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Show O ' ' Television is a triumph of equipment over people, and the minds that control it are so small that you could put them in a snat's navel with room leftover for two caraway seeds andan agent's heart. " Fred Allen, (1894-195- A GDi 0000(1)00 6) Saturday, May 28, 1994 The Daily Herald Wh ars wrong wi th ride of country? When the Lake County. Fla.. school board passed a policy that students of American history be taught that the United States, its institutions and its culture are interna-ionalisMjperior. liberals, sickheads and frothed at the mouth. The state of the country is worse than I Thought, if telling American children the truth is considered controversial. Yeah, ;.ou read that right. The United States, its institutions and its culture are superior to all others, and every child in every public school in the 50 states should be so instructed. You dont have to indoctrinate the children. Just tell them the truth about their country and they'll recognize it as superior. Internationalists naturally hate the idea of American children learning to love their country, because they. see American independence as an obstacle to their money schemes. They hack away at American independence every chance they get. and as far as I'm concerned they fall into the category of domestic enemies. We can disagree on a lot of subjects and still be pals, but not on the subject of American independence. There's no room to compromise on that issue. So that's one contints gent of critics. The sickheads are people who think small children should bear the burden of every error, evil and tragedy in our 2 y before they learn the positive that of history. Well, anybody who aspects wants to turn out cynics and 1 8-- -- ear-histo- manic-depressiv- is a es child-abu-s- and ought to be locked up. There's plenty of time in high school and college to get into the problems. In elementary and middle schools, children should be given a solid look at the great aspects of their country. Finally there are liberals, bless 'em. More heart than thought. Well, suppose children from another country are in that classroom, they argue. Well, so what? If they are in an American classroom, presumably they intend to become Americans and need to know what a great country they've settled in. But, some argue. America isn't superior. Oh? Then name the country and culture you think is superior to America's. And then tell me why you're here and not there. Superior doesn't mean perfect: f I Charley Reese Syndicated Columnist means better than the others. I had a chance to travel the world a bit. There are some countries and cultures I admire a great deal. Some I don't. But there is none I think superior to America. There is no place on earth I'd rather be that right here in the United States. I visited Canada once. Nice place. But when I drove across that bridge back into New York. I felt a tangible exhilaration. I wanted to get out of the car and dance a little jig. There's something magical about America. I feel it every time I come back. It's real freedom. You can smell it. You can see it. It's the excitement of knowing that America is place where anything can happen and everything is possible. It's the American people. They are very special. They walk and move differently than other people. They think differently. I love every square inch of this country even and I love the American people Yankees. Even New Yorkers (well, Pier-posome). That old financial pirate. J. Morgan, knew America was superior. He said. "Remember, my son. that any man who is a bear on the future of the country will go broke." Some blockheads cannot distinguish between patriotism and jingoism. Some people are so historically illiterate, having been educated by Hollywood and television, that they see evil in the past where there was only tragedy. And some people, I guess, get a masochistic pleasure from being doormats. But America needs the love of every generation of its sons and daughters. A major purpose of public education is to take a generation of barbaric and turn them into good citizens who love their country enough to do the hard work nt er it darenou to cross just of preserving it. The CIA: Bury this evil empire In my lifetime from Pearl Harbor in 1941 w hen a Japanese surprise attack sank our fleet, to the recent disaster in Somalia, high price. A few weeks ago, CIA turncoat Aldrich Ames took a shot at America's espionage agencies just before the steel door slammed shut on Moscow's pet mole. Ames, who spent his adult life with the CIA, said the intelligence community is sham, carried out by ca"a reerist bureaucrats who have managed to deceive several generations of American and the public" concerning their effectiveness. He said, "There is no rational need for thousands of case officers and tens of thousands of agents working around the world, primarily in and against friendly counself-servi- policy-make- 'portable' health plan that is a suitcase full of bricks A By THOMAS OLIPHANT Boston Globe Phil Gramm calls WASHINGTON his Republican health-car- e concept "portan intriguing and revealing ability" misuse of an important jargon word. Imagine, if you w ill, a suitcase containing your health insurance. Under every proposal now on the table that makes health insurance universal and r from liberal centrists to John that Chafee's moderate Republicanism suitcase goes w ith you w hether you change jobs or lose your job. move to a new employer who has a health plan or move to permanent through single-paye- mixed-mark- one that has none. "Me, too," Gramm claims on behalf of the Republican Right, which correctly senses the movement toward congressional compromise and is trying to block it. are ofWrong. What the but is portability. Their anything fering lame attempt to appropriate the word fittingly, in a television commercial upon even cursory examination. The scheme advanced by the Texas ideologyRepublican senator may help him in GOP presidential politics, but -driven it" sacrifices working families in the right-winge- process. Again, imagine the suitcase. Under all serious reform plans the suitcase simply goes with you to your next job. Under Gramm'1 proposal the suitcase's weight will be increased tenfold, but it still can be rejected at your destination even if you have somehow survived the double hernia suffered in getting it there. Thanks a lot, Phil. If you change or lose your job, Gramm all would give you three "choices" rich. unless Hobson's you're The first is the opportunity to keep your current policy for 18 months and pay the ' entire premium yourself. For working of w hom share this Americans, burden with an employer, this "opportunity" would triple or quadruple their costs. The second choice is to keep the policy with a $1,000 deductible, which Gramm says would reduce the premium an average of 23 percent. The third choice is to keep the policy with a $3,000 deductible, which he says would cut the premium an average of 52 percent. In short, these choices offer the consumer the opportunity to pay a great deal more for a great deal less, and should you be headed for an outfit without a health plan, what you have to look forward to is: two-thir- : nothing. ';; Worse, Gramm & Co. thumb their nos es at another bedrock concern of working the denial of insurance or the families usurious premiums for it on of charging the basis of "preexisting" medical conditions. The best he can come up with is a lame offer to toss millions of such Americans into state risk pools that then would be put out for bid to insurance companies. failure here. This is no garden-variet- y The intellectual flop that is Grammism instructs us that the minimalist approach to the essence of the country's health insurmore and more millions of ance crisis people pay ing more and more for less and less coverage, with nothing resembling offers a medical or financial security tiny bandage that doesn't come close to covering the wound, w hich, in the form of g economy-cripplinexplosions in the nation's health-car- e bill, will continue to fes- ter. That participants in this debate keep returning to the bedrock concept of a system that includes everyone: not just so everyone has insurance but so everyone helps pay for it. Politically, the Gramm failure is best summed up by Sen. John Chafee of Rhode Island, one of Gramm's Republican colleagues who is still searching for compromise with President Clinton and Democratic congressional leaders. "If there's no mandate that people have to belong," Chafee said on "Meet the Press" last weekend, "then the healthy young males who don't ride motorcycles aren't going to join and so the costs are going to be carried by those who are is why responsible sick." The gaps in the status quo, of course, involve a lot more than yuppies, but Chafee's principles are sound: universal coverage phased in with subsidies for the poor and small business and restrained by cost controls. The choice in the next few weeks is not about "the Clinton Plan"; it is between responsible compromise and Grammism, between a light suitcase and one full of bricks. Letters policy The Daily Herald welcomes letters to the editor. Address letters to Letters to the Editor, POBox 717, Provo, UT 84603. Letters must be signed and include the writer's full and a daytime phone numname, address ber for verification. Letters should be typed, double spaced, and less than 400 words in length. Letters are published on a first come first served basis. jar where intelligence reported that Gen. Mohammed Aidid had 1.000 soldiers just bethe United fore he struck with 25,000 States has had a lousy spy apparatus, for which our warriors have always paid a rs tries." Ames added that our interest ably aided by secrecy." Out of the mouth of a I've witnessed firsthand "a self-servi- spy agencies were group, immeasur- traitor came truths all over the globe concerning our multilayered, law unto spy gang. themselves, I have known CIA spooks in Australia, New Zealand, Thailand and Vietnam who were busy executing dirty tricks against America's friends, whose sons were dying at our request in Vietnam. These evil deeds, such as killing or otherwise dismissing foreign heads of state who wouldn't go along with U.S. policy, made a mockery out of w hat America stands for. Will David Hackworth Syndicated Columnist In a new book, "War of Numbers: An Intelligence Memoir" (Steerforth Press), written by the late Sam Adams, a CIA operator blows the whistle from the grave, showing how U.S. intelligence is manipulated by politicians. Adams, who tried from within the system to show the true enemy picture in Vietnam so our soldiers would know what they were up against, reinforces in riveting detail what spy Ames briefly told a federal judge last week. Mike Wallace of "60 Minutes" wrote that Adams' book is "the graphic truth about how we Americans were led down the garden path" during the Vietnam War. It tells how the books were juggled to justify the propaganda gushing out of the White House, the Pentagon, the CIA and Gen. William Westmoreland's Saigon headquarters to present the false picture that we were winning the war. Adams shows how the truth was twisted and how intelligence was given a spin by CIA and mil- itary brass who put their careers over truth, country and our warriors. He tells how the brass stacked the deck, how by 1967 the enemy had us so outnumbered there was no way to win even if our military commitment had been tripled. Had the real enemy strength gotten to our duped Congress, the public and our warriors down on the ground, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial would have but a fraction of the names on it. Yet, when it was obvious the war was not winnable, ou; leaders continued to feed young men into a death machine that ground them up and spit out white crosses and mangled bodies and emotions. I've seen too many soldiers pay with their lives and limbs because of corrupted, bungled intelligence. I was so moved by the manuscript which no big publishers would touch because around to bear witness Adams wasn't that I wrote the introduction. No American military involvement has had more walking wounded than the Vietnam War. I'm not talking just about people who were blown apart on the battlefield, but also about those who served in Vietnam and cannot let the war go. Many feel it was their fault that, unlike their dads' war, they lost. The book should be read by every Vietnam vet and by our lawmakers. Let's hope the war (beit will help the vets deep-si- x cause they didn't blow it) and cause Congress to disband the CIA (because they did blow it) and transfer CIA functions to the Pentagon, State Department and the unemployment line. It's ironic how a most honorable man like Sam Adams, and a most dishonorable man such as Rich Ames, came to the same conclusion: that the U.S. intelligence system is right out of a corrupt "Alice in Wonderland." the next step be thought police? Marge Schott, the woman who owns the Cincinnati Reds baseball team, is, by all accounts, a disgusting human being. There is no evidence to argue the other way. You may remember that she was removed from baseball for the 1993 season and fined $25,000 for using racial slurs in the course of business, as in calling an C i Pcta Dexter outfielder her "million-dolla- r nigger." The commissioner's office issued a statement at the time saying that she was being reprimanded and censured "in the strongest terms" for insensitive language, and warned her not to engage in it again. You may remember that she ordered office employees to clean up messes left by her dog, a drooling Saint Bernard with matted hair who considers the world his bathroom. You may remember lawsuits brought by employees who were fired on a whim. Over the years, Ms. Schott has somehow come to embody most of the repugnant traits of all the other owners of profranchises in fessional long-sufferi- big-leag- America, including George Steinbrenner and Jerry Jones, and that is no small achievement. Last week, Ms. Schott was in the news again after telling a reporter from The Cincinnati Enquirer that she was still having trouble getting used to players with scruffy beards and earrings. "It just doesn't seem right," she said. "I was raised to believe men wearing ear- rings are fruity. I guess things have changed since then." And that is certainly true. Things have changed. Ms. Schott, who looks as old as the redwoods, was brought up in a different time. Syndicated Columnist But before baseball's temporary commissioner, Bud Selig, announces another fine or a suspension, as he is almost certain we to do, he ought to stop for a moment and all ought to stop for a moment consider exactly what Marge Schott has done. Her offense is that in expressing an opinion on the appearance of earrings in men's ears, she used the word "fruity," a word which is officially insensitive until some group perhaps Queer Nation and one of them into factions splinters ' begins calling itself "Fruits of the Womb' which at or something comparable, point the name becomes usable again in polite conversation. Which is to say that on that dark day in Cincinnati when Marge Schott dies and we all look back on this incident, the use of the word "fruity" will seem like small stuff. It will seem small first of all because Marge Schott is small. It will seem unimportant because it is simply a reaffirmation of what is already there for anyone to see: She is an intolerant and ignorant woman. The reaction to what she said, however, may not seem as inconsequential. That fines and suspensions in Ms. reaction Schott's case, the ruination of lives and is a symptom of an careers in others intolerance more profound than Marge Schott could ever manufacture. We have come to a place in the history of our democracy in which people are being punished for thinking the wrong thoughts, for saying the wrong words. ; The phenomenon is everywhere and it is growing, and has, in fact, fostered a cotg an army of tage industry adults who keep track of what is offensive. Who make their livings deciding Vvho is a racist or a sexist. correct-thinkin- It does not seem to have occurred to these people that in dictating appropriate or trying to language, they are deciding what is appropriate thought. , decide It does not seem to have occurred k them that there are more interesting and significant identifying marks on all of Us than the words we use for one group of people or another. It does not seem to have occurred to them that the very process currently in use to decide who is thinking correctly and who isn't is in itself a substitute for, the process of thought and reason. How, for instance, do you discuss race if you are terrified of being called a racist? The process works best the way it was when we can all open designed to work our mouths and say what we're thinking. Marge Schott is entitled to her opinions and judgments, just as we are entitled to ours. There is no reason to fine her or suspend her or shut her up. The appropriate thing is to allow her to be what she is. It's not catching. |