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    insi sted that our international partners put a European-built canal back in

    Nasser's hands.60

    By giving Nasser a victory, we lent tremendous prestige to the Arab

    revolutionary movement, a political tide that soon planted anti-American

    autocrats all through the middle east.61  And eventually, with OPEC, those

    leaders found a way to twist our tail.  The resulting rocket rise in the price of

    oil would give us our first negative international trade balances in the early

    '70s.    It  would  create  a  decade  of  spiralling  prices.    And  it  would  make  a

    major contribution to the American decline.

    At its best, scapegoating is a nasty business.  At its worst, it is a

    sluggish form of suicide.  Battering our British allies in the Suez incident, we

    set the stage for a financial hemorrhage that would later overwhelm us.

    During the McCarthy era, we attacked talented people in government and

    the arts-- "eggheads," intellectuals, people with insight and brains.

    Ultimately, we were the ones deprived of the fruits of their talents.  And in

    the late '80s, when conservative groups battered away at rock and roll, they

    were undermining one of the few American fields of endeavor which

    contributed  massively  to  our  economic  well-being.    In  just  the  first  half  of

    1988 we exported 3.65 million records and CD's to our arch trading rival,

    Japan.62   That's one reason the entertainment industry in 1987 generated a

    $5.5 billion balance of payments surplus, a surplus second only to that created

    by U.S. aircraft manufacturers.63

    When we run into pecking order problems,  we look around for

    someone smaller to kick.  And in the end, the folks we kick the hardest are

    ourselves.

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