Opening Shots (June 1980)

Surely you remember the Susan B. Anthony dollar: sort of a quarter with pretensions, bearing the great suffragette’s profile. “It is about time that women be given their proper recognition in this all-important phase of our national life,” the Secretary of the Treasury intoned when it was first issued last year. The American public was less enthusiastic, and the Treasury finally shut down its stamping mills with some 770 million Susies in non-circulation. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen has found one use for the Susie, however: in the bowels of San Francisco’s raunchy Tenderloin district is a place called The Film Den which offers “Fantasy in Flesh.” Feed coins to a slot and the curtains part, revealing an unclothed lady with whom one may chat at a cost of one dollar for ninety seconds. Not only can one operate this slut machine (as Caen calls it) with the Susie, it will accept nothing else. It’s enough to make Gloria Steinem embrace the gold standard.

A very good point, from an unlikely source: “From his very first official call for a boycott of the Moscow Olympics,” declared the Soviet news agency Tass in a March 24 editorial, Carter “has actually embarked on the path of violating the rights of American athletes.... One can hardly treat athletes more highhandedly and cruelly than by depriving them of their basic rights, without which sport is senseless—the right to compete with other top athletes; moreover, at such a world festival of sports as the Olympic Games.” Meanwhile, a proposal by U.S. Olympians that they go to the Moscow Games but boycott the awards ceremonies got a brusque dismissal from the White House. “It’s obviously unacceptable,” sniffed one White House aide. “The President has made his decision.”

The March 31 issue of U.S. News & World Report has one of those insipid bar graphs showing “Where U.S. Billions Have Gone” abroad, which almost manages to make the subject boring. And this is no mean feat, considering that by State Department figures the U.S. taxpayer has sent $194,560,000,000—that’s 194 billion, if you’ve lost track of the zeroes—in military and economic aid o’er the briny since 1946 (“through Sept. 30, 1979”). Champion subsidy-suckers have been the Defenders of Freedom in Vietnam, who lapped up $22,877,000,000 (lesser Defenders in Laos, Cambodia and Thailand split $6.8 billion for their assistance), and our “friends” in South Korea raked in nearly $13 billion. It may surprise the reader to learn that Israel collected near $15 billion—about $5,000 per Israeli, by the way—while Egypt got $6,380 million, most of that even before the glorious “peace” treaty which gave both countries the free run of the public purse. Indeed, Uncle Sap has financed both sides of several wars: Turkey versus Greece, for example ($7 billion and $5 billion, respectively), as well as India versus Pakistan ($6 billion and $5 billion—no wonder Pakistani strongman General Zia rejected Carter’s proffered $400 million aid deal as “peanuts”). USN&WR did not see fit to comment on these figures, but that’s probably for the best, given that journal’s general inability to rise above kindergarten red-baiting. They even used the finest of fine print to note that these figures omit $11.9 billion in outstanding Export-Import Bank loans, used to subsidize trade with the Soviet Union, among other places.

The insolence of Big Brother knows no bounds; now the Food and Drug Administration has arrogated to itself the power to regulate and approve vibrators. “Although specific standards still are being written,” says the Oakland Tribune (March 15, 1980), “FDA officials say they are primarily concerned that registered vibrators will not damage or inflame sensitive genital tissue.” And none too soon. If we had permitted just anyone to make and sell such devices, it would have been only a matter of time before Americans were maiming themselves by the thousands with the products of Cuisinart, or Black and Decker. You can carry laissez faire only so far.

Barron’s had itself a hearty businessmen who lent their names and likenesses to support the 1980 U.S. Industrial Payroll Savings Program, asking how many of them were dumb enough to buy the Savings Bonds they tried to con American workers into buying. Surprisingly, one wrote in to claim that he had $50,000 in the things and buys more at the rate of $225 every week—and that he has “no current plans” to unload them before their maturity date. “I consider Savings Bonds to be an investment in America—a country I’m tremendously proud of and one which has given me opportunities that I’m extremely grateful for,” says Roy A. Anderson, Chairman of the Board for Lockheed.

Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff brings us the tale of how, four years ago, wee Jimmy Carter told Mike Barnicle of the Boston Globe that he has never been afraid. “My faith in God,” said the Blessed Peanut, “has prevented me from knowing fear.” (Barnicle, who was driving with Carter at the time, remarks that he had a sudden urge to leap out of the car “rather than spend any more time with a man who had just told me he was not susceptible to the healthiest of all emotions, fear.”) This year, during the Iowa primary, Rosalynn Carter assured the voters that her helpmeet “would not be afraid to declare war” (we have this on the authority of another Globe columnist, Robert Healy), inspiring in Hentoff the same urge as Barnicle had: to “Dump Carter—and Madame Nhu Too” (the Voice, March 3, 1980). Ngo Diem’s sister-in-law was given to proposing “barbecues” of her family’s detractors; a trait Hentoff finds akin to the First Dragon Lady’s “cold ferocity against all who get in the Carters’ way. . . . But what this First Lady is saying in

1980 involves the readiness of Jimmy Carter to create a barbecue of millions upon millions of souls to prove how utterly committed he is to peace through strength.”

“Carter is truly a cretin and Kennedy, having drowned his mistress, went to sleep for twelve hours.” That’s Gaulist politician Edgar Faure, quoted in the February 29 Le Monde (by way of the incomparable Alexander Cockburn). Some things, it seems, can be seen much more clearly from a distance of five or six thousand miles.

But of course there is one surefire way to convince yourself that Jimmykins isn’t really that bad: read the rantings of such as George Will, who is livid at his “abandonment” of the Shah. “To appease the terrorists,” raged Will in a recent (March 19) column, “the Administration betrayed American values by deporting [sic] an old ailing ally to a fly-blown island in the tropics.” (Said f.b.i. is General Torrijos’s favorite vacation spot—and the place where Patty Hearst spent her honeymoon—which may be why the “deported” Shah went there of his own accord.) “Torrijos and his henchmen,” as Will would have it, “have already fleeced the shah for substantial amounts of money. They monitor his calls. [What?! Who do they think they are, SAVAK?] They harass and arrest his aides.... Today the shah is a virtual prisoner of his tormentor, Torrijos, who says that the shah is not free to leave Panama.” Well, maybe he had his fingers crossed. But nothing can excuse Carter for refusing the impoverished Shah admittance to the Canal Zone hospital, forcing him to turn to that infamous quack, Dr. Michael Debakey (of heart-transplant fame). “The Administration would not even provide a government plane to get doctors to Panama. Fear of terrorists now controls Administration decisions about planes and medicines.” Anything to keep dictators off the dole.

The reader will no doubt celebrate Independence Day this July 4, unaware that he should have been celebrating 54 days earlier. Tax Freedom Day, as calculated by the Tax Foundation, Inc., is the day when the average American schmoe has finally worked long enough to pay his taxes—federal, state and local—for the year and can devote himself to the pursuit of such extravagant luxuries as food and shelter, and perhaps a rag to cover his nakedness. Unlike the Fourth, Tax Freedom Day is a moveable feast, which comes ever later in the year as governmental depredations increase. In 1980 it falls on May 11—three days later than in 1979, five days later than in 1978.

Just as we go to press the Boston Sunday Globe reports that, contrary to George Will’s fears, the Administration did not “abandon” the Shah in Panama. Rather, it was White House counsel Lloyd Cutler who arranged for the chartered jet that spirited the King of Kings out of Panama just one day before Iranian lawyers filed for an extradition order. The Shah flew the friendly skies of Evergreen International Airlines, which, according to the Globe, has “links” to the CIA.

Caveat emptor: “The maker of Woodward’s Celebrated Gripe Water, a British concoction for infant discomforts, legally lists ingredients on its Malaysian label in Latin.” (Wall Street Journal, April 8, 1980.) “In Britain, the label is in English, and it sets a limit of eight doses a day.”