Bad jokes in America

Nicholas von Hoffman

Washington Most people here hadn't focussed on the fact that Jimmy had flown off to Warsaw until they learned that a translator, out of

incompetence or mischief, had mistranslated a phrase in the President's arrival address to mean he had come to that distant Slavic land with a 'carnal desire for the Polish people'. After he has been almost a year in office, a growing number of Jimmy Carter's countrymen are coming to doubt Whether their President is capable of a carnal desire for anything. So bloodless does he appear week after week, repeating his eight main clichés, that some are beginning to Wonder if he did not lie to Playboy magazine when he ‘confessed to his interviewer that he sometimes entertained lust in his heart.

His has turned out to be a lustless ambi tion, an automated personality in which human activity and emotion are expressed in the use of words like option, input and aspiration in place of choice, thought and hope. Some men may speak that way because they use bureaucratising words to muzzle urges they wish to hide, but Jimmy Carter, far from appearing in a state of inner conflict, seems to contain within himself an unearthly, eschatological placidity.

In any event, our first non-biodegradable President showed up in Poland, a land Which Americans are convinced is not a Proper nation but a bad joke. Cultural anthropologists have yet to explain why the Americans love what are called Polish Jokes, but they do, and there are hundreds of them circulating across the country all the time. Sample: 'How can you tell a Polish airplane? It has hair under its wings.' Hence Poland is the one country in the world every American politician should stay out of. But Carter, who would be more popular if he loved God less and man more, had to go to Warsaw where of course he immediately fell victim to the curse of Polish humour.

Jimmy the Baptist's encounter with carnal desire on the banks of the Vistula has not answered the question of why he is taking this long, rather pointless trip. This is the One he postponed in order to stay in Washington and fight for his energy legislation, which is in even less danger of being passed now than it was a month ago. Congress is on holiday so that this is as good a time to go souvenir shopping in New Delhi as Carter is likely to get.

If the President intends to take a more active hand in the Middle East negotiations, he hasn't indicated it. Carter's chief difficulty is to resist becoming such a complete captive of the Israeli lobby that he renders himself useless in Arab eyes. He came close to doing that the other night during yet one more television interview when he declared himself opposed to an independent Arab state on the West bank of the Jordan. Under the happy influence of a Polish moon, he began to backtrack at his Warsaw press conference, advertised au style Nixon as the first ever by an American President behind the slowly rusting Iron Curtain.

The television coverage of the Middle East which continues to be massive has only • served to underscore the idiocy of the American stumblings. We have, for instance, a lady interviewed in her Israeli settlement in the Sinai declaring: 'I didn't move all the way here from Miami Beach to become an Egyptian'. On a different, although not necessarily higher plane, we have had Messrs Sadat and Begin, who were appearing on our television almost as frequently as patent medicine ads, start each interview with a little statement of thanks to President Carter for leadership, vision and tireless efforts on behalf of peace. Since no one can guess what these might consist of, the suspicion has taken hold that the two Middle Eastern heads of state are carrying Carter because they anticipate they will need him for some kind of guarantees later on.

Before leaving for his Indo-European sojourn, Carter signed a bill raising taxes to pay for the social security system, the means by which the government pays old age and physical disability pensions. America is the only Western democracy where the government makes no contributions to the pension funds from general revenue. The social security system is supposed to be an insurance system entirely supported by wage and salary workers and their en ployers. In fact, the system has never been financially sound, although payments by low and mid

dle income workers are already so high it is considered the most retrogressive part of the American tax structure. The new bill, by far the largest welfare measure Carter will sign during his incumbency, adds an estimated quarter of a trillion dollars in taxes over the next couple of decades without dealing with the system's failures.

The most serious inadequacy is that a retired older person cannot live on the pension. Instead of raising the pensions so that they can buy satisfactory food, shelter and medical care, the government have preferred to create a number of programmes in which third party, private enterprise firms are paid subsidies to provide these goods and services for the indigent elderly. The consequence is that the old, rather than the black or the hispanic, are becoming the poorest Americans.

One of the reasons a programme as bad as this one can be continued and enlarged is that Federal Government employees are not part of it. From President to postman, federal employees have their own retirement system into which they pay not the 100 per cent non-government employees' pay, but about sixty per cent of the cost. How much better federal government employees live than the rest of the population is illustrated by the difference in income levels between Washington and its suburbs and other major American cities with their suburbs.

The average household income in Washington is $27,702. Only eleven other metropolitan areas have an average family income in excess of $20,000, and only one, the high income New York City suburb of Long Island, comes close to Washington's. With virtually all wage earners either employed by the government, directly or through government contractors (a favoured way of hiding the true dimensions of government employment), the average family income in Washington and environs works out to be $13,004 a year higher than in Los Angeles; it is more than $10,000 higher than in New York City and more than $8,000 a year higher than in Chicago.

For all this, America remains a land of justice. A jury of nine women and three men recently acquitted one Ralph Borello of selling obscene movies. Mr Borello was accused of starring his enormous Alsatian in two films of bestiality entitled 'Man's Best Friend' and 'Every Dog Has His Day'. The jury found the movies 'too disgusting and repulsive' to appeal to the prurient interest of a normal human being and therefore not obscene under the law.

In another part of the forest, Hamilton 'Jordan, President Carter's most important political adviser, was accused of plucking the top of the bodice of Madame Ashraf Ghorbal, the wife of the Egyptian Ambassador, and then saying, as he peered southward, 'I've always wanted to see the pyramids'.

Thank God he didn't pluck at the lady's panties and exclaim, 'I've always wanted to see the Sphinx'.