Gloom and Doom on a Saturday

ON SUMMER weekends, for the lucky ones, the world slows down to a more manageable pace. Minor tribulations aside, on a hot Saturday afternoon at the beach or bopping around town the problems of the world slide easily out of mind. While ignorance, however temporary, is bliss, it remains ignorance. So if you want to keep your weekend intact--and there's no reason not to, for it will all be there to deal with again during the week--stay away from a decent newspaper. The idiot papers will fill your mind with puffery about craft fairs or "celebrities," but a good newspaper never stops giving you the news, and it's almost always bad. If you don't watch out, you'll catch yourself remembering what an out-of-control mess this country is, and that will probably spoil your weekend.

In last Saturday's New York Times, for example, a cursory inspection of the news section revealed several stories bearing menacing portents, directly or otherwise. These items were only connected loosely, in that they add up to one inescapable, and hardly novel, conclusion: America bloats with inertia, and as the torpor grows, rational actions dwindle. Although Fridays in July are supposed to be slow news days, a speculative reader could not help but feel bewildered after reading these seemingly disparate stories:

In Washington, D.C., organizers of Sunday's pro-Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) march, which drew 100,000 heavily-recruited supporters, were making their final preparations for the rally to save their endangered legislation. The ratification deadline for the bill falls next March, and it is highly unlikely that the necessary three more states will approve the amendment before then. Illinois failed last month after three increasingly futile and bitter attempts; several months ago Kentucky rescinded its approval, as did South Carolina. Failing the necessary 38 states, pro-ERA factions are pursuing a bill in Congress that would extend the deadline until 1986, an unheard-of break for a Constitutional amendment. That bill may well pass, and so the ERA would, given its novel renewed lease on life, probably pass in the next few years--but realistically it could well go in the way of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery in name, but did little else to support the rights of blacks. The real progress of the women's rights movement in America has been, and will continue to be, agonizingly slow. We are still an outrageously sexist nation, and there are only minor signs of change, and the feminist movement has by and large collapsed into a rather bizarre disarray. Yet 100,000 people marched in Washington to show their support for women's rights, and millions more must surely realize the sensibility of sexual equality. Here is a clear case of inertia holding the upper hand.

In Virginia, David Truong and Roland Humphrey were sentenced to 15 years in prison, five weeks after they were convicted of espionage, stealing government documents and feeding them to the government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The two men admitted to stealing the documents, but maintained that their goal was to help normalize relations between the U.S. and the nation we bombed, defoliated and depopulated during the '60s and early '70s. True, they could have gotten life sentences--but the fact that they were convicted at all demonstrates that there are serious problems in the federal government and in the White House.

Briefly, it was revealed during the trial that President Carter had, without a court order, authorized wiretaps on Truong and Humphrey after Justice Department officials persuaded him that the pair was dangerous to national security and had to be caught. In the course of the trial, several government officials testified that the documents in question were neither sensitive nor fraught with national security matters--the crux of the government prosecutor's case. Yet Truong and Humphrey were singled out, as if to demonstrate Washington's contempt for Vietnam. While the pair clearly deserves some sentence--pilfering government documents, after all, is not very nice--the whole affair smacks of Cold Warriorism, and jibes scarily with Carter's recent gung-ho reescalation of old-style brinksmanship in foreign policy.

In another Federal Court ruling, Frank W. Snepp III--a former CIA agent and author of Decent Interval, a rather embarrassing book about the old firm that cited several "secret" documents without agency permission--was told by the court to surrender the money he made on the book, because he didn't play by the rules. The issue has been fought out before: every CIA employee, when he comes to the agency, must sign a waiver that gives away his rights to use CIA materials outside the job without permission. Still, "secret" documents have been used by some, and not by others, who lack the position or the prestige to get away with it. Perhaps the most astute comment on the ruling came from Robert L. Bernstein, chairman and president of Random House, the firm that published Snepp's book. Bernstein rather angrily noted that there are two classes of American citizens:

One is the select group of high officials including Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger who are free to make use of classified secret material in the preparation of books and to demand extraordinary sums of money for them.

The secod class are the legitimate whistleblowers, including Frank Snepp, who despite unchallenged care in preventing the compromise of secret material, run the risk of a lifetime gag order and the penalty of forfeiting any earnings from their writings.

Of course, the tangle that passes for government, try though it might, is not completely to blame for the bad news. Some of the other curiousities involved the omnipresent crazies of the world, and the dangerously sick. Worse yet are entire roving bands of the dangerously sick, such as the charming kids who took a stroll in New York's Central Park last week. These white teenagers, armed with baseball bats, went on a depraved spree one afternoon, attacking passersby and savagely beating them, leaving five men hospitalized with skull fractures. Curiously enough, robbery was not the motive: no one knows what they were after, and the gang still has not been apprehended. Their little jaunt is not the first act of seemingly senseless violence, urban or otherwise, and it will not be the last, but it is nonetheless notable for its Clockwork Orange style of viciousness. Mugging is one thing, but splitting heads for the hell of it boggles the civilized mind.

And then there lurks, as ever, the wonderful world of big business. To add to the normal abuses that constitute "good business" in America, every now and then factories turn out products that manage to beat out their planned obsolescence by several years, and with a vengeance. A classic example if the Ford Pinto, circa 1971-'75. It seems there's something wrong with the gas tanks in some of these Pintos that causes them to explode after a direct, though not necessarily hard, rear-end collision; this tends to fry the unlucky occupants. Late last year a California man sizzled by his Pinto won a $100-million-plus suit against Ford. Needless to say, the cars have been recalled--but apparently Ford didn't get them all. Maybe they didn't try hard enough. Maybe they did. But there are a lot of Pintos, and on Friday, two little girls in Pennsylvania died when the Pinto they were in blew up after being hit from behind. That story ran as a tiny filler on an inside page. No big deal, just two more victims.

THESE INCIDENTS and stories might just as well have been chosen randomly, for there was enough bad news in Saturday's paper to fill this page and about nine others. And while there is no common source of all these tragedies, they all exemplify the daily tragedy that has become America. It is a system beyond anyone's control, slowly consuming itself like a cooling star. It will continue, of course--nothing can overwhelm the combined forces of inertia and entrenchment, at least not now--and improvement seems hardly likely.

While the examples and words may be new, this sort of view is hardly original. Every decade in this century has been condemned by someone as the worst, most hopeless period of history; at the very least, each period was compared unfavorably to the past. That is a symptom of Americanism that dates to the Jacksonian Era. I do not suggest any of that; even so it is difficult not so sound like (God forbid) Eric Severeid. It is the general, but by no means pervasive, comfort of America today that makes the '70s so inert and dangerous. But every intelligent person clucks over the headlines each day and then forgets them, unless they directly affect him or her. And no one does anything. Despite the claims to the contrary, progress is not forthcoming.

Again, this observation hardly rates as an intellectual or journalistic breakthrough, but it is still valid. The point simply struck home with an unusual force Saturday afternoon, perhaps as a result of the contrast between a pleasant, idle afternoon and the suddenly not-so-distant mess of the nation, brought into focus by the daily paper.

THERE ARE any number of reasons for the inertia that has seized America. There is, of course, the old "Nixon and Vietnam and inflation sapped the vitality of the '60s" line--but comparisons of the '70s to the '60s are hackneyed and generally odious. The '60s, if nothing else, were a dynamic, essential turning point, of which the '70s are the antithesis. Then there is the "lobotomization of America" argument, which points to television and pre-professionalism and People Magazine as the leading indicators of plasticity, stupidity and rampant escapism. Armchair (and journalistic) philosophers can rant forever, yet still achieve nothing by this course. No one dares come to the inescapable conclusion: This country is dying, slowly, and there's very little that anyone will be able to do about it in the near future. Perhaps it's a case of paranoia born of early-summer lethargy; perhaps the result of reading the paper without the benefit of the accustomed cyncial attitude. But when the overwhelming realization penetrated, despite the sun on the shoulders and cold drink in hand, the day was shot. Pessimism may be fashionable, but it's no fun.