AN ASSAULT ON A NATION'S VALUES

by George Will

Some will rush to judgment. They will say that Sen. Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat, was lied to. Recently, he made a plea, in the Oval Office, that if the government went to Elian's home to seize him, it should not do so at night. "The president of the United States," says Graham, "made that commitment to me that there would be no taking of this child at night." But whether the president lied depends on what the definition of "night" is.

Anyway, Eric Holder, deputy attorney general, says the paramilitary operation was "done professionally." So are a lot of burglaries, but Holder is right about the INS agents' professionalism--why, the one agent's finger was at least half an inch from the trigger.

One bit of intelligence that supposedly justified the assault--"dynamic entry" is the term of art--was that there might be weapons inside. Considering that 40 percent of American households have guns, it is notable that the assaulters managed to hit a house that did not have any.

However, here are a few questions that should be explored in congressional hearings about these warriors whose Omaha Beach was a bungalow in Little Havana:

Is "dynamic entry" justified whenever the government has some business to conduct with an American household and suspects that occupants of the household may be exercising their Second Amendment right to own a gun? Or was there something else that alarmed authorities about Lazaro Gonzalez's house, which bristled with . . . toys?

What was it about the behavior of the Gonzalez family over the last five months that justified the government's conclusion that the family lives by the Clinton standard? That is, what justified the judgment that the family would not honor its pledge to open the door to INS agents if they came like civilians, in daylight, and asked for Elian?

Granted, in such an event there might have been crowd control work for the Miami police outside the house. But is one part of government justified in making nighttime assaults on homes in order to spare another part of government work?

Government and media did much to vilify the family before the paramilitary assault on it. A subtext of the Elian affair has been a tendency of many political and media people to render harsher judgments about Cuban Americans than about the dictator who drove them to America. However, Castro always has had fans.

When Jean-Paul Sartre, French philosopher and Stalinist, made a pilgrimage to Cuba shortly after Castro seized power, Castro squired him around. At a roadside stand they were served warm lemonade. Castro "growled" that the warm lemonade "reveals a lack of revolutionary consciousness." The waitress shrugged, saying the refrigerator was broken. Castro replied, "Tell your people in charge that if they don't take care of their problems, they will have problems with me."

Enthralled, Sartre later wrote: "This was the first time I understood--still quite vaguely--what I called `direct democracy.' Between the waitress and Castro, an immediate secret understanding was established."

Cuba still has "direct democracy": Cubans have no real elections (although on Sunday, during a pause in celebrating what he called the "shared victory" of the United States and Cuba, Castro "voted"), but they still can shrug their shoulders. And Castro still usefully causes some people to reveal their strange political views.

The farcical National Council of Churches has played its familiar role as friend of leftist tyrannies. And now the nation knows that there are people not unlike the man whom voters in the South Bronx have put into Congress. When Rep. Jose Serrano was asked three times on television "Is Cuba a free country?" his three answers were: "It's a sovereign country," "It's a country with a different system than ours", "I don't know. . . . I don't live there."

Castro has given America two benefits. He has caused many in public life, and especially in the media, to reveal the extent to which they favor such "shared victories." The other is the splendid Cuban American community which, as immigrants often do, has a livelier appreciation than many native-born Americans do of American values and their negation.

END

George Will

April 26, 2000
Digital Chicago Inc.
2000

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