26 FEBRUARY 1977, Page 7

Trumpeters and kings depart

Nicholas von Hoffman

• Washington President Carter, who is widely suspected of wearing blue jeans under his white shirt, tie and jacket while seated at his desk in the Oval Office, has now done away with the fourteen trumpeters who used to appear on the White House balcony to toot fanfares. Ruffles and flourishes have been banished as the new President goes to any lengths to make sure that he is not isolated from his fellow-citizens.

It is commonly believed in Washington and in Hollywood that it was imperial, presidential isolation that brought down two of Mr Carter's three immediate predecessors. Unhappily for Americans more interested in gardening and gourmet cooking, no steps have been taken to isolate them from the President. He has made it clear that no home is safe, that he may turn up in any one of our kitchens any morning to 'communicate' with us. Communicate is the big buzzword so we are not to be frightened if we oPen the cupboard and there in the dark are those smiling teeth, come to have a word of Prayer and political communion. LBJ and Richard Nixon alone and deserted in the bunker are beginning to look good. The latest is that our compassionate, aring and communicative leader is going to have a call-in radio talk show. Our radio talk shows permit anybody, anywhere, to call a designated number and talk to a discjockey, prurient-minded psychologist, sports star, or in this case, a President. There is a seven-second delay before the caller's voice is broadcast thus permitting the producer to 4iP out the obscene and the excessively

insane,

The radio show is supposed to be concerned with public issues but President Carter continues to devote an inordinate amount of time to discussing the need to strengthen family life. He has ordered his sutiordinates — to their depression and desPair—to go home and not let work get between them and the little ones. Then the Other day he turned up at the Department of Housing and Urban Renewal to tell a large auditorium full of bemused and astonished bureaucrats, 'Those of you who are living in Sin, I hope you will get married. Those of you who have left your spouses, come back home. Those of you who don't know your children's names, get to know them.' This was all said with a laugh and a smile, but it was Prefaced with the serious observation that 'We need astable family life to make us etter servants of the people.' The man means it and everybody knows he means it s° it won't be surprising if his show develops into Jimmy Carter's Personal Problem Hour.

'Hello, Mr President ? This is, ah, I mean my name is Louetta Coynes of Half Moon House, Missouri, and I have a terrible problem with zits [American slang for adolescent pimples].'

`Louetta, there is a pretty serious zit shortage and it's due in my opinion to too much government regulation. I know the young people of America can't dance without their zits and! want you to know yours is a sensitive and responsive government that is not going to allow the Tasmanian zit cartel to cast a shadow over what should be the happiest years of you and your school buddies. As you know Louetta, I've just moved in here from Plains, Georgia, but I promise—and you can count on it—that by 4July America will have a zit policy.'

He has also promised an oil policy even sooner, but these are extraordinary times. The new White House frankness extends to everything but diagrammatic details on the positions of presidential copulation, while matters like energy and the Middle East remain largely undiscussed in public. The most probable reason is that the policy isn't yet formed. It may never be if the President, Mrs Carter and the rest of the Cabinet don't stop giving interviews on the state of their bowels and get off somewhere to huddle and thrash out what is to be done.

The early indications are, however, that the United States will make a larger effort to cut back on its oil imports. As with the Nixon and Ford administrations, the slogan is 'energy independence,' thereby continuing a long-standing if baffling policy of using domestic oil in preference to foreign crude. The upper layers of government are fixated on the idea that buying and burning imported oil will put us in the hands of the Arabs. They are haunted by visions of demented sheikhs in sheets turning off the spigot while the wheels of American industry grind to a halt. Only a few voices have tried to point out the surest way of guaranteeing this doesn't happen is to use foreign oil as much and as long as possible, keeping the domestic oil in reserve against the day the King of Saudi Arabia loses his marbles, joins the Chinese Reds and cuts off the American supply.

Nor are many getting up to point out the economic consequences for the world if America ends her energy purchases. There is a not very intelligent kind of economic isolationism infecting the brains of poli ticians here who would never be guilty of political isolationism. In their minds America isn't to be 'dependent' on any really necessary imported commodity; but how the most important industrial power is to sell abroad without buying and expect the rest of the world trade system to maintain itself isn't explained.

A fully detailed and rounded set of proposals on energy is promised for April. In the meantime, there are other topics. UN Ambassador Andy Young is back from Africa with a kind word for what the British have attempted in Rhodesia while the Administration tries to prove its heart is now with the insurgents by getting Congress to join the UN boycott of Rhodesian chrome. The right-wingers may make a successful fight on this one if American radio and television persist in repeatedly talking about the possibility of 'race war' in Africa. The United States can help an oppressed majority conduct a revolution to establish democratic institutions but, given its own internal problems, it will be paralysed in any conflict defined as a 'race war.' It's still too early to say if people here will identify with one side or the. other. Upper-class publications like the New York Times are doing their best to print atrocity stories which reflect shamefully on both sides and if that becomes the practice, the government will retain freedom of movement.

The informal, off-the-cuff way of talking that Carter and some of his people affect makes it difficult to sift out what is a mere fragment of a larger set of thoughts, what is a whim of the moment and what is a trial balloon. The President continues to talk disarmament with several suggestions of how Russia and the United States might begin. The suggestions, which seem calculated and rehearsed, revolve around the free will/good will gesture idea. Ivan, you do something nice for us like not deploying your new intermediate range portable missiles and we'll do something nice for you and that will prove to each of us we're good guys and then we can get down to hard bargaining.

But some people here are objecting that negotiations can't go forward if Mr Carter persists in being Andrei Sakharov's pen pal. 'Standing up for human rights,' as these sallies are called, is praised by those who regard hopes for disarmament as a species of weakness, while Dr Kissinger's admirers dismiss them as inept. The Doctor of Diplomacy himself has just signed a multimillion-dollar contract to be a television commentator, so we should learn what he thinks presently. The debate on the question, however, hardly got itself started when the newspapers began publishing the names of foreigners on the CIA payroll. Unhappilyfor Britain there are no English names on the list, which may explain the deficit in the balance of payments.

In accordance with American racial eccentricities, blacks get paid considerably less than whites. But the uproar over payments hasn't focused on this obviously discriminatory practice, dwelling instead on the propriety, indeed the morality, of paying non-American citizens to perform certain little services for us. It is terribly important for Americans to believe that the reason King Hussein does exactly as we tell him is that he loves and admires us. That it should turn out he helped us for compensation running several million higher than what Dr Kissinger will get for his Memories casts doubt on the authenticity of this Arab's affections. When the news broke, the President fired the King from his employ while the White House said he intends to continue his correspondence with the inmates of Siberian institutions of higher learning and Russian mental health facilities. However, this is still a young administration and unfixed in many of its policies so that these debates may change the direction of events.

Now for some closing titbits to keep you abreast of the onward and upward march of American civilisation : Newspapers carried pictures of five paediatricians manacled together after being indicted for trying to bribe officials to keep their branch of medicine among those health services for which the government pays.

Steak Tonight, Inc., has begun the retail sales distribution of a substance variously known as flaked steak, restructured steak or reconstituted steak. Whatever it is called, it is made by flaking the meat, fat and gristle of not very good beef, putting the resultant particles together under pressure and moulding them into anything from a pork chop to a veal cutlet. Our palates have been so ruined we can't tell the difference between calf's liver and pickled eel, so sales of this 'upwardly mobile hamburger' are reported to be brisk.

The government tired the doctor unlucky enough to get blamed for the swine flu inoculation programme; the next day the programme was reinstated for the old and sickly while at the same time the Navy announced the court-martial of two sailors for refusing an order to have the injections.