Bishops call for nuclear ban

I think I must have told you about an old friend of mine who never ceased to amuse, if not amaze, me by his habit, at the end of an evening's meal out on the town, of picking up the early edition of tomorrow's New York Times at the nearest newsstand and flipping over the pages with an expert gesture to arrive at the obituary page. He would scan it with great concentration for a minute or so and then say aloud, 'I see old so and so's had it' and then fold the paper, call a cab and read the headlines on his way home.

I once hinted to him that this was a rather bizarre habit. 'Wait, my dear boy!' he said, 'Wait till you're 60!' He was quite right. I have to confess a shameful truth. Unless the deceased is somebody near and dear, there is a furtive and, I admit, a detestable pleasure in reflecting not so much that so and so has had it, as that you, with your fingers newly crossed, have not.

There's another morbid pleasure which appeals, however, to New Yorkers of all ages and I'm sure some people would say it's more of a civic duty than a morbid habit. Whichever it is, I have to say that it's one I've indulged for years. Once a week, the New York Times has a small but regular item printed in small type – it's entitled 'Restaurants Violations'. It contains three lists of the names and addresses of restaurants that have been closed by the city Department of Health and Consumer Affairs for violations of the health and/or the sanitary codes. The second list is of restaurants that have been warned. The third is of restaurants that have had the ban lifted and are free to reopen.

You'd expect, and you'd be right to expect, that most of the violators are quick lunch counters, snack bars and cafeterias with such names as Joe's Bite and Run, The Elysian Fields, El Castro. If these names sound wild, believe me they're not as wild as the actual names you'll find in the classified directory of a city that contains 30 or 40 ethnic groups much given, whenever they name a baby or a restaurant, to flights of fancy.

I ought to reassure any friends of mine who fear for the legal consequences of my own flight of fancy that, like a movie producer inventing the names of his characters, the streets and shops and restaurants that they will be called on to inhabit, I have patiently gone through the Yellow Pages to be quite sure there is not, in fact, a Joe's Bite and Run or a restaurant called The Elysian Fields. I ought to add that a couple of times I came perilously close to slipping into an absurd name that is, in fact, a going and, I must assume, a blameless restaurant.

But friends of mine have learned that not all the violations are discovered in the little places around the corner that we used to call cheap and dirty. A year ago, I called two friends and told them to meet me at 8.30 at the expensive favourite. Luckily I got there early. It is the restaurant of a hotel of sumptuous, of impeccable, elegance. Well, it was peccable. It was closed and, after we'd eaten somewhere else, I went home and found the reason. It was listed, along with Joe's Bite and Run, as a violator of the health code in the kitchen – something to do with the stacking of empty boxes on the floor which is forbidden by the New York health code as an invitation to rodents to play house. It took only a couple of days to whisk the floors clean of all trash and stack the boxes on shelves, but the deed had been done and throughout the following weeks the maître d' had a terrible time assuring favourite guests that, no, the restaurant had not been closed for the more usual violations of dirty restrooms, ants in and around the vegetable washing area or what is gravely called 'rodent faecal matter' in odd corners of the kitchen.

New York has one of the strictest codes of health inspection both for restaurants and produce centres and food shops and supermarkets of any city in the country. It all began about 70 years ago when the city health commissioner, a demon of a Puritan with the good Puritan name of Emerson who was appointed during an administration benevolently and loosely run by Tammany Hall, the reigning Democratic political machine. Since the good doctor was a Democrat, they assumed he would play ball.

He was, however, a singularly honest man and an almost maniacal crusader too busy to play any kind of ball. He threw the city government into paroxysms of alarm when he went down to the docks, examined an incoming liner and a freighter or two and announced that from a certain days, say, a year or more from then, ships' bottoms must not be planked in random horizontals but must be tilted at two sharp opposing angles so that any rats aboard would fall into the trough and could be counted. It was a radical step in eliminating cholera.

It did affect, however, every shipping line that used the port of New York, but it was done and soon became, I believe, an international requirement.

Then, this missionary went after the restaurants. He made himself equally unpopular by publishing, at the end of a three-month survey of his inspectors, a report announcing that the cleanest, the healthiest restaurants were being run by the Chinese and that the most insanitary were run by the Irish. I need hardly tell you that, considering the ethnic make-up of Tammany Hall, he was not reappointed.

If this doughty old man were alive today, he would rejoice at the daily work of the Health and Consumer Affairs departments which, between them, patrol 16,000 bakeries, delicatessens, fish markets, restaurants, catering services, produce markets, all retail stores and pounce on this restaurant for listing on its menu 'bay scallops' when they are, in fact, sliced ocean scallops, fine a grocery for selling milk after the date imprinted on the carton, inspect the restrooms and the towels used by employees, crawl around basements looking for insects, punish one butcher for carrying packaged beef which has been dyed to look red and juicy and another butcher for using light bulbs on meat which, similarly, redden it up.

The staff of the departments, like the staff of practically every other enterprise in the country, from the steel industry to the internal revenue, have been cut for budgetary reasons, which has had a surprising, salutary effect.

An old city health inspector put it this way and he was talking about ten years ago, 'In those days we had what you might call an educational approach. We'd find violations and make suggestions and issue warnings. Now we don't have the manpower for education. Bam! We hit 'em with a fine.' This is the only case I know where a reduced workforce has appeared in a cloudy economy as a silver lining.

Well, there are precious few silver linings in the thunder clouds that are piling up over the administration. Can there ever be any agreement to get the Israelis and the Syrians and so, ultimately, allow the Americans out of Lebanon? Is a revolution in Nicaragua exportable to her neighbours?

And is Central America in ferment a threat now or later to the security of the United States? There's a tense and bitter debate growing up on this question and whether the threat is as dangerous as President Reagan says it is, it is not a question to be taken lightly or wearily pooh-poohed and when a European author asks, 'How would the Americans feel if, like the Russians, they had missile bases on their northern and southern borders?' I think the answer is that no administration one can imagine taking office in this country, in the near future, would allow it to happen.

Which brings us, inevitably, and unhappily to the unending nuclear debate and to the action, this week, of the Roman Catholic bishops of the United States in ratifying – by the stunning majority of 238 to nine – of a pastoral letter which goes far beyond all previous statements of the church in denouncing nuclear war and saying that, 'Good ends – defending one's country, protecting freedom – cannot justify immoral means, the use of weapons which kill indiscriminately and threaten whole societies'.

Last time they met, the bishops urged a 'curb' on nuclear arms. Now they're asking for a 'halt', even after the administration had exercised powerful pressures to have them retain the softer noun.

'We are the first generation,' the letter declares, 'since Genesis, with the power virtually to destroy God's creation. We cannot remain silent in the face of such danger. The whole world must summon the moral courage and the technical means (that could be the snag)... and the technical means to say no to an arms race which robs the poor and the vulnerable, and to say no to the moral danger of a nuclear age which places, before humankind, indefensible choices of constant terror or surrender.'

This is the first time, so far as I can recall, that any church in this country has faced the true Western alternative in such sharp language. 'Constant terror or surrender'. It's impossible to guess what the effect on the Reagan policy will be of spreading this letter around the country, by which I mean its purpose of disseminating it in Catholic churches and schools and study groups.

One thing you can say is that it's bound to be a more effective shock to the administration than any protesting action of the Democrats in Congress. They, after all, are looked on and expected to be the president's political opposition. The Catholic bishops have ripped the ground out from under the administration's contention that nuclear freezers and other advocates of a halt are, at best, the dupes of Communism.

Why should the vote of 238 bishops matter? Well, in this country there are three million Episcopalians, as close as any other group to the beliefs and liturgy of the Church of England. There are nine million Methodists. There are 14 million Baptists, but there are 52 million Roman Catholics – practically one American in four.

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

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