Detroit Free Press from Detroit, Michigan • Page 192

droit 4ftee Stress INSIDE: Section Bob Talbert, Page 4 Jim Fitzgerald, Page 4 Hugh McDiarmid, Page 4 Call Comment, 222-2441 Far from home: Bush ignores "domestic stuff." Joe H. Stroud, Page 3 Sunday, July 28, 1991 Sunbathers gather at a lake north of Moscow. mXiL JyL 'rl'- 1.1 SUMMIT 1 MITCH I 3 fr'Km No neus, good news on road less traveled VI Liu SOVIET STYLE nh 1 'i-r-H ill ill 1 Tf J. i' Above: Customers check the quality of grapes from a Moscow street vendor. These people paid a price higher than they would have in government stores, but stock in those stores is limited.

Below: A woman and her dog rest on a Moscow street. There is scattered homelessness in the Soviet Union. took a vacation. I went to France. When I go away, I like to go far away, someplace where they don't speak English.

I do this not because I enjoy ordering what I think is a hamburger, only to have the waiter bring me ox brains. I do it because going someplace where they don't speak English is the only way to escape my addiction. My addiction is the news. When I am here, I cannot avoid it. The news greets me on my doorstep.

It hollers from my car radio. It is my life. My work. My addiction. The news.

Who's dead? Who's been elected? Who's been traded? Maybe it's different if you don't work in this business. All I know is, after a while, the news just finds me no matter where I am. And at some point each year usually when the weather gets hot I suddenly don't want to know anymore. I overdose. I turn off.

The stories are no longer absorbed. Instead, they pile on top of me like dead leaves. I am smothered. News sick. I cannot hear about another death.

I cannot hear about another drug bust. I cannot listen to another athlete complain that a million dollars is lunch money. There is only one cure for this: Go away. Where they don't speak English. I took a vacation.

I went to France. It worked. For a while. From French provincial I got a bicycle there. I went riding.

Every day, through the southern countryside of Provence, I pedaled my seven-speeder with a small group of friends, our wheels spinning tirelessly, gears clicking in rhythm. The roads were empty. The sun was hot. Like quiet wind, we whistled past olive groves and peach trees. Past vineyards thick with grapes.

Now and then we would glide by a farmer tending to his crop, and he would look up, wipe the sweat from his brow and shake his head at these fools on wheels, out in the heat when they didn't have to be. We said nothing. We rolled on. I liked that part, saying nothing. I was not there to talk.

I was there to disappear, to blend in, to smell the aroma of fruit trees, to feel the sweat dripping down my arms, a victim of the same French sunshine that baked the red tile roofs and left dogs panting under shade trees. This was what I wanted: to join the picture for once instead of analyzing it or reporting it. I gripped the handlebars of my bicycle and tried to forget about the U.S. trade deficit and the latest teenager to be shot for his sneakers. By the third day, it was working.

I felt clensed, lighter. I no longer felt the need to pull off the road and click on CNN. Instead, I ate breakfasts of fresh bread with jam, and listened to the crickets that sang in the trees. I walked through the water beneath an ancient bridge. I bought yellow plums from a vendor who had just picked them.

One day, while riding, a large bee flew into my face, startling me so much that I crashed into another cyclist and we both tumbled into the grass. Unhurt, we looked up and began to laugh uncontrollably, like kids who had just fallen into mud. The day was hot and dusty, and you could hear our laughter half a mile down the road. to Milwaukee madness This lasted two weeks, and when my plane touched down in Detroit, I was still feeling good. I had a nice tan and strong legs from all the cycling.

I vowed to continue my healthy eating, and went to the supermarket for fresh tomatoes and cucumbers. And at the supermarket I finally bought a newspaper. And this was the first story I read: A man in Milwaukee had been arrested for the murdering at least 17 people. He not only killed them drugged them, strangled them and cut their bodies into pieces but he also had sex with some of their corpses. He took pictures of them with arms missing, heads cut off.

There were even reports that he ate their dead flesh; he claimed to have cut one victim's heart out and put it in his freezer "to eat later." He told the police all this in a calm voice, and as I read it I felt the breath leave me, as if I'd been kicked in the stomach. Lord, how on earth is a man like this created? What happened in his childhood to turn him into such a monster? And all those victims! Their families, no doubt wondering where their sons had gone, now learning they are not only dead but in pieces, perhaps even eaten. Is there any understanding this? I felt a sudden shiver and then a familiar oozing, sinking feeling. The news. The news.

My job. My addiction. I was home. I folded the paper and put it in the bag. A humid breeze blew.

For a moment, I thought about France, the breads and jams, falling off my bicycle and laughing beneath the olive trees. And then I thought about this lunatic in Milwaukee, slicing the heads off his victims, licking his lips. And I realized, like most people who take a vacation from the news, that I already need another one. 1 It )9' 3 I 3, DAVID TURNLEYDetrolt Free Press Rut 1 frf I I AT ISSUE When Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev sits down this week for a superpower summit with President George Bush, a flurry of headlines will hail the two nations' agreement to reduce nuclear weaponry. It's a substantial agreement each side is agreeing to slash its long-range nuclear arsenals by 30 percent over a seven-year period.

The treaty will get little more than a shrug from Soviet citizens who instead are asking where's the beef or the bread, clothes, housing and other necessities of life that Gorbachev's domestic policies so far have failed to provide. But without the nuclear arms treaty, Gorbachev is unlikely to get the economic help his country desperately needs from the United States and other Western democracies. This report by Free Press staff writer Charles Mitchell and photographer David C. Turnley explores the dilemma Gorbachev faces on the domestic front and traces the Soviet leader's dramatic evolution that brought him to this week's summit in Moscow and Kiev. By Charles Mitchell Free Press Staff Writer here is no talk of triumph now.

The word heard most when political analysts mention Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev is survival. The Soviet leader, who will host President George Bush in Moscow and Kiev on Tuesday and Wednesday for the signing of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, is a changed man from the unyielding defender of the Soviet system who stared down President Ronald Reagan at their first summit meeting in Geneva in November 1985. There has been a remarkable evolution in Gorbachev and his views oh communism and the West since that get-acquainted summit. The man who once bragged the Soviets had nothing to learn from the West went cap-in-hand earlier this month to the world's capitalist leaders during the economic summit in London to seek advice as well as money. In the six years since he came to power, there has been an equally remarkable evolution of the West's perception of Gorbachev.

He has gone from a mystery to a global visionary to a besieged politician. For Gorbachev, this week's summit his third full summit with Bush will do little in the short term to keep the lid on his domestic troubles, which stem from his country's severe eco- See SUMMIT, Page 5G their will on society, says Richard Freeman, a Harvard University labor specialist. Unionism in the industrial sector had been eroding for decades. But it was Reagan's handling of the PATCO strike, along with his celebrated embrace of unfettered capitalism, that hammered home to unionists that they were no longer honored guests in the nation's corridors of power. They were on the outside looking in.

Now, the nation's air traffic controllers are organized into a new union, and are voicing many of See STRIKE, Page 6G Dnn. no amnes On the eve of another summit, and six years after unleashing change, Gorbachev walks a tightrope at home where support is evaporating Decade later, strike haunts air controllers and labor Stirring up politics of race, legislator basks in a ruckus Rep. Shirley Johnson recently said Jaye's race-baiting made her embarrassed to be a Republican. BY JOHN LIPPERT Free Press Labor Writer f'tf xux, VV11C1I iwu- il 1 1 a RS311 stod in the White House Rose Garden ill and said, "There will be no All 9 1 HQ1 negotiations ana extraordinaire. allies, constituents from his Macomb County district and conservative soul mates the state, say Jaye's antitax, and anti-affirmative action message is the agenda for often, it's not just what he It's how he says it.

Take his response to a recent question about why so minorities work in suburban departments: "They probably don't want to be They probably don't want to ooliticians. Thev probably don't BY JACQUELYNN BOYLE AND DAWSON BELL Free Press Lansing Staff LANSING If Republican Rep. David Jaye were a different animal, it might be a dinosaur. Aggressive, single-minded, without subtlety or self-doubt, Jaye is comfortable in his own (thick) skin. What is harder to know is whether he is indeed a throwback to the past or the harbinger of a new age.

His enemies in the Legislature and elsewhere would have you believe David Jaye is as he has been called at various times in the last three years a Nazi, a racist and a want caveman His north their across antiwelfare tomorrow. But says. interview few police cops. be ty," many U.S. unionists concluded he was talking not just about air traffic controllers, but about all of them.

President Reagan's decision to fire 11,500 striking members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization came ten years ago this week. It was "the symbolic event of the 1980s" that dramatized the inability of unions to impose like to be up north camping or having fun with their families. Different jobs appeal to different people. There's a risk to being a cop." That some would consider this a racial slur appears not to bother, or even occur, to Jaye. But it does bother some.

Rep. Shirley Johnson recently said Jaye's JAYE, Page 6G to be reporters. They probably.