'Of all the gin joints'

...While we watched everything seemed once again as clear and clean as it had seemed for most of us during what we thought of as "the good war...

...It takes leaders like De Gaulle—like Walesa, Havel, and Yeltsin—to know the uses of courage...

...They were for the most part antiwar students, disillusioned by our venture in Vietnam...

...She was a smiling and beautiful woman, deputy mayor of Villa el Salvador, a town of shanties and hovels south of Lima...

...Their contemporaries had joined in the sit-ins, had been "freedom riders...

...So, perhaps, they scoffed a bit at Bogart as Rick and what film critic Stanley Kauffmann has called his taciturn nobility...

...What we need is a leader who can evoke the image of our country not as she is—divided and riven with disunion, with little hope for the future—but as she should be and as we once thought she was: a land of opportunity and equality...

...and, of course, the unabashedly bathetic Bogart line, "Of all the gin joints in all the world, why did she have to walk into mine...

...We know of Lei Yuille, Terri Barnett, and Titus Murphy three people of color—who braved the mob to save white truck driver Reginald Denny...

...Commonweal 5 June 1992: 11...

...Still, among them were the students of the civil rights movement...

...When historian Eugene Genovese wrote recently that heroes are hard to find and "especially hard to acknowledge in this time of moral decadence" (The New Republic, May 11), he was thinking, I am sure, of our own country...

...We cannot forget that behind Rick and Renault stood a proud, lone, stubborn Frenchman who, with his nation not only defeated but colluding with the enemy, could still call forth the spirit of another France: France as she should be and, as he believed, once was...

...In the midst of their disillusionment over our involvement in Vietnam they could find in Casablanca some vestige of belief in cause and country...

...If he had not mounted that tank at the time of the coup in Russia, what might not have happened...

...Williams does not think of himself as a hero, he says (Washington Post, May 11...

...What we do not seem to have are the leaders who evoke heroism and who embody values and a vision worth serving with heroism...

...No more Ricks or Renaults, I thought, going off into the mist to make a last stand against tyranny...

...There were certainly more than we know during the violence in Los Angeles...

...At the end, as the credits rolled, and the audience lingered absorbing the effects of a really good movie, I found myself wondering why those college students of twentyfive years ago had liked the film so much...

...Undoubtedly, watching Casablanca they felt a yearning for a time and a place for clear-eyed heroism in the cause of liberty...

...We need a leader to summon the courageous to the works of peace...

...We know of Gregory Williams, the black actor who, in the midst of the riots, fended off five angry youths stalking a lightskinned black man and then saved a Japanese-American from being brutally beaten by the rioters and carried him to safety...

...It is important to remember the Chinese students and workers who rose up in 1989, those who died and those held in prison...

...One can only hope that this will be true of Peru's Maria Elena Moyano who so bravely led the public resistance to the Maoist terrorists known as the Shining Path...

...It was easy to feel the sting of tears...

...10: 5 June 1992 Commonweal Such are the risks, but the heroes persist...

...A recent news report on student leader Wang Dan quotes a Chinese official as saying "It's not easy to reform his ideology," indicating that, even in prison, Wang Dan is resisting pressures and deprivations we can only imagine...

...Senate hearings had exposed "the rogue elephant," the CIA, and the callous manipulation of men and small countries by its covert arm...

...She led her people in a peace march, was dubbed "Mother Courage" by the press, only to be shot and dynamited by a Shining Path execution squad...

...To be moved again as the crowd in the seedy cabaret drowned the singing of the Nazi officers with the rousing Marseillaise...

...And then I shook myself into reality...

...There are those who survived the risks to lead their people all the way to freedom— Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, and, yes, Boris Yeltsin...

...Television had shown them children aflame with burning napalm rained from bombs from our planes and eventually reported the shame of My Lai—horrors resulting from what they were told was a war of liberation in which they should take part...

...They had reason for their cynicism...

...Somehow I had missed seeing it again during the sixties and early seventies when Bogart film-watching was almost a cult on campuses of the colleges attended by my children...

...The courageous rise on every continent: often to be beaten down again and sometimes to rise again as martyrs, symbols, and inspiration to new heroes...

...As I shook off the spell of the film, I myself thought that it was harder to do that now, after the last decade of greed and corruption in an era when wars are waged and won by technology, when human fighters are so negligible in the march and flight of machines that they are as likely as not to be the victims of "friendly fire"—in such a time there is little room for personal nobility...

...Many of them had no trust in the government, no belief in the goals set by its leaders...

...I was guilty, I realized, of unearned cynicism...

...What I had forgotten was how dewily beautiful the young Ingrid Bergman was, and how uncomplicated and credible was Paul Henreid' s patriotism, idealism, and courage as the Czech freedom fighter...

...Some of them had faced Bull Connors and his men at Selma...

...The same is probably true of the two credited with masterminding the protest movement, Chen Ziming and Wang Juntao...

...Like everyone else, though, I remembered the marvelously cynical effrontery of Claude Rains's "I am shockedshocked— to discover that you permit gambling here...

...Heroes are hard to find but we do have them...

...Yes, we have our heroes, spontaneous heroes...

...He prefers to think of himself as "the recipient of a gift, a gift to serve another human being...

...I was forgetting to remember and honor a generation of heroes, of men and women who endured (and endure) prison, sometimes torture, to keep alive the thought of freedom...