Kill privacy, kill freedom
Pfaff, William
that welled up in his eyes at the mention of his brothers, Frankie and Joey, showed me that the family also knew about loss. While the brothers were fighting in Europe, two other Surek sons were...
...Our leaders have been distracted, our sources of information have been distracted, and so have we...
...Thus, when word came that both Joey and Frankie were dead, few family members were there to receive the news...
...But government by public opinion polls is government by impulsive judgment and unconsidered opinion...
...9 1998, Los Angeles Times Syndicate efore President Bill Clinton went to Russia in September, former Assistant Secretary of Defense Graham Allison, now director of Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, called attention to the reason Russia's economic disaster matters to us...
...There cannot be liberty without privacy...
...It is imaginable - - in another House of Representatives, at least - - that the lurid details might have been withheld out of respect for the people concerned, and for the public...
...It surpassed all expectations...
...The American public does not like this...
...Today, this is condemned as hypocrisy...
...That is, until I went to the movies this summer...
...We want peace...
...If the Congress and the states want to install government by popular referendum, let them do so...
...The prosecutor or the journalist asks questions which intrude into the privacy of another...
...It happened in St.-Lo, only days after the D-Day invasion...
...Hearing the vague references to their heroism and seeing their saintly memorabilia had instilled in me a sense of my family's loss...
...There was in the past a public code of conduct in Washington, and in American society, concerning private lives, which was generally respected, if often in the breach...
...My mother remembers her father sitting in his rocking chair and crying when he thought of his brothers...
...He showed me what it meant to die in war--to rush into a flurry of bullets, to call for your mother in your last breath, and to be killed in a small French town, the victim of a sniper hidden away in the heights of a deceptively benign church...
...Nobody ever "got over" their deaths...
...What happened...
...In 1944, PFC Joseph Surek was killed after being targeted by a sharpshooter hiding in a steeple...
...War revisited Beaver Brook a few more times in 1944: my grandfather's first cousin was killed, as was a childhood friend of my grandmother...
...But who will take such a lead...
...Art imitated life...
...But Steven Spielberg completed the picture and gave me a perspective that I never expected...
...Since the film dealt with the fate of a soldier who loses all three of his brothers in the war, I thought it might echo the experiences of my own family...
...And matters very much...
...To defend the people's right to privacy is to defend the people, and to defend liberty...
...There is so little we can do...
...The political conflicts of the past were also ruthless, but they served political, class, regional, and moneyed interests...
...Sex and scandal are mere weapons of opportunity...
...It is essential to the mutual confidence among citizens that is necessary to self-government...
...The publication and broadcast of President Bill Clinton's grand jury testimony were rationalized by an appeal to transparency...
...However, the public does not have an unlimited right to know...
...But what good would it do if we were not distracted--if we were fully aware...
...A Purple Heart will never look the same to me...
...Start with 7,000 nuclear warheads: armed, mounted on missiles, capable of arriving at targets in the United States less than an hour after a decision to launch," he wrote, and added other horrifying details of Russia's still-existing super-power arsenal...
...All this is a very bad sign for representative government...
...Spielberg helped me to appreciate what my family could never bring themselves to imagine: the unpretentious bravery and courage of my granduncles, two men who literally helped, as Stephen Ambrose has written, to save the world...
...ecent events have delivered a serious blow to personal and judicial privacy in the United States...
...It was obvious in face of such facts that the president's focus in Russia should have been, as Allison said, getting control of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction...
...Those who want change are inclined to conclude that they are isolated and that action is futile...
...Richard Alleva's review of Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan was worthy of its powerful subject (see, Commonweal, September 11...
...It has been an equally daunting task to fully appreciate the sacrifices of granduncles who were killed in a war that I understood only from sanitized statistics or descriptions in history books...
...It was understood that no one's interest was served by overturning a code of public decorum which protected the essential privacies of a civilized society...
...Their only remaining brother, my grandfather, received deferments every six months because mining was an "essential wartime occupation...
...asked a friend...
...The media have their own responsibility to face...
...The anniversary was scarcely noticed here in the country responsible for that bombing and the devastation it wrought...
...What we can do is summon and express concern...
...The defining characteristic of totalitarianism is its assault on privacy...
...Add this to our comparatively tepid responses to the nuclear arming of India and Pakistan--and to news of a vast secret underground nuclear facility in North Korea--and it is clear that, as normal citizens, we do not fully comprehend the danger or give thought to what our national policy should be...
...Puritanism cerCommonweal 7 October 9, 1998 tainly has been a deep influence on American civilization, but what is going on now results mainly from the culture wars waged in the United States since the 1960s...
...When Joey died, my grandmother said, it was just too hard to believe...
...Congress justified what it has done as allowing the people to judge...
...Its continued support for Bill Clinton, despite what has been revealed about his behavior, demonstrates popular distaste for what Mr...
...This combat allows no compromise or negotiation...
...While the brothers were fighting in Europe, two other Surek sons were stationed overseas, on in the Philippines and one in Panama...
...No one is safe from this...
...Too many interests profit from the present situation...
...Starr and the Congress have made of the affair...
...That would at least be part of an orderly and constitutional consideration of the issues...
...Concern affects policy and eventually brings action...
...Clinton and Yeltsin signed a pallid minor missile agreement and announced it at a press conference where questions about the Lewinsky affair were as numerous as were any questions on policy...
...When I walked into that movie theater, I had thought about my granduncles, the war, and what it meant to lose family...
...Brian P. Murphy, a free-lance writer, is a recent graduate of Hayerford College with a degree in history...
...The press, for example, says that competitive pressures make it impossible not to collaborate in the destruction of privacy...
...Moreover, it is likely that the Senate will not muster the two-thirds majority necessary to ratify the proposed worldwide test-ban treaty...
...For twenty-two years, I saw a Purple Heart handled with reverent care and read letters that were read and reread and refolded for half a century...
...Their conduct (since, notably, the Gary Hart affair in 1984) has increasingly been marked by "gotcha...
...tactics, which often amount to a form of entrapment (in effect if not in law) - - not unlike methods used by Judge Starr in developing his case against the president...
...They have remained numb ever since...
...Expressed public hatred of politicians, as of journalists, is unprecedented...
...These have subordinated political differences, which by definition are negotiable, to an ideological struggle over values intended to change American society...
...and the inquiry henceforth is no longer ignoble scandal-mongering but has become an investigation into suspected lies or perjury...
...The public's revulsion against the fanatical partisanship which exists on both right and left (the abortion and homosexual wars, for example, display equivalent fanaticisms) is partly responsible for the extremely low level of electoral participation in the United States today...
...This violation of the traditional confidentiality of grand jury testimony, harming not only the president but Monica Lewinsky, a private person, and other individuals associated with the president, was actually intended to serve partisan advantage and sway public opinion in the run-up to the congressional elections in November...
...Today's ideological wars are aimed at the elimination of enemy ideas from the American moral landscape...
...Under the existing Constitution, it is the duty of the Congress to judge...
...It was also the belief of the 250,000 who marched in Calcutta on the same anniversary and chanted, "We don't want the bomb...
...There was no recovery, no rationalization...
...I would say that if the mainstream press, or an influential part of it, refused to report unsubstantiated and salacious or scandalous allegations from partisan sources, refused to reprint such reports published elsewhere, and applied a serious standard of public interest to matters invading individual privacy, this could do much to restore responsibility to public life...
...The individual in a totalitarian state is deprived of privacy in order to destroy his or her liberty...
...We face "the threat of 'loose nukes,' the theft of one or a dozen weapons, sale to a rogue state or terrorist group, and their use to threaten or attack Americans at home and abroad...
...A description of the president's behavior with Lewinsky would undoubtedly have come out in the course of congressional deliberations over impeachment - - assuming that those take place...
...Nothing now is barred...
...Those who did so would be attacked for abridging the people's right to know, although this is a false argument...
...I have often wondered how it felt to lose two brothers in combat...
...There is a countervailing public interest in the protection of privacy...
...Beyond appealing to an unrecoverable past, I have little that is constructive to propose...
...Congress is mandated to represent the people, not pander to them...
...As an only child reared in New Jersey at the end of the cold war, such realities seemed far removed...
...It has already failed to Commonweal 8 October 9, 1998...
...European critics of the United States like to say that all this is the result of American puritanism...
...the other denies the allegation or implication contained in the question...
...One of the film's battles took place after D-Day, in St.-Lo, France, and featured a sniper firing his rifle at Allied troops from the cover of a church steeple...
...That was certainly the belief of the 50,000 who assembled in Hiroshima this year on the fifty-third anniversary of the world's first atomic bombing...
Vol. 125 • October 1998 • No. 17
