Red alert time
Nicholas von Hoffman
Washington The past few days, the television has taken on a late Sixties hue. Shots of enormous, bulge-bellied, grey-green airtransports humping their way down runways toward blue skies and violent adventure . . . interviews of paratrooper boys saying they're scared . . . of master sergeants saying they're ready . . . of young officers saying they know their duty. Red alert time again on the network news as the correspondents speak with wicked melodrama about 'these soldiers' missions.' and all the other officious expressions of modern, bureaucratised war.
In front of the White House politicians gather to make statements of national solidarity. Thankee, Lord, things are never so good as when they're bad overseas. All of this martial activity and statesmanesque posturing for the cameras in front of the Casa Blanca had, of course, to do with Africa. Until a few years ago, Africa never figured in the news except when an occasional visiting political personage would reprove the United States for neglecting the dark continent.
The great powers were otherwise occupied with the Vietnamese tiger hunt, so that the Africans, backward people that they were, were forced to carry on such bloodletting as they were fain to commit on themselves with archaic weapons: that black men killed each other with spear and blunderbuss only served to show how underdeveloped were the nations of those tropical climes. For years on television talk shows, experts and professors explained that most Africans had no clear understanding of or allegiance to the modern national state. They killed out of merely tribal considerations — a lower form of death.
Thus the importance of all this fighting and the reasons for our interest, must now be explained to us. The television commentators tell us that there are now seven wars, civil and international, going on in Africa, and that's not counting Idi Amin who is an entire conflagration all rolled up in his single, fat, tyrannical personhood. Nevertheless even the officials at the State Department have been looking a little fuddled over who it is exactly who is fighting in Zaire, and why. Castro says it isn't him and from the distance of Hannibal, Missouri, or Takom a, Washington, fighting in Katanga or Shaba province is like flooding on the Mississippi. They both happen every spring.
To politicians who are itching to do something violent and manly in Africa, the situation is a chance to show the world the Yankee pack is back. Set them goddamn little shot glasses in a row on the bar so's I can draw my repeating F-15 fighter bomber and shoot 'em into flying fragments. Whether the memory of Vietnam still hurts, or whether it's Fidel Castro who is driving us crazy, a lot of military molecules are spinning around. The President is staying calm. The White House has been at pains to emphasise that, whoever it may be that the United States will help in the homeland of the hippo, it's not going to be with soldier boys.
Such near-serenity may stem in part from the vote in the Senate sustaining the package deal of war planes to Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. It was a climactic struggle against the Israeli lobby which not only works in sedate and traditional ways but also sponsors endless demonstrations. This is a city of demonstrations. Sit at a sidewalk cafe on Pennsylvania or Connecticut Avenues and you can see one trot by every fifteen minutes: masked protesters who want to kick out the Shah of Iran, angry anti-abortionists, followed by angry proabortionists, sympathisers for southwest Africa, and people outraged at the most recent examples of foul treatment meted out to the Iphgaani people by their historic oppressors, the five-foot-two, but very compact Lowbi. Even in this swirl, there are so many Israeli demonstrations they're noticeable even without rabbis chaining themselves to the iron fence around the White House.
Without a doubt it was coincidence, but in the days shortly before the Senate vote on the jets, the NBC television network presented a mammoth prime time, nine and a half hour long soap opera on the Nazi extermination and persecution of the Jews. The Jewish Jaws, as one irreverent reviewer referred to this electronic schmaltz, was
piously and ecstatically received in most quarters. (You will soon be able to judge for yourself because the BBC has bought it.) Bantam Books is reported to have already issued nine printings and sold 1,750,000 copies. This astonishing success caused Peter Biskin in the left weekly Seven Days to write, with cruel but perhaps clairvoyant wit, 'Bantam Books . . . is owned by a German firm,the Bertlesmann Publishing Group, which in turn is controlled by one Reinhard Mohn and family. Herr Mohn, according to the New York Times, was a ilieutenant in the Afrika Korps and spent a lgood part .of World War II interned as a prisoner of war in a detention camp near Concordia, Kansas. Another chunk of Bantam belongs to the Agnelli Group of Italy. Italy was, you may recall, the second of what used to be known in simpler times as the Axis countries. If you watched Holocaust on your Japanese Sony TV the circle is complete. First the Axis annihilated as many Jews as they could: then they sell the story back to those who are left.'
While the Carter administration was garnering a majority of the votes in the Senate despite all this melodrama, in another part of Washington the Supreme Court was not getting the attention it should with a ruling that henceforth corporations would enjoy civil rights, specifically the right of free speech. Up until now, only people had been accorded this right, but not chairs, tables, steel companies, banks or railroads. 1819, Chief Justice John Marshall, speaking for the court, had apparently defined the limits of corporate pretensions when he declared, `p corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible and existing only in contemplation of law. Being the mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it ... ' That's changed and it now appears that in America, at least, all men and organisations are created equal and the Alleghany Screw and Bolt Corp., a wholly owned subsidiary of Universal Drive Shaft., also has a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
In the practical order this seems to mean that the hard-won hedges designed to keel' corporations at some distance from the electoral process are in danger of beulg dismantled. Since this Supreme Court, even more than most, is adept at handing down decisions'no one quite understands, thirtY more cases will have to be litigated at terrible expense before the import of this decision is known, but it appears that whatever good the post-Watergate reform legislation may contain is being nullified in the pompously marble courtroom located in the building just behind Congress. Even in this, the most pro-business interlude since Calvin Coolidge, corporate power has been careful not to act ham-handed in public, so we probably won't see Exxon or US Steel buying up chains of newspapers and TV broadcasting stations to propagandise. to the public. Nevertheless, corporate election activity may be more public and more energetic this autumn than in a long, long• time.
In the onward-march-of-progress department, Joe O'Steen, the Sheriff of Lauderdale county, Tennessee, is investigating a twenty-five-pound chunk of green Ice which fell from the sky near the town of Ripley. 'What I suspect is that someone emptied an airline toilet and it froze at high
altitude', the lawman hypothesised. In New York, a seven-year-old named Kira heard the iexpression 'homosexual politician' on the television and asked her mother to explain. While her mother tripped over a definition for the first word, Kira interrupted to say, 'Oh, I know what a homosexual is. What I don't know is: What is a politician?'
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