Humanitarians amok
Getlein, Frank
two brothers and a sister and nieces and nephews, as well as his Catholic Worker family. Among the present editors were Frank Donovan, Rita Corbin, Peggy Scherer, Dan Mauk, Kathleen Clarkson,...
...They like their friends more than they like ill-paid people they don't know who may have to sacrifice their lives in the cause of humanitarianism for the rich...
...We were learning that elsewhere in the paper...
...After ihe closing of the funeral home, a stream of people walked back to Maryhouse to find the concert still in progress...
...Contrariwise, there is no doubt at all that the Shah is everything the Ayatollah says he is: long time and wicked oppressor of the people, big-time looter of his country's wealth, supported in his oppression and his looting by the United States, most notably by Kissinger and Nixon and, in the private sector, by David Rockefeller and your friends at Chase Manhattan...
...While most of the Catholic Worker family went to the nearby funeral home, a few stayed behind to hear Chopin and Beethoven...
...The driver, a Central Casting New York hackle, removes his cigar, rolls up his shaggy dog eyes, and growls, "Whatsamatter, doc...
...Humanitarianism for the immensely rich and recently powerful, anti-humanitarianism for clerks, typists, diplomats, and Marine corporals...
...As President Carter counted his options, he missed the most attractive: an offer to trade Rockefeller and Kissinger for the hostages and thus test the unflaggingness of their love for the Shah...
...Odd, when you think of it, the disappearance of all those medi-planes between Shangri-La and JFK...
...This mass vanishing could well provide the plot for "Airport '80...
...R was just one of those things...
...How about Grand Central...
...Well, it's one way to look at the world and I guess we all do so one way or another and to some extent...
...The choosing of a president has become our national spectator sport...
...Naturally, this is cleared with the Soviets first...
...The humanitarian argument is based on two interesting assumptions...
...Take us to Kennedy Airport...
...EILEEN EGAN (Eileen Egan, an associate editor of the Catholic Worker and UN representative of Pax Christi, is currently writing a history of Catholic Relief Services...
...Peggy Scherer led the procession carrying an immense Easter candle...
...We open above the credits...
...For the dwindling band of journalists who still believe that Old Nick Machiavelli probably had a better grasp of statecraft than Henry Kissinger-- with the single exception of the ancillary art of bamboozling the press--it is easy to see what the Florentine would have advised his Prince: "We continue efforts to save the hostages...
...Some participants in these feasts of pure reason doubtless make the journey by more exotic means, but your average, Sir Luke Fildes, plain American millionaire sawbones, gets there by air...
...No planes, no airport...
...Meanwhile, on the day that Corporal Crowley laid down his life for his friends our friends at Chase Manhattan ran a double-truck, two full pages, ad in the New York Times to present a new scheme to eliminate the "float" we all lived on when young...
...Two great surgeons, specialists in incredibly expensive operations for incredibly rich ex-dictators, rush out the doors of their New York hospital en route to save the Shah in Mexico...
...The next morning, the simple gray coffin was carried in procession by Stanley's two families to Nativity Church...
...It didn't have to be...
...in articles, in photographs and slides, and in the extended history still to be published...
...It seems that we have been on the way forever...
...Anyway that, s what the two of them have .accomplished as of this writing and I hate to think of what they will have run up as of this reading...
...The Mass ended with the singing of "Salve Regina," loud and clear as Stanley liked it, "Mother of mercy, Our Queen, we greet you...
...FRANK GETLEIN I Of several minds: Abigail McCarthy CONTINENTAL LOVERS THE GOVERNORS OF CALIFORNIA S OON AFTER you read this it will be at long last election year...
...It was just there and everybody who counted heard it and jumped...
...And after our life of exile, show us the blessed fruit of your womb, Jesus...
...The Chase Convenience Package," proclaimed the head and a parenthetical deck, "(Here's what's in it for you...
...Among the present editors were Frank Donovan, Rita Corbin, Peggy Scherer, Dan Mauk, Kathleen Clarkson, Robert Ellsberg and Katherine Temple and among past editors Robert Ludlow, Tom Sullivan, Gerry Griffin, Tom Cornell, Kieran Dugan, Patrick Jordan and former Chicago Catholic Worker editor James O'Gara...
...Whether from true hubris or simple fatuousness, the Rockefeller-KissingerVance-Carter act of humanitarianism wasn't even done huggermugger, as it could easily have been: he goes into medical seclusion in Mexico, arrives at Newark at 3 a.m., is driven to the uniquely equipped and staffed New York hospital in a Chevrolet, registered falsely as a rich rug merchant, swathed in facial bandages, the heavy armed guard is maintained at his Mexican hideaway to chase reporters, and everything is 9 tickety-boo...
...But, no, the humanitarians were themselves so infatuated with their royal visitor, they couldn't quite imagine the Iranians not sharing their admiration and affection...
...Without question, one of the fundamental principles of international relations, not to mention international law,-was violated when the Iranian government, insofar as there can be said to be one, not only did nothing to relieve the occupied embassy but gave its blessing,9 literally, to the occupying force, making it, in effect, a government agent...
...Don't need it...
...They can hardly object in View of our complaisance toward their periodic invasions of their assorted colonies in Eastern Europe...
...He would often join Dorothy Day at Maryhouse to listen to broadcasts of concerts and operas...
...The experts were ignored, just as other experts were ignored in re China one time...
...If the military replies that this is manifestly impossible, we renegotiate our whole policy of drunken spending on military equipment and personnel useless when you want them...
...The death of Corporal Crowley while covering the retreat of the American staff in the Islamabad embassy was not the direct result of the RockefellerKissinger initiative, but the links are quite legible if you look...
...Second, there are no airplanes in or near New York that could be used to fly New York doctors anyplace else...
...Stanley has left a unique record of the Catholic Worker...
...Tamar Hennessy, Dorothy Day's daughter, always close to Stanley, came with two of her daughters...
...There is no doubt in my mind that the Ayatollah is also correct in saying many of the embassy people are spies...
...Because it is a spectator sport, it seems to invite less and less participation and, therefore, fewer and fewer people vote--but that is another story...
...Close up and jump cuts from doc one to doc two: consternation, bafflement, frustration, pecuniary trembling...
...Machiavelli, of course, worked from reason and psychology uncluttered by the humanitarianism that led Kissinger to the Christmas bombings, the incursion into Cambodia, and many, many similar human rights initiatives...
...But he has left another record, the record of a unique life...
...What we see in the press and on television day by day is a sort of racing form appropriate to the process, a result of the relentless daily scrutiny of the ephemera of the political process...
...The basic reason for the ensuing stand-off was that both sides were completely correct in the denunciations each issued of the other...
...In a flacked-up statement issued on his behalf, David Rockefeller reiterated the argument he presumably, or at least for the record, used with the secretary of state and the president of the United States, namely that he was motivated solely by "humanitarian" reasons in demanding that the Georgia Peach and the once and future.corporation lawyer admit David's and Henry's great and good friend, the well-known tyrant, torturer and bon vivant, Shah Mohammed Riza Pahlevi, late of the Peacock Throne and now allegedly suffering from some exotic form of alleged cancer for which convention ever held in Honolulu, Pago-Pago, Athens, Paris, London, Samarkand, and other famed centers of American medical knowledge...
...And we clear it with the Saudis, who presumably would be much relieved to be relieved of a neighbor upstaging them as holier than anybody...
...There ain't no Kennedy airport no more...
...Aincha heard...
...All," however, seems a little overstated...
...The regular Friday evening meeting at Maryhouse that Friday, November 16, was planned as an unusual break in the series of lectures and discussions...
...Once we get them back or once the Iranians kill them, we withdraw all Americans from the country, go in big with all force available, hunt down and slaughter everyone connected with the occupation and extortion, hang the Ayatollah and the Shah together in the centi'al square--a two-for-one withguaranteed total coverage--occupy tile country, set up a friendly, a ve(y friendly, government and renegotiate the price of oil...
...So long, OPEC...
...To return to the real world, you can believe the humanitarian argument if you want to, but deep in my heart what I believe is that the deciding arguments 21 December 1979:711went something like this: Don't screw around with Chase Manhattan, Jack...
...I Of several minds: Frank Getlein They slipped into the auditorium and sat quietly until the playing stopped...
...What they said was, if you let the Shah in, the embassy will be occupied, the staff held hostage and possibly some of them killetl...
...Candidates are rated according Commonweal: 712...
...They could have saved their money...
...When, as predicted by the professionals, the Shi'ites hit the fan, the humanitarians were astounded...
...O gracious, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary...
...They brought him in like Joe Duveen coming up the harbor on the Berengaria...
...It was a piano concert by Douglas Finch and was not called off...
...Among the ones who heard it and didn't jump were the ones who didn't count, namely the entire staff of Iranian experts at the State Department...
...Music up, titles roll...
...In all of these, he carried the message of the Gospel, of peacemaking, of voluntary poverty, of hospitality and service to the homeless who are "other Christs...
...They hail a cab...
...The trust is that there are no doctors anywhere in the world except New York...
...The Shah was admitted, the embassy was occupied and the staff held hostage...
...Rockefeller and Kissinger obviously practice selective humanitarianism...
...That's one of the points about embassies...
...For those Who come after him...
...It doesn't really matter whether that succinct statement of reality and normal prudence among once and future corporation lawyers was actually spoken or not...
...HUMANITARIANS AMOK KISSINGER, ROCKEFELLER, & THE SHAH no known treatment allegedly exists outside New York City...
...The second assumption contradicts the experience of every American medical DON'T SUPPOSE David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger set out to get that Marine corporal killed in Pakistan or the embassy folk terrorized in Teheran...
...Stanley loved music and found joy in it while recovering from a severe heart attack seven years before his death...
Vol. 106 • December 1979 • No. 23
