Washington Report: Not Remarkably Entertaining
Getlein, Frank
inconvenienced by childbirth or by the welfare mother who fears she cannot feed another childmis a tragedy. This did not happen. Rather, one of the most complicated moral issues of our time,...
...The just-announced Carter-Califano plan to subsidize the adoption of these children is excellent...
...The minority won...
...a family allowance for food, clothing and education...
...Soon he sinks to the final degradation of sounding like the unspeakable A1 Haig: Another cause of Communist ascendancy in Europe: "Intellectuals condemn society .'or materialism when it is prosperous and for injustice when it fails to ensure prosperity...
...It took place because Nixon was perceived to be the crook he was...
...The subject was the dread threat of "Eurocommunism," by which the Pop star means not just Western European Communist parties taking over the bankrupt governments of Italy, France and Spainmwhat a time for Franco to go to that great Inquisition in the Sky, just when we need him most to defend Freedom here below--but even such parties gaining cabinet seats in coalition governments and their mutually profitable alliances with other parties soft on social welfare, dubious about American arms imports as salvation...
...An ODiSS supporter, Konstanty Lubienski, argued for Catholic support of the amendments, while the Znak leader Stanislaw Stomma opposed them...
...It was not the "age" that "debunked" the "authority" of Nixon, but Nixon himself by his own handling of that authority...
...Who is this "age" that debunks "authority...
...WASHINGTON REPORT NOT REMABKABLY ENTERTAINING From those Hollywood anti-Franco parties during the Spanish Civil War all the way to Jane Fonda during the American War Against the Indochinese and Paul Newman on practically anything, conservatives and reactionaries in this country have grumpily denounced artists and entertainers who have political convictions and express them...
...The significance of the quote, however, is stylistic: here is a mind capable of invoking Yeats's twilight gloom (with an inexplicable tense change) in the penultimate clause and falling immediately into standard sociospeak jargon in the next...
...Can it be anything else...
...Hundreds of protestors lost their jobs and many of them were brought to trial for their participation in the strikes...
...If the age is relativistuwho are these relatives?-should not its organizing principle be so, too...
...For its part, the ODiSS group was able to set up rival laymen's organizations in Warsaw and Lublin and assume control of the KIK chapter in Poznan...
...Several struggles within the laymen's movement ensued...
...they admit that the state has some responsibility to protect the unborn...
...Rather, one of the most complicated moral issues of our time, built around the tension between private moral judgment and public good, was reduced to a fruitless election-year fight over an antiabortion amendment to the Constitution...
...Parliamentary elections were held soon afterward, and Stomma was prevented from running...
...Under normal circumstances, the internal problems of a Polish chemical firm would hardly attract attention...
...The juxtaposition tells us clearly what kind of entertalner the entertainer is: a male Barbra Streisand, commanding the top dollar for reasons never apparent in performance...
...The Germans, militarists themselves, have been able to contain our largesse of arms...
...In the final voting on the changes, Stomma's abstention was the only dissenting voice...
...At this point, the Carter-Califano policy to not subsidize abortion-on-demand and the Senate bill to restrict federal funds for abortion to cases when the mother's life is in danger, cases of rape or incest and other specific cases of medical necessity do several things...
...But, because the shareholders represent competing Catholic laymen's groups, the dispute is anything but internal...
...But you certainly won't if you don't try and instead waste your time on such probably low-gross gigs as the Woodie Wilson Cen...
...What he means is that the treasonous American press and Congress rejected their President, Kissinger's own Richard Nixon...
...Like most sociospeak, this example goes soft and drippy as soon as you pick it up...
...Party leader Edward Gierek suggested that the Constitution be amended to codify the leading role of the party, proclaim Poland's ties to the Soviet Union "unbreakable," and make a citizen's rights dependent on the fulfillment of his duties...
...The Italians, profoundly anti-militarist, have been ruined by it...
...ODiSS, however, has become increasingly closer to the party line on several recent political issues...
...We can't escape the fact that this policy may inflict immediate hardship on the poor...
...It kills the unborn children of the poor...
...This split first became evident during the constitutional controversy early last year...
...Because of the protests, the amendments were watered down, but there was still a dispute within Znak--the group of five Catholic deputies in the Polish parliament --about support for the new clauses...
...It's all nonsense, of course...
...and they put the brakes on the rush to abortion as if it were a morally indifferent alternative to birth control...
...for Kissinger there is no intellectual activity of more value than joining in the hallelujah chorus in praise of authority, preferably his own...
...Thank~ to our common knowledge of the entertainer's own background, we are able to understand his meaning...
...But that rejection did not take place because this is a relativist age...
...The general sentiment is classical Marxist doctrine, though the classical Marxists extend the concept of "opponents" to include absolute monarchies and military dictatorships as well as "the democratic system" and come to think of it Kissinger may well use a similar extension to include such forms as within the democratic system...
...Since the Church has given this moral issue so high a priority, until the government has assumed its full responsibility the Church should back up its preaching by shifting its own resources, limited as they may be, away from education and property and into grants for sex education, family planning and family support...
...Abortion doesn't cure poverty...
...The far deeper scandal is the disgusting inequitable distribution of wealth and public services in our society, where the poor are terrified to bring children into the world for fear that they cannot feed and clothe them, send them to school, watch them grow and prosper, marry happily, and have children and grandchildren of their own...
...The reason for Picasso's success and the total failure of a distinguished line of official brains from Dean Acheson's through and apparently beyond Henry Kissinger's is instructive: the official brains were concerned with what might be: if Soviet Communism swept through Europe, Spain would be a logical marshaling yard and jumping-off-point for the New World: hence, whatever peccadillos the Spanish dictator may have had on his record, he was obviously a friend of freedom, a bastion of the Free World, rally to him, give him arms, arms, arms, if he uses some of them to electrify the testicles of potential advocates of democracy, that's too bad 22 ]uly 1977:452 but a small price to pay for saving the whole Free World...
...Until recently, seven of the thirteen shares were controlled by the Warsaw Club of Catholic Intelligentsia (KIK), one of five such social and cultural centers around the country...
...LibeUa shares are important for the financial support they provide Warsaw's lay groups...
...Abortion can easily be a rich person's solution to a poor family's problem---one that spares the upper classes the burden of facing the social unrest generated by a multiplying poor, black populace...
...Hasn't he, in fact...
...It is 22 July 1977:454...
...Well, I drifted along in that conviction until only the other day, when television personality Henry Kissinger came out from in front of the camera to speak his mind on current international politics to an audience of businessmen and scholars at the Woodrow Wilson International Center...
...Personally, I have always ascribed the right-wing grumps to sheer jealousy over the fact that if you educate yourself to corner the market in soybeans or make a fortune on cost overruns in arms sales, you probably aren't very graceful on the dance floor nor as good-looking as Paul Newman...
...Part of his analysis is worth quoting for the prose alone: "In the end, the Communist parties find their opportunities less in their inherent strength than in the demoralization, division, or disorganization of their opponents...
...This may well be the case, but it is a situation open to serious question, not a condition given by a right-wing God to be upheld at whatever cost...
...Would not Brezhnev say the same thing about troublemakers in Eastern Europe...
...Like so many Pop celebs who mouth off on politics and the world situation, poor old Kissinger didn't know what the hell he was talking about, got some facts wrong, ignored others and in general sketched a picture of reality as he wished it were...
...Among the intellectuals who provided legal and financial support for the jailed workers and their families were a number of KIK members...
...Perhaps not...
...Picasso, on the other hand, being an artist, looked not at what might be but at what was and said bluntly that Franco was a monster...
...subsidized housing and more generous welfare payments for extended families where grandparents and aunts etc., live together and care for otherwise unwanted children...
...The entertainer also brought his giant brain to bear on the question of how come those hated Commies are getting so strong in Western Europe after all we've done for that difficult continent...
...Communism is indeed gaining strength in southern Europe and is doing so because of the weaknesses of the existing regimes...
...Although they represent a more liberal and intellectual Catholicism than that of the Polish episcopate, the KIK and Wiez groups essentially agree with the Church's critical stand vis-a-vis the Warsaw government...
...Although there were no formal bonds between the laymen's organizations and groups such as the Committee for the Defense of the Workers, the government suspected that Libella funds were being used by Warsaw laymen to support the jailed workers...
...When he finished, I found myself asking the question I had so long despised: What business has this public entertainer using his undoubted show biz charisma to lend specious weight to entirely specious arguments, to clouded understanding, to the general cause of arms racing, political assassinations, the grinding the faces of the poor...
...Besides, it seems incontestable that in one picture Picasso made a more penetrating analysis of Franco than about five generations of top State, Defense and White House officials ever quite managed or have managed yet...
...The implications of that criticism--which, incidentally, takes the speaker himself out of the class of condemned and condemning persons--are exactly those of Haig's famous expostulation against law enforcement officers trying to enforce the law: "Your commanderCommonweal: 453 in-chief has given you an order...
...Wiez, an ecumenical monthly magazine, was financed by the profits from its three shares, while the remaining three shares supported the Center for Documentation and Social Studies (ODiSS), a research organization which also publishes its own monthly...
...Get back on that high wire, Henry, I found myself yelling, and get those NBC plates in the air: Perhaps you can hype that poor third network's ratings...
...Here Kissinger achieves the analytic powers of a William Satire...
...They allow for the moral ambiguities in the issue--they acknowledge that there may be individual instances in which it is better to tolerate the evil that results than to require the childbirth...
...Get back on the high wire and get those plates in the air, the right-wing-flap, so to speak, has seemed to be saying, and leave politics to those of us who understand the value of a whiff of grapeshot...
...By shifting the Libella funds to the ODiSS group, the government evidently hopes to deepen the developing split within the Catholic intelligentsia...
...It's breaking the mirror because you don't like what you see in it...
...Intellectuals and churchmen immediately responded with letters of protest, arguing that the amendments would legalize Soviet influence over Poland and provide a legal basis for discrimination against believers...
...For Haig there was no law higher than the wishes of his master...
...The KIK Coordination Bureau, which acted as the liaison between the five KIK chapters across Poland, was closed by government order last June...
...Because of a political dispute last year, a minority of its shareholders went to court to wrest control of the company from the majority...
...a guaranteed job (Wasn't that in the Democratic platform...
...At the same time as these rivalries were unfolding, Polish workers struck in protest against the government's dramatic price-increase proposals...
...Those weaknesses come in part from American militaristic dabbling in European economies...
...That seems reasonable, but it also seems to say that the principal purpose of our policy toward Europe is to have a troop deployment on that continent...
...Kissinger said that the big danger of Eurocommunism is that "the moral and political basis for our present troop deployment in Europe" would be undermined if there were Communist governments in NATO...
...This made it even more difficult for the independent laymen's groups to keep contact with each other...
...Now there is an opportunity to work through the chaos toward a national family policy that would embody the values of both religious and secular humanism...
...But Justice Blackmun's claim that as a result of the majority decision "the cancer of poverty will continue to grow" misses the point...
...They can begin by lobbying for: an enormous public and private investment, accepting the taxes involved, in health care programs to take care of all childbirth expenses...
...Rather than badger candidates over an anti-abortion Constitutional amendment, which we still do not think adequately resolves the problem in a pluralistic society, Catholic leaders might think harder about positive alternatives...
...The Church has a chance to make a more sophisticated, constructive and more radical response to this new situation...
...The traditionalist Znak leaders around Stomma and the pro-episcopate weekly Tygodnik Powszechny argued that Lubienski and his supporters had no fight to present themselves as the real Znak circle, and demanded they change their name...
...Continuing his keen analysis, Kissinger gave other reasons for Communist growth: "A relativist age debunks authority and puts nothing in its place as an organizing principle of society...
...That single example came close to convincing me that what we needed was not to get those artists back up on the high wire, but down into State, Defense and the White House: it can't be all that dangerous to have someone in those establishments who sees what is actually happening rather than what might conceivably happen someday, somehow, somewhere, over the rainbow...
...It should not automatically oppose a candidate who wants to use state or city funds for abortions when his other social policies might make abortions less desirable...
...At its annual meeting in May, the Warsaw KIK removed all ODiSS representatives from its board of directors while keeping Wiez people in prominent positions...
...in short, he might as well have been in State, Defense or the White House for all the good his status as an entertainer did for his perception...
...they succeed only when the democratic system seems unable to solve the social problems of the day, when the center does not hold and societies become polarized...
...FgAIqK GETLEIN 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 IN POLAND IOBE GOVERNI IENT PRESSURE Libella is a small Warsaw company which produces floor waxes, cleaning fluids and cosmetics...
...It is, in fact, the latest in a series of government measures designed to split the laymen's movement and eventually undermine some of the Catholic influence still strong in Poland's communist society...
...Lubienski, with obvious government approval, succeeded him as Znak parliamentary leader...
Vol. 104 • July 1977 • No. 15
