Piecework

But the basic neo-Stalinist demand was for national amnesia, and that, too, was familiar. It was at the heart of the Reagan era, when Americans were urged by the Great Communicator to forget Vietnam and forget Watergate, and use borrowed money to indulge in mindless pleasures.

This is not to say that the United States is the moral equivalent of a totalitarian state. That’s ludicrous. But all human beings, including Americans, are confronted every day by the temptation of the totalitarian solution. Wandering the streets of Prague and East Berlin, I never saw a homeless person, never ran into a junkie, never felt a personal sense of menace. The total state, after all, places order above all human values, including justice. But back home in New York and Los Angeles and other American cities, I’ve talked to many people over the years who demand those Good Old Draconian Measures to deal with our disorders. They would gladly surrender the Bill of Rights if that meant clearing the streets of drug addicts and gunmen. I even heard this argument from some of the Eastern European exiles on the rainy sidewalks outside the United Nations.

That taste for the draconian certainly hasn’t perished from the earth, as we saw in December in Romania and Panama. In the hardest of the old Stalinist states, the end came in blood and destruction, with the ruling family joining that of the czar on the casualty lists of the century’s revolutions. In Panama, an American soldier was killed, another soldier’s wife was insulted, and the great might of the United States was unleashed on the regime of Manuel Noriega. According to polls, most Americans loved this fierce spectacle. And while such peaceful and historic events as the collapse of the Berlin Wall drew poor television ratings, many cheered the brutality of the Romanian revolution. Apparently, nothing makes American blood quicken faster than the spirit of revenge. If it’s history, most of us yawn; if it resembles a movie, we snap to attention.

That was what was so special about the events in Prague. Over and over, Havel and the others sent out the message: We are not going to do to them what they’ve done to us. “That would be the worst corruption of this revolution’s ideals,” said a filmmaker named Antonin Masa, who had spent twenty years directing his movies only in his imagination. “We want a country that is generous and decent. And where every man can speak his piece. That’s all. Revenge is a debasing emotion.” Another quoted Albert Camus, saying how it should be possible to love one’s country and justice too.

There are lessons here for all of us. The American Right, after an initial period of bafflement, is claiming a triumph of capitalism over communism. “But that’s not what is going on here,” said Rita Klimova, who lived in New York as a child from 1939 to 1946, returned to Prague, became an economics professor, was blacklisted after the fall of Dubcek, and earned a marginal living as a free-lance translator. “If people here had to choose a model, it would probably be Sweden. A democratic socialist society, with freedom for the individual. This is a struggle for choice.” Others noted that in the places where the United States did use physical force in the crusade against communism (Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam), Stalinism was still in power, its authority reinforced by the need (real or imaginary) to resist an outside threat. In Eastern Europe, the more pacific techniques of trade, cultural exchanges, and communications helped bring about the great change. Stalinism eventually fell of its own dumb weight. One Czech friend said to me: “There were two specific factors. One was Gorbachev, who made it clear that he wouldn’t send the tanks. The other was the decision to stop jamming Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America. That allowed us to get hard news. We didn’t care about the propaganda or the oratory. Just the news. That was very important.”

He and the others were too modest to mention the one final factor: courage. Men like Havel, who began their lonely fight more than a decade ago, believed enough in their cause to place their bodies before the might of the state. They had no guns. They had no money. And in the end they won. They won for themselves and their families and their friends, for their country, for memory and history. But they also won for those lonely men and women who stood for so many years in the hard rain of strange cities. I wish I could find some of them and say that I am sorry for not listening to them in their separation and solitude. But they’re gone now. And that might be the happiest ending of all.

ESQUIRE,

March 1990

PART V TALENT IN THE ROO