Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!enterpoop.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.natrev From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: Poor Man's War? Date: Wed, 25 Nov 92 12:17:28 EST Message-ID: Lines: 242 Poor Man's War? NEW YORK, OCTOBER 28 Scene: U.S. Embassy, Saigon, January 1967. Present: Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and visiting journalist. HCL: Do you know Mary McCarthy? VJ: Well, sort of. HCL: She was here with me for three hours this morning. Have you ever read The Group? VJ: No, actually. HCL: Well, in anticipation of her visit, I bought a copy. Now I know a . . . lot about sex. But I mean, after I read it, I had to hide it to keep an- ybody else from seeing it . . . But anyway, she comes in here and tells me that, of course, only poor boys get to Vietnam, and get killed here. I said to her, ''How come so many sons and relatives of my own friends come here?'' I can't count the letters I've written to parents and widows. . . . It is a deeply rooted part of the conventional wisdom that during the Viet- nam years, all you needed to do in order to escape service in the military was to be well-born and/or affluent. Indeed this was my own impression of reality, notwithstanding Ambassador Lodge's rebuke, and in an appear- ance in 1990 on the MacNeil - Lehrer program I admitted as much. Two scholars heard me on that program and have now written that in part be- cause of my subscription to the legend, they were prompted to make a scholarly investigation. This they have done, and the extensive article re- porting their findings appears in the current issue of the journal Opera- tions Research. Arnold Barnett, professor of Operations Research at MIT, and Captain Timothy Stanley, of the Department of Social Sciences at West Point, write to tell me that ''The main finding [of their research] was that variations by income in Vietnam death rates were marginal rather than gigantic, and thus that they cannot possibly sustain the rhetoric about 'class war' indulged in by James Fallows and many others.'' The authors checked the family incomes of the 58,000 American war dead in Vietnam. They devised a ''disparity score'' under which ''0'' would mean that there was no net link between economic status and casualty rates, and ''1'' would mean that there was a heavy concentration of war deaths among the poor. Their finding: The disparity score for Vietnam was about 0.06. This suggests that only six one-hundredths of the affluent young had a safer life span in Vietnam than their poor counterparts. The importance of these findings is self-evident. ''If untrue, the belief that affluent citizens were conspicuously missing from the Vietnam war dead is harmful to all Americans. It demeans the sacrifices of the wealthy by implying that such sacrifices were non-existent. It demeans the sacri- fices of the non-wealthy by suggesting that, manipulated and misled, they shed their blood in a conflict in which the privileged and influential were unwilling to shed theirs.'' And this has of course been a postulate of the critics of the Vietnam War for a generation. A full-time merchandiser of it has been James Fallows. Mr. Fallows has written that with gold stars going to families in rural and working-class areas, ''the mothers of Beverly Hills and Chevy Chase and Great Neck and Belmont were not on the telephones to their congressmen screaming, 'You killed my boy.''' The scholars report: ''We found that per-capita death rates exceeded the national average in three of the four 'upscale' communities, as did the overall rate for the four.'' The legend holds that the growing antipathy to the war on the part of America's wealthy class was a reflection of the war's progressive inconven- ience in the careers of their sons. The scholars comment, ''A concentration of casualties among wealthy citizens toward the start of the war, there- fore, might imply that such citizens rapidly withdrew from participating in the conflict once they ceased supporting it. Date-of-casualty data indi- cate, however, that deaths of servicemen from the richest 10 per cent of the nation's communities had essentially the same distribution over time as the deaths of other servicemen.'' It would trivialize the findings of the two researchers to pretend that such devices as Bill Clinton engaged in -- in effect, the manipulation of academic immunities -- were rare. It is unquestionably true that thou- sands of students, perhaps tens of thousands, stayed on in college for the primary purpose of avoiding the draft. And among those who fled to Can- ada there was probably a higher incidence of the relatively wealthy. But these facts dramatize the findings of Messrs. Barnett and Stanley. They mean that notwithstanding the special protections available to the wealthy, on the whole they shed as much blood as the non-wealthy. Which means that Vietnam was indeed an all-American effort, and one that, some of us contend, will one day take its place in the annals of national nobility: a witness to America's disposition to endure special sacrifices in discharge of its heavy international responsibility: to contain the move- ment that brought death, oppression, and poverty to so many millions for so many years. A Solution For The Post Office? NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 6 In the great speech assembled by Ronald Reagan over a number of years and delivered on coast-to-coast TV on behalf of Barry Goldwater's cam- paign, one of the most telling lines compared the efficiency of the tele- phone company, privately owned, and the post office, publicly owned. By the time Mr. Reagan was through giving The Speech he would say (one forgets the exact formulation) that a long distance call from New York to San Francisco went down in price from $50 to $1 during the period when the delivery of a letter from the one city to the other went up in price from 5 to 18 cents. First-class mail is now 29 cents, but two years from now, unless something pretty drastic is done, the price will rise to 35 cents. Meanwhile we hear such rumors as that maybe on Tuesdays and Thurs- days we could get along without mail delivery. . . . Much of the heat against the post office's performance was dissipated by two private-sector achievements. The first was Federal Express, a brilliant concept, brilliantly executed. It has its copiers, including the post of- fice's Express Mail. But one tends to use Federal Express because of its uncanny efficiency. The other lifesaver of course has been the fax ma- chine. There are about five million of these in active operation now and they seem to be growing exponentially. Postmaster General Marvin Runyon swore last September that within ninety days he would crack open the post office, and his credentials are very good, he having run the TVA, another federal hemorrhage, where he cut down the bleeding by over $500 million annually. Mr. Runyon faces everything from inefficiency (the rise in postal rates greatly exceeds the rise in inflation) to scandal (to quote the Washington Post's Bill McAllis- ter: ''On December 16, 1991, a St. Louis real-estate investment group pur- chased a largely vacant office building in downtown St. Louis for $5 mil- lion. Five hours later, the U.S. Postal Service bought the building for $12.5 million''). One wishes Mr. Runyon all the best, but necessarily we reflect on the consumption rate of Postmaster Generals: we have had six in the last seven years, and my proposal now is that President-elect Bill Clinton announce that he will offer the post to H. Ross Perot. Why should he take it? Well, one reason is that he would take on a job big enough to challenge those skills he boasted of during $60 million worth of radio and television time. The post office spends about $40 billion per year, has over eight hundred thousand employees, and operates about thirty thousand branches. In the course of a year, the post office handles, and mishandles, about 166 billion pieces of mail. Mr. Perot was asked, the day after the election, whether it was his in- tention to found a third party, and he said, No, but if four years from now he thought the time had come again to challenge the two-party duopoly, he might just go ahead. His vote -- 19 per cent -- was truly astonishing. Only Theodore Roosevelt as a third-party candidate did better. But although many questions were posed during the presidential de- bates, Ross Perot hit one theme tenaciously: We are a can-do country which is losing its managerial skills. Mr. Perot knows how to manage; he has proved himself out in the world of business. It may be a little bit of a comedown from managing all three million of the people who work for the Federal Government, but he'd have, as Postmaster General, the larg- est bloc of subordinates. And as for Mr. Clinton, by offering the position to Mr. Perot, the new President would be manifesting his non-partisan spirit and acknowledging the Perot voters' enthusiasm by giving their man a big job. And of course if an impasse developed, of the kind that developed at General Motors when Perot served on its board of directors, President Clinton could simply sell the post office to Ross Perot, relieving us perma- nently of our misery. The Forgotten Man NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 9 The quarrel between those who believe that deregulation has been a net public good and those who believe it was a dreadful mistake finds this air- plane traveler in an unusual situation. In theory I like what has hap- pened; as a traveler, I am confounded by the unfolding mysteries of it all. A few weeks ago a friend met my wife and me at Las Palmas in the Ca- nary Islands. To reach there, he needed to fly New York - Madrid - Las Palmas. From there we sailed aboard the Club Med liner to Martinique, and then flew back to New York. He needed the following day to make a business trip to Cleveland. It cost him more to fly New York - Cleveland - New York than it did to fly New York - Madrid - Las Palmas/Martinique - New York. It is hard to believe that Adam Smith could have run that one through the free-market wringer. Odd economic interventions are at play here, and they are giving the free market a bad name. But regular air travelers come upon other anomalies. Unemployment in Martinique is officially registered at 30 per cent. In Italy, at about 11 to 15 per cent. In Spain, at about the same figure. But at airports in the three countries you will not find a porter. Is this because tourists refuse to pay a living wage to porters? I would doubt this, having seen any num- ber of tourists, many of them men and women of autumnal age, struggling with their bags. I should confess, up front, that I have a special problem. I travel with as much hand luggage as Santa Claus, so that the pain is immediate as I leave the airplane and begin the -- one-hundred-yard? three-hundred-yard? -- walk to the baggage-claim area. Traveling in the other direction, from the airline counter to the aircraft, if you are lucky you will find or be able to rent a trolley. With your brief- case, your computer, your correspondence sack, and your wife's carry-on, you arrive at the security gate: and you are told that you cannot retrieve your trolley on the other side. More and more, in our bureaucratized world, we are habituated not to ask questions when dispensations of this kind are transmitted. But on this particular day in Rome, a little gestating flame, burning within me, flared up. And I approached the supervisor, looked him in the eyes, and said: ''Why?'' Why do airports require you to abandon life-saving conven- iences at security check points? Do they suspect that you have injected co- caine into the aluminum rods? Or is it as simple as that the airport per- sonnel will suffer the indignity of collecting the trolleys at the departure gates and returning them to the central collection points? I suspect it is the latter, because the evidence mounts that the conven- ience of the passengers is of evanescing importance to the bureaucracies. That is probably why I mustered the courage in Rome to ask, Why? Be- cause in order to reach the security gate it had taken us (I have a stop- watch) 32 minutes. There were two gates. One of them was shut down, no reason given. The live security gate processed passengers and their lug- gage at the rate of about one per minute and a half. If the alarm went off on the X-ray machine, the suspect was there and then required to expose his luggage -- which meant that the two hundred persons standing in line stopped moving. The young inspector took his time, and his earnest ex- haustion required him to take a little R & R every five minutes or so, at which point he would sit down and smoke a cigarette while his subjects sweated in line, some of us wondering whether we would reach the air- plane before the airplane reached its cruising altitude. It is an odd world. Massive unemployment and no porters at airports or (legal) dishwashers at restaurants, while travelers have become the pas- sive clients of bureaucrats who don't care how long you have to wait, or what you have to carry. One has the sticky feeling that many of those who are quietly frustrated about this state of affairs actually believed that things would get better or get worse depending on whom they voted for for President. (Universal Press Syndicate) This article is copyright 1992 National Review. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. 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