon disappear altogether, or survive only on public and listener-sponsored stations. They claim that stations broadcasting top 40 hits and rock would probably offer listeners only a slim diet of news and public service. Yet, under regulation, rock stations are already offering their listeners such starvation diets. For all practical purposes, what’s the difference whether the public affairs programming is aired at 3:00 AM or not aired at all? And as to the clustering of news and public affairs on non-profit stations, that prediction is difficult to reconcile with the phenomenal growth over the past ten years, especially in the major cities, of the all-news and all-talk format in radio. In most cases, these profit-making commercial stations are the most popular in their markets. The FCC does not insist that they air nothing but news and public affairs. They do it because this format draws the largest audiences. Similarily, Jim Gabbard, President of the National Association of Radio Broadcasters, and an owner of radio stations in San Francisco and Honolulu argues that he recently purchased a community access van to record “free speech messages” in the San Francisco area, not to please the FCC, but to score points with the community and give his station the sound of local involvement and identity. And Gabbard is not unique. An FCC staff analysis conducted in 14 markets in Alabama and Georgia during the last year showed a large majority of stations carrying far more than the minimum amount of news and public service programming required of them (and only about half the maximum 18 minutes per hour of commercial time they’re now allowed). Broadcasters, quite un-surprisingly, are more responsive to the demands of their listeners and viewers than to the demands of government bureaucrats. When their audiences demand news and public affairs, they supply such programming — in the quantity and the quality and at the times of day the audiences demand. When the FCC demands such programming, on the other hand, broadcasters supply it only to the extent that their audiences also want it. If the FCC demands more than their audiences want, they supply it only at 3:00 AM and on a very low budget. If the citizens groups that are now crying foul foul have trouble gaining access to the airwaves, could it be because they usually don’t bother to create programming ideas with any potential for attracting audiences, but rely instead on persuading the government to force broadcasters to air their uncreative, uninteresting material at the point of a gun? If I managed to find stations willing to produce my own public affairs programs (albeit on a shoestring budget) in one of the largest and most competitive markets in the country, why can’t NOW or the or the ACLU do the same? Aside from abrogating the First Amendment rights of free speech which broadcasters ought to share with publishers, the FCC public affairs and commercial time requirements only encourage citizens organizations in their already arrogant disregard for what the public wants to see and hear. Let the media and citizens groups come up with creative programming ideas, and they’ll see how fast their public affairs shows can find support—not by all, but by those stations which find it profitable to encourage such types of programming. And in turn, let those who support public affairs programming speak out. Let them ensure the future of such programs on particular stations, by writing letters, by telephoning, by lending their support. Another action taken by the FCC late in 1979 is expected to increase the number of AM radio stations in this country by more than 30 percent in the next decade. This growth in the number of stations, in combination with a free market in radio news and public affairs programming, could lead to the kind of diversity in broadcasting which exists in the comparable but unregulated market in magazines. Indeed, with deregulation, the future of the electronic media burns brightly. —LJN