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Lest We Forget #624 DATE:1/11/92 AGAIN the UGLY AMERICAN It '" Lest We Forget #624 DATE:1/11/92 AGAIN THE UGLY AMERICAN It was embarrassing to have the President of the United States throw up at a state dinner and collapse on the floor. He was in the midst of what was supposed to be an important mission to get from our Japanese superiors in economic management a boost for the American economy. The "hero" of the embarrassing moment was Barbara Bush. In fact, she was the only saving feature of the Japanese stop on the trip. Iacocca of Chrysler boasted on his return that the corporate executives with the Bush team had really given the Japanese "something to look at." Iacocca was wrong again: the Japanese executives have long since taken the measure of the American executives. The heads of Chrysler, GM and Ford didn't surprise the Japanese statesmen and business executives at all. The Japanese had already looked at them and understood what they were looking at: over-paid and under-brained corporate executives, taking care of their personal interests while their employees and their country suffered. Barbara Bush was something guite strange for them, however: a woman in command of a crisis, responding with calm presence, being an active and useful stand-in for her indisposed spouse, even speaking with a touch of humor. And TV gave us "the whole story." We saw the exhibitionist Iacocca in Detroit as we had earlier seen the sick Bush in Tokyo. TV took us there when Gorbachev came out of the jaws of death at the end of the failed coup d'etat in the collapsed USSR, and we remember that he looked a lot healthier than Bush leaving Japan. TV is really a rogue cannon on the deck of the ship of state! - not just reporting on events but actually creating political decisions... and doing it without being responsible to any legitimate sovereign, king or Congress. TV is accountable neither by appointment nor by election. The political person who wants to be a survivor and not a victim has to be fast on his feet indeed. It is interesting to read the rumor that the Japanese, who have a sensibility about the role of the host, are threatening to punish the TV people who embarrassed the American President by catching him vomiting and collapsing. They can't do anything, of course, about those who embarrassed President Bush and his mission most of all: the corporate free-loaders he took along with him. What are the brute facts that these "giants" of the economy reminded the Japanese of? The mother of all facts is this: in 1980 the United States of America was the chief creditor nation in the world. Today it is the chief debtor nation. If they hadn't already figured out what was wrong with the American economy, the Japanese had it vividly presented to them in the person of Lee Iacocca and his less noisy associates on this mission of supplication. Lee Iacocca, in case you've forgotten, is the head of the Chrysler Corporation - Iacocca the great entrepeneur, the champion of "private enterprise" and "free trade," Iacocca who Again the Ualy American 2 just a few years ago had to be bailed out by the tax-payers to the tune of three billion dollars. His was one of the first of a series of business raids on the national treasury - all the banditry, of course, carried out in the name of "free trade" and "private enterprise" and "conservativism", not to forget "down with the socialist professors" and "up from liberalism" and "down with the welfare cheats." Iacocca, who obviously has populist political ambitions, rushed home, leaving behind his ailing President and host on Air Force One. He couldn't stay with his host and miss his chance to pre-empt the President's report to the nation. He couldn't wait to get back to the Detroit Economic Club and the media. Iacocca was determined to get maximum coverage for his coarse, jingoistic tirade against Japan. In evocative slogans punctuated by pauses calculated to allow some applause and laughter, he even managed to throw in Pearl Harbor and crocodile tears for the thousands of unemployed in Detroit! (Some of his words were bleeped in the TV studio, although guite a few "hells," "damns" and other "me big boy, tough, treat- 'em-rough" posturing words and phrases got through. Who does he think he is - Nixon!?) It is a painful thought, hopefully born dead, that the American voters possibly might fall for 1300003's vulgar, chauvinist, demagogic, isolationist, protectionist, ranting rot. After all, 55% of the white voters gave David Duke their mandates in Louisiana, and the ACLU is trying to get him on the ballot in Again the Ugly American 3 Georgia and other states... The psychologists tell us that most people have a memory span of no more than six weeks. To appreciate how America became an economic basket-case you have to think back over nearly twelve years of de-regulation, junk bonds, insider trading, S & L scams, swash-buckling speculation, and politics by attention to appearances rather than facing up to reality. Is that more remembering than American voters are capable of? Lest we forget, to submit David Duke to appraisal you have to be able to remember Nazism and the "solutions" to political and economic anguish that Hitler promised German voters all of six decades ago. But to put Lee Iacocca in context you only have to think back over a long decade - hardly longer than a "lost week-end" - in the span of American history. - Franklin H Littell Again the Ugly American Lest We Forget #625 DATE:l/16/92 TRUE OR FALSE? I would like to think that if a correspondent sent in a sermonette to the "Letters" Editor of The New York Times based upon a false identification of Socrates and Peter, someone would catch it. "Athenians, I hold you in the highest regard and love, But I will obey God rather than you." That was Socrates. "We ought to obey God rather than man." Thus "Peter and the others" are cited in Christian's book "The New Testament" (Acts 5:29). It is guite possible, these days, that the hypothetical confused citation would pass without being detected - since during the last two generations the public schools have been gutted of any teaching of basic religious facts. Although newspapers are very careful to have experts reporting on commercialized baseball and football, hockey and tennis, even the good newspapers are notoriously weak in the the area of religious journalism. Also, one must admit, the two guotations sound alike to an outsider, to one unfamiliar with what the Greeks were about and what the Hebrew were about. Martin Niemoeller's most famous saying has produced even more grievous confusion than one between Socrates and Peter, and almost always for obviously political purposes. A few months ago the Church Relations Director of the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Council, Ms. Margaret Obrecht, put out a beutifully printed pamphlet on the work of the Council. This time, a bowdlerized version of the saying begins with "the Jews," goes on to "the Communist," mentions "the trade unionists," and omits the socialists altogether. The corrupted text not only lacks accuracy: it lacks the aesthetic touch of Niemoeller's actual saying, as well as lacking his respect for the facts. On January 14th of this year, to pick another example, The New York Times printed a Letter to the Editor which ran as follows: "Pastor Martin Niemoeller comes to mind, that German Lutheran who said, during World War II: "When they came for the Catholics, I did not speak up, because I was not a Catholic. When they came for the trade unionists...the gypsies...the homosexuals...the Jews, I did not speak up, because I was none of these. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak up.'"^- Then she rushed on to write what was really on her mind: "Unless we all speak up for Salman Rushdie..." There is a good deal to be said for the moral lesson the correspoondent wants to impart, but none for passing a rank misguotation that The New York Times could have corrected from its own files - had someone taken the trouble. The writer got it half right that Martin Niemoeller considered himself a Lutheran: as a pastor in the Church of the Old Prussian Union, fraternally related to the former Evangelical and Reformed Church in this country, he was theologically a Lutheran and a presbyterian in church order. However, he did not "speak up during World War II:" he spent eight and a half years in concentration camp, two years of them before the war in Europe True or False 2 even began, and three of them in solitary. He wasn't producing guotables then, even for his ecumenical friends, although I can remember participating in intercessory services where readings were taken from some of his earlier published sermons against Nazism. What he actually said, he said during his post-war trip through the United States in 194 6 - a trip that was organized under the auspices of Church World Service and planned by Marlene Maertens, a lifelong friend who lived her latter years in Philadelphia. He used the same formula dozens of times before church audiences: "They came for the communists, and I did not speak up because I was not a communist; "They came for the socialists, and I did not speak up because I was not a socialist; "They came for the union leaders .Gewerkschaftler), and I did not speak up because I wasn't a union leader; "They came for the Jews, and I did not speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
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