Republican Party Reptile Read online

  President Reagan has shown some promise of standing up to the Safety Nazis. James Watt was as dangerous a Secretary of the Interior as we’ve had in a long time. And a few of the safetyist regulatory excesses of the Carter years have been revoked—the requirement that all full-sized sedans carry a blimp under the dashboard, for instance. But as yet there is little indication that the President perceives the true lack of danger our country faces. Maybe this is because he got shot not long ago. That’s fine for him. His life is plenty dangerous. But what about the rest of us, the common people crying out for hazard and risk? I hope President Reagan keeps us in mind as he trims the federal budget. The MX missile system looks like a perilous thing, but if that proves too expensive, give us a small increase in Amtrak funding and perhaps we could all die in a horrible train wreck.

  Ship of Fools

  I never did get it, what this trip was all about. I stood at the rail of the cruise ship Alexander Pushkin staring out at the vast rolling shore of the Volga. Here or there was a patch of grain, not high enough even in late July to conceal the line of furrows plowed straight downhill in the most erosion-producing way possible. And here or there was a skinny cow in an untidy hectare of pasture. But most of the land looked empty, unsown, ungrazed, uncultivated. And all around me were minds just as fallow.

  I was on something called the Volga Peace Cruise, a sixteen-day trip to the USSR featuring a nine-day boat ride from Rostov north up the Don, through the Don-Volga canal, and on up the Volga River to Kazan. The 160 passengers were all Americans. Most were antinuke activists and peace-group organizers with sixties leftover looks. Others were products of the Old Left. The peaceniks talked about peace, mostly in terms of atomic holocaust. The leftists talked about peace, mostly in terms of Soviet-American relations. The entire program of the “peace cruise” consisted in the bunch of us talking about peace. And the Soviet government had provided five Russian “peace experts” to talk about peace too.

  I asked some of my fellow passengers what the point was.

  “Atomic holocaust is the most important issue facing mankind,” said the peaceniks.

  “Atomic holocaust and Soviet-American relations,” said the leftists.

  What about dissident Russian peace activists? Was anyone interested in talking to them?

  “There is no need for dissident peace organizations in the Soviet Union,” said the leftists. “The Soviet Union already has the largest peace organizations in the world. In America dissident peace organizations are important because American foreign policy is prowar. But the Soviet Union is propeace because twenty million Soviets died in World War II.”

  “Well, if we see any . . .” said the peaceniks.

  Did anyone expect the Soviet “experts” to say anything everyone hadn’t heard Soviet experts say already?

  “Soviet-American relations are very important,” said the leftists.

  Were we going to convince those experts that their government ought to pull its troops out of Afghanistan?

  “Huh?” said everyone.

  Or maybe the leftists would convince the peace activists to take a more political view of things?

  “What leftists?” said the leftists.

  FRIDAY, JULY 16, 1982

  I was attracted to the Volga Peace Cruise by a half-page advertisement in the February 27, 1982, issue of The Nation magazine. It read, in part, “Find out for yourself what’s going on in the Soviet Union capital and heartland as you join The Nation this summer on an exciting, affordable Soviet excursion.”

  I have a sneaking love of the old-time left and that compendium of their snits and quarrels, The Nation. Mind you, I’m a registered Republican and consider socialism a violation of the American principle that you shouldn’t stick your nose in other people’s business except to make a buck. Still, Wobblies, Spanish Civil War veterans, the Hollywood Ten touch the heart somehow.

  But, to tell the truth, I’d never met any Old Leftists. I expected them to be admirable and nasty, like Lillian Hellman, or brilliant, mysterious, denying everything, like Alger Hiss, or—best of all—hard-bitten and cynical but still willing to battle oppression, like Rick in Casablanca. I did not expect them to be the pack of thirty fussing geriatrics I met at Kennedy Airport, misplacing their hand luggage, losing their way to the ladies’ room, barking at the airline personnel, and asking two hundred times which gate we’d have to be at in three and a half hours.

  They were leftists all right. In between palsies of fretting, they’d tell you how wonderful the Soviet Union was: Pensions were huge, housing was cheap, and they practically paid you to get medical care. Believe me, you haven’t been bored until you’ve been buttonholed by a seventy-year-old woman who holds forth all afternoon on the perfidity of American foreign policy and shows you pictures of her grandchildren. These were people who believed everything about the Soviet Union was perfect, but they were bringing their own toilet paper.

  SATURDAY, JULY 17

  The ad had promised excitement, and surely entering the Soviet Union would be exciting. The Russians are famous for making border crossing an exciting event. But we just stood in line for four hours. “You can understand the delay,” said a lady who had complained all night about everything on the flight to Moscow. “So many reactionary forces are trying to destroy the Soviet Union.” If reactionary forces are vulnerable to understaffing and inept baggage handling, they don’t stand a chance at the Moscow airport.

  There was only one faint thrill when we handed in our passports to the officer in the little glass passport-control booth. He was maybe seventeen with a tunic too large around the neck and a hat too big by half. He made an awful face and shouted, “Num? Fuss num? Plas oaf burf? Dat oaf burf?”

  One of my tour group members had been born in Kiev. She said her “plas oaf burf” was Russia.

  “Dat oaf burf?”

  “1915,” she said.

  “When leaf?” hollered the passport officer.

  “1920.”

  “Reason leaf?” he yelled.

  I swear she sounded embarrassed. “I don’t know. My parents did it.”

  Then we got on a smoky, gear-stripped bus and rode past blocks of huge, clumsy apartment buildings and blocks of huge, clumsy apartment buildings and blocks of huge, clumsy apartment buildings; through the smoggy Moscow twilight, through half-deserted streets. No neon lights, no billboards, no commotion, not much traffic, everything dusty-looking and slightly askew, and everything the same for an hour and a half.

  “Some people,” said a leftist lady with orange hair and earrings the size of soup tureens, “say the Soviet Union’s depressing. I don’t know how they can say that.”

  We pulled up in front of an immense glass-curtain-walled modern hotel, a perfect Grand Hyatt knockoff, and I headed for the bar. It was pretty much like any bar in a Grand Hyatt. There was a big drunk man there, red-faced and bloated. He seemed to speak English. At least he was yelling at the bartender in it. “A glass of schnapps,” he said. He got vodka.

  “How long you been here?” I said.

  “Hahahahahahaha,” he said, “I’m from Frankfurt!”

  “Scotch,” I said to the bartender. “Where’ve you been?” I asked the drunk. The bartender gave me vodka.

  “Fucking Afghanistan!” said the drunk. Afghanistan? Here was some excitement.

  “Afghanistan?” I said, but he fell off his stool.

  SUNDAY, JULY 18

  My tour group of leftists met with another three or four groups in the Moscow hotel. The others were mostly peaceniks. I don’t know how my group got involved in the peace cruise or how I got put in with them. They certainly weren’t from The Nation. “The Nation prints too much anti-Soviet propaganda,” said a potbellied man smoking a pipe with a stupid bend in the stem.

  In fact, there was no one from The Nation on the cruise except one assistant editor in the book-review department. The excursion ad had run, I found out later, in large part because The Nation received a commission for ea
ch passenger it signed up. The ad had listed a number of other sponsors: Fellowship of Reconciliation, National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, Promoting Enduring Peace, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and World Fellowship League. A few passengers in the other tour groups were from those organizations, but most seemed to be representing tiny peace organizations of their own. And if you didn’t stick socks in their mouths right away, they’d tell you all about it.

  First, however, a visit to Lenin’s tomb. It’s real dark and chilly in there, and you march around three sides of the glass case, and it’s like a visit to the nocturnal-predators section at the Reptile House with your grade-school class—no talking!

  “He has the face of a poet,” said our beautiful Intourist guide, Marya. He certainly does, a nasty, crazed, bigoted face just like Ezra Pound’s.

  None of the leftists so much as sniffled. This offended me. I can get quite misty at the Lincoln Monument. And I had to explain who John Reed was when we walked along the Kremlin wall. “Oh, that’s right,” said the orange-haired lady, “Warren Beatty in Reds.” Today she wore earrings that looked like table lamps. “Isn’t it wonderful?” she said, presenting Red Square as if she’d just knitted it. “No crowds!” The square was cordoned off by soldiers.

  Back to the hotel for another big drink.

  We spent the rest of the day on a Soviet version of a Gray Line tour, visiting at least thirty places of no interest. For the uninitiated, all Russian buildings look either like Grand Army of the Republic memorials or like low-income federal housing projects without graffiti. There are a few exceptions left over from the czars, but they need to have their lawns mowed. Every fifteen feet there’s a monument—monuments to this, monuments to that, monuments to the Standing Committee of the Second National Congress of Gypsum and Chalk Workers, monuments to the Mothers of the Mothers of War Martyrs, monuments to the Inventor of Flexible Belt Drive. “In the foreground is a monument to the monument in the background,” Marya narrated.—

  During a brief monument lacuna, Marya said, “Do any of you have questions that you would like to ask about the Soviet Union?”

  “Where can I get a—” But the leftists beat me to it.

  “What is the cost of housing in the Soviet Union as a percentage of worker wages?” asked one.

  “What is the retirement age in the Soviet Union?” asked another.

  “What pension do retired Soviet workers receive as a percentage of their highest annual work-life salary?”

  “Is higher education free in the Soviet Union?”

  “What about unemployment?”

  Marya answered, pointed out a few more monuments, and asked, “Do any of you have other questions you would like to ask about the Soviet Union?”

  Exactly the same person who’d asked the first question asked exactly the same question again. I thought I was hearing things. “What is the cost of housing in the Soviet Union as a percentage of worker wages?”

  And that flipped the switch.

  “What is the retirement age in the Soviet Union?”

  “What pension do retired Soviet workers receive as a percentage of their highest annual work-life salary?”

  “Is higher education free in the Soviet Union?”

  Marya answered the questions again. The third time it happened she began to lose her composure. I could hear her filling up empty places in the sightseeing landscape. “Look, there’s a building! And there’s another! And over there are several buildings together! And here [sigh of relief] are many monuments.”

  All the time we were in Russia, at every opportunity, the questions began again, identical questions with identical wording. I’m proud to say I don’t remember a single one of the answers. Except the one about unemployment: “There is no unemployment in the Soviet Union. The Soviet constitution guarantees everyone a job.” A pretty scary idea, I’d say.

  Later in the trip, when I’d fled the bus tours and was wandering on my own, the lumpier kind of Russian would come up and ask me questions—not the “You are foreign?” sort of questions but rapid, involved questions in Russian. Perhaps because my hair was combed and I wore a necktie (two Soviet rarities) they thought I had special access to the comb-and-necktie store and must therefore be a privileged party official who knew what was what. I’ve wondered since if they were asking me, “What is the cost of housing in the Soviet Union as a percentage of worker wages?”

  MONDAY, JULY 19

  One of the bus questioners stood next to me as we waited to board our flight to Rostov. She looked out at the various Aeroflot planes standing on the tarmac and managed a statement that was at once naive, gratuitous, patronizing, and filled with progressive ardor. “Airplanes!” she said. “The Soviet Union has thousands and thousands of airplanes!”

  I never did find out what this lady looked like. She was only about four foot eleven, and all I ever saw was a skull top of hennaed hair with a blur of fast-moving jaw beneath it. She had that wonderful ability some older people have of letting her mind run right out her mouth.

  “Well,” she’d say, “here I am with my seat belt buckled up just sitting right here in the airplane seat and folding my hands in my lap and I’ll move my feet over a little so they’re on top of my flight bag and pull my coat up over my shoulders, whoops, I’m sitting right on it but I’ll just wiggle around a little like this and pull it over my shoulders . . .” For hours, all the way to Rostov.

  The peaceniks, especially the older peaceniks, were more visually interesting than the leftists. Somebody ought to tell a sixty-year-old man what he looks like in plastic sandals, running shorts, and a mint-green T-shirt with Kenneth Patchen plagiarisms silk-screened on the front.

  The peaceniks were sillier-acting than the leftists too. There was a pair of Quaker ministers with us, man and wife. But they were not Quakers as one usually pictures them. They had “gone Hollywood.” Imagine a Quaker who came up to you in the L.A. airport and tried to get a donation for a William Penn button. Not that they did that, but it always looked to me as though they were about to. Anyway, this couple bore different last names. When we got aboard the ship in Rostov, a passenger went to return a book to the husband.

  “I’m sorry,” said the wife at their cabin door. “He’s not here.”

  “But can’t I give the book to you?” asked the passenger. “It belongs to your husband.”

  “We’re not the same persons,” said the wife.

  My cabin mate was no leftist. “I’m not pro-Soviet,” he said as he watched me unpack a necktie with little duck hunters all over it. “I’m a retired peace activist. I mean I’m not retired from peace activism—you know what I mean.” He had spilled a bottle of Camphophenic in his luggage and had gastrointestinal trouble from the food and wouldn’t use the air conditioning because it might give him a cold, so all the way to Kazan our cabin smelled like the bathroom at a Vick’s factory. Three bus tours after we met he told me, “This country is just like a big club. Did you know there’s no unemployment? The Soviet constitution guarantees everyone a job!”

  TUESDAY, JULY 20

  Fortunately there were other people to talk to. Actually, you couldn’t talk to most of them because they were Russians and didn’t speak English—what you might call a silent majority. On the plane to Rostov I’d sat next to a fellow named Ivor. He spoke only a bit of English but was a good mime. He got it across that he was an engineer. I got it across that I was an American. He seemed very pleased at that. I should come and stay with his family. I explained about the cruise boat, showing him a picture of it on the brochure. I did a charade to the effect that I’d better stick close to the boat. He gave me an engineering trade magazine (in Russian, no illustrations), and I gave him some picture postcards of New York. We parted in a profusion of handshakes at the Rostov airport.

  The boat stayed at the dock in Rostov until midnight Tuesday. They have plenty of monuments in Rostov, too, and tour buses were lined up on the quay. I could hear someone
asking inside one of them, “What is the cost of housing in the Soviet Union as a percentage of worker wages?”

  I was just being herded into that bus when someone grabbed my arm. It was Ivor. “Come on,” he gestured. I escaped down the embankment. We got on a boat packed to the scuppers with Russians and went for a two-hour excursion on the Don. Ivor bought a bottle of champagne and began a labored explanation punctuated with hand-wavings and flurries of picture-drawing in my reporter’s notebook.

  His father had been on the front lines when the armies of the East and West had met in Germany in 1945. Apparently the Americans had liberated every bottle of alcoholic beverage between Omaha Beach and the Oder-Neisse Line and really made the welkin ring for their Red comrades in arms. “Anglish—poo,” said Ivor, “Francis—poo,” but the Americans, they were fine fellows, plenty of schnapps, plenty of cognac, plenty of vino for all. And they could drink, those American fine fellows. So Ivor’s “vada” had made him promise (point to self, hand on heart) if (finger in air) Ivor ever met American (handshake, point to me) he must buy him much to drink. Da? (Toast, handshake, toast again, another handshake.)

  Standing behind Ivor was a giant man well into his sixties, a sort of combination Khrushchev and old Arnold Schwarzenegger. He was staring hard at me, cocking an ear to my foreign language. He wore an undershirt and a suit coat with a line of medals out across the breast pocket. “Deutsch?” he asked me sternly.