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| A Tale of Two Old Men |
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| John Paul and Fidel party in Cuba |
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This is Dark Cloud on Wednesday, January 21, 1998. Today, perhaps at this moment, Fidel Castro and Pope John Paul are starting a five day program of mutual self-justification and grotesque hypocrisy. It has become a tiresome subject, Cuba, much like Northern Ireland and the Middle East, by which is meant Israel and its neighbors. Two principal adversaries, neither as they represent themselves, maneuvering for face time with the camera to enact theatrical set pieces unconvincing to first grades in any language. Fidel Castro - once a hero - is now exposed as a typical communist fraud. Like all socialist parties in power, somehow the head guy never gets voted out or down, and we are to believe that nobody else will do. The argument is, of course, that the people want Fidel as President, and that may be true, but it is his duty to create a government that will survive without him, and he hasn’t done that or shown any interest in doing so. He’s just a demagogue like all the others. That said, he is probably a step up after the rule by American Mafia that preceded him. Still, the pundits say he’s taking a risk to let the Pope in while he’s on his last legs, that he’s underlining communism’s failure and Cuba’s foggy future. Not hardly. Cuba’s future is pretty clear. Castro dies; the new government softens or tosses communism, the appalling pseudo-Cuban Miamians purchase vacation homes outside Havana and Cuba heads towards non-entity status. What nobody chats about, apparently in deference to a man in his late seventies with Parkinson’s and a bullet wound, is that Catholicism is about to crash. Absurd? Hardly. The differences between that religion’s nationalities are far greater than between Catholicism and the Lutherans. The socialist padres of Latin America would be excommunicated if not shot by the nearly fascist priests of certain French cities, and both of those extremes would be appalled by the intellectual mushiness of the American Church, itself in holding pattern over abortion and sexual transgressions of some men of the collar, which is to say homosexual rape. The priests who bless the corrida in Malaga have no peer in the United States. And virtually nobody in the Curia has a clue what it’s like in the hovels of the world. The Cardinals, as a rule, are nobodies in their own nations, whose utterances are banal and unheard. The Church, as a religion and intellectual force, is dying if not dead. It could fight communism, it can’t fight scrutiny, or survive it. And who better to symbolize that than the man who must have children hand him dirt to kiss, who cannot stand or walk without help, who looks more and more like an illustration from that Book of Gnomes. A man who stood on every reactionary side of every debate except one where he stood with powerful allies, and only because his native land was oppressed. It is heartening to think that maybe we are watching the last combat between different ignorances, and the struggle between John Paul and Fidel will soon be as absurd to the general reader as the dual Papacy, The Vietnam War, or Microsoft and Apple. |
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