Opening Shots (July 1981)

“In Chile,” Government economist Alberto Martin told the Washington Post (April 3, 1981), “everybody can write what they want. The only censorship that exists is against new publications. All the authorized magazines write without censorship of any kind.” Glad that’s been cleared up.

Even the most stalwart of advocates of free trade might think twice about buying foreign submarines, but the U. S. Navy is contemplating just that. Navy Secretary John Lehman says that unless American shipyards make themselves more competitive, “we are prepared to look at offshore procurement” of subs. Meanwhile, Mr. Lehman’s civilian colleagues successfully pressured the Japanese government to pressure Japanese automakers to cut their exports to the U. S. in order to make themselves less competitive.

Apparently what’s good for the Pentagon is not what’s good for General Motors.

Fat chance: “Roscoe L. Egger Jr. was sworn in yesterday as commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service and immediately promised to ‘shore up’ the agency’s image with American taxpayers.” (San Francisco Chronicle, April 18, 1981.)

In its never-ending struggle to keep us free, the State Department refused to extend Soviet scholar Georgi Arbatov’s visa, lest he take part in a TV debate. Arbatov, head of Moscow’s Institute of United States and Canadian Studies, had planned to appear on “Bill Moyers’ Journal,” but that fell through when he had to leave the country. “It’s a petty action that results in senior American officials acting as if they were bureaucrats in a third-rate paranoiac, totalitarian country,” said Moyers. “Now I will understand a bit more about the policies of the new administration than I knew before,” said Arbatov. As will we all.

The Camel’s Nose Dept.: Director Bernard Rostker of the Selective Servitude System wants a “limited program” to screen out draft registrants with physical and mental disabilities. In a perhaps related move, the SSS is also looking for people to serve on draft boards, if and when. None of this, of course, should be taken to mean that the draft itself will be revived. Certainly not.

First they took the gold out of the dollar, then they took the silver out of the dime, now the Treasury plans to take the copper out of the penny. Or most of it, anyway; by next fall all new one-cent pieces will be made of 97.6 percent zinc, with a copper “wash” to make them resemble the undebased coin. Thanks to inflation, copper prices are approaching $1.12 per pound, at which point each penny costs more than one cent to mint. When the price tops $1.50 per pound, the coin’s copper content alone will be worth more than the face value.

China’s rulers have called off their two-year fling with greater political, cultural, and economic reforms. Vice Chairman Deng Xiaoping’s reforms gave increased independence to factory managers and relaxed controls on the arts and political dissent. But things went too far: “In some places,” Deng charged in a speech last December, “people are setting up illegal organizations, publishing illegal journals, spreading anti-party and anti-socialist sentiments and even establishing secret ties with one another.” Obviously an intolerable state of affairs, and so the lid went back on. Anything to avoid a repetition of last fall’s local elections when, so it seems, “Some people practiced anarchism and extreme individualism.”

As if John Paul II were to embrace atheism... John E. Bryson, president of the California Public Utility Commission, actually went before Congress on April 6 and declared that power companies may no longer be “natural monopolies,” and “we should at least look at the possibility of deregulating electricity generation.” No word yet on how his colleagues on the PUC are taking Bryson’s apostasy.

TV Guide usually gets thrown out each week with the Saturday morning coffee grounds, but a recent article on Donald Baruch, the Pentagon’s Hollywood liaison man (“He let Lassie fly in a B-52,” April 4, 1981), deserves closer attention. Baruch works for the Defense Department’s public affairs office, and he provides technical assistance to TV and movie producers, “for projects his office approves.” His office did not approve of the first script for “Enola Gay,” the TV-movie about the atom-bombing of Hiroshima: “The characterizations seemed all wrong, and the sympathies were all on the Japanese side.” (Tsk, tsk!) So a retired Navy man rewrote it to remove the excessive sympathy for the bomb’s victims and “placed the mission in a context: faced with a fanatical enemy and ignorant for the most part about radiation, the Americans were dropping the bomb they thought might end all bombs.” Thus equipped with the correct political line, the film makers were permitted to use military planes and buildings. “Without these props, said [executive producer Frank] Levy, the film would have cost ten times the $5 million it took to produce it —meaning it would never have been made. ‘And nothing we had to do,’ said Levy, ‘in any way compromised the picture.’ ”

The Quotable George Will: “Implicit in [Adam] Smith’s theory is a sharp distinction between society and government, and the seeds of hostility toward government. The theory makes government seem merely coercive and barely necessary: Society is essentially independent of, and morally superior to, political institutions. Society is natural, spontaneous, cooperative, and productive. Government is of marginal importance and negligible dignity... That is why I find the Adam Smith necktie lovelier than his philosophy.” (The Washington Post, March 22, 1981) “Although the vast majority of the proposed [budget] cuts are sensible, and all are arguable, there has crept into some advocacy of them a tone that is unworthy of, and dangerous for, the Reagan administration. It is a tone of dogmatic disparagement of government... You cannot tell people over and over that government is a klutz that cannot help Cleveland, and then suddenly say: Oh, by the way, give the government $1.3 trillion for military assets, and support its attempt to do something about Cuba.” (Ibid, March 26, 1981)

Crimes by private citizens are on the rise, and the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that the U. S. murder rate (8.8 per 100,000 population in 1976) is seven times that of Great Britain and five times that of Japan. Anyone with a knee to jerk and an ear to listen to Teddy Kennedy knows that our lack of gun control is the reason. The Bureau also reports, however, that the incidence of rape in America is ten times higher than in Japan, and twelve times higher than in Great Britain. We can’t imagine how Teddy explains that one.

Last month yr hmbl srvnt hailed the California State Senate’s courageous defense of the right to wok one’s dog. We regret to report that the Senate reversed itself two weeks later and voted to outlaw the eating of dogs and cats. Intensive lobbying from “animal welfare groups” was credited, if that is the word, for the turnaround. These worthies also bombarded the Archdiocese of San Francisco with protests when a local priest suggested that Southeast Asian refugees (whose reported taste for canine flesh started this whole fuss) be allowed “to go to the local humane societies and claim unclaimed pets for personal consumption. I would especially encourage this for people on meager salaries.” (Let them eat Peke?) One irate caller threatened to take the matter to the Pope.

Proposed cuts in two government agencies may prevent publication of the papers of Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, and the Adamses. The National Historical Publications and Records Commission and the National Endowment for the Humanities pay nearly half the costs of editing the founding fathers’ papers, but Reagan’s proposed budget eliminates those funds. The George Washington project has the best chance of getting its money restored, says its editor: “Jefferson may be too radical for some.”

“The Committee for the Free World” took out a full-page ad in the April 6 New York Times to proclaim that “We—a group of intellectuals and religious leaders—applaud American policy in El Salvador.” To hear the committee tell it, “it is the government of El Salvador that today represents progressive change” and the U. S. must help the junta “strengthen democratic institutions” lest El Salvador “be added to Cuba and Nicaragua as instruments of the further expansion of the burgeoning Soviet empire.” Writing in the April 18 Nation, John S. Friedman notes that the Committee bears a resemblance to the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a CIA front of the fifties and sixties (they even have some members in common, like Sidney Hook and Raymond Aron), and got nearly half its starting capital from the CIA-linked Smith Richardson Foundation and the Scaife Family Charitable Trusts. The 184 “intellectuals and religious leaders” who signed the ad include chair-thing Midge Decter, her husband Norman Podhoretz, Barbara Amiel, Edward C. Banfield, Edith Efron, Arnaud de Borchgrave, Guenther Lewy, Edward Luttwak, Bay-ard Rustin, and Ernest van den Haag—easily the most distinguished assemblage of half-bright apologists for the warfare state since William F. Buckley last dined alone.

Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) used to be a real fire-breather before he was burdened with the responsibility of chairing the Senate Labor Committee. For example, he recently proposed to abolish the minimum wage for teenagers to fight teenage unemployment. When labor interests objected, Hatch revised his plan so that employers could pay less than the minimum wage—but the taxpayer would make up the difference. As the Wall Street Journal observed, “For this we need Republicans?”

One Jack Gregorio is president of something called Taxpaying Parents Against Smut, a Tampa, Florida anti-sex education group. He has been photographed carrying a sign reading “Save Our Kids From Smut.” So guess what he’s just. been arrested for? Right: “Sexual battery” of a 17-year-old boy, and “lewd and lascivious behavior” with an eight-year-old girl.

According to an official British government publication, “A large scale nuclear attack on this country would completely disrupt the banking system.” (Quoted in New Statesman, March 20, 1981)