Word: pentagon
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...mind wanders in an American technological wilderness, and the paranoia he evokes is at home under the shadow of the Science Center. Memoirs Found in a Bathtub starts where a comfortable narrative would already be well into the body of its tale. The narrator is in some indefinite Pentagon Three, buried deep within the Rocky Mountains. Pentagon Three, with thousands of offices, miles of corridors, and an enormous supply of food and water, sealed itself off from the outside world when it felt America became heretical--when American joined a world federation. The narrator wanders in the halls of this...
...Pentagon Three is a self-contained world that marks time in work shifts. It produces plans and counterplans ad infinitum. Then it produces reports and files and stuffed manila folders on the plans. The papers shuffle between offices and then another department reports on the reports. Secretaries keep them in order and librarians store them in archives. Higher-ups order them studied, or declare them confidential. Pentagon Three is called simply "The Building." Its actions are all theoretically directed against the "Antibuilding"--the enemy. But the Antibuilding does not exist, and all the paper-shuffling only serves to deny...
...campaign pledge came last month, with the submission of his administration's proposed amendments to former President Gerald R. Ford's defense budget for fiscal 1978. But the amendments Carter submitted to Congress last month are a disappointment to those of us who hoped for an aggressive challenge to Pentagon demands for higher spending, and a poor prelude to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) scheduled to resume in Moscow later this month...
WHILE THESE PROPOSALS highlight the difficulty of cutting the military budget when congressional interest in constituent jobs and business investments comes into play, they also exemplify a significant but resolvable paradox in liberal-initiated efforts to reduce defense spending. Pentagon supporters are quick to point out that major cutbacks in weapons procurement are likely to conflict with the goal of higher employment. This ironic justification of defense spending as a public jobs program has often proved to be a formidable obstacle to opponents of Pentagon spending...
...preserve existing programs as a form of corporate welfare--and by doing so preserve a structural defect in the American economy--but to judge them on their merits and to deal separately with the adverse economic consequences that might arise in the event of reductions. The justification of Pentagon programs on economic grounds is a sham--it panders to the economic sectors least in need of government aid; those who would lose jobs if the Vought plant in Dallas closed are likely to find jobs more easily than the permanently unemployed of the Dallas ghetto. The central question, as always...