The Nation's Pulse/The Phil and Vlad Show
Stempf, Tory
sure the administration is in a position to dictate to us what to do," anti-apartheid activist George Bourozikas told Insight magazine. "It's not their decision. It's ours." The day after the raid...
...THE NATION'S PULSE...
...Politics] is something fundamental through which each person asserts what he is and what he wants to become...
...Then one remembered how Isaiah Berlin describes the product of modern totalitarianism: "individuals who never know or have forgotten what douceur de vivre, free self-expression, the in-finite variety of persons and of the relationships between them, and the rightof free choice, difficult to endure but more intolerable to surrender, can ever have been like...
...Not so fast, Paul...
...The rhythm—the drummers and the bass—was not so crazy, but my brother-in-law (cornet) and a moonlighting high school band leader (trombone and baritone) were quite good...
...But this is not to say that nothing was revealed...
...it's certain that they didn't meet whom they expected—not, that is, someone like themselves, "just another human being...
...To begin with, the Soviet audience was struck by what Donahue called our "preoccupation with restrictions on the Soviet citizens...
...The lack of Soviet "candor," Donahue was to reflect later, was his only disappointment in the summit venture...
...Iftfji b 11101Of THE SHOWBOAT LOUNGE by Richard Brookhiser Once upon a time, when Cincinnatians wanted to frisk, they would slip across the Ohio River to Kentucky for low-rent sin...
...Excluded from the audience by O'Reilly in order to maintain "balance" and eliminate "propaganda," they were (to put it mildly) concerned that the audience wouldn't ask the "tough" questions...
...If you don't stop it immediately, it just keeps growing...
...Leo Rosten observed years ago that so far as he could see student radicals were really looking for adults—adults to confront, to oppose, and to emulate...
...The front room is a restaurant, with Volunteer Police Department Chili Cook-Off trophies in the windows...
...DCD activist Eric Ness was always certain that the shanties were illegal, even when the president and the dean were not so sure "It was a protest," he says simply, and a protest needs rules to break...
...From Leningrad there came only puzzlement, a profound, uncomfortable silence...
...They did pop songs of the three-decade chunk from Benny Goodman to just before the Beatles...
...All of them, in their five minutes on stage, were treated like stars—introduced by the trombonist, given a little fan-fare as they came up, and a cheer when they finished: house attractions, every bit as much as Bobby Short at the Carlyle...
...The only rule of the house seemed to be, two songs to a customer...
...But the fact remains that throughout the three-month controversy the ad-ministration was distinguished by its weakness, and this made neither right nor left happy...
...With little prompting from Posner the Lenin-graders counterattacked with their own familiar hit list of capitalist sins, producing a staccato, in-your-face sort of exchange that was mostly boring, never edifying, and ultimately, for both audiences, terribly frustrating...
...It means that anyone can go in and occupy Parkhurst and get away with it...
...The Alliance wanted to score points off Shanahan and McLaughlin for the rest of its agenda—an annual Martin Luther King Day teach-in, increasing recruitment of Hispanics, the handicapped, "and other traditionally oppressed groups other than blacks and Native Americans," and "adjudicable" Principles of Community—whatever that means...
...But the most poignant moment came when a Seattleite asked what the Russian counterpart to the American Dream was...
...The American complaint of "disappointment" is more problematic...
...Lucille O'Neill herself—massive, energetic, 69 years old—banged out standards on a quaking upright, and called out the titles in a gravelly voice...
...One was excellent: a suave, sweet voice, and a powerful stage presence, pro-jected from an improbable prison of flesh...
...The Showboat sits half a block from a railroad track...
...The local passion for chili is so all-consuming that a Cincinnati politician successfully defended himself against a charge of soliciting for prostitution by arguing that, when he had asked the undercover policewomen for a "three-way," he was simply proposing a friendly bowl of chili...
...And where does that leave civil disobedience...
...They were stumped by an idea like petitioning for change and scoffed at the pickets they were shown marching in front of KING TV...
...Today the shanties are gone, removed when McLaughlin and Shanahan dispatched a fork-lift, pneumatic drills, and police to the green in a belated authoritarian spasm...
...Would talking about fishing or bossy employers or alcoholism have helped erase this stereotype...
...At Dartmouth College, it seems, the problem is that there are no adults to be found...
...The day after the raid the DCD joined with the Afro-American Society, gay and lesbian groups, and other student organizations to form the "Dartmouth Alliance against Racism and Oppression" and staged another illegal sit-in at Parkhurst Hall...
...Indeed, the only Soviet gesture in this direction was some mention or other of a polluted lake...
...Friendship delegations" blessed by the city's ecumenical Church Council traipse back and forth regularly between here and our "sister city" Managua, and the city council recently proclaimed Seattle an official "sanctuary city" for Central American refugees...
...A damnable offer, which has meant in practice that no one can be famous for more than fifteen seconds...
...So it was quite a shock when the Seattle delegation came out swinging,demanding explanations for Soviet policy on Jewish emigration, Afghanistan, SS-20s in Europe, Sakharov, human rights...
...There is a small dance floor (brush up on your Lindy), and a larger and more interesting menu than you might expect...
...For her part, Debbie Stone says her group acted only because the ad-ministration was "paralyzed with fear...
...They were also pretty fancily dressed for a neighborhood night spot: the gentle-men in jackets, many with ties, the ladies in sweaters and pantsuits of unnatural fibers, designed for the "fuller-figured" woman: going-out clothes...
...Still, most of the patrons of the Showboat were pretty long in the tooth...
...I thought everyone in the place was Lucille's age, until my wife pointed out they were simply all overweight...
...We had to take over because the job that had to be done was not being done...
...The first time, I thought the singer—a bowed, white-haired man—was being given a special dispensation, perhaps to celebrate his birthday (most likely, his seventy-fifth...
...We Russians, one said, have no "need" to dissent, because everyone is in agreement with Soviet policy...
...well, modern...
...Everything pointed to a whitewash in the making...
...The problem, it seems, was politics...
...Tory Stempf is a writer living in Seattle...
...Applause in both camps...
...THE PHIL AND VLAD SHOW by Tory Stempf Seattle"The Phil Donahue Show" gave a new twist to international relations here on December 29...
...Yes, one earnest young Seattleite conceded, both super-powers do perpetrate atrocities upon an innocent world, and he "opposes" both...
...We'll soon have fewer Americans asking why the cold war is still around...
...Why was Seattle chosen for this goodwill mission...
...For example, there was the matter of that instinctive Russian patriotism that made our yen for self-flagellation look so...
...A few Seattleites began to catch on...
...Even the gabby Posner was for once quiet...
...Bellevue, Kentucky (just up the hill from Newport) is not the sort of place I typically go...
...Populism, progressivism, and internationalism run strong here...
...I dare say, it's not where you typically go either...
...We demanded amnesty," one student leader said...
...Perhaps because the place displays a certain savvy for what's called a "person to person" approach to foreign affairs...
...Since then, Central American "scholars" in the employ of the revolutionary left have been invited into private and public schools to give history lessons to our children...
...A few years ago, the critic Paul Fussell wrote a delicious, bitchy book describing American class traits, such as fat, with the precision of Audubon painting birds...
...I had gone to the Showboat because my brother-in-law was playing a gig there with Lucille O'Neill and Her Crazy Rhythm...
...and surely bewildered, maybe appalled, by American eagerness to ex-coriate our own country's behavior, usually in the guise of neutrality and evenhandedness...
...Our beef," says Joe Leake, chairman of the Dartmouth Afro-American Society, "is with the administration...
...The Russian end was handled by Soviet commentator Vladimir Posner, the dapper Americanist with the Brooklynese ac-cent who frequently appears in this country on television news shows like "Nightline...
...Herein lies the reason why the Seattle audience overcame their own blowzy sentimentalities, not to mention the producers', and injected hardball politics in spite of themselves into this people's summit: They could do no less, given that the whole idea was to "put human faces behind the super-powers...
...Granted, few personal views were ex-changed about abortion, careers, child-rearing, or marriage...
...The sin in towns like Newport is gone now, but the rent is still low...
...Of course, other unsettling aspects of "Soviet man" emerged as well: dogmatic, a bit paranoid, imbued with a sense of the wartime past that armors him against outside criticism...
...I don't know if the right of performance extends to visitors...
...If this can be the lesson gleaned from "A Citizens' Summit," then let's hope Phil Donahue and Vlad Posner put on more of them...
...Sturges Dorrance, who wanted to "put human faces behind the superpowers" and "stick to human issues," didn't help...
...The bar is in the middle, the lounge is in the back...
...Did the administration press charges against the protesters this time...
...Sure...
...young weight is a characteristic of the lower middle class...
...What is really needed in dealing with campus disobedience is a firm hand...
...Iivo years ago, for instance, the electorate passed Initiative 28, which pledged the city to lobby against American military aid to Central America and amounted to an endorsement of the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua...
...For at every third or fourth number, one of the audience would get up and perform...
...Bring your keys, just in case...
...badly misinformed (though he accused the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1986 29 Americans of that continually...
...Instead they met Otherness, in the form of Homo sovieticus...
...The discipline committee ruling that left his group guilty but blameless, Ness says, "set a dangerous precedent...
...Keith Mano has suggested that the only chance people have nowadays of breaking out of their media-battered passivity is The Rocky Horror Picture Show...
...Two-hundred Seattleites led by Donahue engaged via satellite for over two hours in a "Citizens' Summit" with 200 Soviets from Leningrad ("ordinary citizens," we were assured by Marilyn O'Reilly, the Donahue consultant who hand-picked both audiences...
...It was directed too much toward political issues that we can't solve," complained a Boeing mechanic...
...But he was followed over the course of the evening—and the evening went till 1:30 in the morning—by eight or ten other patrons...
...The Americans then could have gone home satisfied that Russians are human beings too"brothers under the skin...
...And anyway, a woman retorted, "your government listens but doesn't hear...
...The Alliance did not picket the offices of the Dartmouth Review and made only brief mention of the paper in its manifesto...
...Another participant said, "I think the time would have been better spent getting to know what the Russian people are really like and having them get to know what we're really like, too...
...Andy Warhol promised we would all be famous for fifteen seconds in the media age...
...In-side, they've never heard of the Surgeon Richard Brookhiser, managing editor of National Review, is the author of The Outside Story (Doubleday...
...In sum we are, as a local reporter crowed with typical imprecision, "the only local jurisdiction in the U.S...
...Every hour or so, the atmosphere got so thick, I had to take a coatless turn up and down the sleeping, wintry hill, just to stay awake...
...The administration proved so malleable that they, not the sledgehammer squad, became the focus of the controversy...
...And only politics, Raymond Aron pointed out, can reveal this difference to us, because it "concerns not only our society butourselves...
...They now seem more stereotyped than ever," a nurse said, "because they all said the same thing...
...But they wouldn't have learned what they need to know most: the vast difference between the Soviet vision of the nature of man and his place in the cosmos, and ours...
...Which is a good thing...
...It's like Soviet expansionism," she says of the protest on the Dartmouth Green...
...THE GREAT AMERICAN SALOON SERIES...
...Thus Posner, when he sensed his own people flagging, could defend the insufferable Soviet emigration policy toward . Jews (if there really is such a thing) by telling them (he certainly wasn't telling us) what he knows isn't true—that Washington's policy is the same for American citizens who want to emigrate to an "enemy" country...
...I soon saw—and heard—why...
...A Party apparatchik must also have been relieved to find that so many Americans despise politics for being a barrier to "mutual understanding...
...El 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1986...
...General...
...And that put everybody on the defensive...
...Statements from KING general manager and v.p...
...Fat had aged them in my eyes...
...The cigarette haze glowed with the light of neon beer signs on the walls, including fly-over brands like Genessee, and, in honor of the season, a pair of four-foot tall holiday lawn ornaments—a red and white candle, a snowman—flanking the piano...
...And the fact is, the moral , values politics embodies are what we're all about, what gives us our human faces...
...I recently fanned out for some music and a drink, and found the Showboat Lounge...
...On the European front, the citizenry sends "peace choirs" and plans for a "peace park" to the Soviet Union...
...Everyone else was perfectly pleasant, carrying his tunes competently, and clearly delivering his words...
...Everyone had wanted "more one-to-one human interaction...
...with its own foreign policy...
...This one lasted thirty hours...
...We shouldn't be punished, we should be paid...
...If the Seattle summiteers failed to meet a "real" Russian, then surely reality was at fault...
...Not a chance...
...if there is a class system, we're all in it together...
...But he had never been to Bellevue, Kentucky...
...One woman was totally out of tune and pretty awful ("Bring your keys next time, honey," Lucille admonished her...
...Given these predilections, it was no surprise that some local human rights groups like the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, the World Without War Council, and the Polish Home Association picketed KING TV's studio and passed out "fact sheets" to arriving summiteers...
...That men are in a certain sense a creation of their political (as distinct from economic) systems was revealed anew when the Soviets simply could not understand our insistence on the importance of the right to dissent, to quarrel with our government and among ourselves...
...He gave his game away, though, in the last chapter, when he posited a classless class, consisting of artists, writers, critics, academics—in short, Fussell himself and the slyly flattered reader...
...Indeed, the local New York Times stringer reported recently that Cincinnati yuppies were fanning out thereabouts in search of cheap old houses...
Vol. 19 • April 1986 • No. 4
