Time for a One-Way Safari

IN HIS SPARE TIME: last week, when he wasn't laying waste to the American environment, our Secretary of the Interior tried his hand at a new activity and went out for a little anesthetic strip mining.

Explaining that rock hands at the Washington Mall's annual Fourth of July concert have been attracting "the wrong element. James G. Watt announced that this year's event would be different. It would "appeal to families and a broad range of Americans," in a spokesman's words, and it would feature the heart swelling music of Wayne Newton and various military bands.

Public reaction was swift and devastating--the largest out cry Watt has stirred up in his far-from-placid two years in office, a department of official reported. Disc jockeys across the country inveighed against Watt-one called him "the administration's chief nerd." The Beach Boys, the most prominent group to play at the Fourth of July concert in past years, issued a statement that declared. "After Watt's remarks, we believe the Department of the Interior has attracted the wrong element."

In Congress, the nation's legislators displayed a newfound zeal for California's best known rock group. "The Beach Boys transcend generations," complained Rep. Thomas J. Downey (D.N.Y.), the chairman of the House arts caucus. "Wayne Newton doesn't transcend anything." "Help me Ronald, don't let him run wild," urged Re;. George Miller (D-Calif.). And Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kansas) suggested that Secretary Watt get going right away on a "surfin safari."

Vice President George bush was also quick to rally around the beleaguered Beach Boys, who had played in successful fund raising concerts for his 1980 campaign. So was Nancy Reagan, who, Watt said, told him that "her children have grown up with them and they're fine, outstanding people."

Finally, the president himself took Watt along the now well-trod path behind the White House woodshed, and when the secretary emerged, he carried a plaster trophy of a foot with a bullet hole in it and announced. "I've learned a lot about the Beach Boys in the last 12 hours. We'll look forward to having them here in Washington to entertain us again."

Now that the incident has died down, we can't help thinking that Watt's biggest blunder was not that he purged the Beach Boys, devout though their following appears to be in the Reagan White House. The more significant faux pas, we feel, was to place them with the most unbearably fatuous entertainer this nation is currently enduring. Wayne Newton. Surely the public outcry would have been diminished if Watt had not selected, out of all the singers in the United States of America, a man whose performances are the musical equivalent of toxic waste.

Nevertheless, we offer an expression of relief that Watt did not err even more gravely than he did in selecting a replacement band. After all, he might have tapped the Clash to play cuts from their popular album Sandinista, a move that would surely have incurred the dangerous wrath of United Nations Ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, who has never been that particular group of Central American rebels' most devoted band that calls itself the Dead Kennedys (best known for its rendition of "Kill the Poor"), thereby annihilating the White House's already troubled efforts to patch up relations with the Democratic party.

Worst of all, Watt might easily have invited Randy Newman to sing his newest hit, with its chorus "Let's drop the big one." Caspar Weinberger might have taken the song seriously, and then where would we all be?