Unchanging America
t\licholas von Hoffman Washington It is fitting in this land of churchgoers t that the soothsayers on the Council of Cicic2,(1°Inie Advisers should look to , ustmas to rescue the world's mightiest hepublic from the doldrums. More analysts :ye been watching the department stores an there have be Christmas shoppers in the en m.
enAtnerica goes into the holiday season and Yeas he year in confusion. Whereas two fls ago they blamed the bad times on in- eijatit)n and a lack of savings — we were ac- rlosied of buying too many consumables and /0-„` saving to invest — now the Wall Street Di"tnal says the fault is stable prices, peo- thsaving instead of buying. 446.511Y a Christmas present for your child aC Preside our country! Senator Paul Lax iv', nt Reagan's closest and oldest ki!ttical friend, the man he recently ap- ..,Irited head of his re-election effort two sears hence, wants the boss to get on the air 1 adaves and sell, as he did when he used to li,vertise on TV for General Electric. 'I've linssed this with the President,' he said, hat's lacking out there is consumer con- 61,d„ence- Millions of people are waiting to te' a car or appliance or home because thhi,,Y, think they can get a better deal later. I Die"K the President should address the peo- gra Md say, "You're part of this. The pro- h4villine can't move, forward unless you lve the confidence to go out and buy that
or ear or hoine." '
,,,,whatever may be lacking out there, Dirt is lurking is fear. With 14 million peo- Out of work, The rest are not buying will use they are afraid they will be next and 114' need the money. The television drives 10441e the idea that the worst may happen to they even if you are not a black teenager; lorthe are many stories on the air about kic'ber1Y prosperous white families from ileft'llgari and Ohio who moved to the Sun the to find work and now live in tents in pDark. li() crin the air and in the papers this is a kid strnas with heavy emphasis on child *pm, sPouse 'abuse' by unemployed Ne'ers, alcoholism and climbing suicide ttits,:,It's a credit to the orderliness of most ly1;''-work Americans that they turn the tealthemselves and don't wave it at tod tellers, something which gets harder tertric: as the tellers are replaced by computer ki.111,als which take your deposits and cash reti- cfleques with robotic efficiency. If the k suicide line on the graphs catches up ),eid crosses the black unemployment line, zieilvi11 have found a new and altogether
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've way of disposing of joblessness. 1 %ork110cl will pay for the funerals has yet to be e out. Most workers lose their medical insurance and such when they lose their jobs; they also lose their self- confidence. They will be staring at their Christmas trees thinking it is somehow their fault that they got dumped. The disposition to blame oneself is encouraged by theielevi- sion programmes on which job experts, whatever they may be, expatiate on how to write a CV (new jargon for Curriculum Vitae), how to dress and how to grovel. Having the right attitude is stressed, a flashy subservience, an eagerness, a will- ingness to work until you drop while look- ing like you're grateful. It also helps to in- dicate no task is too low, vile or disgusting, and the women can crank up to make cof- fee for the men again. No more talk about sexual harassment. They say that in his hey- day every morning at MGM, Louis B. Mayer had a starlet kneeling between his legs while his barber gave him a shave and he read Variety. This year in Washington, not a heyday period for anyone, the bailiffs are working evicting people for non- payment of rent. There is a backlog of 4,000 such families. You can see them on the sidewalks with their lampshades, their scratched TVs, sitting on stained sofas, ask- ing themselves what comes next. It is worse if the family owns a parakeet.
We are a perky nation, however depleted though we may be. Many communities have summoned their strength to renew the war on incest, a war which I bet you didn't know we were fighting. Persons denominated as 'counsellors', often hir- sute, hefty women, have been coming on the television to encourage children to report their daddies to the police or their teachers if Pops 'abuses them sexually'. It is not safe to be the father of a daughter in the United States and show affection in any manner other than by expensive, economically stimulative Christmas presents. Why this war is waged exclusively against fathers leching unnaturally after their daughters is not discussed. A mother can do things to her children that would make a Greek playwright retch, and nothing is said about it. As for brothers and sisters fooling around, the mental health community has no interest whatsoever.
We enter 1983 with a high-tech heart, preferably an artificial one. Our science, temporarily stumped by the spread of Ac- quired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, or AIDS, among homosexuals, haemophiliacs and most recently, new-born infants, has successfully implanted a plastic heart in the breast of a human being who, at this writing, lives a not altogether satisfactory life as a comatose zombie. We follow Barney Clark's story every day, every hour, as the government's centre for disease con- trol issues communiqués concerning the newest reports of AIDS' progress in killing us. It is like America to invent so many diseases. We will not go routinely to our graves, dead from old-world afflictions. We want our own and we mean to have them.
We have our ways. We who invented the disposable society, the throw-away con- tainer, the junkable everything, we are on the threshold of obsolete ways of taking care of sick people. Nursing them back to health is too expensive and it entails too much dirty work that only Haitians or other illegal immigrants care to do but don't even do well. When a human part is diseased, we replace it in the same way we fix broken computers or television sets. We pluck out the defective module and slam in a new package. We can do the same thing with hearts and kidneys, livers and spleens. It's less time-consuming and more up-to-date than preparing barley soup.
Even in our economically depressed state, we are our old selves — trying, inven- ting, coming up with the new and the bet- ter. Only the other day we passed another socio-cultural landmark (we like to coin compounds beginning with socio — it sounds scientific). We married medicine and criminal justice with the first execution of a condemned murderer by hypodermic injection. This happened in Texas, and everyone's excited about the possibilities of combining these two American obsessions, punishing the guilty and high-tech, stainless steel medical procedures. We think it is the beginning of new life styles for some and death styles for others.
We have a public relations problem. It kinda sneaked up on us. We have 1,115 men on the nation's various death rows. That's a lot of chicken to fry at once, the smell of which might offend foreign nostrils, nostrils attached to noses attached to heads less dedicated to the endless and relentless war against crime than us. The proposal is to inject these persons with a fluid that will only cause brain death. Then, they will be stored until their organs, hereafter referred to as modules, are needed by persons whose own original factory equipment has broken and been replaced.
Hereafter persons convicted of capital crimes will be called 'donors'. Capital punishment, as we have known it, will be abolished. The world will admire and love us. Our judges, instead of condemning murderers to death as we have done in the past, will announce, 'The State has decided to give you the opportunity to realise your true, human potential and fulfil yourself by an act of sharing and togetherness that will put you in the most intimate contact with others. You are being given a chance to par- ticipate in a pro-life programme and to give yourself in a unique and uniquely satisfying way.'
Better to give than receive, eh, Mr Scrooge? A merry and generous Christmas to all you dear English people.
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