Editorial / In Foreign Parts / Masters of Disaster
Tyrreil., R. Emmett Jr.
.............................................................................................................................................................. E D I T O R I A...
...Visions of excellence did not intimidate them but goaded them...
...It is of course a pipe dream...
...C A P I T O L I D E A S THE BISHOPS' BRAIN I n the press release it was billed as a "debate...
...Here there is only space to say that we shall continue to depreciate human achievement as long as we look at Americans as whites and blacks or, for that matter, Poles or WASPs...
...If the left-wing Democrats now rendering impotent American foreign policy with the same discredited analyses they applied to Angola and Southeast Asia before these went Communist in 1975 were serious about bringing economic growth to Central America, they would not allow a Communist takeover...
...The Hunter College Elementary School is populated by children of the New York intelligentsia...
...Thus there are a lot of anomalies here worthy of our attention...
...Did you know that Catholic churches put out press releases and hold televised debates with parish priests talking about such things as "a return to a MIRVed world," "vertical proliferation," and "strategic implications for superpower relations...
...0 MASTERS OF DISASTER Last month the National Elementary School Chess championship slipped from the grasp of New York City's Hunter College Elementary School, which did not seem right...
...And there are good biological reasons to drop these categories-racial and ethnic particularity is less and less possible in a land like ours, and according to our ideals it is less and less creditable...
...He specializes in ambiguity-rather odd, one might think, for a parish priest...
...When Rep...
...No sir, I had not...
...There was a grand prix motor...
...According to one or two bishops, Hehir actually wrote the recent Bishops' Letter, 44,000 words long, on nuclear weapons and deterrence...
...Together we traveled to one of those little lands where as a Peace Corps volunteer Senator Dodd learned the elements of New Age statecraft...
...all the palaver is of parks and schools and day-care centers...
...Today this desire to achieve is always undervalued, yet it is essential to all human endeavor...
...Their pose was one of heroic independence...
...and when the kids got flattened in competition the social scientists could have pulled out all their cant about endangering the fragile self-images of poor blacks...
...once the checkered flag has fallen it is off to the presidential palace and the victory ball, the Sandinists having decorously left their AK-47s in the cloakroom, the local members of the Chamber of Commerce having sworn Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Post column syndicated by King Features...
...Adepts of the social sciences might have considered this absurd, and their charts and statistics would back them up...
...There is still time to end the violence, and history has shown repeatedly that the only way to end the violence of Marxist-Leninists is with superior power...
...There is very little poverty and almost no guerrilla activity...
...In Chicago, one of the Republic's most successful teachers of inner-city children, Marva Collins, insists that the desire to achieve is the result of devoted teachers holding high expectations for themselves and their students rather than low expectations...
...by Tom Bethell St: Peter's Church was already packed full by 8 p. m. Some of the people in the pews seemed vaguely familiar, and with a sinking feeling I began to suspect that this was in part the same group I had seen at last month's IPS reunion-an itinerant flock of nuclear disarmers and allpurpose leftists ready to show up at a few hours' notice and cheer their heads off the minute someone said "growth," "commitment to change," or "peace &justice...
...The Masters of Disaster are black, and for one reason or another black kids are not supposed to be chess champions...
...Since then he has attained a kind of celebrity as a behind-thescenes manipulator of Roman Catho lic bishops-the sort who over a period of years were bullied into thinking they were "irrelevant...
...What brought them a cropper was OPEC and the ensuing worldwide recession...
...The press re lease said: "Contact: Bill Hinkes," followed by the telephone number of New Jersey Congressman Frank Guarinini's office...
...One is the question of race...
...As Taki observed, conditions in Monte Carlo support Senator Dodd's thesis 100 percent...
...last month, I tapped The American Spectator's chief foreign correspondent, Mr...
...The Poor Have Suffered Enough" said the button on his lapel...
...El...
...Ask Lech Walesa...
...The church has been turned into a big TV studio, with bright lights, cable TV on hand, those familiar bundles of electric cords taped to the floor, and-wouldn't you know it-a bearded priest sitting on a table in back, swinging his legs, and advertising his caringperson status...
...Social science has told us much that is true about human beings, but it has also told us some things that are palpably untrue and certainly it has diminished the wonder of human achievement by insisting on quantifiable explanations for human behavior...
...The explanations run from the sensible to the bizarre, but one thing we can all agree on is that these chess players had the desire to persist through arduous practices and through defeats...
...Behind the episcopal front lurked the church's by-now thoroughly leftist bureaucracy, and there, in its midst, sat Father Hehir, with his fast patter about a MIRVed world...
...That is why congratulations are in order not only for the chess players of School 27 but also for their coaches who no longer have to teach their charges how to cope with being patronized in defeat but rather with being celebrated in victory...
...Some say it is because these kids are street tough...
...Having been bullied for so long they are now only too happy to have someone like Hehir whisper "peace &justice" in their ears to make them relevant again...
...IN FOREIGN PARTS In Sen...
...Rev...
...He calls himself a "radical centrist...
...In the church press release Hehir got top billing-above a senator, a congressman, and the former heads of the Central and Defense Intelligence agencies...
...Perhaps one day he will tell us what these veiled, ideologically charged words mean...
...J. Bryan Hehir, a parish priest in Falls Church, Virginia, and director of the Office of Justice and Peace at the U.S...
...Cuba...
...They were beaten by a team from Indianapolis, Indiana, a team composed of inner-city kids with no Ph.D.'s in their lineages, a team billed as "The Masters of Disaster" I Were the eggheads from New York victims of street-gang mayhem...
...That was a reference to Rev...
...When the fledgling team members grew mutinous after ten minutes of practice, the social scientists might again have pointed to their statistics...
...sociological findings to the contrary...
...He's big on initiatives and negotiations (and let's not forget global interdependence), and a prot6ge of Stanley Hoffmann, the Harvard ambiguity specialist...
...The bishops had become relevant at last...
...to refrain from lewd references to the profit motive...
...The aforementioned unquantifiable elements seemed to be activated by defeat, and elementary school kids who could not sit still for ten minutes became kids who trained two-and-ahalf hours nightly, five nights a week, and on Saturdays, for two years...
...Then the noble revolutionaries began their butcherings, butcherings that the left-wing Democrats ignore whenever they wax eloquent on anti-revolutionary savagery in Central America...
...This vision is an old favorite with left-wing Democrats: unimpeded by CIA plots, the Marxist-Leninist regime turns "moderate," prosperous, harmless to the United States or any living thing...
...Taki Theodoracopulos, and told him to pack all the requisite travel equipment, ointments, tonics, and anti-malarials...
...No doubt this was correct news judgment, too...
...To one side were his supporters, former CIA head William Colby and Senator Patrick Leahy, to the other 7 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1983...
...The question is how does one instill it in young people...
...Hungary and East Germany, we are told...
...They hear of leftist revolution in the jungles and envision young men and women sitting by late-night campfires talking of the libraries they will build once the last agent of the anclen regime has been reeducated, strumming big Gibson guitars, and singing old Joan Baez songs, the kind that supplied so much inner warmth to Senator Dodd and his cohorts when they were waging America's youth revolution in the glorious 1960s...
...Decades have elapsed since the civil rights movement carried the day, yet we are, alas, no closer to the goal of a color-blind society, a goal which any serious-minded student of human nature knows mast be realized for enduring racial harmony...
...The Ferraris and Renaults shall be stripped of all frivolous kapitalist advertisements, bedizened instead with wholesome revolutionary exhortations...
...He is fluent in the by-now increasingly exposed verbal camouflage of the contemporary Left: commitment, challenge, conscience, compassion, coalition, community, change, and, of course, concern...
...Catholic Conference in Washington, D.C...
...You see, people like Hehir tend to win political battles in an institution like the Catholic Church because traditionalist clergymen by definition are not interested in learning whether MIRVing is a good or a bad thing...
...As a result, the position of the church emerges as misleadingly skewed toward political activism...
...E D I T O R I A L...
...of Washington Archbishop James Hickey, for example, while Hickey was testifying before Congress...
...With the Panama Canal so close and American cities well within missile-range, Central America is indeed within our sphere of influence...
...Is it luck or a gift...
...so why do those countries need all the border guards...
...Hickey seems to be a soft touch for the peace & justice crowd...
...Christopher J. Dodd's now widely celebrated rebuttal of the President's speech on Central America only one statement stung me as perhaps plausible, to wit: the senator's claim that he had been to backward regions and seen for himself how poverty breeds revolution...
...Peter's Church in the nation's capital held such a debate, heralded by a press release headlined: "Bishops' Top Adviser To Appear In Capitol Hill Debate...
...Two-and-a-half years ago a fifthgrade science teacher at Indianapolis's School 27, because he liked 6 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1983 chess and the students around him, suggested that the kids play chess...
...If the Marxist-Leninists win, kiss au revoir to grand prizes or to any other kind of economic elixir in the region...
...The complexities of race in America are such that only a genius would attempt to discuss it wisely, and he would need far more space available to him than a mere column...
...He gives sermons in which the words "grow" and "growth" occur two or three times a sentence...
...The kids at School 27 did indeed get flattened, hence their now forbidding nickname, Masters of Disaster...
...In front of the altar was a table with microphones and in the center sat the gaunt, intense figure of Bryan Hehir...
...But their wordy document was filled with an unedifying cloud of clerical evasions, omissions, and quarter truths...
...Hehir has been photographed whispering into the ear Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...It has never taken place anywhere on this diverse and occasionally amusing orb...
...We went to Monte Carlo...
...Evidently this was something more than a gathering of curious parishioners...
...I see Senator Dodd, even now, ensconced with his Third World advisers planning the Managua Grand Prix...
...Actually the prerequisite for prosperity in Central America is political stability...
...Here they all were, wedged into the pews, perhaps eagerly waiting for Hehir to tell them tonight that the arms race was sinful...
...This was to be his "first major public appearance" since the Bishops Conference in Chicago, as though he were some Hollywood star or Las Vegas performer...
...Hehir (pronounced "hair") is an intelligent, fast-talking cleric of leftist persuasion...
...Perhaps the left-wing Democrats now crippling our foreign policy in Central America could arrange grand prizes for Nicaragua and El Salvador...
...The element flickers and flares irregularly but, when it does, it flickers and flares without regard to race, color, creed, or national origin, as the phrase has it...
...Life became more dangerous...
...Had I spent any time in such remote parts...
...Russia...
...She puts the burden on teachers first, then students I believe she is right...
...Others say it is because chess is all they had to do...
...Nor for that matter are poor kids, nor Hoosier kids...
...Yet how does one put on such a wide-open affair as a grand prix in a place like Marxist-Leninist Nicaragua...
...How does one explain it...
...In the 1960s and early 1970s the economies of the region were expanding robustly...
...Elements that cannot be quantified get short shrift in social science, and persistence or willpower are such elements...
...Likewise, "it is too early to make a real judgment on liberation theology," he told a reporter in Washington...
...Hehir was the man to watch...
...Not at all, they were victims of persistence, that incalculable element in the human spirit that allows for marvels in the face of all by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...They are more interested in sin, for example, and their devil does not come in the guise of technology, as seems to be the case with our recently relevant bishops...
...Yet they were not so fragile...
...At the Bishops Conference, remember, the Catholic hierarchy fell into line with the media and the academy (not to mention Moscow) by saying we should "halt," not "curb," the production of nuclear weapons, and then seemed to think it was due credit for bravery because the Reagan Administration disagreed...
...Yet somehow the left-wing Democrats see all Marxist-Leninist regimes as abounding with potential friends...
...They are also the elements chiefly responsible for such achievements as were attained last month by the Masters of Disaster...
...Henry Hyde asked him whether he thought Christianity and Marxism were compatible, Hehir said that this was "a much disputed question...
...Poland...
...After all, is there any Marxist paradise on earth that is not an economic shambles...
...race there, and we went down to see firsthand how the guerrilla movement fares...
...Let the record show that in May 1983 St...
...The latter condition is always more dangerous to . the human spirit...
...So, Senator Dodd, I have rectified the situation...
Vol. 16 • July 1983 • No. 7
