Editorial 8.3, March 2006, by Deirdre Helfferich Who the Bad Guys Were Many years ago, when I was a teenybopper, we had a visitor up to our house on Ester Dome: a Soviet dissident writer. I don’t remember his name. He was a frail, skinny, balding, white-haired old man, with a thick accent, and not very interesting to me at the time. His suit didn’t fit him very well, rumpled a bit as he was, and his glasses and cigarettes and ho-hum conversation didn’t grab my attention. While my parents and he chatted, I idly watched them and the men who’d come with him. These two were interesting. There were two of them, and I remember vividly the older one, middle-aged, maybe in his fifties, with a graying crew cut, wearing a suit so stiff it looked like it was made from deep blue pin-striped cardboard. It was broad, that suit: the man was broad—but the antithesis of paunchy. He was incredibly fit. The suit was stiff because the man underneath it was nothing but muscle and sinew and bone. He moved easily, alertly. He kept watching us, looking calmly around the room, glancing at the porch occaisionally. He did not participate in the conversation. His whole mein shouted CIA, Secret Service, Bodyguard á la Spy, Professional Killer. He made me nervous. The younger man, who was less visibly a Protector/Guard type, had been sent outside, obviously to keep an eye on the immediate vicinity of the house. It was clear that the funny-looking little old man who had come to visit and check out the view from our house was in danger of assassination or kidnapping. And it was also pretty clear to me that the men with him were his minders and keepers as well as his protectors. They might be guarding the writer’s life, but they were not his friends. Yet, even though I don’t remember what little conversation we had with him, I do remember that he was important, important and brave. He’d dared to disagree with the Soviet political behemoth. He’d defied Soviet Russia, been forced to leave everything and everyone he’d known, because being able to be true to himself, to be free to speak or write the truth as he saw it, was essential to him. He’d been put in a gulag, exchanged for a U.S. spy. He must have had some kind of information that was valuable enough that the U.S. would do this to get him, guard him night and day, or was a visible enough dissident that his touring the country under protection was a sufficient public relations or political lever against the Soviets to merit the expense. His protection, the protection of his freedom of speech, was worth quite a lot, back in the Cold War. It’s not worth that much now. Now, I feel a bit of chill when I hear about Cindy Sheehan hauled roughly out of her seat at the State of the Union Address for wearing the wrong t-shirt, or about a president whose ego is so fragile that he can’t risk the actual public coming to hear him speak in public. His audiences are carefully screened, and those who might disagree with him (Democrats, for example) often find themselves prevented from entering. But if they want, they can go stand in the “Free Speech Zone” behind the fencing three blocks away if they feel the urge to say something about George W. Bush’s domestic spying program, or trumped-up pretext for invading Iraq, or lax views on torture, or even to complain about the confusing new drug program. It reminds me too much of what we used to point at in the Soviet Union as Bad, Wrong, Anti-American. It reminds me of how dissidents were given shelter here. | ||
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