Editorials/The Solitary Hart/Safe Sex in Moscow
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIALS SAFE SEX IN MOSCOW T he moral and intellectual disman- 1 tlement of America, always proctored so zealously by Americans of a progressive cast of mind, has now advanced sufficiently that...
...For years businessmen such as Armand Hammer have been accorded applause for fraternizing with the Soviets...
...Whcn it was reported that fifty of these were double dippers, drawing salaries from the United States Treasury and the mysterious KGB, former Ambassador Arthur Hartman, according to a Washington Post source, took the position that "I don't have any secrets here...
...The Secretary of State, oblivious to the humiliation visited upon his government by Soviet penetration of the inner reaches of our embassy, contemplated flying off to Moscow trailed by a mobile home for his private meetings...
...It's a terrible thing to do to a piano," Mr...
...So have politicians, private citizens, and intellectuals of the glassy-eyed variety such as Gore Vidal who recently returned from a seance with Mikhail Gorbachev, extolling his political virtuosity in terms Vidal could not even apply to Lincoln...
...Somewhere in The Unquiet Grave Cyril Connolly said of the British of the late 1930s what can be said of many Americans today: "We have developed sympathy at the expense of loyalty...
...While attempting to understand the Soviets our loyalty to America has diminished to the point that Marines join diplomats in panting after the agents of the Soviet state, oblivious to the indignity...
...If the accused Marines have their wits about them—and the Marine who hired William Kunstler has at least half a wit about him—they will argue thatthey were merely strengthening relations between the superpowers, relieving tensions, engaging in people to people diplomacy...
...Ever since the late 1970s the Sovietshave been eavesdropping brazenly on our diplomats and infiltrating our embassy staff, but enlightened opinion remained nonchalant...
...EDITORIALS SAFE SEX IN MOSCOW T he moral and intellectual disman- 1 tlement of America, always proctored so zealously by Americans of a progressive cast of mind, has now advanced sufficiently that the Marine guards at our Moscow embassy are making love not war...
...Enlightened American opinion is offended by the thought that the Soviet regime is our enemy or that in terms of virtue it is at one with the Nazi regime, though it is anti-Semitic, despotic, and aggressively opposed to democracy...
...Actually the Soviets are capable of far more terrible acts, but as Americans have continued their stupendous essay into self-dismantlement they have ignored the nature of the Soviet regime even as they have stripped away the moral content of their own regime, leaving them looking a little stupid...
...No insult, no matter how public, registers on the brains of Americans accustomed to working in their underwear...
...Until recently, two hundred of the embassy employees have been Soviet citizens, as though they were the citizens of just another democratic society...
...They will repeat the high-minded vaporings of all the upper class Americans who have paraded to Moscow for years assisting in the great work of creating moral and political symmetry between the Soviet tyranny and this woebegone democracy...
...Hartman innocently opined...
...I refer to early 1986 when "vandals" somehow secreted themselves in the Ambassador's official residence and brutalized its piano just before two hundred guests arrived to hear Vladimir Feltsman, a Soviet virtuoso and dissident, perform on it...
...Connolly was a small man speaking of small things, but the line can also be applied to large matters...
...Consider the snores that were heard when the Wall Street Journal reported last October that the American embassy then under construction was full of bugs, or when it was reported that so intense was Soviet microwave bombardment of our embassy that diplomats feared for their health...
...He also had but one string on the low E of his grand piano...
...Consider their braying following President Ronald Reagan's perfectly unobjectionable assertions that the totalitarian regime of the Soviet Union is evil...
...Possibly the alarm grows from rumors that the concomitant breach of security is the gravest since the melodious Walkers, but do not bar the notion that enlightened opinion's alarm grows from the thought that the Marines may not have engaged in safe sex, as the phrase has it...
...Now these ignorant American servicemen are being accused of fraternizing with the enemy—a charge unfamiliar to the ears of most Americans...
...Nothing could raise the moral hairs of enlightened American opinion until the KGB's ladies of joy disarmed our Marine guards...
...During our years of moral and intellectual dismantlement it has become outr4 torefer to any foreigner as an enemy other than an occasional Chilean or a South African bigot...
Vol. 20 • June 1987 • No. 6
