大象传媒

The one thing there's surely no need to say much about is the death of Elvis Presley. For the past 20 years or so, it was not possible to be mildly interested in him, any more than it's possible to be a teensy weensy bit pregnant. He was a cult, like one of those terrifying freak religions that are grown in Southern California. People who were at all interested came close, at one time or another, to obsession. I think it's a dubious reflection on the world's press, or the press of the English-speaking world anyway, that it seems to have assumed we were all as interested in him, his life, his origins, his money, his drug taking, as we might be assumed to be interested in the late John Kennedy or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. So, if ever an appetite was glutted by the newspapers, this was one.

Even the New York Times, which never mentioned the death, or for that matter the life, of Leon Bix Beiderbecke, a considerable musical artist who died in 1931, had a large picture and two separate column stories about Presley on its front page. And the New York Post, which under new management has been, in my opinion, declining from its 200-year tradition as a serious evening paper into a scandal tabloid, had pages and pages, and pictures and pictures, and reams of information about Mr Presley, both trivial and shocking. In other words, interested people could wallow in an orgy of prurience and then save their self-respect by a quick reference to short leaders gravely commenting on the danger of drugs and the terror of popular success.聽

This sort of treatment reminds me of the days, of the heyday, of one of America's most successful newspaper chains, now almost shrunk beyond recognition, which used to print big and horribly detailed centrefold photographs of the victim of a rape or a murder, and then hasten to take the curse off its primary interest with long and shocked editorials about the wickedness of rape and murder.聽

A matter which I hope is more likely to interest listeners to these talks is the matter of Jimmy Carter. What he's up to and where he thinks he's going. He's been in office now for the better part of a year and it's quite common to run into intelligent and well-informed people who say, 'I still don't know what he's all about'. The legend of Mr. Carter's non identity is beginning to take on Dickensian proportions, so in the end it may well be that, as with Dickens's father, the living reality will be blurred or obliterated forever by the brilliant myth which is Mr Micawber. Last time I gave a little rundown on Mr Carter's well-filled day and his exhaustive working habits and the small punctuations of meditation and music he allows himself. The one thing we do know about him is that however far he's come by way of ideology or political bias, his character is sufficiently rooted in the ways of the nineteenth-century southern Baptists that he retains one striking characteristic of the Victorians: a strong belief in personal industry, the wish and the capacity to make the most of 24 hours of every day.聽

About what he's up to and where he's going, most people, I find, have fairly firm opinions. Conservatives, especially Republican conservatives... No, let me begin again because that phrase alone may have produced more than a few puckered brows. Let me say as a working proposition that for any foreign audience certainly it makes much more sense to talk about the division of political bias in this country as one between conservatives and liberals than it does to talk about Republicans and Democrats as if they were separate parties, which they are, committed to essentially different ideologies, which they are not.聽

For at least, oh, 30 years, the art of getting elected president in this country has been the art of attracting as many voters as possible from the party to which you do not belong. There is a general bias of the Democrats toward liberal policies and Republicans toward conservative policies, but in neither party is the bias strong enough to carry a Republican into the White House on conservative policies alone, or a Democrat on the promise of producing a liberal Utopia. The need to be very much aware of the strong minority opinion in each party is what seems to make all presidential candidates slightly blurred when they turn into a presidential profile. By the time any one of them ceases to be a candidate and becomes a president, he finds, if he's a Republican, that he simply cannot get bills passed or policies carried out unless he pays considerable respect to the liberals in his own party. And if he's a Democrat, he may guess that the country is taking a liberal turn, and during the campaign he may promise total equality to the races, a three-day week and swimming pools for everybody over 30, but when he gets in the White House, he finds that his own party leaders in the Senate and the House are a good deal more conservative than he is, and consequently he's going to have to settle for equality between the races, only in so far as there is equal skill or competence, a five-day week, only if it maintains the country's rate of productivity, and swimming pools, only for those people who are prepared and can afford to buy them, filter them, and, out West, conserve water by keeping them empty three months of the year. So, I hope we can now see why the knight in shining armour who runs for president so often turns into a man who is unrecognisable, mainly because he's had to dispense with his armour. It turns out to be too expensive to maintain. Armour polish is in short supply and, anyway, there are powerful men in his party who pretty soon point out to him that a coat of mail is the wrong uniform in which to attack the advocates of strip mining, a balanced budget and an all-American Panama Canal.聽

So, now let's go back and begin again with the sentence I abandoned. About where he's going and what he's up to, most people, I find, have fairly firm opinions. Conservatives find little fault with him, what we call Fiscal Conservatives, especially. He has appointed to the treasury, to commerce, to agriculture, moderate men sceptical of sweeping reforms, either of the currency, or of a splurge of free trade, or of unlimited subsidies to hard-hit crops. People who feared another, and more dramatic, new deal on these fronts are happily reassured by Mr Carter's cagey ways with a dollar. The doubts about him, not yet swelling into a vocal opposition, have come from his own party liberals and from Republican liberals. The criticism you hear of him is almost wholly liberal criticism. But Mr Carter, even when he was running, must have known in his bones what liberals in full frenzy did not know, that the mood of the country was swinging back to conservatism. Not, by any means, I may add, to the right. There is, so far as I can see, no sign in this country of a general disgust with both parties and an itch for the totalitarianism of the right or the left. But the feeling which is general, that, for instance, since the last three administrations have made an unholy and hideously expensive mess of welfare, to begin all over again and try and create an alert, fair and workable system that compensates people who cannot work and still allows rewards for people who can and will.

Now this sort of job, the revamping of failed crusades, the restoration of a crumbling building is, of course, very undramatic. And that's why Mr Carter has been a disappointment to his old liberal supporters. Nevertheless, he has cut through the endless debate about the B-1 bomber and cancelled it. He has, for better or worse, agreed to Vietnam's coming into the United Nations. He's got a bill passed which finally controls strip mining. He's put through an energy bill. He's started to overhaul welfare and written a treaty with Panama which may not be approved by the Senate this year, but once its careful provisions for American military security are understood, it will surely be passed next year.聽

Where he is vulnerable is on his policies, if any, towards what one famous black liberal called this week 'the powerless and the poor'. Julian Bond of Georgia, who is one of the certainly three or four most effective spokesmen for the blacks and a year ago an ardent Carter supporter, said this week that the president had reneged on his campaign promises. In a stream of bitter sentences, Mr Bond said, 'He captured the attention of the black masses who never realised that a candidate may know the words to our hymns but not the numbers on our pay checks. He promised no rise in social security taxes but he says now they must go up. He promised parity for blacks but the record shows few dark faces in Washington's high places. He promised to cut the defence budget by $15 billion. He has cut it by $2.8 billion. He said that if winning jobs conflicted with fighting inflation, then inflation would have to continue. But now we hear that a balanced budget comes first. He promised to let us know when the CIA and the FBI abused our trust but he tried to stop the American press from telling the story of CIA pay-offs to foreign heads of state. While New York smoulders and burns, he visits Yazoo city, Mississippi. In short, he's not evil but he is president, not candidate and like all those who preceded him in the Oval office, he is giving the squeaky wheel the most grease.'聽

Well, the criticisms of so powerful and attractive a black as Julian Bond could be an omen. If there's one belief growing out of the last election, it is that Mr Carter owed his election to the blacks. In fact, this is quite untrue. A little-noticed Harris survey showed that just as many blacks, no more, voted for Mr Carter as voted for Richard Nixon in 1972. But the myth is powerfully established, most of all amongst the blacks themselves. And if they come to believe what Mr Bond believes, it could be the end of the long and comforting calm of the blacks.聽

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original 大象传媒 broadcast (漏 大象传媒) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the 大象传媒 cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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