Our reborn President

Nicholas von Hoffman

Washington

The event that called forth goose pimples and lachrymose attention here was the return of the commission sent to Hanoi to learn whatever there is to learn about some 2,500 men missing in action, The relatives of the former PoWs and MIAs have °rganised into a pathetic and morbid special interest group which has been used from time to time by the more emotional sort of anti-Communist. Besides petitions and television interviews of the widows and their ageing children the public has also had It suggested that travellers have seen some of these long-dead men in one place or another in South-East Asia. The government, which probably didn't want to have any truck with the now united Vietnamese for other reasons, had been taking the Poson that normalised relations were contingent on an 'accounting' of the MIA's fate. That has changed with the return of the commission with twelve coffins, eleven of Which apparently contained the remains of American soldiers. The last was either a ringer or a mistake. . Whoever is in that box, President Carter 1,s taking the position that the Vietnamese have acted in good faith and the way is now °Pen to their membership in the UN and all sorts of tokens Americans favour. They do not extend to reparations which the Vietnamese claim President Nixon promised then. Evidently it was never explained to Hanoi that the United States has traditionally reserved financial help to defeated BY winning the war Vietnam lost t, claim to any help, although some Washington lawyers say if the Vietnamese are ready to go through a symbolic ceremony os t surrender they will get machine tools, wine-flu vaccinations and their pick of s,e,v,en new Hollywood movies. In return for 1'10 the United States asks for no territory, no naval bases, but only effusive thanks and the oil concession. At least Mr Carter indicated at his last ews conference that he was ready to deal te°lr oil, but then our reborn President is on evision so often and says so much, a few People are beginning to think he doesn't mean what he says. A couple of days ago he D'n in°13Ped LIP in a small Massachusetts town ,„ f2-eting to spend an hour and a half on his bet answering questions. The folks loved it, ut then how can we not love it when the :lseart ofJimmy's public appearance formula th to flatter us? Every time you look up, _. ere is the President osculating the left and cheeks of the public rump. If he isn't W Mg us how freedom-loving and hardy:Irking we are, he is praising us for our our. Are we really as good as our

President constantly tells us we are, and will such praise spoil us since, as he reminds us, we are,a simple and humble people whom he insists he is unworthy to serve? All of this religio-civic gush has prompted some people to call upon the President to practise a little rebirth control.

A few others are saying 'Enough already. Stop communicating and relating and establishing rapport and do something.' He almost did something the other day in Zaire when it was announced we were accelerating arms shipments because one of that nation's provinces was being invaded by a well-equipped army of unknowns who were raping, burning

and pillaging for reasons no one in Washington dared claim he understood. Later reports tentatively identified the unknown invaders as exiled policemen or some such. Demands were heard in the halls of Congress for a law prohibiting war unless the enemy has a name and a mailing address. The whole name question is impeding American involvement in Africa. We think of Africa, when we do think of it at all, as a place where they shoot their leaders almost as frequently as they change the names of their countries. Some effort is being made to heighten interest in Africa by telling the public that Cuba is conquering much of the continent, Some television programmes are displaying maps of Africa with Cuban soldiers of varying size superimposed on them so that we can see how many men Castro has in each place. Given the popu lation of that not very large island, it appears that Castro has gone Xenophon and the march of the ten thousand one better.

But if the Cubans are all off stealing Africa, who is cutting down the sugar cane? It may be the well-to-do left-wing American youth who have been known to form themselves into `Venceremos Brigades' and paddle across from Miami to help the compesenos get the crops in. Cuba is picking up support in places where you couldn't hear a good word spoken on its behalf a few years ago. The Washington Post's leading society writer has been

publishing an endless series about Cubans, who are gradually resuming their place in the American imagination as a colourful, excessively rhythmic nation of tango dancers and hookers.

At the same time as people with older editions of the atlas were demanding to know where the hell Zaire might be, the debate over 'Standing for human rights' has begun. Fine symbolic gestures are one

thing, but a number. are asking if so much

speechifying on the subject won't endanger reaching an arms agreement with the Russians. The President has been saying he doesn't think it will, at least he certainly hopes it won't and we'll all find out after Secretary of State Cyrus Vance comes back from his Moscow trip.

The human rights question has helped distract media attention from the economic question of questions. Few people have much enthusiasm for the President's 'stimulation package,' which contains the blend ing, melding and compromising of so many schools of thought that none but its official sponsors will embrace it. Next Carter is promising an 'inflation package' which is supposed to contain some cuts in government spending, but not of the sort that will disturb the stimulation package. He is also hinting that his inflation package will include cutting back on the sort of government regulations of business that arc thought to drive up the prices of the goods and services in a number of industries. It's demon strably true that government intervention in such diverse activities as trucking and orange-growing does drive up the general price level, so the contents of this package

may not be any more satisfying than what's in the first: The President's third package, the one dealing with energy, is still tightly wrapped but the rumours have it that when the ribbons are pulled the nation will face near-draconian, government-forced cut

backs in consumption. This, it is speculated, will be done both by regulation and by jacking up prices. Wall Street's current swoon is supposed to be on account of the anticipated effect the energy programme will have on business, but then anyone seriously claiming to know why Wall Street does whatever it does is a delusionary lunatic.

While the Carter administration gets its economics untracked there are other things to yell at each other about, the most notable of which is the ban the government has proposed on saccharin because it has been shown to cause cancer in laboratory rats. If the ban sticks, which doesn't look too likely, it will be the first time since the prohibition of alcohol that the government has tried to take such a widely used substance away from her children. The children don't like it one bit. Congressmen are making the most idiotically ill-informed speeches challenging the conclusions from the saccharin experiments, while others are announcing they'd rather have cancer. In a nation which finds emaciation so attractive that the victims of concentration camps are considered sexy, the threat of pudge and paunch is making people hysterical. They're buying every last bag of saccharin off the supermarket shelves and stockpiling low-cal soda pop in their basements even as the shrinks tell us that they've isolated a new neurosis in the female population which consists of a compulsion to starve oneself literally into the hospital.

The happy side of the news is that prosperity has come to the Jerry Ford family. Mom and Dad have signed with the William Morris (talent) Agency, as opposed to Henry Kissinger, who has International Creative Management working for him. Norman Brokaw, who takes care of the Ford Family account, has represented Loretta Young, Marilyn Monroe, Mark Spitz and Clint Eastwood, so it was no great shakes for him to get a milliondollar deal for Jerry and Betty's separate but probably equally dull memoirs. He then picked up another million or what's reported to be close to it for Ford to be a television news commentator of some sort on N BC, a network which already has falling viewer ratings. Son Jack Ford, a selfimportant young Grinch, has got himself a non-job as an assistant to the publisher of Rolling Stone Magazine. Daughter Susan has arranged to sell her snapshots to Good Housekeeping Magazine, which will print them under the title of 'White House Scrapbook.' Son Steve has signed to star in a made-for-TV movie and when all this hits, the Fords will have done it again . got rich by putting the rest of us to sleep.