The Miami Herald from Miami, Florida • 59

Monday May 4 1987 The Miami Herald 15A UievjpoSnts Waldheim barred but not punished Yugoslavia which charged him with murder after World War II seem eager to try him today Austria certainly want to and Israel is even less interested By LARS-ERIK NELSON AUSTRIAN Chancellor Kurt Waldheim spent World War II in the midst of horrendous crimes of which he has said: 1 He in the German army 2 If you can prove he was in the German army he anywhere near the war crimes 3 If you can prove he was near the war crimes he know about them 4 If you can prove he knew about them he take part in them After a year of studying war record the Justice Department finally announced last week that it was placing him on its "Watch which means he cannot enter the United States unless he wants to visit the United Nations in which case maybe he can enter the United States after all By barring Waldheim from the United States the Justice Department served the letter of US law but it may not have served justice Waldheim is now being portrayed in Austria as a martyr to US politics and the Jewish lobby an honorable soldier of the Reich who has been dragged through the mud because he wanted an honorable peace for Arabs The blame for this denial of reality is partly and partly ours There is a cuteness to the Justice position that leaves an opening for evasion Despite all the evidence and all its investigation Justice will not actually say that Waldheim committed war crimes Why not? Because it have to The level of proof needed to bar Waldheim from entry to the United States is less than would be want to and Israel is even less interested Many Israelis even question the wisdom after all these years of trying accused death-camp guard John Demjanjuk the Cleveland auto worker against whom the evidence of atrocities is far-more substantial Rep Stephen Solarz D-NY who has been in the forefront of the efforts to expose war record acknowledges that the evidence against him is not perfect would be difficult to justify the use of a word like Solarz said is very strong evidence sufficient to reach a finding that he should be on the Watch List and there is documentary evidence linking him to German army units that engaged in war crimes But whether he himself actually committed war crimes is not incontrovertible It gives him a little opportunity to wiggle off the Wiggle he will As long as there is doubt about his actual wartime deeds his fellow Austrians will feel compelled to defend him known charges against President Kurt Waldheim are not proven and are therefore Austrian Chancellor Franz Vranitzky said Until some one assembles an irrefutable case against Waldheim we are left with accusations that stop short of branding him a war criminal but which imply that he is and with injured denials Oh yes and a penalty placing his name on the Watch List that both trivializes the alleged offense and makes him a martyr in the eyes of his countrymen New Yorfe Daily News needed to convict him of atrocities All Justice needs to do in the words of spokesman Terry Eastland is demonstrate that he "assisted or otherwise participated in activities amounting to persecution during World War The evidence against Waldheim on this level is substantial He concealed his war record He received a medal from the Croatian puppet government for helping to organize mass deportation of Yugoslavs to slave labor camps He drafted orders targeting Yugoslav villages for German army reprisals that included the summary execution of civilians He turned Allied prisoners of war apparently including US commandos over to the Gestapo for torture and execution Are these war crimes? for a court to a Justice Department official said The trouble is that no court is going to try Waldheim Yugoslavia which charged him with murder after World War II doesn't seem eager to try him today Austria certainly Spanglish off the streets and onto the bookshelves By CARLOS ALBERTO MONTANER MADRID Spanish is giving birth Its offspring is a mixture as happens when languages crossbreed but it is being delivered And the babe is starting to grow to move about freely and to kick up its literary heels in books on television programs and in other media manifestations I refer of course to Spanglish But not to Spanglish as a contemptible corruption of the Spanish spoken by Hispanics in the United States Rather I refer to Spanglish as an expressive beautiful and creative vehicle voluntarily used by American intellectuals of Hispanic origin who when writing feel more at home in Spanglish than in either Spanish or English And now these intellectuals even have a good novelist the writer Ralph Rewes and a theoretician Gustavo Prez Firmat a professor at Duke University and one of the most valuable heads thinking about literature in the United States An article-cum-manifesto by Prez Fir-mat in which every word tells appeared in the Caribbean Review the best of its kind He called it Spic Chic because that is the contemptuous name for Hispanics in the United States and because Prez Firmat wanted to highlight the positive values of the language of a large segment of the Latins who live in the United States The arguments that the professor uses are compelling: is one thing to live in confrontation with the values of society and something very different to live in confrontation with your own language When the language of daily life is English and the language of literature is Spanish the outcome is a frightening dissociation between the real being and the literary And if that real being if those millions of real express themselves in Spanglish if they love dream or get mad in Spanglish is there any reason they should not give their language a literature that matches the experiences they are having? Do the purists gnash their teeth when they read that "Usmail (a name derived from US Mail) went with his pana (friend) to the marqueta (market in standard Spanish mercado after llamar para atras (calling back in standard Spanish devolver la llamada the principal (in standard Spanish director) of the school?" All right that will make them gnash their teeth but it is not the intent of writers from the Bronx Los Angeles or Dade County to keep the purists happy much less to worry about their learned gums but to have the art that they are creating in their Hispanic ghettos somehow reflect the circumstances of their lives And their lives whether the members of the Royal Spanish Academy like it or not take place in the context of a rough-hewn Spanglish not in the more-or-less correct Spanish of Madrid Buenos Aires or Mexico City There should be no apology Spanglish must be welcomed with at least the same generosity as for half a century millions of us Spanish speakers have been moved to accept that incomprehensible tango in which an unfortunate Buenos Aires woman is accused of the dough at the and for good measure continuing to play Trickster the cat with the poor However Spanglisn is probably even more complex than the low-life cant of Argentina because while fortunately there is only one of these Spanglish has three quite distinct dialects: The Chicano of the Mexican-Americans the Newyori-can of the Puerto Ricans and the Cubarriqueno or Cubichano of the Cuban Americans of Miami All three have their literature their considerable poets their clever television programs (such as Que pasa USA?) and their growing markets commercially capable of supporting the products of their creators And to aggravate the situation none of the three large Hispanic communities of the United States is interested in what befalls the other two which confines literature in Spanglish to the particular limits of the dialect of each ghetto and to simultaneous melancholy resignation to the fact that whatever is done however valuable it may be simply will not awaken any interest within the Spanishspeaking world in either Spain or Latin America and much less of course within the English-speaking world For now a long now I fear it will be a ghetto literature as good as those who cultivate it but of no importance Until one day Until the day let us say when the world will do justice to some prodigious tale spinner in that hybrid bastard tongue Until one day an Isaac Bashevis Singer makes his appearance in Spanglish letters Because Yiddish was also a scorned omniumgatherum of a language as is Spanglish now Until they gave it the Nobel Prize FIRMAS Press Agency Possessiveness has given us a paranoid society By JORGE ARANGO Board of Contributors Internationally known architect Jorge Arango of Miami is the author of The Urbanization of Earth He is one of The special contributors who analyze for this page issues affecting Floridians killing each other to get there fast? Why are we making what should be the most important and the only thing we really have our lives into a turmoil in which the best moments for some people are those in which the conscious is blurred by alcohol drugs intense excitement or absorbing entertainment? Is this something we all have to expect in the 20th Century? Is this something we want or something fatal we have to endure? Is this true of everybody everywhere? Is this the price of what we call No it is not necessary to go through life with frenzy No it is not necessary to kill and to get killed No it is not necessary to dope yourself in order to make life livable Yes life is not a trip on a rose cloud fortunately it is not Life is a marvelous gift that has to be worked with love just as anything else we care for And just as a painting is not all light or all dark but a combination of both in a harmonious way life has to be carefully and artistically put together by ourselves ed on those things The fact is that in order to stand to suffer this continuous and strenuous living this desperate false fear for survival we need things for another reason We need them to fill the large emptiness of our lives to console ourselves for the lack of real friends to substitute what at one time was the warm feeling of having a real family the immediate one and also the other the larger one That one is a society in which we felt secure and loved instead of pushed and threatened Why do we have so much crime? Because more and more individuals feel that they have been left out Because we have encouraged them to want things beyond their potential beyond their own capability to earn them and in general because we have come to believe that what happens to others is their problem Drugs in some cases have become not a curse but a need Some people need alcohol cocaine or heroin in order to cope with a condition that otherwise will make them lose their mind Paranoia is a thousand times more common than statistics tell us A young woman recently back from a visit to a foreign country was telling me how scared she was of people offering her help and hospitality and how ashamed she soon felt upon realizing that her fears were unfounded and that kindness and generosity still exist and in some places are not all for sale Yes we have more things than anybody else in the world but are we aware that our fear of losing them is pushing our society into paranoia? We educate our youth toward the idolatry of things We want them to produce more and consume more things We have come to believe that we are right that that is the way the future will be for everybody everywhere But are we sure? we taken the wrong alley? Those are not the qualities that have created great and lasting civilizations in the past Large amounts of things create great market places and those are short-lived Great civilizations are made of great men IT IS EXCITING to watch the price of thousands of stock go up and down to witness a continuous growth in the production and in the retail volume of sales to experience the ever-increasing mileage of roads and vehicles using them to see more and more buildings being built All of this is very exciting and gives us a feeling of stimulation of seeing that Yes it is possible there is continuous progress Maybe soon we think we could achieve what we want Yes it is very possible and probably soon and we all run and push a little and get hurt a little and then what? We think we get there but there is nothing there What is happening to all of us who are making living such a cruel experience? Why are we The Industrial Era has made possible the manufacture of things with relative ease What men always wanted now we can have but then we want more and more Greed is a cancer that invades the soul and demands more and more and more until things instead of being a possession become possessive until we instead of having them become the subject of their greed Yes because things have greed and they want to have more and more of us But I do not believe that the Industrial Era is either a panacea or a felon Maybe we have been giving too much importance to things and forgotten the people We are people and we sometimes forget that part of ourselves When we think we are being to ourselves or to others we again think of things When we want to show love we give things As a country we think we treat people better than anybody else in the world because we provide them with things It is obvious that there is a minimum amount of things needed and that it is nice to have them But man can live with very little and we have a lot In fact the common man today in most of the Western World has more than the privileged had in Athens or Florence when those cities were producing outstanding men We do not give others humanity because in our feverish dash for the acquisition of things we have become selfish and insensitive as if living in a continuous emergency as if our lives depend Governors show the 'right stuff THE ART The wandering ear Presidential hopefuls draw on executive experience By JAMES KILPATRICK STAND back! I am working on a theory and when I work on a theory it is time to move back the sofa and put out the cat The theory is to this effect that many of the errors that flaw our newspapers are products of the wandering ear Writers complete a sentence Then they read it back but they read not with their eyes but with their ears You be the judge Not long ago United Press International had a story about a man engaged in a fast He was week on the sixth About the same time a Southern paper told us of a diet that would take off 20 pounds six In Harrisburg Pa a writer speculated on the culture clash American workers meat their Japanese bosses" Another writer spoke of the futility of trying to get a car out of feat ot snow" Now these may have been examples of the ordinary off-the-rack everyday typographical errors that result when a finger hits the wrong key My theory holds that the writers knew perfectly well the difference between weak and week meet and meat feet and feat But they read their copy not with their eyes but with their ears and their ears deceived them More Horrid Examples: This past December The Indiana Student described a party that would feature "Christmas wassail and plumb A couple of years ago (you readers do hang on to vintage clippings) The Odessa (Texas) American spoke of throwing manuscripts a bombfire" The eye may have seen but the ear heard Bombfire and bonfire sound pretty much alike What my theory charitably excludes is the vice of sheer carelessness The Durham (NC) Herald recounted the experience of a school-bus driver whose vehicle slipped off an icy road: had to bring out a wench and pull us out" Some wench! The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reviewed a couple of movies featuring Richard Chamberlain they were both stinkers that Indiana Jones could sue for deformation of character" really twisting things around In Florida we learned of a Miami-based retailer who the seeds of its own In Pennsylvania a garden columnist told us how to get rid of moles: a roller over the tunnels rake over mounds of soil and sew grass seed over These far-apart ears heard and so it goes Universal Press Syndicate By DAVID BRODER BOSTON Few students of American politics seem to recognize that the statehouse has become the path to the White House In the last two decades no one has been elected President- who has not previously run for governor of his state To be sure a bit misleading because the list includes Richard Nixon who failed in his bid for governor of California in 1962 but was elected President on his second try in 1968 Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan went from the gubernatorial office to the Oval Office a pattern that has inspired at least three candidacies this year Former Govs Pierre duPont (R) of Delaware and Bruce Babbitt (D) of Arizona were the first formal entrants in their sweepstakes Last week Massachusetts Gov Michael Dukakis (D) threw his hat into the ring seeking to become the first sitting governor since Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 to win the White House Down in Little Rock Gov Bill Clinton (D) is weighing whether to join the chase While none of the contending governors has escaped the dark-horse category all are showing assets at this early stage Babbitt is generally credited with having the best organizational skeleton in Iowa the first caucus state This week he starts targeted TV spots aimed at luring additional recruits This is by far the earliest use of paid media in the contest DuPont showed well in a recent Republican in Cedar Rapids where he has the support of Ron Mosher a local insurance executive who was formerly Delaware's budget director Cedar Rapids may be strongest nucleus of support in Iowa but it is not unusual now to hear knowledgeable politicians speculate that the strong third-place showing he achieved there (behind Vice President George Bush and Sen Bob Dole of Kansas) could in time be repeated elsewhere around the state As for Dukakis thanks to Boston television and a strong stand on the Seabrook nuclear power plant that appealed to liberal activists and environmentalists he is displaying early strength in New Hampshire site of the first primary Two newspaper polls have shown Dukakis even with or slightly ahead of the presumed front-runner former Sen Gary Hart in New Hampshire No other challenger has gained such a position vis-a-vis Hart in any state polls There is no mystery why the governors and former governors have seemingly found a formula for success in Presidential politics Voters instinctively recognize that executive experience is the best training for a Chief Executive And there is a reality to the gubernatorial records that penetrates even as thick a membrane of political cynicism as surrounds many voters in this era For example Rep Jack Kemp has expounded theories for years But none of his arguments carry quite the persuasive power of simple statement that in his eight years as governor he taxes 30 percent and increased the supply of jobs 20 Similarly Babbitt has established his credibility with Iowa environmentalists not just by joining them in their bike hike across the state but by telling of his successful battles to save some of the magnificent geography of his state from exploitative developers And Dukakis benefits from the demonstrated economic success Massachusetts has achieved during his years as governor Richard Licht the Democratic lieutenant governor of Rhode Island showed up for Dukakis's announcement rally here the other day eager to endorse seen the growth Licht said benefited from the spillover in our Governors are in fact in the forefront of the fight for more and better jobs for responsible budgeting for effective social and education programs and for balanced environmental protection At a time when Federal policy innovation has been circumscribed by mounting budget deficits and an anti-government ideology the states do to the as the title of a recent publication by the Council of State Governments put it Voters in state after state have seen their governors step up to the challenges facing this society So when a governor or former governor runs for President voters are prepared to take him a bit more seriously than they do other itinerant aspirants flashing fancy Federal Government credentials If you suspect that I find this voter tendency to be a demonstration of great common sense you are right again Washington Post Writers Croup.