# Opening Shots (Aug. 1981) **URL:** **By** Bill Birmingham **Published:** August 1, 1981 --- “Anything you can say about El Salvador will serve almost as well about Guatemala.” What a bonus ... “If the U.S. refused to base the MX on land because of gripes from ranchers in the open spaces of the Southwest,” complains syndicated pundit Joseph Kraft, “the Europeans would never agree to station \[American\] nuclear weapons on their far more heavily populated territory.” Anything you can say about El Salvador will serve almost as well about Guatemala. Guatemala has a military junta just like her neighbor; starving and oppressed peasants; a squalid oligarchy; political prisoners, repression, and torture; right-wing ‘death squads’ that slaughter dissidents, peasant leaders, and priests (six priests in the last year alone). And, on May 6, the State Department announced that Secretary Haig was sending his aide, former general Vernon Walters, to Guatemala to discuss possible U.S. military assistance for its rulers, so they can crush what the State Department is pleased to call ‘Cuban-supported Marxist guerrillas.’ The only thing we learn from history, said Hegel, is that we learn nothing from history. Haig \& Co. can’t even learn from their morning newspapers. Senator Lawton Chiles of Florida provides further proof of Hegel’s dictum, with his crack-brained scheme to spray Paraquat on Colombian marijuana fields. Congress stopped funding a similar program in Mexico out of fears that the herbicide damaged marijuana smokers’ lungs. But the Senator is unafraid. ‘Most of the studies that have been done are discounting that there will be major health problems,’ claims Chiles, whose scholarship is as vile as his syntax. ‘It is now becoming more clear that there is a major health problem in heavy smoking of marijuana itself.’ Since the end of the draft the number of women in the armed forces has skyrocketed from 1 percent of the total in 1971 to 8 percent today, with a goal of 12 percent by 1985. But according to the _Washington Post_, ‘the volunteer Army has quietly enacted what it calls a ‘pause’ in its recruitment of women,’ and ‘the proportion of women in all the services will probably be leveled out at 10 to 12 percent, possibly lower.’ According to such authorities as ex-Air Force Major General Jeanne M. Holm, the Army may have trouble meeting its personnel requirements as a result — and Reagan did promise not to reimpose conscription unless (ie: until) it was ‘necessary.’ Is the ‘pause’ just a ploy to bring back the draft? ‘I think that’s the hidden agenda,’ the _Post_ quotes General Holm as saying. ‘There are certainly members of Congress and those in the defense community who’d like that.’ John McAtee, Reagan’s chairman of the Synthetic Fuels Corporation who complained about the ‘hardship’ of living on his $150,000 a year salary, has resigned rather than endure an $80,370 pay cut. McAtee’s predecessor, John Sawhill, got $175,000 a year; his successor, Ed Noble, has offered to work for a dollar a year. Before you start dancing in the streets, though, reflect that even Sawhill’s bloated salary was only .001 percent of the $17.5 billion SFC budget. Back in 1979, Jimmy Carter ordered his agency heads to inspect their fiefs and ‘get rid of all those who are incompetent, except minorities and women.’ Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Joseph Califano got the axe a few days later. Califano reveals this and other secrets of the Carter Administration in his book _Governing America: An Insider’s Report From the White House and the Cabinet_. Jimmykins refused to comment on the book, but his ex-flack Jody Powell declared that “whatever lingering doubts I had that we had judged Joe too harshly have been substantially relieved. Hell hath no fury like a fat-cat Washington lawyer scorned.” How did Vice-President George Bush respond to the shooting of the Pope? “To the degree terroristic actions internationally kind of condition society for this kind of thing,” Bush told reporters, “it’s unacceptable.” Otherwise, we suppose, it’s OK. Most media accounts describe the strife in Lebanon in religious terms, with Muslims (Syrians, Lebanese, and Palestinians) and Christians (the Falange and Major Saad Haddad’s forces in the south) at each other’s throats, and Jews (Israel) succoring “the Christian communities” (as when they shot down two Syrian helicopters attacking Falange positions near Zahle on April 28). Last April, however, the _Christian Science Monitor_ ran two pieces that told a different story. The first, by Helena Coblan in the April 21 issue, reports on Haddad’s artillery attack on the Lebanese port city of Sidon on Easter Sunday, April 19. The shelling killed 16 persons and wounded 32 more, whereupon “enraged companions of the victims stormed and tried to burn the local headquarters of the Maronite and Greek Catholic Christian sects” to which most of Haddad’s militiamen belong. “Response from the leftist and Muslim parties predominant in Sidon... was swift. They quickly ‘discouraged’ those responsible... and by April 20 were mounting a special protective guard on some Christian sites in the city, local people said.” Ms. Coblan points out that “Sidon and its environs — like the rest of the country not under the militias’ control — also contain a substantial Christian population. ...Most of these Christians believe they are in no greater danger from the violence that pervades the country than their more numerous Muslim neighbors.” In the April 30 _Monitor_, correspondent John Yemma expands on this theme: “Many Syrians, Palestinians, and anti-Falange, anti-Israeli Lebanese are at least as nominally Christian as the \[Maronite\] Falangists. There are 11 Christian sects in Lebanon.... Many leaders of these Christian communities... condemned Israeli military intervention in Lebanon.” Muslims are similarly divided. “In Saad Haddad’s southern Lebanese ‘Christian enclave,’ more than half the population is believed to be Shiite Muslim, and Haddad’s main financial support comes from American Protestant fundamentalists.” There are two major non-religious reasons for the fighting. First: “The Maronites long have been economically and politically dominant in Lebanon, yet they have become a minority. They are fighting to maintain their position.” Second: “The Falange, founded in 1936 and modeled on German National Socialism” — which hasn’t stopped Israel from giving them 40 U.S.-made Sherman tanks — “is in ideological conflict with the left-leaning Palestinians and Syrians.” The interested reader may consult Walid Khalidi’s _Conflict and Violence in Lebanon_ (published in 1979 by Harvard’s Center for International Affairs) for more information. The issue is not merely academic hairsplitting; Ms. Coblan quotes a Lebanese university professor who worries that sectarian bloodshed may indeed engulf all of Lebanon: “Everyone in the West, and the Israelis, are making such a fuss about ‘saving’ the Christians of Lebanon, they are really stoking the fires of hatred. It might rebound on us all, Christians and Muslims.” François Mitterrand, the new Socialist president of France, has created four new cabinet posts, bringing the total number to 42. And high time, too; for how much longer could the Fifth Republic have lasted without a minister of “leisure time,” or of “national solidarity,” or the sea, or, especially, “decentralization”? What’s the prime lending rate today? Is it higher, or lower, than when this was written (when most banks charged 20.5 percent)? Why should you care? Why indeed? The House Banking Committee recently surveyed the nation’s largest banks and found that in some circles the prime rate — despite the frothings of politicians and the convulsions of the stock market — really doesn’t mean very much. Indeed, in May 1980 the big New York banks charged an average of 13 percent interest on 60 percent of their commercial loans, when the prime rate (what they supposedly charged their “preferred customers”) was 17 percent. Morgan Guaranty Trust defines its prime lending rate as “the rate of interest publicly announced by the bank in New York City from time to time as its prime rate.” The Miracle of Plutocracy: The California Fair Political Practices Commission recently toted up the money spent in last November’s elections. The state legislative races and eleven statewide ballot propositions cost a total of $22 million; business (including agriculture and the health industry) provided 70 percent of that amount, organized labor gave 12 percent (a quarter of which came from public employee unions and pressure groups), and 8 percent came from political parties. The individual citizen, for whose alleged benefit the farce was staged, gave just 5 percent. Private judges are the coming thing in California, it seems, at least among disputants willing to pay from $100 to $175 an hour rather than wait a year or two for a trial in the public courts. The practice started in 1977, when two Los Angeles attorneys got the presiding judge to refer their case to a retired colleague, who was paid to hear it at once. Now there are 39 retired judges throughout the state available for civil cases — criminal cases cannot be tried privately, yet — whose rulings, unlike those of regular arbitration and mediation services, have the full force of law. Although some customers call it “the greatest thing since sliced bread” not everyone likes free-enterprise justice. According to the _San Francisco Chronicle_ (May 26, 1981) “the state Judicial Council, the policymaking body for all state courts, \[worries\] that private judging is causing more judges to retire early because they can make more money taking private cases.” Afghanistan may be “Russia’s Vietnam” in more ways than one. An item in (appropriately enough) _Rolling Stone_ (May 14, 1981) reveals that Soviet troopers are no less susceptible to the joys of hashish and other recreational drugs than were American GIs in Southeast Asia. “You see the Russian soldiers stoned all the time,” the daughter of an Afghan official told the _Stone_. “There’s nothing to do in Kabul — all the fighting is in the countryside — except hang out in their compounds and guard things, so they smoke hash all the time.” After years of propaganda against dat ole debbil nicotine, 20 percent of the populace still don’t know that smoking causes cancer, and 30 percent are “unaware of the relationship between smoking and heart disease,” according to a recent FTC staff report. The Fettered Trade Commission paradoxically blames the warning labels on cigarette packages and ads, which it claims are so familiar (“worn out” is the phrase) that hardly anyone reads them anymore. Actually, it says that less than 3 percent of all adults exposed to the labels read them, which to anyone but a bureaucrat suggests that young, beginning smokers do read them — how else could they get “worn out”? — and that nonsmokers get, and need, less exposure than smokers. It is also worth noting that the FTC did not see fit to reveal how many of those it deems ignorant of smoking hazards, do, in fact, smoke. “One day after calling for higher military pay, President Reagan agreed to a three-month deferral of a military \[pay\] raise this summer as a cost saving move.” (_San Francisco Chronicle_, May 29, 1981) Fast work. Bill Birmingham is a contributing editor of LR.