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If Ronald Reagan gets re-elected, which I think will

happen, he will continue to be an actor who pretends

to steer the United States of America. He will go on

spinning a great ship’s wheel this way and that, although it

is connected to nothing but the floor of the set. He will go

on issuing orders to a nonexistent engine room, “Full speed

ahead” or “Half speed ahead” or whatever, which will,

then as now, be solemnly reported on the front page of The

New York Times.

His compass might as well be a bowl of goldfish and his

barometer a cuckoo clock, for the real power in this country

now resides entirely elsewhere, in the hands of anarchist

money managers and militarists and so on. When Mr.

Reagan performs, I am reminded of a seafaring drama

written for radio by the late comedian “Archie” Ed

Gardner. He cast himself as the captain of a ship in terrible

trouble, and he electrified his crew with this salty command:

“Scuttle the barnacles!”

Mr. Reagan never wanted real power anyway. No actor

ever does. He wanted an acting job, and he got it, and he

will get it again. An actor will do anything to get on stage,

to pretend before an audience to be this or that, while real

lives are being led in some other part of town. It is a credit

to the majority of the American people who vote that they

understand the powerlessness of the presidency, realize

that their function, for the fun of it, really, is to approve or

disapprove hams sent over by Central Casting. Who, for

example, could exhibit the truer grit while guiding a team

of malamutes through a blizzard of soap flakes driven by a

wind machine—Fritz Mondale or Ronald Reagan?



No contest.

A personal note: I made a lot of money, a lot for me,

about 12 years ago—and my publisher took me over to the

Chase Manhattan Bank to meet a money manager. I decided

not to sign up with him, but he promised to do his best to

make my money grow, even as the planet became poorer.

It would keep pace with inflation and then some. As though

to reassure me, he declared that he would not, in effect,

allow his judgment to be addled by patriotism. If the

United States turned out to be a relatively inhospitable

place for my money, with workers getting high wages and

expensive social benefits and so on, he would send it

overseas. How fast could he do this? In two shakes of a

lamb’s tail.

So long, Youngstown, Ohio. Hello, Seoul.

As for militarist anarchy: Nobody, obviously, can prevent

the Pentagon from spending our children’s and grandchildren’s

money however it likes—no matter how foolishly

or wastefully or crookedly. No braking mechanism

exists. I remember The Atlantic reporting years ago that

getting officers of the Army Corps of Engineers to testify

before Congress about where all the money was going was

like “rounding up the Vietcong for an appearance on the

Lawrence Welk Show.” Things have gotten a lot worse

since then, and Caspar Willard Weinberger, who can’t act

for sour apples, has a little steering wheel all his own. He

grabs for the emergency brake, which comes off in his

hand, and the gorilla in the rumble seat wraps it around his

neck, and so on.

It goes without saying that this uncontrolled militarism,

based as it is on the powerlessness of the presidency, is not

only ruinous financially for our heirs but bloody as well. I

read in the Encyclopedia Britannica (1971) about the

Japanese militarism during the early 1930s, which in turn

militarized this country and led to World War II in the

Pacific. The Japanese Army, of its own volition, engaged

regularly in battles on the Chinese mainland. “The civilian

government in Tokyo,” I read, “found itself powerless to

stop the army, and even army headquarters was not always

in full control of the field commanders.” Later on it says,

“Each advance by the military extremists resulted in a new

compromise concession to them by more moderate elements

in the government, and each of these in turn brought

greater foreign hostility and distrust.”

I think to myself, “Gee—that sounds a lot like the CIA

and all those other patriots of ours down in Central America

now.”

Reef the spanker and spank the reefer, me hearties.

Open the seacocks! Full speed ahead!