The Inside Dope

Some of you youngsters out there in the audience may not remember it, but time was when the Fourth of July wasn't much more than an extra day off, a family picnic, and maybe some fireworks to top it off. Well, it's not that simple any more.

It just so happens that when the stuffed shirts who run this country decided everybody was gonna have to celebrate the U.S.' 200th their way - which is to say, with more than the usual patriotic hoopla and hot air-the population, for the most part, felt a bit squeamish about going along. Most of them, it seems, have read the Constitution at some point or another in their lives, and due to certain conspicuous transpirings in recent years, were having difficulty seeing what it had to do with what was going on right in front of them.

A bunch of these citizens, in fact, have had the effrontery to suggest that the occasion might be better used to ask, "What does it all mean and make a start at straightening things out. A few hundred thousand of them decided to stage their own celebrations in Washington and Philadelphia, right alongside the official red-white and-blue goofiness.

Well, the powers that be lost no time in explaining what patriotism means to them - the government came out with a fancy report accusing the more vocal citizenry with trying to "steal the Bicentennial," Clarence Kelley invented a radical conspiracy to "turn the Washington Monument into a Roman candle," and Frank "Ratso" Rizzo, the current chief executive in the "City of Brotherly Love," put in for an army of federal troops.

It's anybody's guess what 's going to happen, but here's hoping cool heads prevail, or else we might end up handing them the chance to celebrate number 200 by tearing up the documents they started with back in 1776!

We'd also like to offer a humble suggestion that, instead of thinking up ways to turn their conscientious citizens into "terrorists," our leaders might spend a little more time going after some real gangsters - the kind that hang out in board rooms, the Pentagon, and Rancho La Costa. Maybe they could take a hint from the folks at the People's Bicentennial Commission, who are about to pay a reward of 25 G's for information leading to the disclosure of a scheme, it says here, by "top executives of Mobil Oil Corp. in a far-reaching ten-year conspiracy to prop up white minority rule in Rhodesia."

Right here in Detroit, besides, we'd be less concerned with citizens exercising their supposed right of free speech than with the lunkheads who run the Detroit Police Officers' Association. In case you haven't heard, they're so upset about their people getting laid off to save the city money that they're talking about some kind of "work slowdown", starting with the city's big fireworks show on the Fourth. Just who do these guys "protect and serve," anyway? It ain't us.

HARD-HITTING JOURNALISM DEPT.

Took note the other day of a big cover story in the News, all about "previously undisclosed testimony" in the great PBB fiasco. The News evinced great shock at discovering that Michigan Farm Bureau Services had not only dumped the poison into animal feed and sold it, but after they got the stuff back, diluted it and sold it again. Well, we hate to burst their bubble, but the Grand Rapids Press printed that fact two months ago, and in fact, so did the SUN - in our May 20 issue. Well, at least they're trying.

Then there's the great Richard Austin expose in the Free Press, which contained not one documented instance of "pressure" by Michigan's Secretary of State and candidate for U.S. Senate to make his branch managers kick into his political fund, let alone an actual threat of dismissal for not contributing. In fact, Austin 's people have been told that they can get their money back if they felt "pressured"- but so far, nobody's asked. The word in Lansing is that Austin is being picked on because he's the only announced black candidate and a good bet to become the first black Democratic Senator since Reconstruction and that the Freep's sources fear for losing their jobs if Austin no longer occupies the Secretary of State's office.