February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Back in the Watergate era, journalists were folk heroes of sorts. No longer were they portrayed as drunken, broken-down, bitter hacks. (Picture those newsroom scenes from the wonderful movie, “His Girl Friday.”)
Instead, newspaper reporters were seen as crusaders without capes, fighting for truth, justice and, yes, even the American way.
When the time came to make the inevitable movie about the heroics of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the reporters who broke the Watergate story thanks to direction provided by the source they called Deep Throat, who played these ink-stained wretches? Only Robert Redford – the matinee idol of the time – and Dustin Hoffman, one of the greatest actors of his time.
Ah, those were the days, weren’t they?
So, if you were wondering why newspapers devoted so much coverage to the revelation that the mysterious Deep Throat was an Irish American named Mark Felt, the No. 2 man at the FBI, now you know.
For some journalists, Watergate was a golden era, and it just hasn’t been the same since. Don’t even try to count the number of newspapers that existed 1972, when the Watergate break-in took place, but were dead and buried by the end of the decade. Newspaper readership has declined ever since, and so, regrettably, as the public’s opinion of journalists.
Something else has changed since those days: The public’s attitude towards gasoline consumption. Maybe some people in the newspaper business think of honor and glory when they recall the early to mid 1970s. I think about the long lines for gasoline, and the shock of discovering that for all our power and might, the United States was scandalously dependent on one of the world’s most-unstable and least-democratic regions, the Middle East.
Forget Watergate and Nixon and Deep Throat, and remember what it was like to get in line for your ration of fuel. Remember how so many Americans decided to junk their big American-made cars and turned instead to the visionaries in Japan, who understood that fuel efficiency, reliability and safety were more important that sheer bulk.
With gasoline prices rising and supplies dependent on the whims of Arab dictators, fuel efficiency was all the rage. People scorned those eight-cylinder behemoths made in Michigan. Instead, they embraced four-cylinder cars from foreign automakers.
This was nothing less than a consumer revolution in the United States. Japanese cars were still exotic in 1972. By 1980, they were ubiquitous.
If you remember those dreadful times, think for a minute about this: How would you have reacted if somebody had told you in, say, 1975, that within 30 years, the hot cars on the market would not be cars at all, but sport utility vehicles that got less than 20 miles a gallon.
What if somebody predicted that in the early 21st Century, General Motors would be turning out vehicles originally designed to move troops – and that those vehicles would get maybe 12 or 13 miles a gallon.
What’s more, what if that same person told you that Congress actually encouraged the purchase of these gas-guzzlers by giving their owners special tax incentives?
From the perspective of 1975, you’d surely say that the nation had gone mad.
And from the perspective of 2005, you’d have to conclude that we’ve forgotten the lessons of the 1970s.
Clearly those of us who lived through those days have repressed the bad memories, and certainly have not passed on the lessons of that time to our children, who can be spotted driving Hummers and Expeditions and Yukons on highways around the country.
Perhaps we have gone mad. For we have done our enemies in the oil-producing states of the Middle East a great favor: Even as we bulk up our homeland security, we have allowed ourselves to become even more dependent on foreign oil, and that makes us less secure. We can examine shoes in airports and we can put machine guns in the hands of police at rail stations, but we will not be secure as long as we depend on oil from the Persian Gulf.
For reasons that defy rational explanation, the Bush Administration and Congress have done encouraged this dangerous dependence by writing tax laws that actually penalize those who buy smaller, fuel-efficient cars. Many commentators defend the SUV glut by pointing out that car-makers simply are responding to demand in a free market. But the market is not, in fact, free – the government’s tax incentives, and not demand alone, help to shape the market.
I often wonder what tourists from Ireland, where cars are smaller and fuel is expensive, think when they see vehicles the size of tanks rolling through the streets of Manhattan, Boston, Chicago and other urban areas. Perhaps some are stricken with big-car envy. Others, though, no doubt conclude that, yes, Americans have gone mad.
There is nothing so ironic as those “Support Our Troops” stickers which adorn our gigantic SUVs. If we wish to support our troops, we should be doing our part to cut off the money which flows to the Middle East, and then to groups that wish to destroy us.
Without the bounty that we provide to our enemies, the oil-producers would watch their power and influence evaporate.
To achieve that goal, however, we need leaders who are willing to use the “c” word – conservation.
Such leaders apparently do not exist.