Carter's phoney war

Nicholas von Hoffman

Washington For ten days the President kept his mouth shut and listened at Camp David, but the ensuing silence was destroyed by the ridiculous fuss over Skylab and messianic cliches about Moses and the mountain top. Before the President came down from the mountain to cluck in the belligerent manner which some mistake for leadership, Carter, disguised in the molted feathers of the American eagle or some other war bird, went about visiting some average families.First he turned up at the home or a steel worker in Carnegie, Pennsylvania, just outside Pittsburgh, and•then he hopped over to Morgantown, West Virginia, to listen to what some of the hometown folks there had to say.

These constant visits to members of the populace are both charming, and an attestation to Jimmy Carter's continuing effort to keep his ears open and his hatsize under control. It is one of the aspects of Carter which never ceases to edify and demand respect, and it certainly distinguished the old, homey Jimmy from the newly galvanised one who clicked on to our television screens. This new Jimmy has learned to make fist gesticulations while talking, and has adapted his facial expression more in time with his text so that there are far fewer nervously nongermane smiles whilst words like 'war', 'sacrifice' and 'national purpose' come flowing out of his mouth. By asking for the formal resignation of his Cabinet, he has also tried to acquire a new sense of authority. Our Jimmy has been off in his country retreat, not only listening to his guests, when they give him what appears to be good-intentioned if lame advice, but also taking leadership lessons. They are worth whatever he paid for them, just on the basis of getting him to practice his speeches before he delivers them There's no denying it, the post-Camp-David President has, for the moment at least, developed a much more commanding electronic presence. His friends no longer need go around saying, 'yes, yes, but in private, in small meetings, he really is inspiring.'

And, in his night-time speech to the nation, he assuredly tried to inspire, but the one thing that genuine leaders don't do is talk about leadership. One cannot imagine Winston Churchill, the current American stereotype of the leader, coming on the air during the Battle of Britain to read a letter from a fellow politician, as Carter did from a southern state goy ernor:, `Mr President, you're not leading this nation, you're just managing ... there isn't enough loyalty among your disciples ... Mr President, we're in trouble. Talk to us of blood, sweat and tears. If you lead, Mr President, we will follow,' Can you hear Napoleon asking Marshall Ney, 'How can a stubby little runt of a man like me look dynamic? Would a change of uniforms help?'

The reason Jimmy has been lost in the woods studying the Life of Alexander the Great by Norman Vincent Peale and How to Make People Obey You by Dale Carnegie is the public opinion polls and the belief in Washington that Carter has come to a turning point in his term and his political career. But, besides their questionable reliability, the polls simply don't measure intensity of feeling; now that the petrol queues in those states which had them have vanished, the truckers have gone back to trucking, the hackers to hacking, etc, there is still grousing about the price of petrol, but nothing like an insurrectionary atmosphere. The much-talked-about recession is more predicted than felt, so that those of us who spend significant amounts of time outside Washington, and the other insular places where politicians and journalists gather, are hard put to discern a crisis.

The social facts of the moment gave the President's speech, loaded as it was with phrases about a 'crisis of confidence' and the 'need for unity', a patina of incomprehensibility. 'The deep wounds our society suffered' in the immediate past are more easily seen or imagined from the Potomac than among those who actually comprise the society. But if President Carter wishes to bind up hallucinatory wounds, such talk is of less moment than his profuse use of war metaphors. He speaks of 'the energy war', telling us 'we can and will win this battle' provided of course that he has 'the financial weapons' such as his 'Energy Mobilisation Board', since it is as plain as the smile which used to be on his now grim and leaderful face that, 'on the battlefields of energy this democracy which we love will make its stand'.

Such phrases are much more unsettling than his lamentation over the newly descried American 'loss of hope'. There are no battlefields of energy, and if there ever are, they are likely to be in Iran. The question of energy, is a supremely important economic, social and technical problem, but it is not a battle or a war. To galvanise people psychologically, in order to make them engage in this non existent struggle, is to thrill them out of the necessary recognition that it's not a battle we are now fighting but a job which needs doing, and one which will take several decades to accomplish., Unless Carter had the Hundred Years War in mind, he is going to find that, as time passes and there are neither victories nor defeats, nor even skirmishes, the foot soldiers are going to lose interest.

The first widespread use of the war metaphor to a plainly non-military problem was Franklin Roosevelt's, when discussing the Great Depression in the first years of his first term. To the men of the early Thirties, the only thing in their experience that compared to that economic cataclysm was World War I, when Woodrow Wilson had mobilised the economy in wasteful, and often highly inefficient but extremely expeditious fashion. Wilson's War Industry Board became the model for the creation of antiDepression agencies, some of which were literally run by the same men who had performed the function 16 years earlier. To complete the military analogy, there were even anti-Depression parades as America Went to war against bad times.

But within a couple of years, the war against the Depression had become an expensive and embarrassing mistake. The parades, the banners and the billboards celebrating this campaign to nowhere. against no known enemy were forgotten like the 'blue eagle' symbol, which once was stuck on every manufactured product and shop window.

Wars are best confined to real enemies, as when the Wilsonian mobilisation plan was brought out a third time to tackle World War II, Again it worked, but again at the cost of the waste, inefficiency and theft which always accompany the need for fast results. Mr Carter's proposal to spend the titanic sum of 80 billion dollars to bring the exotic technologies of rending petrol from oil-shale and tar-sands cannot escape being wasteful, assuming the project achieves any success at all.

The war psychology hasn't yet swept the mass of people, but apparently it has already so grabbed hold of the White House's shaky thinkers they have lost the capacity to be sceptical. Thus, there is no explanation as to why they think this 80 billion dollar investment can actually result in a synthetic fuel industry capable of producing two and a half million barrels of oil daily. There seems to be no reason to believe that the problems involved with the mass-scale application of such exotic technology will be solved; there is only the hope that America can cut its fuel imports by that much during the next decade. But, even if petrol can be squeezed from the geological formation called oil-shale without destroying the Rocky Mountains, no one has yet explained the wisdom of its economics. It may very well be that it will cost three times as much to make oil here as it will to buy it from Iran. How sensible is it to buy something at three times the price you get it from abroad, just because it is made at home?

The energy war, which Carter and his friends have conjured into existence, consists mostly of spending money to make, high octane fueld out of moonbeams. Is there any other way to describe the President's summary pronouncement that in 20 years and five months, 20 per cent of America's energy will come from the sun? Memories of the Manhattan Project and the American man-in-the-moon programme have led the more optimistic and credulous among us to believe that any accumulation of technologists and money Will get us what We want. Sometimes it may and sometimes it may not, as the failure to cure cancer surely shows. But in this case, the senior politicians of both parties are so sure of eventual success that they are gambling we can continue to live just as we have always done. Just hold on for a few more years, put some stuff in your walls to keep a bit of the cold out and the fuel bills down, and then, good soldier in the energy wars, the valves will be turned on for you, the fuel will flow and there will be fishtails on everybody's limousines.

But the President's war doesn't give recognition to the cause of the nation's high per capita use of energy, which is the locational pattern of construction. It does not in other words attack the zoning laws, which, in virtually every American community, make it illegal to mix land use, so that shopping, work, home, government, hospital, school, must be separated from each other. Everything, in fact, must be separated from everything else, with the result that the car is a survival tool, When Henry Ford first massproduced his tin lizzie, it did liberate countless people from the austere narrowness of the agricultural village; but a recent study of the automobile driving habits of the people of Portland, Oregon, and environs shows that only four per cent of their motoring is for recreation. Over three quarters of all the driving was to go to work, to go to the store, to go to the dentist, and so on.

If it turns out, in the year 2000, that the refining of gasoline from moonbeams or sunrays is impossible on a large scale, or that to do so is even more expensive than the highest price oil, it would make sense to use the intervening time to free people from the necessity of the automobile, which uses up about half of all energy consumed in the United States. This could be done by changing the locational pattern of construction, as I have said, but also in many other ways 'which aren't dramatic, aren't war-like but are fool proof in the sense that their adoption will unquestionably result in lower fossil-fuel usage and, therefore, less dependence on OPEC if that continues to be the summum desideratum.

A few companies have already shown what can be done in the way of energy savings. Since 1972 Dow Chemicals, for example, an enormous multi-billion dollar firm has been able to cut 40 per cent of thermal units per pound of product by doing little more than turning the lights off when not in use.

The latest fuel furore has been caused by a crude oil short-fall of not more than four per cent and, more likely, two per cent of the total current market demand. In other words, with a little less greed, a little more luck, a little better management and a little clearer forward vision, there would have been no gas lines this summer and no 'battlefields' of energy. But since it has happened, it's too bad that Mr Carter chose to use the modern war President or Prime Minister as his leadership model. Had he picked Lincoln instead, he might have used simpler tools, seeing that to be great is not always to be strident, and that the best leader does not seek battlefields, of whatever kind, for his people.

Let war come if it must, but don't court it.