Editorials/The Good Book/Why Will?
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
E D I T O R I A L S ........................................................................................................................................................................... THE...
...Would go out to get more drugs...
...Call me Brother Harvey...
...When he had a headache he said he thought of it as the Crown of Thorns...
...As no other commentator in the land, he had acquired The Hush: The Hush of respect from sophisticates, The Hush of respect for his learning and eloquence, The Hush over his moderation and humanity...
...The explanation for their absence I believe is the growing insularity of so many American intellectuals, particularly those of easy celebrity...
...I also briefly met a sister from Portsmouth, England, and another from Chicago...
...Cuba's dictator wills it...
...All is revealed in Valladares's recently published memoirs, Against All Hope' The beatings and humiliations that he suffered, the temporary paralysis, pellagra, scurvy, and emphysema, would have ended had he agreed to at-tend political indoctrination courses and to don the blue uniform that Cuba's Communists issue to common criminals...
...They are irked by the success and happiness of their fellow citizens, especially those who are right about large matters while these neos have been absorbed with the picayune...
...But everything is voluntary...
...For years American intellectuals have been enraptured by the criminal mind, but the reality of suffering victim escapes their prissy consciences...
...Excruciating cruelty is the theme and the gravamen of Valladares's book...
...And as for his celebrity, these days people from all walks of life are being raised to celebrity status owing to a synergism between communications technology that allows it and a national appetite that is aflame for it...
...Beamingly they acknowledge Castro but not his prisons and his firing squads...
...Once he said he would take all our sins, put them together like clay, and put it before Jesus on Cross...
...Now whether the author of Against All Hope was a twenty-three-year-old policeman—Cockburn, typically, offers no evidence—or bureaucrat, butcher or baker, is irrelevant...
...There is also periodic religious instruction...
...Sister Dolores, who is from India, ushered me into the small front parlor...
...Two volunteers were working in the kitchen in back...
...Taken to hospital one night very sick...
...Sister Dolores, the superior of the house, came out to greet us wearing the white, blue-trimmed sari of the Missionaries of Charity...
...They will now take out their peevishness on George Will and on any others whose misdemeanor it was to have been right when they were wrong...
...Will has read history, seen it being made, and commented intelligently on it...
...Had a long history of drugs...
...Expressed a desire to die in the house and was the second to do so...
...Posted nearby was a sheet of paper listing names and "departure" dates of the nine men who have died since the house was opened...
...Attached great importance to the rite...
...At first so demanding the sisters called him King David, which pleased him...
...David: Died in St...
...Until recently he was acclaimed a sage by liberals and conservatives alike...
...Died early the next morning...
...He never set out to be a reporter...
...streamers in yellow and white, celebrating the fact that one of the men was going to be baptized that after-noon...
...He has illuminated the astounding cruelty of totalitarian regimes that torture political opponents day in and day out from a bestial lust apparently unique to totalitarian dictators and the kind of degenerates who are known to us as "serial murderers...
...38 years old...
...They esteem Yasir Arafat but overlook his terrorists...
...When he came back he was baptized in the chapel...
...Lost in their infantile alarums over the sodomy laws of Georgia, the treatment of laboratory rats in medical research, discourtesies shown a Vonnegut novel in some Podunk settlement where no by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...More and more was coming to God...
...He was given white shirt and trousers to wear...
...That is the kind of sadism Valladares has chronicled...
...one would read Vonnegut anyway, the American intelligentsia are increasingly oblivious to the extraordinary cruelty perpetrated in the non-democratic world...
...But it would be better...
...Sister Dolores read the Gospel as he expired in great peace...
...WHY WILL...
...one who had perpetrated a kissand-tell piece about the Carter Ad-ministration even before his former boss had vacated the White House...
...All that he had done was inform fellow workers at Havana's Postal Savings Bank of his opposition to Castro's Marxism during the early days of the regime...
...And our intelligentsia's insularity grows not only because of their childish absorptions but also because of their curious squeamishness...
...Now living in Madrid, Valladares is becoming a renowned figure in the growing ranks of civilized minds op-posed to the abuse of human rights that characterizes the world's Communist regimes...
...and soon the 'Against All Hope The Prison Memoirs of Armando Valladares...
...After all, he once earned a Ph.D., he taught politics at three great universities, and he was an aide to a United States senator...
...Valladares writes: "Today, at this very moment, hundreds of political prisoners are naked, sleeping on the floors of cells...
...They have mass and say the rosary every day, and I gathered most of the patients do attend...
...Notably absent from this movement are the moral hams of America's community of concerned artistes...
...Teach me to pray," he said...
...Visited by Mother Teresa and Cardinal O'Connor, who asked David to pray for him...
...As with most puritans the neoliberals' fundamental flaw is a curiously abbreviated sense of honor...
...Perhaps he does...
...Came to house in March...
...They are denied medical care and visits...
...Harvey: The first to die in the house...
...Only in the America of the 1970s could such a thing grow so eminent...
...They are very unhappy people, and where they dwell they have created a mood of petulance and meanness...
...I know, because some of his tormentors have sought my collaboration...
...But practically all of them wish to die at home," she said, "because they know we will keep them company...
...In fact, Americans are almost wholly absent from the list of intellectuals whom Valladares credits for securing his release...
...They are narcissists and they believe that in the natural order of things George Will's money and fame should be theirs...
...She said that most of the men have died in one or another of the nearby hospitals, because the sisters don't havemuch in the way of sophisticated medical equipment...
...C A P I T O L I D E A S KING DAVID'S ROYAL FAMILY by Tom Bethell Ralph Dyer drove me to the four-story house just off Christopher Street, in Greenwich Village, where Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity run a home for AIDS patients...
...Started drugs age 14, prison record...
...Twenty-two years of the kind of sadistic abuse that Valladares suffered has made him very forthright in his contempt for Fidel Castro's regime, and perhaps this is why he is now depicted as "controversial" by such luminaries of the shanty intelligentsia as Alexander Cockburn, who in the Nation charges Valladares with having been a policeman before Fidel rescued Cuba from perdition...
...In the New York Review of Books, Village Voice, the "Doonesbury" comic strip, and other organs of the shanty intelligent-sia, Will is being rudely depreciated...
...Even the bourgeois Wall Street Journal sneers at his career...
...Will must understand that the mood in the mediahas changed because large numbers of the youthful idealists of the 1960s are coming to power there, in the publishing houses, and in the universities...
...Vincent's Hospital, aged 34...
...Adapted from RET's weekly Washing-ton Post column syndicated by King Features...
...In the hall was a picture of Mother Teresa above the caption: "Unless life is lived for others it is not worthwhile...
...Alfred A. Knopf, $18.95...
...To our right as we entered was the chapel, dominated by a large realistic crucifix on the wall, next to the words I THIRST...
...His face reminded everyone of Jesus on the Cross...
...He must realize that he is now the victim of a change of mood...
...They write deliciously of murders and sexual perversions, but avert their eyes from the innocent blood congealing on the floor of the Rome airport...
...When al-ready very weak was unexpectedly at mass one day...
...Yet possibly he does not...
...They have thrust the utopianism of their youth into the sentimental chambers of memory and turnedtheir minds to smaller things: thy neighbor's salary, thy neighbor's celebrity, his tax returns...
...They remained industriously about their business, and didn't linger much to chat...
...Incredible as it sounds, most_ of them have learned nothing through the years, beyond the troublesome truth that an ample salary is even more important than being mellow...
...But now he is being criticized from other quarters and for different transgressions, for in-stance, his stupendous salary, celebrity, dinner parties with the giants of society, wanton use of scholarly quotations, reluctance to pound the pavement for news stories, and failure to kill thousands of Communists during the late war in Vietnam...
...twenty-three-year-old poet was being stripped, battered, and forced through the agonies of Cuban prison camps that Vladimir Bukovsky believes actually go beyond those that he experienced during his dozen or more years in the Soviet Gulag...
...Most of those who rallied to his support are European or Latin American...
...He has long been the occasional target of conservatives, critical of his particular enunciation of the conservative canon...
...Valladares, however, knew that he had never committed a common crime...
...One day prayed Our Father in bed, said it was first time he had ever prayed...
...THE GOOD BOOK For all those Americans fashionably aggrieved by the Republic's shortcomings, I believe I have found someone who has suffered even more at the hands and feet of his government...
...Think of it, had Fidel not become Cuba's head of state he might have one day been arrested for having waylaid little boys and girls, tortured them to death, and left them in shallow graves...
...The last date was July 2, and beneath it there was ample empty space...
...The NYRB piece was muddled to the point of imbecility...
...Out-side was a sign, "Gift of God, Missionaries of Charity...
...Military service in Vietnam...
...Otherwise the house was silent...
...The hallway and stair-case were decorated with Easter-style Tom Bethel/ is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...To its babble Will could plausibly respond that illustrative quotations are useful...
...Most of the men said they wanted to die that way...
...Four or five nuns (or sisters as they are usually called) work in the house, devoting their lives to the patients...
...Fourteen men with AIDS were living there...
...As he must recognize, that respectful congeniality once accorded him in the media is evaporating...
...A high salary is as morally neutral as a low salary...
...Indeed, his place and persona on the national stage were incomparable...
...They never see the light of day...
...The day before he died he received the Sacraments and Father Greg gave him the Last Sacraments that afternoon...
...Presbyterian background...
...They have seen the nation turn its back on their New Dawns and other claptrap dreams, and it makes them very cross...
...Most of these shocking allegations were recently packed into a widely read essay in the New York Review of Books, written by a former Carter speechwriter...
...It's according to whether they say `I want,' " said Sister Dolores...
...The house is an archdiocesan building, formerly the rectory of St...
...Welcome Home My Sons...
...If you say so I'll go...
...Veronica's Church...
...Sister Dolores showed me where the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1986 13...
...Most of these middle-aged potentates do not call themselves radicals anymore...
...When asked if he wanted to go to heaven he said, "Yes, but I don't want to leave this house...
...Was visited by Cardinal O'Connor, also Mother Teresa...
...I am in close contact with God...
...Long history of drugs...
...The point is that Armando Valladares has done for Cuba what Solzhenitsyn did for the Soviet Union...
...I want to be baptized as a Catholic...
...His was a singular persona interlarded with elements of the austere prof, the ideologue, the homme 12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1986 de lettres, and the lovable paterfamilias...
...The suffering continues...
...We were admitted by a volunteer worker...
...In their art they can portray the utmost ghastliness, but the brutality of real life makes them squirm...
...One thing that Sister Dolores wanted to emphasize at the outset was that they don't try to convert anyone who doesn't specifically ask for it...
...He expired most peacefully...
...Here are abbreviated versions of written accounts of three men, all white, who died recently in the sisters' care: Dennis: Aged 42, at house for five months...
...Wore Rosary around his neck...
...Does he understand why...
...Heaven Is Our Time Home," it said above the list...
...Moods change even in the most placid of times, and now as a chorus of weisenheimers fall upon the illustrious person of George F. Will—author, columnist, and TV notable—he must recognize that a mood has changed...
...Taken to hospital and received First Communion a few days later...
...Frequently these morbid puritans call themselves neoliberals...
...From the beginning was grateful to be with the sisters...
...Neither Tom Hayden nor Jane Fonda, Kurt Vonnegut nor E. L. Doctorow is mentioned...
...Evidently theirs is an ecumenical view of salvation...
...His mother said later that David had taught her much and she wanted to be baptized as well...
...Yet these refutations are not going to end George Will's public trials...
...Now the mood has changed, and Will is under fire...
...His name is Armando Valladares, and for the twenty-two years prior to his release in 1982 he was repeatedly tortured and brutalized in Cuban prisons...
...It was opened on Christmas Eve, 1985...
...Most Americans are optimistic and brimming with benevolence, but not the neoliberals...
...She entered the novitiate in Calcutta in 1960, but beyond that she discouraged questions about herself...
Vol. 19 • September 1986 • No. 9
