Amerikai Magyar Szó, 1976. július-december (30. évfolyam, 27-51. szám)

1976-07-01 / 27. szám

AMERIKAI MAGYAR SZÓ

Thursday, July 1. 1976.

Emery Nanasy:

THE BICENTENNIAL:

DESPITE THE'CUCKOO’S NEST' THERE IS HOPE

In this year of great USA bicentennial celebrations, considering how many seemingly insane things are going on (in this country, and in many other lands, as well), perhaps it is fitting that “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, a film about life in an institution for the mentally ill, won a large share of the Academy Awards, for best movies,actors and directors. We live in an era when weird contradictions and paradoxes clutter the landscape. In a way, if the bicentennial occasion is supposed to hark back to the American Revolutionary War, and the liberating of the thirteen colonies from the British Empire, as an instrument of “pure Democracy”, then that is a paradox in itself. For among the people who led and carried thru the Revolution some were democratic in their attitudes, and others were anything but that. George Washington, the military leader of the insurgents, was a regular army man (British Army that is) and a slaveholder.

Even Thomas Jefferson, one of the more progressive of the early politicians, was a slave-owner-» And when the Constitution was put together, Afro-Americans, who had been brought to this country against their will, in bondage, were not considered as human beings. Each slave was counted as three-fifths of a person, in apportioning Congressional Representatives according to population. And there were those among the Revolutionaries who wanted to make Washington an American king; they merely wanted to exchange a British monarch for an American royal ruler. Only property holders could vote, and only male property owners, at that. Contrast that with the USA of today and it is more likely to reason that American democracy is that which has developed SINCE 1776, rather than IN 1776.

There were those leaders who did something for this country, like Jefferson, Lincoln, the Abolitionists, the suffragettes, and Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal, and the Warren Court, which started to weaken the traditional American patterns of racial segregation. But then democracy received a big setback when the Nixon gang made it into the White House. For the first time ever in American history, both a president and vice-president were forced to resign from office in disgrace in order to avoid impeachment and/or prison. An appointed vice-president (Ford) then acceded to the top post and proceeded to pardon his ex-boss, after appointing another vice-president (Rockefeller) to take his old job. Fortunately, the voters will have a chance to rectify this condition in November, if a worthwhile candidate is nominated to run against this president who was not elected.

Many negative moves in American foreign policy have been made since FDR died, and Truman invited Churchill to Fulton, Missouri, where he mentioned a few things about Iron Curtains, and sparked some Cold War activities. There was American action in regional wars in Greece, Korea and Indochina with disastrous results all around. Illegal activities by the CIA and FBI have been exposed, in rather large quantities. In Angola, the CTA intervened covertly on the side of the losing faction, while Cuban-Russian aid was delivered less covertly to the winning side. Loud protests agains^ “Coimpypist

intervention” in Angola were made in this country, but Gulf Oil is trying to do business with the new Angolan government. North and South Vietnam ended the bloody warfare between them (which cost a lot of American lives, too) and have become a single nation. Now European and American oil companies are vying for offshore drilling leases, which they äre attempting to obtain from the new rulers of united Vietnam. These oil companies surely are flexible, aren’t they?

Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz, a faithful Nixon-Ford supporter, is known for many things- perhaps he is known best of all for his consistent devotion to the cause of big agri-business in this country. But he is certainly not known for his diplomatic or humanitarian statements. Once he made fun of the Pope of Rome, speaking in an insulting put-on (and very exaggerated) Italian accent, in criticizing the Vatican in relation to birth control in Italy. Then there was the time that he was told that it was getting very difficult for less affluent American families to feed themselves adequately, because of the steeply rising cost of food. (Some ghetto residents are buying pet food, for human consumption.) His solution for that was to advise such unfortunates to simply “eat less”. He may preach austerity to others, but perhaps does not always practice it, in his own ballpark. A recent round-the- world trip (in an Air Force jet) by Butz and some of his associates, made to boost the sales of American farm products overseas, cost the U.S. taxpayers at least $ 112.000.

Not only is the USA burdened with an appointed president and vice president, and people like Henry Kissinger and Earl Butz, in high cabinet posts and high rates of inflation and unemployment, but the USA is losing out in some departments where it used to be first in the world. For decades, American workers were the world’s best paid, and by a rather wide margin, too. But that distinction is gone. There are now five countries where hourly wageworkers are more highly paid than they are here : Canada, Holland, Belgium, West Germany and Sweden. It is not surprising that Volkswagen plans to build an auto-plant in the USA, in order to take advantage of the cheaper American labor, and Volvo, the Swedish auto manufacturer may do the same thing. How is that for a reversal of the old status quo?

This business of “having to be No.l.” is kind of an infantile disorder anyway, and it really does not matter which nation is the first in the production of this or that, as long as that large volume of production works for the betterment of the people of that country, and of other countries. The USA and the USSR have been engaged in an armaments race for a long time and that has not been for the betterment of humanity. Russia is now the world’s top producer of oil, steel and cement, and therein we have another internal paradox. Tts agricultural program has not kept pace with its tremendous industrial expansion, so we find the USSR with an unfavorable trade balance with its capitalist trading partners largely because of large grain imports from private enterprise nations, like the USA, Canada and Australia. That happened last year; in 1974, it ^.was tj^.pfhpr Wityaifiurjd.oiyith.a favorable: Russian»,

foreign trade balance in a year of good harvests of grain. Why the Soviet Union has so many ups and downs in grain production still has not been adequately explained by Russian agricultural authorities, altho they mention uncertain weather conditions and periodic-"! large- scale droughts as one considerable negative factor. Another paradox in regard to Russia’s grain situation lies in a statement by Russian farm-experts who claim that it is more economical for Siberia to import grain on ships from the USA’s or Canada’s West Coast ports than it is to ship Ukrainian grain several thousand miles overland to Siberia, via train or truck. Considering all these factors, it loooks as tho a long-term trade of Russian oil and natural gas for American grain might be a real “natural”.

Speaking of grain, the horses of the world eat more grain than do all of the people of China put together land there are at least three-quarters of a billion people over there), and the world’s beef and dairy cattle population consumes more grain than the world’s human population. Another bizarre grain story carries us up into the stratosphere, into the ozone layer, which is being haunted by supersonic jet flights and the discharges of fluorcarbons from aerosol spray cans. A University of California economist says that a large disturbance in the earth’s ozone layer could result in a three degree Centigrade world-wide drop in temperature, and the resultant cooling effect could very easily eliminate most of the wheat production of Canada and the USSR, since that much heat loss would shorten the growing season in those two northern countries just enough to effectively scuttle their wheat crops. Such a loss could reduce world wheat production by as much as 30 %. This possibility is a very important factor to consider when deciding about the fate of SST flights.

In 1945, a farmer in California could purchase a 100-acre farm, and for a primary investment of $ 50.000, could support a family on what the farm produced. Today the same land would cost five times as much to buy, and the prices of farm equipment, irrigation systems and livestock feed have risen proportionally, so that very few young people, are able to buy farms and they achieve farm-ownership only thru inheritance. As a result of this, American farmers average about 50 years of age. Purchase of farmland by speculators who buy it for tax shelters, or for reselling it at huge "profits, has greatly reduced the amount of farmland available for real farmers. In one area of Southern California, that used to be a dairy farming region in the I940’s, 1950’s and 1960’s, dairy farmers cannot afford to hold on to their land, when they are offered 30-40.000 dollars per acre to sell out. Shopping centers, housing tracts and light industry cover the land that cows used to occupy.

Here is another problem that involves farming, of a very different sort:

The world’s sperm-whale population is gradually declining, as the whales are slaughtered for their valuable oil. Tt has become so bad that the sperm whales were declared an endangered species in 1971. Many nations ban the hunting of sperm whales and/ or importation of sperm oil, which is used in the making of automobile transmission fluid, lubricants watch lubricants, skin lotions and in the tanning of leather. But now the whales have found a savior, in the form of an evergreen shrub called the jojoba, which grows quite well in hot and dry regions, on ^ land that is considered unfit for anything else, and