by W. E. Gutman
It is little wonder that Col. Anatoly Makhov, a military attaché at the Soviet Mission to the United Nations, would show such keen interest in the magazine. Printed in Birmingham, England, the magazine was first distributed in Europe, then shipped to the U.S. I’d met Makhov at a party held by the late Bob Guccione and his wife Kathy Keeton at their palatial East 67th Street Manhattan townhouse to celebrate the launching of the magazine. A former fighter pilot and a KGB agent, Makhov had made a strange request: He wanted to receive his copy before his counterpart in London got his. I found this curious rivalry between two associates serving the same master fascinating. Makhov had a habit of sneaking past security, first in the lobby then on the third floor where my office was located. I never found out how he managed this sleight of hand. When I asked him, he just smiled. I remember Makhov with fondness. He was a bright, cultured man who never ventured into the minefield of international politics. Instead, we chatted at length about Russian music and literature. I wonder what became of him.
After eighteen months of sluggish advertising sales, and despite a loyal and growing audience, we also became the last magazine of its kind. Publication was suspended and I was unceremoniously “terminated.” Following twelve months of unemployment during which I exhausted my meager savings, OMNI called me back and refitted me with two hats. I became an in-house consultant (I never found out what I would be consulted about) and U.S. editor of Science in the USSR, the official organ of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, which OMNI published in English and marketed in Anglophone countries during its brief and turbulent existence. This new venture took me to Moscow on several occasions. It was an experience that would deeply affect me, filling me with new insights and radically altering some of my perceptions.
*
Strolling in Krasnopresnensky Park, along one of the many elbows of the Moskva River, I saw lovers kissing as they do everywhere when spring alights and lust, like sap, percolates through the veins to flush out winter’s numbing grip. Pigeons cooed, pecking at the graveled walkways, geese waddled to-and-fro in search of a crumb or two. Sparrows chirped boisterously in a tongue understood by sparrows from Central Park to the Great Wall of China. Overdressed red-cheeked toddlers frolicked under the half-attentive gaze of stern-faced parents. Huddled on a bench barely wide enough for three, five furrow-faced matriarchs, their heads covered with kerchiefs, knitted furiously in unison as though guided by the hand of an invisible taskmaster.
From a humpbacked bridge, her reflection playing brightly in the pond below, a little girl with a huge white bow in her flaxen hair cast a baitless hook in the fishless water. Poised for a strike that could never be, her eyes fixed on the concentric circles radiating away from the quivering line, she waited. I took her picture from a distance. She may still be there for all I know, undaunted, Quixotically defiant, a symbol of the Russian quest for the impossible dream.
Seventy-three years after the September Revolution, I thought, dreams are especially useful. They help deflect an existence colored by yesterday’s nightmares and corrupted by a national psyche that would rather bring back the Bolshevik straight jacket than savor the risks and rewards of freedom. Dreams, when carefully managed, also interrupt reality or, at worst, blunt it for a while. What cannot be prevented must be endured until the nightmares dissolve or return transformed.
Gray and gritty, dusk slowly settled on Moscow like a shroud, accentuating the surreal lifelessness of the Ukraina Hotel rising in the distance from the river’s murky waters. Dusk would linger for an hour or so, swallowing shadows and jealously postponing night which -- like all my Moscow nights -- would be spent awaiting dawn. Krasnopresnensky Park was now nearly deserted and I knew that bands of marauding young thugs would soon be on the prowl.
I returned to my room at the Mezhdunarodnaya Hotel -- “Armand Hammer’s Folly” -- past the unavoidable “floor lady,” a matron of redoubtable girth endowed with a persistent gaze and an inquisitorial manner. I bolted the door behind me, more out of symbolism than practicality, and I settled down to thirty minutes of news on CNN, my only lucid window on the outside world.
Following the news, another slice of the Soviet dream was being dished out for all to feast on, like manna from heaven. Dr. Anatoli Kashpirovski, the alchemical man, miracle maker, healer extraordinaire and perestroika prophet, was about to bend the airwaves, as Uri Geller would a vulgar spoon.
In lifting countless taboos, perestroika, or “restructuring,” had reopened the floodgates of credulity among a people noted for their mysticism. A craving for miracles, fortified by mounting social and economic problems, Kashpirovski had galvanized the Russian people, many of whom, haunted by apocalyptic visions, were willing to entrust their fate to psychic sleight of hand for the grandest dream of all -- a cure against despair and hopelessness. This time, perestroika had aimed at far more than meets the eye, the blunted eye, that is, of television viewers who, night after night, were being lulled into insensitivity by the ubiquitous drone of political speechmaking. It may in fact have sought to conquer the wounded Slav soul by seducing its weary optic nerve.
Such seems to have been the inspiration for the launching of a fortnightly prime-time program promising relief against everything from acne to senility, gout to cancer and, the architects of perestroika hoped, destined to shake off inertia and emotional paralysis.
It failed on all counts.
While reformers had quickly understood that social and political changes can help reduce the de-civilizing effects of past repression, no social restructuring, however swift and radical, can eliminate them all. Ultimately, the individual must come to terms with society by adjusting to it. Television, they thought, could act as a therapeutic go-between and foster a re-humanization process.
Positioned to follow the Sunday evening news broadcast, “Time,” a mild anesthetic in the bountiful pharmacopoeia of Russian TV soporifics, the program reached 200 million viewers, all of whom anxiously focused their wistful pupils and battered psyches on the soulful eyes of the charismatic hypnotist and healer, Dr. Kashpirovski.
The rationale was deceptively simple.
“There are too many sick people in this country,” Kashpirovski had told network executives. “I will speak to them, touch them. I will reshape their egos as I entertain them. What have we got to lose? Our healthcare system is so primitive.”
This was an understatement. Hospitals were overcrowded, understaffed. More than two-thirds of the 4,000 rural hospitals lacked hot water and more than one-third had no sewers or indoor plumbing. Despite a thriving black market, pharmaceuticals were scarce.
But the crisis had reached the cities as well. A paucity of modern surgical equipment, including disposable hypodermic syringes and needles, inadequate post-operative facilities and an acute shortage of nurses and technicians had forced the National Institute of Orthopedic Medicine to limit the number of operations it could perform to five or six a year.
“It may take our physicians five thousand years to reach all of our sick and infirm,” Kashpirovski had warned. “Only a miracle, only the unshakable belief in a wondrous and heretofore untested oracle can help. I have an antidote against all human ills and suffering, and it’s as easy to administer as turning on the TV.
“Think of it as mass-market medicine,” Kashpirovski had argued. “Millions of people can seek and be granted a miracle in the privacy of their own home just by looking at their television screens. For free.”
In only a few weeks, Kashpirovski had insisted, devastating illnesses, some in their terminal stages, could be cured (or ousted from consciousness). Tumors, cerebral lesions would shrink and disappear. The blind would regain their eyesight. Warts, scars, migraines, insomnia -- “a mere trifle” for Kashpirovski -- would vanish. The bald were promised full heads of hair; the impotent, the libido of Siberian tigers.
Delivered against a bland musical backdrop, Kashpirovski’s pronouncements were designed to conquer incredulity, thwart cynicism, overcome doubt and suppress s
kepticism.
“Whether your eyes are screwed onto the television screen or whether you go about your household chores,” he intoned with rapt eloquence, “you are now under my spell. You are now healing yourselves.”
Faith in the “mystery of miracles,” Kashpirovski urged smugly, “augments my curative powers.” He was now the shepherd who forgives an errant flock, a savior who absolves the unbelievers who denigrate him, a redeemer who exonerates the pitiable skeptics who scoff.
The program had none of the tawdry glitter of American televangelism. Absent were the sumptuous stage settings, the cosmic lighting displays, the ethereal vaulted spaces where the heavens themselves are born and from which are echoed the stentorian voices of the self-anointed. Such stratagems do not enhance the mystical experience. Instead, Soviet-gray proletarian-drab reality in its most elemental manifestation helped deepen the urgency of salvation.
His rotund face overflowing from the television screen, his eyes lost in an all-knowing void, exuding serenity and love, Kashpirovski had succeeded in reducing his audience to cataleptic trances and other states of exaltation resembling extreme religious fervor. This would prove to be his undoing.
On the eve of the 11th Congress of the People’s Deputies, the Soviets had suddenly been offered a double ration of television therapy: hypnosis on Saturday, to mend the soul; a political sermon on Sunday, to reshape perceptions and behavior. Who knows, the architects of perestroika must have reasoned, perhaps faith in miracles can help us too.
Their benevolence -- or their credulity -- was short-lived. Whereas writers continued to mix metaphors on Sundays in the name of social equilibrium, Kashpirovski, show-biz demi-god and prime-time exorcist, was suddenly taken off the air. In the rich lexicon of Soviet euphemisms, his brand of “healing” was deemed “counterproductive.” It may have been more than even perestroika could bargain for. Not unlike Mephisto, Kashpirovski had bartered the souls of his flock against the promise of an afterlife as a TV celebrity.
Born from an ideological crisis, incapable of dusting off the unraveling webs of communism and thus depriving itself of the comforts of a hereafter, perestroika failed to ensure liberty, to kindle abundance, to hasten the end of economic exploitation, to inspire and bring about social equilibrium. The new Russian classes faced an awesome problem: Perestroika, the powerful instrument of social destabilization had not yet learned to become an instrument of social conservation. Thus, miracles like hot running water or uninterrupted telephone service or fully stocked grocery shelves, would continue to be transient phenomena. After all, too much of a good thing will corrupt the national dream. And many will wonder, as the nightmare lingers on, what schism can the malcontent turn to, what shape will idealism and humanism and justice take now that communism is dead.( First published in Penthouse, March 1991.)
Mankind is at its own mercy. The stomach growls whereas the heart can only murmur.
*
A year later, OMNI suspended its Russian venture. A series of internal convulsions cleared the way for the creation of a tailor-made new post on its editorial staff, that of International Editor. For the first time in more than 30 years I was now doing what I’d always wanted to do, what I knew would bring the best in me. I was traveling, managing my own assignments, writing articles about germ warfare, monasticism, UFOs, voodoo, the physics and poetry of speed, France’s newly launched super train, the TGV, the rise and fall of Grenada’s former and perennial candidate prime minister, the late Eric Gairy.
*
Later that year, I successfully argued at an editorial round table chaired by OMNI’s founder, the late Kathy Keeton, that the future must look beyond space-age gadgets and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence; that vexing social issues such as human suffering at the hands of other humans are as likely to alter the course of history as any wondrous technology or mind-bending science fiction come true.
I remember suggesting that the future is a real place, that posterity has an inalienable right to occupy it and partake in its fruits, and I asserted that in several parts of the world this right was being abrogated by recurrent, state-sponsored orgies of violence, including murder, against society’s most vulnerable outcasts -- street children.
“Where is this is happening,” Keeton asked.
“In this hemisphere? Brazil and Guatemala,” I replied.
“Brazil’s too far,” retorted the fiscally conservative Keeton. Go to Guatemala.”
*
I spent the next three months immersed in research. I also sought counsel from the leading children’s rights advocates. UNICEF admitted the problem existed but refused to point fingers. “We can’t afford to alienate host countries,” explained the Director of Communications. “A confrontational approach to human rights abuses would be counterproductive. We must maintain strict neutrality.” The DoC also said something about “the exigencies of cultural relativism.”
Eager to glean practical information but in no mood for double-talk, I countered that “neutrality in the face of hideous crimes is the crassest form of indifference.” The DoC said nothing. Perfunctory smile turned to blank, lifeless stare. As for cultural relativism (its leading articulator at the time was Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, who justified the brutal repression of those who got in his way) I asked her whether this newfangled doctrine was not being foisted on the world “to extenuate, condone and exonerate aberrant behavior, degenerate traditions, rabid ethnocentrism and an orgy of human rights violations.” In lieu of an answer, she handed me a large envelope, stood up and bid me farewell. I left her office with a press kit containing success stories of land reclamation, reforestation, water purification, Guinea worm eradication, salt iodination and oral rehydration, all peppered with photos of happy, smiling, well-fed Third World children. (Photos I shot of heavyhearted, starving or mutilated children, which I later offered UNICEF, were rejected on the grounds that “they’re apt to traumatize our donors.”) The UN’s policy of accommodating warlords coddling thugs and overlooking rampant abuses, apparently, has no effect on donors.
Save The Children, which, like UNICEF, does not work with homeless minors, also conceded that street children were being habitually persecuted in Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico by vigilantes and agents of the state, but refused to share useful intelligence or offer assistance in the field.
Christian Children’s’ Fund declined to be interviewed and thwarted efforts to visit one of their sites on “logistical grounds.” Both Save The Children and Christian Children’s Fund would later be embroiled in major scandals.
Childhope, an obscure UNICEF adjunct, provided me with some data but used the opportunity to upbraid “rogue organizations that, in pursuit of justice, interfere with the internal affairs of sovereign nations.” It was precisely such a “rogue” organization, Casa Alianza, the Latin American branch of Covenant House that would provide the unvarnished tutorial elements I needed and shepherd me through the abyss where Central American street children live and die.
Nothing could have prepared me for what I was to see and feel that first night in Guatemala City. Retold in an essay entitled, Witch Hunt in the Land of Eternal Spring, and published in OMNI magazine, this dizzying descent into a nether world of terror and suffering would constitute a turning point in my career. It would lead to a keen and sustained interest in Central America and a deepening involvement in human rights issues that would eventually wane and cease. Dedication to a cause must be measured against the results it produces. After twelve years in the belly of the beast, I realized that I was powerless against corruptible individuals (the politicians) and that I’d stopped fretting about people who don’t fight back. It was no longer my battle. Others would step in, also brimming with idealism, until their fanciful optimism was slowly eroded by reality -- as had been mine. The “struggle” will continue I’m sure -- with the same short-term triumphs and intractable defeats. In the grander scheme of things, nothing will ever change. It’s not that I didn’t hear the cries or
see the tears; I did. It’s not that I was insensitive to injustice; I wasn’t. It’s that I’d exhausted my capacity to care.
When will goes to sleep, instinct keeps watch.
YES, THEY SHOOT CHILDREN
Dawn rises behind Guatemala City’s 16th-century cathedral, flushing the nave with shafts of spectral radiance and suffusing the marble altar and colonnades, crystal chandeliers, richly carved gilt pulpit and solid mahogany pews with a celebration of light over the forces of darkness.
For Jorge, sunrise heralds the start of another perilous journey. He’d just spent the night in the fetid culvert that girds the cathedral’s flanks, drowsing into a thin, turbulent sleep, one eye trained against the creeping shadows, his ears alert to any sound louder than his heartbeat. Normally, Jorge beds down with his friends Pedro and Felipe under a pile of filthy rags, sharing scraps of food pilfered from an outdoor market or recovered from a garbage pit. Normally, they huddle like newborn pups, seeking warmth, sharing a tin or two of cobbler’s glue until the noxious fumes release them from the grips of hunger, cold and fear. But these are not normal times. Beatings, torture, rape and extrajudicial executions have been on the rise in Guatemala, and Jorge, Pedro and Felipe decided to split up for a while, to disperse, to find safety not in numbers but in seclusion and stealth, like hunted animals.