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It's hard to remember just which Newt Gingrich interview produced the statement that the new Republican majority planned to eliminate any lingering effects of the 1960s.
There have been so many Gingrich interviews of late. The poor starving aerospace contractors need money, so more space exploration and defense spending, but the poor people who get food stamps are having their moral fiber destroyed, although giving them computers would improve their character. We need a CIA, but we don't need a CPB. Government is too big and intrusive and expensive, but continue the War on Drugs and build more prisons for those who don't get the message that corporate Prozac is legal and stuff you grow yourself isn't.
But in a larger sense, Gingrich is right. Politics is about ideas, he often says, and it's interesting to contemplate one of his ideas -- what America would be like if there hadn't been any 1960s. You'd catch the news some evening, and it might go like this:
At the top of the news tonight, Julie Nixon Eisenhower announced the winners of the 35th annual national chocolate-chip cookie baking contest. It was a rare public appearance for the First Lady, who prefers to stay home with her 14 children.
The winner, Mrs. Gloria Steinem of Centerville, Iowa,
said her secret ingredient was lots of real lard. It's
tasty and quite filling. And with all the wonderful
pesticides and preservatives available today, these cookies
will stay fresh for years -- not that they need to, since
they get snapped right off the plate.
In another White House press conference, President David Eisenhower said draft calls would likely remain at current levels for the rest of the year.
General William Clinton, the new commander of our
three million soldiers in South Vietnam, has assured me
that present force levels are adequate to defeat Communism
and restore the Diem democracy,
the President said,
and the commitment of the American people is inspiring
and unwavering. Many months, we have so many volunteers
that we don't need to draft any soldiers.
He added that
congressional approval was imminent for expansion of
Arlington National Cemetery into Maryland.
The President was also sanguine about a domestic situation in Oxford, Miss., where state authorities have prevented a Negro student from attending the University of Mississippi.
The party of Lincoln stands squarely for civil rights
for all Americans,
Eisenhower said, and by
proceeding at all deliberate speed, we have made great
strides. Just last year, the separate drinking fountains
were removed from all federal facilities. With patience,
more progress will come.
The President had just emerged from a conference with
Yashika Ito, prime minister of Japan, who was in the
country to urge Americans to buy more Japanese goods.
The trade imbalance worries me greatly,
he said.
We buy so many of your cars, telephones, radio sets and
cameras, and yet you buy so little from our poor nation,
still striving to recover from the devastation of war.
Unless we can export more, we must continue to ask for
aid.
Elsewhere on Capitol Hill, Sen. Roy Romer, a Colorado
Republican, called on the President to cut wasteful federal
spending by eliminating the Bureau of Narcotics and
Dangerous Drugs. It's been 30 years since they've found
anything illegal -- heroin, cocaine, marijuana, any of that
stuff -- in the United States,
he pointed out. This
agency did its job well, but its job is done, and the money
could be better spent elsewhere.
Atop the foreign news, British Prime Minister Michael P.
Jagger said that although there had been minor recent
disturbances in the southern counties, all of Ireland
remains very much a part of Her Majesty's Empire, and will
remain so.
He also announced the appointment of the Right Hon. J.W.
Lennon as governor of Rhodesia, and decried Belgian
proposals to grant limited independence to the Congo.
Such developments threaten us all,
he said, and
they must be throttled or none of us will get any
satisfaction from carrying the burden of
civilization.
Back in the U.S.A., Allen Ginsburg, chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, defended the dismissals of four professors.
Three of them were assigning works by Karl Marx or
Frederick Engels,
the educator said, and we cannot
allow innocent young minds to be corrupted by those
nefarious apostles of immoral collectivism.
The other terminated professor, Ginsburg said, had
failed the annual lie-detector test, which disclosed that
he had yearnings for the sort of depravity which cannot,
and should not, be mentioned in public. I'll leave it at
that.
On the cultural scene, conductor and composer Charles
Berry announced his retirement last night from the St.
Louis Symphony Orchestra after a presentation of his
best-known opera, Johnny B. Goode.
And in Hollywood, Warner executives announced that
Ronald Reagan would play the lead in God Bless
America
after the studio acquired the rights from
Malcolm Little, author of the inspirational
best-seller.
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