Stepping Over: Personal Encounters With Young Extremists

...When you advertise in magazines, your message will get what magazines get...

...After World War II reforms in higher education opened the Everyone used t o watch network television because there wasn't much else to watch...

...Yet the authors are obviously competitors...

...Not at all...

...As far as they are concerned, Nazism and Fascism might as well have occurred on Mars or Saturn...

...The Fitzgerald translation, then, is inappropriate for careful study of the Aeneid (a task for which one really should learn Latin...

...Likewise, the teeny-bopper prostitutes of Santa Monica Boulevard simply present a more joyless version of the Playboy Philosophy...

...The entire theme of 1960s culture--"Do your own thing...

...Yet evidence of such complicity continues to mount in the face of grim official silence in the West concerning the affair...

...and finally, a leader of the "new" Ku Klux Klan...

...A t t h a t rate, their audience share will sink to 60% by 1990...

...It would be comforting to report that these people are as exotic as their appellations make them sound...

...But in so doing, they had freed themselves of a destructive affliction of fatal potentiality...

...teenage runaways who sell their bodies on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles...

...The author tries to sort these pheqomena out with the aid of clinical psychology, sometimes convincingly, sometimes not...

...Best o f all, magazines are read more by the people who watch cable more and network less...

...Sometimes this works very well...

...the self-indulgent radicals of the German Left...

...His travels took him, in sequence, to Indiana, Iran, Greece, California, Tulsa, Texas, Italy, back to California, Tennessee, and finally, to Washington, D.C...

...Mission in Rome...

...It was from this reserve army of unemployed inteUectuals that the urban guerrilla and armed political action groups (including, it must be said, the neo-fascist MSI) drew their recruits...

...Other Bulgarians--secret service defectors to the West--have joined in accusations of Bulgarian complicity in the matter...

...The phenomenon is worldwide, although apparently evident largely in Western countries, where a combination of abundance and freedom has produced precisely the opposite effects anticipated by social theorists a generation or two ago...

...the quintessential Bay Area radical, an embittered veteran of Vietnam...

...and of those who know Bulgaria well, none would have us believe its government capable of disobeying Soviet orders...

...the arrest of several Bulgarian nationals in Rome on charges of complicity, and the flight of another, has the case now sub judice in the hands of an Italian judge...

...After these somber excursions, it is almost a relief to happen upon Bill Church, a resentful redneck who is trying to revivify the Ku Klux Klan in Chattanooga...

...c) Agca, following his arranged escape from prison in Ankara, was trained, funded, and expedited across national frontiers and developed intimate ties with Bulgarian ajgents...

...It was only after he was discharged under less than honorable conditions from the Navy (for drug use and also trafficking) that--having been summarily rejected by his father--he assumed his present "radical" persona...

...In each of these places he found a different story--a young cousin "burned out" by drugs...

...universities of that country for the first time to children of the working class...

...B u t . . . she had been swept up into a cyclonic culture, and dropped back eight years later, crippled in ways that no one could have foreseen when her parents had taken her to the pediatrician for her polio vaccination...

...I n such an intricately concocted plot as that against the life of this Polish Pope, common sense leads one to begin by asking: cui bono...

...Who benefits...

...Fitzgerald does give us a sense of what Dryden meant when he said, in regard to one of his favorite lines "amongst a thousand others," that "For my part, I am lost in the admiration of it: I contemn the world when I think on it, and myself when I translate it...

...A recent study shows the networks' prime-time audience has dropped 17% in the last eight years...

...During the 1970s many Italian cities were overflowing with young adults still living at home, waiting for the employment that would give them not merely economic independence but would validate their new identity...

...The Europeans one meets in this book have other problems, although it is not easy to feel sorry for them...

...She wore no makeup or jewelry, did not cut her hair, and her somber dresses fell well below the knee...

...But they had, to a great degree, opted out of the contemporary mainstream...

...The truth is that we live in an unsettled age in which the most outrageous ideas are given a respectful hearing, and in ways that many of us probably do not realize, are becoming part of our larger frame of reference...

...The number of native Turkish Roman Catholics today probably could con36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1984...

...When people d o n ' t see the shows o n network, they don't see the advertising either...

...It is, however, probably the best choice available, both for first-time readers and for those who wish a fresh presentation of the poem...

...T h a t ' s why advertisers should pay more a t t e n t i o n to the medium people are paying more a t t e n t i o n t o . . . magazines...

...b) press reports to the contrary, he was neither a religiously inspired Muslim zealot nor a right-winger of any sort in his short career as a killer...

...Perhaps the most important contribution McConnell makes is to liberate our analysis of social disaffection at least partially from the quasiMarxist thralldom in which it has languished for the past half-century or so...

...Her published work on terrorism in Italy (not just "Italian terrorism") has gained her widespread recognition for meticulously tracing the links among such groups as the Baader-Meinhof gang, the Brigade Rosso, the IRA, and the PLO...

...fanatical Islamic fundamentalists living only to overthrow the Shah...

...maybe some of them even think they originated in the United States...

...Who was I to say that they had not chosen the better life...

...Both books have come off the press at about the same time, and each is the product of more than two years' intensive sleuthing...

...the truth, alas, is that most of them are easily recognizable, ordinary, even banal...

...The principal victims of the 1960s, it would appear, were not the Mrs...

...Sterling, at least, seems anxious not to acknowledge her indebtedness to Henze's previous research on the topic (indeed, his name appears nowhere in her book, not even in a footnote, an omission the more obvious to connoisseurs since Henze now figures as a" prominent malevolent figure in Soviet versions of The Case...

...Jackie stayed home, taking care of Billie (their daughter) and the neighbor kids...

...The very idea that the Soviet leadership in 1981 ordered the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II has been difficult for many to imagine, much less to believe...

...The two books thus complement each other...

...Their social life was concentrated on the weekly prayer services, their Bible study, and periodic revivals...

...Most of what we learn about her comes from her still grieving father, a somewhat unconventional Greek Orthodox clergyman who represents all the qualities liberal critics of the family insist upon--warmth, tolerance, "openness," flexibility, empathy, etc...

...In saying this I do not mean to trivialize it, for it is extraordinarily interesting and revealing, although in a very unsystematic way...

...The result is a rather discursive, uneven book, which shifts uneasily back and forth between pop-sociology and poppsychology...

...they lie scattered across the pages of this book--some maimed, some incapacitated, some dead...

...Grundys, but those who followed the Pied Piper...

...Even more troubling is the case of the late Maria Katsaris, who perished in the Peoples Temple holocaust...

...Stepping Over is supposed to be a book about exceptions--people who have crossed the boundary between the ordinary and the pathological or the downright bizarre...

...T h i s book is about a quiet crisis in our civilization--the disaffection and dislocation of many of its young people...

...officialdom both in the CIA and in the U.S...

...Both are richly documented...

...For years Sterling has been based in Rome...

...But at times there is no direct relationship between family background and later marginality...

...Even now Steve Katsaris--a thoroughly appealing human being in McConnell's description--cannot account for his daughter's fate...

...Oddly enough, the most unusual and surely the most repugnant personalities to make an appearance--the Islamic radicals McConnell met in Iran--seem the most rational in terms of time and place: Unlike their Western counterparts, they, at least, have a clear idea of what they want, and by all accounts, are willing to pay for it...

...This is particularly true of the Americans, who after all function in a society so jaded by sensation that by now nothing is capable of shocking it...

...For example, Duane, the Vietnam veteran, uses coarser language than does George McGovern or Gary Hart, but his "analysis" of our foreign policy traces roughly the same lines as theirs...

...Sterling also has the investigative journalist's penchant for heroic systembucking, exposing bureaucratic stonewailers and sandbaggers who, she says, sought to block her access to necessary information (part of her book is devoted to flashing out at a most uncooperative, U.S...

...In Germany and Italy, the two countries represented, the economic recovery of the postwar period was so rapid (and in the case of Germany, so complete) that children who grew to adulthood in the 1960s and the 1970s can have no sense of continuity with their nations' past, and therefore suffer from a serious lack o f historical perspective...

...Henze's own professional and scholarly interests have focused largely on Turkish and Muslim politics...

...The method of exposition of each work is idiosyncratic: Sterling's is that of a bold investigative reporter, Henze's more that of a seasoned intelligence analyst...

...Such sloppiness belies the meticulously conceived structure of the poem...

...They had money in the hank and were saving each month to make a down payment on a house...

...Henze in failed assassin Mehmet Ali Agca's native land...

...Italian Maoists who have moved along the peripheries of urban guerrilla warfare...

...McConnell congratulates those young people who were not totally sucked in and destroyed, but he overlooks the degree to which these poisons are still in our system, and the length of time it will take us to work them out...

...They now live in Tulsa, where the husband is a machinist who hasn't missed a day of work in two years: His future with the company was promising...

...The Italians provide an additional twist to the story...

...Various hypotheses can be ruled out...

...In all matters of importance, she deferred to her husband's decision...

...At least he seems to be in it for nothing more than status and a quick buck--would that all extremist behavior could be so easily explained...

...This obviously distorts their view of the present: The young recruits to Italian terrorism were ' anxious to see their country in the worst possible light...

...a follower of Jim Jones who perished with hundreds of others by drinking cyanide in backwoods Guyana...

...Instead of holding up that allpurpose abstraction "society" to blame, McConnell focuses his analysis at the micro-level of personal relationships...

...As its chieftain Todor Zhivkov once proudly remarked, Bulgaria keeps its "political watch-dial to the second with the watch of the Soviet Union...

...To McConnell, who describes himself as a "reconstructed Kennedy liberal," this provided a rather discomfiting picture: They had, indeed, surrendered their patrimony of intellectual curiosity for a closed, fundamentalist belief system...

...rested on a simple premise: that constraints were fundamentally harmful to one's own well-being, and if, in the process of self-realization, society's interests were not met, well, that was society's problem...

...Her parents had seen that she was immunized against not only polio, but also against other threatening childhood ill34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1984 nesses...

...For example, the Vietnam veteran turns out to be a young man perpetually in searcla of parental approval...

...Likewise, most of the teenage prostitutes McConnell interviewed in Los Angeles were latchkey children from broken homes, starved for affection and attention from older people...

...Nevertheless, the two authors converge in their final judgment that (a) the Turk Agca was not a loner...

...Thousands of young men and women were prepared for jobs the likes of which their parents could never have dreamed, but the jobs themselves did not always materialize...

...Or the matricidal Ronnie Love, who grew up in a family situation that could only be regarded as ideal--strong peer support on all sides and an abundance of role models...

...Of particular interest, perhaps in some ways the centerpiece of the American sections of the book, is the case of a young couple who have overcome drug addiction through involvement in Pentecostal Christianity...

...The author of Stepping Over, a former Foreign Service officer and Peace Corps director in Mauritania, has circled the globe in search of exemplars...

...They did not want to consider Italy in terms of the progress that it had made since World War II, but rather through a Utopian lens that measured how much social and economic improvement remained to be accomplished...

...The other point about this book worth noting is that the decline of traditional institutions of social controlmfamily, church, school--has been profoundly damaging not merely for societies but for individuals-perhaps, indeed, particularly for individuals...

...Agca himself had no prior personal reason--as a "loner"--to "get" the Pope, nor, for that matter, did the zealots of the Turkish Right...

...This has not been the work of zealous investigative journalism alone...

...Take McConnell's cousin Karen, permanently invalided out of the drug wars of the 1960s: She had a healthy, untroubled childhood...

...We have now before us two American books which, taken in tandem, present the case for Soviet guilt in the plot: Paul B. Henze's The Plot to Kill the Pope, and Claire Sterling's The Time of the Assassins...

...McConnell originally set for himself the task of finding some common threads to iink his people beyond their ideological or national differences...

...But what one notes about McConnell's people is how in many ways they are merely grotesque archetypes from which more "mainstream" figures f'md their views, however watered down...

...Sterling Paul Seabury is professor of pofitical science at the University of California, Berkeley...

...The Roman Church, even in Byzantium, played no role in Turkish politics...

...Good reception...

...Before their conversion, such optimism, hard work, and stability would have been impossible...

...d) Agca's connections as a young professional killer while in Turkey were with extremists of right and left alike, and (e) it was precisely his publicized rightist connections which made him an ideal Soviet choice to accomplish his final task in Rome...

...Magazine circulation is at an all time high, up nearly 10% in the past two years...

...is at home in the Italian scene...

...in the non-Western world, the clash of traditional values with modernity, itself often a "foreign" import...

...90% o f all adults read magazines, averaging eight a month and about three readings per copy...

...Now there are cable channels, video games and home computers to distract network viewers...

...In the United States it is drugs...

...in Western Europe, identity...

...Each approaches the mystery from a special point of departure...

...In this he did not wholly succeed, but certain themes do habitually recur...

...But the picture has changed...

...He is not merely mystified by the manner of her death, but the fact that for months before she would have no contact with her family, in spite of repeated efforts and a visit to Guyana by her brother...

...a young man who murdered his mother while under the influence of drugs...