The Time Remaining

9

59 9 “Could you please read the last passage back to me, Raya?” Gilchrist asks. Raya prints out the page she has just typed and reads, supplying, as Gilchrist has insisted, the punctuation marks as she goes. “If a person persists in his dissent in the country in question (comma) he may be arrested as a public annoyance with the hope that a temporary incarceration will cure him of his problem (period) If (comma) upon his release (comma) he returns to his former habits (comma) he is usually remanded to a mental hospital to be treated for mental imbalance (period) If this does not result in his recanting his views publicly (comma) he is destined for internal exile or prison where he is reminded daily that he is a ward of the state that he has betrayed by his actions (period) Dissent is thus seen as heresy (period) Heresy is treason (comma) and treason is incompatible with the official view of whatever the official view happens to be (period) If this resembles the profile of more than one country in our century (comma) it is probably because it could very well be the profile of a good many (period)” “You might delete the last sentence, Raya. I think it makes the point after the point has already been made.” Gilchrist is still thinking of how he can further refine the paragraph when Raya asks, “Are you writing about what has happened in Palestine?” “Not specifically. What happened there has a lot of old colonial politics attached to it and a lot of power politics as well. Israel and the United States play the power game better than most, but it all comes down to strengthening the relationship between the two, and anyone who challenges that can count on being called everything in the book.” He pauses. “We use Israel when it’s in our interest, and they return the favor. It’s called the game of nations.” 60 | The Time Remaining What Gilchrist does not tell Raya is how the Israeli government has now allied Israel with various dictatorial countries in Latin America, providing them with arms, money, and “advisers” and even offering the guaranteed services of their lobby with the Senate and House of Representatives in Washington. He keeps to himself how the Israeli leaders stress their democratic traditions when in effect they keep supporting some of the most repressive regimes in the hemisphere with the means to remain repressive. When congressmen who returned from Latin America raised this issue in closed congressional hearings or even in the press, they were told by members of the Central Intelligence Agency that such “support from a responsible ally gave the United States leverage with those countries that it would not otherwise have.” In one of his columns he almost called “Pimp and Circumstance,” Gilchrist described the implications that he thought this had for the United States. This earned him the usual barrage of letters and denunciations, including one from the responsible ally’s ambassador, who wrote, “When you are in the business of arms manufacture, you have the right, even the obligation , to sell to anyone who has the money to buy. That’s simply freemarket capitalism on an international scale.” Gilchrist was tempted to reply that nations were not exactly the counterparts of department stores and that those who sold arms to known tyrants had to share at least some of the guilt when those arms were used to kill defenseless people, but he decided against it. The ambassador would probably have compared the sale of Uzis to the sale of diamonds and proceeded to shift the argument into the sphere of free trade, and Gilchrist’s argument would have been lost in the give-and-take. “But a lot of what you have written applies directly to us,” says Raya. “Maybe, but remember that when something is happening to you directly, you tend to see it in terms of everything else, and you also see everything else in terms of it. It’s human nature.” “But you describe the situation perfectly.” “Well, regardless of that, I’d appreciate it if you’d print out all we’ve done here in a final draft, and that will finish what we came to Saranac to do. After that, we’ll have some dinner, and I’ll drive you to the airport, and you’ll be back in Washington with your uncle in time for a snack and [3.140.185.123...