Two months later, in
Philadelphia, the only substantial gavel-to-gavel media coverage of Physicians
for Social Responsibility was TASS and East German broadcasting. Curious as to
their motives, I chatted up the TASSman. He was on a nitpick. Talked about
George Will’s “political pornography.” Was delighted, clearly, that the
American media were doing a piss-poor job of covering the conference in which
U.S. physicians were lobbying against nuclear warfare. Reinforced his
stereotype about mass communication in the United States being only about
sensationalizing distractions.
Our side doesn’t do much
better. The U.S. media keep ragging away at the Soviets for mistreatment of
dissidents. They positively exulted in the reflex secrecy of the Soviets
immediately after the Chernobyl disaster. (And they provided the Soviets with
plenty of ammunition about how competitive, deadline-manic American media can
make a misleading mountain of falsehoods out of a molehill of data dribbling
through the Soviet self-censorship.)
Then, most recently, when Ted Turner
delivered on his promise to broadcast the Goodwill Games, you’ve never heard
such an outpouring—from the American media—of sour grapes about the Mouth from
the South’s initiative. Competitive American media chortled over how many
millions Turner was bound to lose at that piddling electronic turnout. They
dismissed as naïve Turner’s promise to do a series of documentaries that showed
“what was good” about the Soviet Union. Talk about xenophobic ethnocentricity. “Evil
Empire” models of the USSR have reduced our sophisticated journalists to
peddling hackish party lines about “reality” in the Soviet Union.
I think of my only trip to
Russia in the summer of 1981—to see the first exhibition of Russian avant-garde
art since 1930, a joint Russian-French production. I put up with two weeks of
sandstorms in Central Asia to get five days in Moscow so I could take a close
look at the show in the Pushkin Museum.
Minutes after we settled
into our Moscow hotel, I was at Intourist’s desk in the lobby, wheedling for
tickets. “Impossible, sir. That show is sold out until it closes.”
Next morning, I tried a
different agent. “Of course, sir. No problem. Come back at noon.”
At noon, the lady handed me
two of the priceless tickets—but my heart sank when I saw they were dated ten
days after our tour left Moscow for the sand dunes. I explained this to the
lady, who replied: “Oh, that’s perfectly alright—as long as you get there before
the expiration date.” Nuts. The tickets gave me two hours on a specific day.
So I fell by the Pushkin
the next morning. Two sentries, who had majored in Nasty at the military
academy, pointed out the date on the tickets, laughed hysterically, and waved
me away with their AK-47’s. Yuck. I love Liubov Popova’s painting too much to
allow such Nerds to muck up my plans. I went back into the line and found
someone who spoke English and had her explain my sorry plight to the soldiers.
They smirked superciliously and told me to come back the next day.
Another guard, with a
different kind of uniform and entirely different mentality, was on duty. He
waved me through without even looking at my ticket. The exhibition was superb.
I was very slow going through, however, because I can’t deal with the Cyrillic
alphabet easily. I had the French language catalogue. But not for long.
Russians sidled up to me and asked if they could take a peek; the Soviets weren’t
selling the catalogue because they didn’t want their countrymen to know the
sordid details about how Stalin had clamped down on this brilliantly innovative
style when someone had assassinated the secretary of the party in Leningrad.
(Later, my Intourist guide in Leningrad told me she stayed up all night to read
the book when I lent it to her.)
The show was just too much
to handle at one run-through. So, the next day, I stationed myself near the
entrance and pssted the attention of a curator. In French, I explained how
important it was that I got a longer look. He said he was sorry but he had to
go to a meeting. I hung out, furtively seeking another open-sesame. In 15
minutes, his conscience unquenchable, he returned and waved me secretively
through.
The third day, I tried the
back door, when I told the guard in German I wanted to interview the director
for a feature story for the Philadelphia Bulletin. He picked up the phone,
hesitated, put it down. Then he picked it up with what looked like renewed
courage, faltered, and put it down again. He waved me through. He’d rather risk
that then bringing the director something she didn’t want to deal with.
Why have I recounted the
story of how I had to wangle my way into a show that should have been at the
heart of any three-week arts tour of Russia? Because it made me realize how
victimized everybody over there is. Those soldiers, that at first made me so
angry, were doing what I would probably do under similar circumstances: Power
there is arbitrary; they never know when its arbitrariness will pinch them;
they compensate by being arbitrary whenever it suits their mood.
The
German-speaking guard already had too much on his plate; so he let me slip
through to avoid any possible contretemps. The French-speaking curator finally
let his love for art triumph over his fear of cutting bureaucratic corners.
These people deserve our sympathy, not our contempt.
The PBS series “Comrades”
this summer has given me even more illuminating windows on what Winston
Churchill called a mystery wrapped in an enigma. An Estonian fashion designer
is putting more and more waggle into a consumer system that even Wendy’s
hamburgers took cheap shots at in its commercials. And even in what the great émigré
novelist called the Cancer Ward, an eye surgeon is leading the world with fresh
alternatives to blindness. But it is significant that this is a British series
distributed by a consortium of American PBS stations (Can’t you just see them
calculating how there’d be strength in numbers in case there was a lot of flack
about a positive series on the U.S.S.R.?).
Come on, fellas. Let’s call
off the reciprocal nit-picking that goes for media relations between the two
countries. I’m not saying we shouldn’t holler bloody murder when they
tit-for-tat U.S. News and World Report correspondent Nick Daniloff—the son of émigrés,
fluent in Russian, one could argue the most superbly equipped member of our
press corps in Moscow. KGB stupidity is no more tolerable than CIA
muddleheadedness.
We’ve just got to assume
that the Cold War has served its purpose, and that we have to constantly look
for new ways of making a world community viable.
And I don’t mean getting
laxer on tracking down spies and American informants. I just mean let’s just
realize, as I saw in Moscow that summer, that the Russians are people who react
differently under an oppressive system, which just may be loosening up. The
candid way the Russians have covered the Black Sea cruise ship disaster shows
they’ve even learned since Chernobyl.
And remember, there’s got
to be a more civilized way to cover airplane crashes like the one in Cerritos,
California. They cover up; we over-cover. The golden mean, gentlemen. The
Greeks knew what they were talking about.
The superpowers need to get
off each other’s cases, and get down to resolving their own mounting agendas,
agendas that must include more and more comprehensive and fair coverage of The
Enemy. We could use an old-fashioned dose of the Bible in mitigating the media
cold war—that old parable about seeing the mote in your neighbor’s eye while
missing the beam in one’s own. I’m not asking for Pollyanna foolishness. I’m
asking for a sane alternative to the superpowerlessness of calling our enemy’s
faults instead of mending our own. And the same goes for the Russkies!
From Welcomat: After Dark.
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