Opening Shots (May 1979)

The rightist press has, of course, had a wonderful time castigating everyone to the left of Willis Carto over the great People’s Temple debacle (“Media Ignore Jonestown’s Marxist Roots,” bellowed Pat Buchanan in Human Events). But the Militant, the Socialist Workers Party organ, would have none of it. “It is neither an exaggeration nor an oversimplification,” that august journal informed us, “to say that capitalism is responsible for what happened in Guyana.” Jim Jones’s disciples “were trying to escape the exploitation, the racism, and the pervasive brutality which are the indelible features of the capitalist society in which we live,” but alas! “they didn’t know how to fight the evils of capitalism”—they had never read the Militant, you see—“and fell victim to the warped vision of a cult leader.” A socialist cult leader? The Trots know better: “Rosalyn Carter made a campaign appearance at the People’s Temple, and Jones sent several hundred of his members to Washington for Carter’s inauguration. The record is ample [sic] enough. Jones was a Democrat, not a socialist.” Some might object that the two are hardly mutually exclusive, but it’s best to take no chances. The next time you’re at the White House, be sure not to drink the Flavorade.

* * *

Since gun control has been such a big success in New York City, Pete Hamill, he of the calloused hands and frontal lobes, is pushing knife control. In a recent New York Daily News column he said: “All pocket knives—not simply switchblades—should be banned in the city; anybody caught selling them should be jailed, not fined; if a weapon is sold illegally, then the seller—if the weapon is traced—should be held as a co-defendant in any crime in which the weapon is used. Possession of a pocket knife should be punished just as severely.” Hamill will hear no feckless talk about the right to bear arms: “The purpose of a pocket knife is to cut,” he intones. “Not apples, pencils, or roast beef. People.” The NCA (National Cutlery Association) is already printing up bumper stickers: When sharp and pointy things are outlawed, Hamill will be beheaded.

* * *

Surely the Food and Drug Administration will seize upon this as proof positive that corn rots the brain: the Iowa Poll reveals that the residents of that state consider John F. Kennedy to be the greatest of all American Presidents. Runners up were FDR, Abraham Lincoln the Great Equivocator, Harry Truman the Butcher of Hiroshima, Eisenhower, Teddy Roosevelt, and then Thomas Jefferson. Hot on Jefferson’s heels was Richard Nixon. The above was taken from Public Opinion magazine, which also noted that the Tricky One placed eighth on the Gallup Poll’s list of those whom Americans most admire; up one from last year, when he tied with the Pope.

* * *

As libertarian greybeards dither over “collective security” as an abstract and hypothetical issue (might it not be advisable for Erewhon to make a mutual defense pact with Shangri-La to contain the imperialist ambition of the land of Oz?), the real-world disintegration of the collective security concept proceeds apace. CENTO, the Central Treaty Organization (neé the Baghdad Pact), seems about ready to join SEATO in that famous dustbin of history. Pakistan withdrew from CENTO soon after Iran did (“The pact lost its meaning with the withdrawal of Iran,” said a Pakistani spokesman, “but we had been moving independently to that position”), leaving only Turkey and Britain, and of course the U.S., to continue with John Foster Dulles’s dream of “containing Communism” along the so-called Northern Tier. During the recent unpleasantness in Iran, such warhawks as the Wall Street Journal tried to invoke CENTO as an excuse for American intervention on behalf of the Shah; just as they had invoked SEATO to justify American involvement in Indochina. We got off cheaply this time; let’s hope the greybeards manage to derive a non-interventionist foreign policy from the Law of Non-Contradiction, or whatever it is they’re holding out for, before it’s too late.

* * *

The anti-ballistic missile may also be making a comeback. Perhaps the reader noticed the recent efforts (by military-industrial shill Aviation Week and Space Technology and other journals we shall charitably not mention here) to drum up support for a “particle beam” ABM system. With luck, articles such as “Particle Beam Weapons” (Scientific American, April 1979) by MIT physicists John Parmentola and Kosta Tsipis, will scotch that drive before it gets properly underway. But weirder forms of the ABM have been proposed. “Arms control expert Richard Garwin,” notes Robert Shrum in Politics Today (March/April 1979), “has foreseen a giant ‘pebble-projector fan’ that would spit a ten-ton barrage of steel pellets, at a density of 10 pellets per square meter, toward an incoming Soviet warhead. ‘God alone knows what that one would cost,’ says an administration arms controller, ‘and even He probably couldn’t afford to pay for it.’”

* * *

Amtrak, America’s socialist passenger rail system, gets two dollars in government subsidies for every dollar the passenger pays. On most routes, says Transportation Secretary Brock Adams, “we can give them a ticket free and send them by air” and still save money. To add insult to injury, Adams claims “Amtrak is an energy waster”; thereby refuting the chief excuse for subsidized railroads. But the ever-frugal Carter administration has a solution. It proposes to cut 12,000 miles of track from the Amtrak system and raise prices so that by 1985 the Amtrak passenger will be paying fully half of what his trip costs. To which Congresscritter Harley Staggers (D-W. VA), who chairs the House Commerce Committee, replies: “I cannot support any plan which sounds the death knell for rail passenger service.”

* * *

Village Voice columnist Ellen Willis has suggested that the so-called “Right to Life” movement is at bottom an anti-sexual movement, noting that all anti-abortion arguments reduce to: “If she didn’t want to get pregnant, she shouldn’t have had sex.” (Do not write and say that you are “pro-life” and hold a lifetime membership in the Society for Rational Bestiality.) This may help explain the case of 21-year-old Peter Burkin, who was arrested after firebombing a Long Island abortion clinic that had 35 people inside. (There have been over 20 such attacks in the last two years. Burkin is the first person to be arrested.) His mother told the press she was “dumbfounded, he was never interested in girls. We never talked about abortion in this family. We didn’t even let the kids use the word ‘pregnant’.”

* * *

Voices of Moderation, Balanced Budget Amendment Division: Calls for a new constitutional convention get short shrift from kneejerk liberal Richard Rovere. “It is at least theoretically possible,” he warns in The New Yorker (March 19, 1979) “that another convention could reinstate segregation, and even slavery.” Whether you find that persuasive, I suppose, depends on whether you’d rather tote dat barge or lif’ dat national debt.

* * *

One of the first great libertarian victories was the 1971 Senate vote to cut off funding for the SST. It passed by just three votes, at least two of which were secured by the efforts of libertarian lobbyist James D. Davidson of the National Taxpayers’ Union, in the teeth of frenzied opposition from conservatives and liberals alike. But it seems that there is now a campaign afoot to revive the SST. According to Business Week (March 19, 1979), NASA has been spending about $9-million a year on SST research, and Boeing (the original SST contractor), Lockheed (of bribe and bailout fame) and McDonnell Douglas “have spent a similar amount of their own money.” Supposedly these companies have learned how to build a profitable SST (unlike the ill-fated Anglo-French Concorde). Lockheed claims that its SST design would cost just 20% to 25% more per seat to run than its current DC-10 jumbo jet, “Boeing now believes that little if any surcharge over economy fares might be necessary in the future,” and “McDonnell Douglas foresees a potential market approaching $50-billion in current dollars over the next 25 years for SSTs.” On top of that, Business Week claims, the new SST wouldn’t harm the earth’s ozone layer (a 1971-vintage concern). So at long last we will see a supersonic airliner produced completely (barring NASA’s $72-odd million) by Private Enterprise, right? The chance, as one might guess, is fat. In fact, Boeing wants the Treasury to pony up $500-million to build a one-quarter scale SST prototype, or “we might withdraw from SST work.” After that, the companies suggest that a Comsat-style government corporation, whose shares would be guaranteed by the taxpayer, might be needed to raise the estimated $7-billion the new SST would cost. (Lockheed’s chief design engineer thinks no one would buy SST stock and, typically, wants a government loan. A $15 surcharge on each ticket would repay the Treasury in just 25 years—assuming a fleet of 400 SSTs.) Libertarians had best make ready to defend their victory; the House just defeated an attempt to kill NASA’s SST research, which will cost $22.7-million in fiscal 1980.

* * *

For the benefit of all you junk food junkies, the regulation junkies in Washington insist that a one ounce serving of potato chips may not contain more than two percent of the U.S. Recommended Daily Allowance of salt.