Phoney baloney.(on the right)(criticism on fuel consumption by government bodies)(Column)

INEVITABLY, President Bush's itemization of means by which to diminish fuel consumption led to derision. The single most common rhetorical device in all argumentation is the invocation of Alternative Uses. I became starkly conscious of this thought-burr in vivid circumstances. I was with poet James Dickey in Florida. We were guests of the U.S. government, invited to ogle the capsule with astronauts headed for the moon.

It was very cold and still dark when the moon-bound streak of fire shot up from the launch pad. Dickey was frozen in awe and admiration. At breakfast he threatened to break the neck of a television commentator whom he heard saying into the mike that the cost of this lunar extravagance was the equivalent of 126,000 units of low-cost housing. Dickey was trembling with furious indignation that such vulgar measurements were being used to discredit the beauty and awesomeness of the enterprise we had just seen coming up from its womb on a Florida beach.

I have ever after been aware of the device. It is of course universally used--and not alone by critics of great government enterprises, though we can see the pharaoh wincing every time he is reminded of alternative uses of the manpower required to construct his new pyramid.

At workaday levels, we are confronted every day with alternative uses of our resources, and there can't be any reasonable objection to the family's being asked to weigh a new car against a vacation in Europe. When it galls is when there is tendentious play going on. When the broadcaster was pointing out how many housing units might have been built in place of sending astronauts to the moon, he was engaging in moral criticism. The final polarization of the argument ends up, Make Love, Not War.

When President Bush said we should consider driving less in order to save fuel, it was a matter of nanoseconds before we would be told how much fuel is burned by Air Force One (6,000 gallons per hour). What is invited is relativist criticism of Air Force One's energy costs.

That line of argument has ...