By BARRY FRIEDMAN
Reviewing the unmitigated disaster of “The Greek Tycoon” (1978), which starred Jacqueline Bisset and Anthony Quinn, and the penance they should pay for appearing in such dreck, Jack Kroll, the great film and drama critic for Newsweek, said the two actors should be forced to take a written exam before being allowed back into the human race.
If you’ve seen the movie, you know Kroll was being kind.
Which brings us, believe it not, to two people, at various times in their lives, who needed to sit for the exam: Yuri Andropov, former Soviet Union premier, and Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), presently the minority leader of the United States Senate.
After he became the sixth paramount leader of the Soviet Union and the fourth general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (the place had as many titles as the Corleone Family had buffers), Andropov was inexplicably treated to a kinder, gentler American press looking for a kinder, gentler Soviet premier.
Andropov, a short, dull brute of a man — earlier in his career, he had been described by the New York Times as engaging “in a fairly successful campaign to throttle the recent wave of liberal dissidence” — was being characterized in the Washington Post as “silver-haired and dapper … tall and urbane,” and someone who collected “abstract art and likes jazz and Gypsy music.” Time magazine, in fact, said he was a “witty conversationalist and a bibliophile.”
The softening of Andropov, the former head of the KGB, was disturbing in part because KGB heads, like today’s Republicans, don’t spend much time wrestling with life’s ambiguities. It’s just easier for some to throw physicists in the gulag, fine teachers for assigning Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” and rail against Jewish space lasers than it is for others.
Even if the stories about Andropov were true — and according to a piece by Edward Jay Epstein in the Feb. 7, 1983, New Republic, they weren’t — you’d like to think reporters wouldn’t have been so quick to talk of a new and improved Yuri just because there were stories he might be sitting barefoot in a dacha, toe-tapping to Ellington at Newport. Andropov, after all, was the guy chosen to head the KGB after Nikita Khrushchev was ousted for being too liberal. Not sure what the thinking was at the time, unless it was “Sure, Andropov crushed dissidents, imprisoned Andrei D. Sakharov for speaking out on human rights, and restored and invigorated the Soviet Union’s secret police, but he liked ‘Jeep’s Blues,’ so how bad can he be?”
“We all were here. We saw what happened. It was a violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election from one administration to the next.”
The same person also said this:
“There is no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the event of that day.”
That the above two quotes came from Mitch McConnell made some wonder if there was something fundamentally different about him than the rest of the invertebrates in the Republican Party who would sell America down a polluted river for 18 holes at Mar-a-Lago.
Was there a humanity to McConnell we had all missed?
Here was the president of the United States — the current one — during a joint address to Congress last year. Joe Biden’s son, Beau, and the story has been well told, had died of brain cancer in 2015, and McConnell called on the Senate to rename in his honor a bill accelerating cancer research.
“I’ll still never forget when we passed the cancer proposal in the last year I was vice president, almost $9 million going to NIH,” Biden said, referring to the National Institutes of Health. “You’ll excuse the point of personal privilege — I’ll never forget you standing, Mitch, and saying, naming it after my deceased son. It meant a lot.”
When Beau Biden died, one national Republican officeholder went to the funeral: Mitch McConnell.
Does this make him any less of a blight on our national discourse? Did the books on Andropov’s shelf make him any less of one?
Debatable.
McConnell’s sins — and I’d need this entire edition of The Progressive Populist to elucidate them all — are vast and deep and unconscionable, so at the end of the day, at the end of the election cycle, at the end of the Republic, if it comes to that, it really doesn’t matter whether he hugged Joe Biden at a memorial service or gave lip service to Trump’s culpability for an insurrection any more than it matters that Yuri Andropov could be a witty raconteur at the end of a long day of crushing Hungarian and Czech resistance.
But their quirks — the good ones, anyway — are worth mentioning.
Unless they’re not. Occasional flashes of humanity can be overrated and confusing.
If only those written tests actually existed.
Barry Friedman is an essayist, political columnist, petroleum geology reporter and comedian living in Tulsa, Okla. In addition to “Funny You Should Mention It,” “Road Comic,” “Four Days and a Year Later” and “The Joke Was On Me,” his first novel, “Jacob Fishman’s Marriages,” a book about the worst love story ever, was published by Balkan Press in February. See barrysfriedman.com.
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