The Washington jitters
Nicholas von Hoffman
Washington Whatever was intended when Senator Frank Church was given permission to make the announcement about Russian troops in Cuba, the whole affair has now got completely out of hand. Church, the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has made ratification of SALT contingent on the removal of those 3,000 'combat' troops — they are always referred to as 'combat' troops, as though there were some other kind of soldier. In this, he is getting support from Howard Baker of Tennessee, the Senate's minority leader and an aspirant for the Republican Presidential nomination next year. Republican Presidential candidates are replicating faster than mould on an unwashed soup bowl, so it's not Baker's distinction, but rather his contribution to the general noise, that increases the uncertainty about when the Senate will ratify this vastly unloved document.
The self-evident answer to the Russian troop business is to invite this sinister brigade to invade Florida. If they're like most of their fellow countrymen, ballet dancers, chess masters, ice skaters or whoever, they will promptly ask for political asylum. If that nation's elite, the few who do get apartments, dachas, automobiles and foreign travel, skip out of the great red gulag at the first chance they get, it is reasonable to suspect that the toiling hoi polloi will stuff flowers in the barrels of their howitzers and desert, the first instant their masters are foolish enough to let them invade a free, fat and prosperous Western nation.
The administration, not unlike an uncertain first-round boxer, has been reacting with pawing, defensive, left jabs — harmless leather dabs aimed alternately at the Russians and at the real enemies in Senate. At length, the President made his Monday night speech on the subject, in which he harumphed in a gentlemanly way and announced that the flag would be shown more often in the Caribbean, a part of the world which remains more or less an American lake. This disarmed Senator Church, at least to the extent of saying he would let sAur out of its committee captivity so it can be voted up or down. Men like Republican John Tower of Texas and Democrat Scoop Jackson of Washington were on the television the next morning proclaiming their dissatisfaction to all who had the time and patience to listen.
But our jittery jingoists, heedless of the fact that the Miami Police Department outnumbers the Russian infantry on Castro's island 90 miles away, keep asserting the superiority of the American way but acting as if they don't believe it. In the last few days, they've publicly scared themselves about left-wingers in Panama, El Salvador and Nicaragua, the new master of the last having been accused of having learned revolution from the detested Fidel. The Nicaraguans deny it, but the actual number of places where that kind of thing is taught is limited. You learn revolution from Castro and counter-revolution from the CIA, or you risk all with the on-the-job training. And, then, just after the mendacious Nicaraguans left Washington, the news arrived that the actor, George Hamilton, had been denied the entrance visa he wanted by the Romanian government; now he won't be able to tour Transylvania in order to promote his recent Dracula film. The real horror story, however, may be Georgia's melon-faced Senator, Sam Nunn, a prematurely pompous man, who has persuaded the Senate to take a preliminary vote increasing military expenditures by something like 80 billion dollars in the next few years. He and his group are attempting to keep SALT hostage, dependent upon the weapons increase. But while he can talk endlessly about armoured division 'equivalents' and ballistic missile `thrnw weights', there is never a word on how these huge increases are to be paid for.
Thus, some of the very conservative members of the Senate have been edging toward that body's dovecote. The Nunn/ Goldwater types don't seem to understand that their own arguments in favour of making social security a pay-as-you-go programme (which it is) apply to cannons as Well. It is one thing to run up a deficit for military expenditure during a war emergency which is limited in time, but there is no war now, this is as close as the latter part of the 20th century gets to peace, and if these immense deficits are allowed to become 'normal', so also will the increasingly destructive inflation. Just as taxes are now raised 'When social security and other welfare benefits are increased, the same ought to be the case with military expendi ture.
It won't, not in the near future, anyway, and inflation continues to do its work of demoralisation. The new chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Paul Volcker, is beginning to look like his predecessors, that IS, a man who talks a tough, tight money Policy even while the printing presses are stepping up production of greenbacks — the Only production, 'incidentally, which is being stepped up these days. Volcker alVarently thinks that he can control the money supply by raising interest rates, and so he has pushed the basic rate that banks must pay to borrow money into the 11 per cent range. This means that the banks are Charging their best customers something like 13 per cent; but while that may see high enough to prevent too many dollars from chasing too few goods, 13 per cent interest isn't bad for many corporate borrowers. Since the inflation rate is approximately the same, they're really not paying anything for the loan of the money. In addition, interest rates are chargeable as a business expense for tax purposes, so that any company paying the maximum tax rate of 48 per cent finds that its actual, after-tax interest rate is closer to 6 than to 13 per cent. Needless to say, Mr Volcker's approach hasn't seemed to discourage borrowing while money supply growth figures have risen alarmingly. Somewhere in all of this, there is a President of the United States, but things have not been going well for Jimmeh. After the attack by the amphibious rabbit (a new subversive group in Washington now calls itself the Lapinistas), there was the six-mile toot race over the Maryland mountains, Which our 'oxygen-deficient' chief executive had to drop out of when it began to look as though he was about to drop dead. (Old Testament scholars of Carter's own bornagain faith have recently determined that the Gadarene swine were joggers, and ztoologists aver that lemmings are, also.) In he meantime a jumpy, nervous White House has come down with the same obsessional concentration on Edward Kennedy that Nixon had, and, before him, Johnson _l.tad about older brother Robert. Carter • ruinself has started to make artless wisecracks about Kennedy panicking under pres sure, cracks which assuredly ought to be made by lower echelon knife-wielders, not by the supreme, serene, democratically elected god/king.
As Carter and Kennedy knocked lint particles off the shoulders of each other's blue serge suits, the Black-Jewish split continued. If it goes on long enough, it could divide the Democratic Party in a manner fatal to its election prospects. American Jewish spokesman, as is their custom, took the Israeli government's part in its refusal to accord any recognition to the touring black clergymen and civil rights leaders who've been visiting the PLO and generally looking around the area as a result of the Andrew Young affair. This, plus the bombings of Lebanon with American-supplied weapons, plus stories now appearing in the press here about Israeli soldiers torturing and murdering Lebanese, plus repeated news of Israelis taking over more Arab land on the West Bank, continually erodes Israeli support, while the almost complete absence of any organised dissenting opinion among American Jews gives them a look of selfish, disciplined solidity to the goyim.
Jews, who might otherwise disagree with their confreres, are beginning to wonder about how the Gentiles view them. 'A lot more Jews would take doveish positions publicly if they felt sure the non-Jewish community would continue to support Israel's right to exist,' a worker in a Quaker organisation specialising in Middle East problems observes. 'Christians have to take a more principled stand against the notion that "Zionism is racism" if they want Jews to have more guts.' Unfortunately, the Christian drift is toward taking a loudly principled stand on behalf of the Palestinians, so that, as one American Jewish journalist put it, are the goyim thinking to themselves, 'At last, we're off the hook. All that pressure to hide our natural dislike of Jews, to be polite because of the holocaust experiences, is over. The Palestinian cause is also just. The Jew themselves have been oppressing an underdog who needs our sympathies.' The same writer, Carolyn Toll, says that 'those who champion the Palestinian cause often give Jews the feeling that Palestinians have replaced Jews in the Christian circle of concern, leaving Jews with no allies but their own people.' Hardly a frame of mind propitious for making concessions or seeing the other fellow's point of view.
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