Letters to the Editor: 10.31.96

Needs Truck Parts

East Hampton

October 27, 1996

Dear Editor,

This Tuesday is Election Day. I'll be up bright and early to get to the polls. What an exciting day it will be. Not only do I get to cast my vote for Bill Clinton, I get to choose a new East Hampton Town Trustee to fill the position of my lifelong friend, the late John Collins.

There are three men running for this very important position this year, Gregg de Waal of the Republican Party, Harold Bennett of the Democratic Party, and Stuart Vorpahl of the Independence Party.

While I don't know Gregg very well, he seems to be a nice fellow and is knowledgeable in Trustee matters.

Harold, on the other hand, I do know. He's a comrade of mine down at the Legion Post in Amagansett. When Harold walks into the place, he keeps us all in stitches. He's a great guy and would make a good Trustee. My only concern is that if elected he will no longer have time to come to the Legion. What would we all do for entertainment?

I've decided.

I'm going to vote for Stuart Vorpahl. I've got three very good reasons for doing so:

1. He's the most qualified candidate. No one knows more about Trustee business than Stuart. His knowledge is truly amazing.

2. Mary, his "bride," wants him out of the house.

3. He needs the money so that he can buy some jeep parts for his truck. Have you seen that thing coming down the road lately? I'm told that if the original owner were still alive, he'd now be 115 years old. What shade of green is that anyway?

See you at the polls.

Sincerely,

JOE HOLMES

Headed For A Fall

East Hampton

October 29, 1996

Dear Helen,

I always thought elephants had long memories, but Tom Knobel, Len Bernard, and Nancy McCaffrey, our local species, seem to suffer some genetic defect in this regard. Or else, they simply don't give a damn. But if they can't learn from history, they'll be headed for a great big fall.

Remember what happened in 1981-82, when the Republicans (in the name of fiscal responsibility, of course) abolished the Planning Department? The cry that went up in this community could be heard 'round the world. They had to backtrack on that one, and it cost them a stunning defeat at the polls the next year.

So go right ahead and forget about the lesson of Newt Gingrich too. All over the front page of every newspaper, on the screens of every TV, Mr. "slash and burn" can hardly show his face today. Certain kinds of extreme behavior just don't sit well with the American people. "Fair is fair," they say.

They also know how to recognize voodoo economics and false "savings" when they stare them in the face.

Closing the dump one day a week is a false economy and so is firing Peter Garnham and not hiring the workers necessary to run the plant efficiently. It's supposed to save us $35,000 in a $23 million budget, and that's like a family making $23,000 giving up one ice cream sundae a year.

But, if what they really want to do is kill the dump and say "we told you so" they're on the right track. It won't take long to find out what they have in mind for afterward - but it will probably involve cronies and secret deals with sleazy operators and cost the taxpayers an arm and a leg.

Leave it to the Republicans to come up with garbage once again! And what else is the plan to take the Supervisor's office and her staff from her and then relocate her in the boonies, so that a bunch of useless lawyers can whoop it up in bigger digs?

Talk about the "gender gap." That raunchy little ploy will not set well with the women in this town - nor with their fair-minded mates. Remember when they took the files and all out of Judy Hope's office? Then try to imagine them doing it to Tony Bullock, and you'll see how big their contempt for women is.

But this bit of nastiness isn't going to play well with the people of our town either. Cathy is smart and honest; she's "one of us;" - she's done a wonderful job, and you know you can trust her. I can't say that for the three Republicans trying to demean and humiliate her. Unite behind Cathy!

Any Republican who wants that office let him or her win it, fair and square, on Election Day. By the way you're going about it, though, I rather think the people will have had enough of elephants by then!

With best regards,

SILVIA TENNENBAUM

Foul Deception

Wainscott

October 18, 1996

Dear Helen,

Its gratuitous nastiness and falsehoods aside, your article on "Some Mother's Son" was raw anti-Irish propaganda of a particularly nasty kind, written by someone so eager to besmirch this brilliant new film that he didn't even bother to see it. Later I'm told he admitted it. Too bad none of your sharp-eyed editors spotted the foul deception before you allowed it to pollute the bright spirit of the Hamptons Film Festival.

Terry George, the writer and director, has made a film of uncommon passion and understanding of human nature. The only political propagandist here was The Star's designated hitter.

Sincerely,

SHANA ALEXANDER

Not 'Eirephobic'

East Hampton

October 24, 1996

Dear Helen Rattray,

On the afternoon of Friday, Oct. 17, on my way out of the Anjelica Huston talk at Guild Hall, a young member of your staff told me in a considerable state of alarm that you wanted to see me. I came to The Star's offices and was informed by you that a lawyer representing the maker of "Some Mother's Son," Terry George, had threatened a lawsuit against your newspaper. You were, to say the least, agitated.

At that meeting, you told me that the filmmakers had demanded that you publish a handbill apologizing for my article to be distributed to East Hampton during the Film Festival. This you rightly declined to do. At the same time, you accused me of "sloppy journalism" and demanded that I produce my sources for some of the claims made in my article.

The next day I faxed you two articles that discussed both the film and Mr. George's involvement in "the Troubles" in Northern Ireland. One was from The Irish Times of Dublin. The other was from The London Sunday Times. I shall quote from both later in this letter.

During the next few days, we had several subsequent conversations, during which you made it clear to me that Terry George's representatives had demanded that you publish an apology for several points made in my article. I believed - and still believe - that the correct procedure was to publish a correction of the one factual error contained in the article (which I shall discuss later). You made it clear that this would not satisfy Mr. George's lawyers and advised me that you were going to publish a much lengthier article. This appeared in last week's Star under the heading "Director and Producer Criticize Star Article."

To set the record straight: Four days before the opening of the Film Festival, I offered you an opinion piece about the movie "Some Mother's Son." Just as one of the producers claims the intention in making the film was to "make people think," I saw my article as an admittedly contentious starting point for discussion about the tragic, and painful, issues involved in the conflict in Northern Ireland.

We agreed that the piece was not to be a film review. You already had one of those. Rather, my piece was to be an op-ed that sought to give your readers, and people who might go and see the film, some background information about the nature of the struggle in Northern Ireland and about the filmmaker Terry George.

For that reason - and not, as Ed Burke suggested in his letter, because I felt myself "unencumbered by the constraints of journalistic integrity" - I did not regard it as essential that I see the film. Due to the deadline set for the piece, I had no way of doing so before the opening of the festival, anyway, something I asked you to make clear in your article of Oct. 24. This you declined to do, saying only that "Mr. Worrall has now seen the film and said he plans to write a letter to the editor next week about his response."

The views expressed in that article were the exercise of my democratic right to speak out about an issue I feel strongly about, not, incidentally, because I have any particular ax to grind. I am British, that's true, though if anyone tells me that makes me a supporter of brutality, I will tell them they are wrong. William Blake and Samuel Taylor Coleridge are my "heroes," not the Earl of Essex or Oliver Cromwell.

I am not "Eirephobic," either, as one of your readers suggested. How could I be, when my great-grandfather was an engraver from Dublin named Whelan, and my cousins in Eire bred and raced some of the most beloved Irish racehorses of the century? I have also been told that one of the best pieces I have ever written was a feature about The Book of Kells which was published all over the world.

In it, I suggested it was a "miracle" that the book was saved from destruction while "Oliver Cromwell's Protestant Red Guards looted and slaughtered their way across the island of saints and scholars."

I do, however, profoundly disagree with sectarianism and the romanticism of political violence, and those who advocate or condone them. I believe, as a very great Irishman, W.B. Yeats, also believed, that the Irish people are badly served by them. If this had been a film about Protestant paramilitaries, I would have said the same things. I also intended no malice toward the filmmaker.

I did, however, want to inform the people of this community which, since 1991, has been my home, who and what they were dealing with. Northern Ireland is a long way from East Hampton, and the complexities of the situation can easily get lost on the way. Gunmen can become confused with heroes.

People in Northern Ireland know better: like the young Catholic woman from Londonderry I met on a plane to London last Christmas. When I asked her if she identified with Gerry Adams, she said this: "Of course I don't. I grew up in a strict Catholic family, so the idea of killing people for your beliefs was absolutely out of the question. My mother, who brought us up in a very religious way, always said that it had nothing to do with religion, or a united Ireland, anyway. The I.R.A. and Sinn Fein, she used to say, it's just a money racket. Same as the Protestant gangs. Then, after I left school, I worked as a nurse in the emergency room at Londonderry's main hospital. I saw the knee-cappings and the burns, the killings and the beatings. Just as many of them were on their own people, too. Now, will you tell me how was I going to support Gerry Adams, after seeing that lot?"

In the course of my article, however, I did make one error of fact - an error that I regret. It was bad journalism. Mr. George was never, as I claimed, a member of the Irish National Liberation Army. He was a member of a group called the Irish Republican Socialist Party. The circumstances of Mr. George's arrest, which led to his serving three years in a Belfast prison on a firearms charge (something he has never sought to deny) do, however, raise awkward questions, questions that Mr. George has never satisfactorily answered.

I will here quote two passages from recent articles in the Irish and British press. The first is from The Irish Times of Sept. 13, 1996.

"George is reluctant to discuss his own involvement in the Troubles. . . ." Interned in 1972 at the age of 19, he became involved with the I.R.S.P. on his release and was arrested in a car in which a gun was found. He was sentenced in 1975 and spent three years in the political compound at Long Kesh . . . in age, background, and personal history, his story is very similar to that of the hunger-strikers themselves."

The second is from The London Sunday Times of Sept. 15, 1996: "It is well known by now that Terry George . . . was a naughty boy in the 1970s. He got locked up . . . on a six-year sentence for possessing a loaded gun, along with other luminaries in the Irish National Liberation Army. Our picture, taken at the time, shows, from left, Dessie Grew, Gerard Steenson, George, John Knocker, and P. MacNeice. Steenson, a.k.a. Dr. Death, was in a car with George when the weapons [sic] were found. While George gave up terrorism on his release, Steenson applied himself very enthusiastically. That all came to a sticky end when his I.N.L.A. comrades murdered him in 1987."

Your readers will have to decide what those two excerpts say - or don't say - about Mr. George and his sympathies.

One of the real achievements of his film "Some Mother's Son," which I have now had a chance to see, is the way that George uses the Helen Mirren character (Mrs. Quigley) as a decoy to confuse our suspicions about those sympathies. We are told, for instance, that this is a film about the dilemma faced by two women caught in "the universal tragedy of war." In truth, there is little "dilemma."

To explain what I mean, I would like to draw a parallel much closer to home. Imagine: You are a hard-working single mother who has spent her life avoiding violent political feuds, when you find that your son has been arrested for bombing an F.B.I. building with other members of a radical militia group in Montana.

Like the young men in the film, he believes that he is being oppressed by a tyrannical central government. Like them, he refused to recognize the courts and the laws of the legitimate Government of the United States. Like them, he begins a hunger strike with his fellow militiamen, to win the right to wear battle fatigues, rather than a prison uniform.

What do you do? Do you, as the Helen Mirren character does, unquestioningly join forces with a dyed-in-the-wool supporter of the militia and its agenda (the Mrs. Higgins character in the film)? Do you start marching with the militiamen and their families in support of the hunger strike? Wouldn't you be incredibly suspicious of anyone trying to make political capital out of your son's self-starvation? Would you so blithely join a campaign to elect one of the jailed militiamen to Congress?

Surely, at the same time as trying to save your son, you would adamantly distance yourself from his militia politics. You would plead with the authorities that your son was just a confused young man who had got mixed up with the wrong people. Above all, wouldn't you be incredibly angry? Wouldn't you be torn to pieces by the "dilemma" in which you find yourself?

But, until right at the end of the film, Mr. George allows Helen Mirren no such moments of doubt or anger. This becomes clear if you study what the Mirren character does, not what she says. She says, for instance, after her son stuffs a message down her throat with his tongue (a gross violation of "her space," if ever there was one) that she will not be used as a stooge for the I.R.A.

In the next scene she promptly becomes one, as she not only reads the message to her new "friend," Mrs. Higgins, but delivers it to Sinn Fein (the I.R.A.'s political front). She says she wants nothing to do with that organization, but by the end of the film she is marching at the head of their parades, distributing their leaflets, and attending funerals where masked gunmen salute the I.R.A.'s glorious dead with volleys of gunfire.

No, the filmmaker does not use Mrs. Quigley to explore the dilemmas of war. Rather, he charts the political induction of an uncommitted woman into one of the two camps currently causing such suffering in Northern Ireland. Helen Mirren's real function is to sweeten the Republican pill Mr. George wants us to swallow. No other options, or modes of feeling, are allowed her.

The manipulation of our sympathies when it comes to Mr. George's portrayal of the jailed I.R.A. operatives is less subtle. The scene in which a group of schoolgirls dance a Celtic jig as an I.R.A. gunman runs through the woods with a rocket-propelled grenade over his shoulder, the way Mr. George intercuts their feet pounding on the floor with shots of the gunmen preparing to attack a convoy of British soldiers, is a deeply ominous glorification of political violence.

Mr. George and his co-writer, Jim Sheridan, stated at Bay Street Theatre that this was their favorite scene. I am sure it would have been Leni Reifenstahl's too.

The domestic cameos which precede and follow that scene establish the leading characters (two I.R.A. gunmen) as good Catholic lads with winning smiles and a touch of the Daniel Boone. The fact that they arrive for Christmas dinner at their relatives' remote farmhouse (a "safe house") not with mistletoe and Christmas pudding, but Semtex and Kalishnikovs, is, evidently, beside the point.

This is a war, Mr. George is telling us, and a just one. The "villains" are the British Special Forces troops crouching in the darkness with their spooky hi-tech gear. I beg to differ. But then I would. My father was a highly decorated member of Special Operations Executive in World War II who, while the I.R.A. landed German guns on Irish beaches, risked his life to save us from another violent, undemocratic group.

This pattern continues as the film moves inside the prison. The line delivered to Bobby Sands - "You look like Jesus Christ" - is treated, at first, as a throwaway. But as the film progresses, Mr. George uses every cinematic trick he can to invest that statement with real meaning.

In Mr. George's sanctification of the terrorists, Bobby Sands does indeed become a Christ figure, his fellow I.R.A. operatives, his disciples. The candlelit processions in the street, the mass held on the floor of the jail, and the El Greco beards and lighting are all used to further enhance the impression that the hunger-strikers are not men who have been convicted of violent crimes, but martyrs for a just and noble cause.

Turn up W.B. Yeats's poem, "On a Political Prisoner," for a different view. There, he describes the prisoner, a beautiful young woman he once knew whose mind has become "a bitter and abstract thing" because of her fanatical convictions, as "blind and leader of the blind/Drinking the fould ditch where they lie."

Some people have suggested that, at the end of the film, the Helen Mirren character does renounce the warring factions by choosing her son's life over his political convictions. In truth, and this is extremely cunning of Mr. George, by that point her "conversion" is almost irrelevant. The ideological arguments (like the one whether the hunger-strikers are "criminals" or "prisoners of war") have already been won, with Mr. George's help, by Sinn Fein and the I.R.A. This is confirmed by the two messages tacked onto the end of the film, one listing the names of the dead "martyrs," the other reporting British "capitulation" to their demands.

By that point, Mr. George has telegraphed us numerous subliminal messages as well. As a group of school girls crosses the street, he has a red-headed girl stop defiantly in front of a British armored vehicle. It is clear who he wishes us to sympathize with. But in case we don't get it, he places behind the armored car a slogan painted in huge letters on the wall of a building. It says: "Join the I.R.A."

Sincerely yours,

SIMON WORRALL

According to John Scanlon, whose letter also appears today,the photograph referred to in The London Sunday Times was not taken at the time of arrest, but in prison afterward. Mr. Scanlon also forwarded an op-ed article by Terry George which appeared in The New York Times and International Herald Tribune last summer. In it, Mr. George pleads for peace. "If peace is to prevail," he says, "we must encourage the peace faction to unite, and actively help them overwhelm the war faction." Another point in the London Times article was clarified by a spokeswoman for Mr. George, who said Mr. George did not have a gun in his personal possession, although British law allowed him to be sentenced as if he had. Ed.