Opening Shots (Feb. 1980)

Congress declared the American alligator an endangered species in 1967, hoping to save it from being hunted to extinction. Since then the reptiles have been breeding like big, ugly rabbits — with some populations increasing by 25 percent to 30 percent a year — with the result that, as a Louisiana official puts it, “We’re up to our ears in alligators.” In the late 1950s there were as few as 100,000 alligators in the whole South; now Florida alone has from 500,000 to 1-million of the beasts (Louisiana has 300,000), with lesser numbers in eight other states. Although Florida and Louisiana have recently been forced to start control programs, the alligator remains on the federal endangered species list; to the distress of Alabama Game and Fish Division Director Charles Kelley. Says he: “It’s just illogical to keep them on the list when we get frequent calls about ‘gators eating dogs and going in people’s yards.”

The Quotable Miz Lillian: “I don’t know a gay from a hole in the ground—in my part of the country we don’t have ’em…. My son the president is running for president again. He’s doing the best he can about the Iran situation. When he’s in trouble, I’m in trouble; when he’s tense, I’m tense. Boy have I been tense lately.” But “If I wasn’t so old, I’d run against him.” (Uttered before the Bow Lake Village, N.H., Men’s Club, as reported by the Washington Post.)

The median income for a family of four, saith the Tax Foundation, was $18,467 last year, or 66 percent higher than it was in 1972. During the same period prices increased 75 percent, federal income taxes 82 percent and Social [sic] Security taxes went up 142 percent.

A reporter for the Wall Street Journal got a letter from a Michigan lawyer on the energy Research and Development Administration: the folks who are going to save us from the energy crisis with a multibillion dollar “synthetic fuels” program. He had sought a grant, for a Michigan researcher, from a special, $10-million ERDA fund. “Sorry, said ERDA, only $1 million was left; the other $9 million had gone for ‘administrative expenses.’” Notes the Journal, “Think of how much ‘administration’ the $2 billion synfuel appropriation will buy.”

Five months ago, Maj. Gen. Rafael Eitan, srnvnt reported now Israeli chief of staff Rafael Eitan helped an Israeli army officer—one Daniel Pinto—escape punishment after he was convicted of torturing and murdering four Arab prisoners, and how it caused a mild public outcry in Israel. It seems that General Eitan learned nothing from the Pinto scandal, but went on to reduce the sentence of a second murderer, a Lieutenant Colonel Aryeh Sadeh. While in Lebanon during the 1978 invasion, Sadeh’s men encountered three Arabs (who offered no resistance) and took them prisoner. Sadeh later decided one of the three “looked like a terrorist” and ordered him shot, which he was. A sergeant reported the crime and Colonel Sadeh was court-martialed and sentenced to two and a half years in prison and demotion to captain. The Appeals Court (at the prosecutor’s request) raised it to five years and demoted Sadeh to private, but Eitan overruled them and promoted him back to major. As in the Pinto case, Eitan ordered the matter suppressed in Israel, but Uri Avnery (member of the Knesset and author of the excellent Israel Without Zionists) leaked the facts to the foreign media; in this case the British Spectator. (“The murderers in Israel’s army,” November 3, 1979.) Eitan has not escaped all censure, however; the Spectator reports that a recent pay envelope of his contained not the usual check but a “verbal message: ‘This man pardons murderers.’ Inquiries soon revealed that the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces]'s central computer had been programmed to respond with this message to any request for information concerning the Chief of Staff.”

In the finest spirit of free enterprise, Robert K. Brown, publisher of Soldier of Fortune magazine, is offering a $10,000 reward (payable in gold Krugerrands) “for information leading to the capture alive by proper authorities and delivery to Uganda for trial” of former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. A pity that Brown, whose magazine extolls the mercenary soldier (and CIA assassination attempts, for that matter) did not see fit to make it dead or alive, but no matter; readers with any information (all manner of people read LR, we’ve found) should write to Soldier of Fortune, Box 693, Boulder CO 80306.

The Only Thing We Learn From History Is That We Learn Nothing From History Dept.:

“In the 1979 Gallup audit of the country’s drinking pattern,” writes John Kofend, author of “The Case for Alcohol” (The Atlantic, December 1979), “one person in five favored a return to nationwide prohibition.”

“Speaker of the House Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr. said Monday that most members of Congress had not been aware of the repressive nature of the former Shah of Iran’s regime. ‘This is all new to me,’ the Massachusetts Democrat said of recent [sic] reports of atrocities committed while Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi was in power. Congress was led to believe the Shah was a progressive and fair leader, O’Neill said.” (Los Angeles Times, November 27, 1979.) The Speaker of the House, you will recall, is third in line for the Presidency, right after the Vice-President.

“The Shah’s personal library in the Niavaran Palace,” notes the New York Times, “has thousands of books in many languages, especially Persian, English and French. Nietzsche was represented by ‘The Will to Power.’” Actually there was also a copy of Beyond Good and Evil, but he took it with him.

Perhaps you’ve heard the estimates that place marijuana as the third most valuable crop in Hawaii. Ah, but that was in 1978; now it is deemed number one. Police estimates put the value of the marijuana harvest—called pakalolo, or “crazy smoke,” in Hawaiian—at from $300-million to $750-million a year. (The sugar crop last year was worth $280-million, and pineapple, $165-million.) State officials are complaining that the illegal, unreported income from pakalolo is significant enough to seriously warp their economic statistics. Still more proof, if it were needed, of the essential libertarianism of the drug culture.

Let us have a moment of silence, please, for Monsieur Marc Quinquandon, the snail-eating champion of the world, who died in his quest to extend the limits of human achievement. He died with his boots on, so to speak, while training to break his old record (144 snails in 11 minutes 30 seconds; set in 1978). After consuming 72 snails in three minutes last November 24, he lost consciousness and died two days later. The doctors’ verdict: indigestion.

The consummate mindlessness of the Pentagon’s proposed MX missile system, especially the weird “racetrack” deployment scheme currently planned for it, has even sent a few conservatives running for cover. One is conservative columnist James J. Kilpatrick (Shana Alexander’s old nemesis), who has never before been known as a critic of “defense” spending. In a recent column he denounced the racetrack scheme—which, he informs us, “is known as Goofy for the Walt Disney dog of the same name”—as “the nuttiest scheme to come along in the name of national security since the CIA proposed to depilate the beard of Dr. Castro.” (And if the authors of a recent Scientific American article—“Land-based Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles,” November 1979—are correct, Goofy may be more vulnerable to a Soviet missile attack than the current Minuteman force!) But Kilpatrick does not content himself with calling for “better and cheaper alternatives.” He calls for the defeat of SALT II, not for the reasons usually heard in the fever swamps of the right but because “it would effectively compel our government to build and deploy all the launchers permitted under the treaty’s terms.... Suppose there was no treaty. Common sense might inform a President that enough is enough, that we already have amassed sufficient nuclear power to devastate the whole world and that funds for national defense could be expended more sensibly elsewhere.” It’s “common sense” to thee and me, but it’s “unilateral disarmament” to the boys in the fever swamps; and it might be nice to send Kilpatrick some words of praise to fortify him against the abuse they will surely heap upon him for his lapse into sanity.