Reagan and his merry men
Nicholas von Hoffman
Washington Nothing is happening. Everybody is irritable and snappish, nobody knows what's going on, and now they are telling us that Perrier contains minerals in its natural effervescence which may be detrimental to the liver. Carter, in a last minute example of incompetence yoked to purposeless dedication, has broken his shoulder in crosscountry skiing. Across the country, in California, his successor has been rather mor,e dormant than other presidents-elect, around whom the illusions of hope have danced at least until their swearing-in.
For Christmas, the Iranians took homemovies of the American diplomatic captives, but, if they thought they got points for it, they were mistaken. The long extracts shown on the television revealed unhappy people whose spirits are much lower than when they were last exhibited to us. Here, they lit the darkened national Christmas tree behind the White House for 417 seconds, one second for each. day of captivity but such gestures received little appreciation. In the mood of the moment, the most satisfactory statement came from Reagan who called the Iranians 'criminals' and 'barbarians', and spoke words more in accordance with the sneaky, mean anger many Americans have begun to nurse towards them.
Instead of 417 seconds of Christmas tree illumination, how about 417 bombs? There isn't much of that kind of talk just now but, if Reagan should come in and do it, there would be a tolerance towards it. Time has weakened the American consciousness of Iranian wrongs. A year ago, the Shah and the practices of his political police were more clearly and widely understood than they are today. Now what is seen is 52, non-big-shots, jailed and mistreated for acts they themselves had no part in, by kidnappers who don't shave or wash, and who are in addition demanding an extortionate ransom.
Crime is on the mind. From Miami come reports of daylight robberies and rapes in the downtown business district; from Philadelphia news of 'wolf-packs', to use the name the newspapers have given gangs of violent youthful robbers scaring Christmas shoppers away from the department stores; and from New York warnings by the police to women not to wear gold chains or necklaces lest they be stolen by street toughs. On television talk shows, meanwhile, fashionable guests explain how chic and invigorating it is to forego sex, It is called the new abstinence' but for once the masses show no inclination to follow the classes. It is suspected that jogging more than two miles a day spoils the libido, It has been the greyest Christmas in years. Not that anything has gone wrong. It is simply that nothing has gone particularly right. In most parts of the country unemployment is at levels Americans are used tn.and whether that is high or low depends on whether you have a job, or how you read the numbers. Still if the hour is grey, it is not bleak. We're stultified, not truly numbed, but unfeeling nevertheless. No zip in the drinks. We're glum and we're cranky.
The films have not been awfully good. The best diversion has been politics. The Carters are fading fast; even before the President broke his collar-bone, he had decided not to go to Congress and make the State of the Union speech. The message, required of the President by the Constitution, will go up in written form and nobody will read it. Instead, he will make a farewell oration on the television that no one cares to hear.
The Reagans are more interesting. Nancy is turning out to be a sweet smiling, demanding, bitch of the old school. If it's not one thing it's another, with her. Why didn't the Carters cooperate and move out of the White House before Christmas so her interior decorators could get in early, she wanted to know? Lately she's complaining that the 50,000 dollars allotted to decorating the purely private presidential apartment is insufficient, Gossip has it that she says that, the way she does it, 50,0(10 dollars hardly suffices to decorate one room.
There will be no Reagan equivalent of Billy Carter. but hopes for diversion from the Reagan children are strong. One of the daughters was heard to refer to her dancer brother and his recently acquired dancer wife as 'fruit loop' and 'twinkle toes'. But the Reagan top has scarcely begun to spin, so perhaps orders will come down not to be so entertainingly one's self in public, although in fact the family may be too theatrical to restrain itself. It is in keeping with an old cowboy actor to resurrect the swallow tail cutaway for the Inauguration. With or without spats, the look of the costume will strike most Americans as only slightly less archaic than silk breeches, satin knee-stockings and silver-buckled shoes.
This fusion of Hollywood and Washington may serve to keep the Reagans popular. Jimmy Carter's republican manners, his walking with his family during the Inauguration parade, his carrying of his own bags and such, were a nice novelty but, in the end, one of his problems may have been that he did not put on enough airs for the workaday folk who enjoy brass fanfares and rolling drums. Jimmy wound up looking like the rest of us, a man whose problems were a mite larger than he. At least the long black limousines with the motorcycle escorts give the impression of power and competence when they roll by, even if they're driving into a ditch.
Nevertheless, the Reagan administration comes to office prematurely aged. Forget the betting pools in which the players try to pick the day Reagan kicks off and George Bush takes over. It is aged in another way. By the sixth or seventh year most administrations are on the defensive, apologising for the corruptions that seep in with the passage of time and the prolongation of power. The Reagan administration is in danger of assuming office with the smell of too much power for too long hanging about it. .,.
Richard Allen, Reagan's new National Security Adviser, assumes office already accused by the Wall Street Journal of corrupt practices when an official of the Nixon administration. Alexander Haig is another gentleman who has been around too long. He will never live down his Peeping-Tomism under Kissinger, his role in wire-tappingnot Russian spies, but his colleagues in the Nixon administration. Unliice George Marshall, the last general to be Secretary of State, Haig has no claim to be a military hero. Purely a chocolate soldier, the only fighting Haig has seen during his career is the stiletto work of a White House aide-de-camp knocking off a. rival in a dark Pentagon passage.
A genuine Mafioso was then discovered in the Reagan transition team. ,This gentleman has long played a part in shifting money from the gangster-infected Teamsters' Union and its pension fund to the mob in order to finance their operation in Las Vegas. Republicans, going back to the Eisenhower administration, have had a soft-on-organised-crime problem. Whatever the reason, racketeers have tended to find it much easier going with the Republicans than with the Democrats.
And there is the woofter-poof connection to the new administration. After four years of heterosexual, liberal Democrats working to protect homosexuals and even accord them privileges that heterosexuals don't have unless they enjoy officially oppressed minority status, this new group is an eyebrow-arching change. Whilst the Reaganite denounces faggotry and all its works, the Reaganian courtiers lisp, toe-trip and crook the pinky: Washington gossip has given itself over these past few days to malicious giggles about the Cabinet appointment that, unofficially but publicly announced, had to be withdrawn. It was learned that the nominee, when serving in an ambassadorial post under Nixon and Ford had a) insisted on wearing all white suits to dark dinner jacket parties, b) practised homosexuality, c) had sex many times with under-age boys, d) in the back seat of the ambassadorial limousine, and e) with the Stars and Stripes flying from the bumper.
It may be the nasty grumpiness of an idle interlude, yet consciousness of this woofter-poofterism isn't confined to Democratic hard-losers. The sense of a double standard, the suspicion that their ministers claim the right to have sex with the choir, the sprouting of talk about 'right wing homosexuality,' all reinforces the impression that the Reaganisti have already been around too long. The Cabinet and the more important advisers look old and hard, not old and wise and kind. Their cheek bones stick out; their pacemakers hum during lulls in the conversation; thin fingered, walnut jointed, they are the American Politbureau. They may be millionaires but their suits don't fit them.
This floating about, this waiting, is spoiling the national disposition.
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