NO GRACE SHED ON ‘AMERIKA’ : What if They Gave a War and Nobody Wanted to Talk About It?

Once we had the Red Scare. Now it appears that we have a touch of an “Amerika” scare. It’s not nearly as insidious, but it contains similar undertones of anxiety and misgiving, a kind of atmospheric aversion to open discussion.

A number of politicians have availed themselves to petitions and letters of protest over the anti-Soviet and anti-United Nations depictions in the ABC miniseries, calling them “unrealistic” and “damaging to international relations.” But not many people in public life, or experts on the Soviet Union, have wanted to talk openly to Calendar about the subject.

“I don’t think he’d want to talk about that sort of thing,” said an aide to former President Richard Nixon. A spokesman for former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance said: “He doesn’t believe it could happen. It’s a silly story. He doesn’t want to comment.”

The office of Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security affairs assistant to President Jimmy Carter, dutifully took Calendar’s request for an interview and reported back: “He won’t discuss it. He says it could never happen.” (The irony here is that Brzezinski is from Poland, where it did happen.)

The office of former President Jimmy Carter refused on his behalf. The office of Henry Kissinger more tactfully reported him as in transit and unavailable. Alexander Haig was reported “lost in the snow somewhere” (Washington had been socked in under a blizzard) and then was out of the country.

A call to the Soviet Embassy in Washington for Vladimir Posner, who frequently pops up whenever Soviet matters are in the news, was referred to the Embassy’s press section, where no one was ever in.

News of “Amerika’s” content as a 14 1/2-hour conservative propaganda program has been seeping out like marsh gas ever since Elliot Richardson, who served as secretary of defense and attorney general in the Nixon-Ford administrations, read up on “Amerika’s” script and worried about it a year ago in a letter to ABC’s Entertainment President Brandon Stoddard. Richardson called it “an apparently McCarthy-esque presentation (that) sounds like a very strong political statement under the guise of entertainment.”

In a letter to the New York Times last month, George Kennan, who is a former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union and professor emeritus at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, deplored “Amerika,” sight unseen, as a “scenario devoid of reality.”

Dean Rusk did talk. “Utter nonsense!” said the former Secretary of State of the show, also sight unseen.

“I don’t know why anyone indulges in fantasies under the pretext of real feelings we can do without,” he said. “The program is irresponsible, unless you have Ted Koppel come on to say that it’s a fiction, a fantasy. We’re hitting our young people with Doomsday talk. “It’s been 41 years since a nuclear war weapon has been fired in anger. There’s no way the Russians could try to take over. There’d be no Soviet Union left. We enjoy criticizing our leaders. It’s easy to criticize Soviet leaders as well. But they’re not idiots. They have no more interest in destroying Mother Russia than we have to destroy our beloved America. Apparently this program not only bashes the Soviet Union, it bashes the United Nations as well. It’s utterly outrageous.”

How is it that rumblings of thunder on the right have met with silence at the top?

Why are so many people reluctant to talk about this? It may be because it’s just, you know, a television series , which traditionally can take any theme of history and human suffering and banalize it to the point of stupefaction.

It’s just an entertainment, right? A fiction. Maybe the political mind, being essentially deductive, is uncomfortable commenting on the creative mind, which tends to be inductive.

And who can feel any degree of responsibility commenting on a program without having seen it? Realpolitik is hazardous enough; who needs to get caught up in ignorant speculation?

Most of these folks pick up a wad of phone messages every day that could choke a horse. What’s the value of talking to an arts-entertainment publication about a TV show when there undoubtedly are more realistic concerns pressing?

What is regrettable is not the demurrals--the road to political hell is paved with impromptu public remarks--but the reasons. To say that “Amerika” is beneath comment is to say that there’s no point in discussing totalitarianism if you’re going to use George Orwell’s “1984” as a starting point, because fiction and empirical reality are incompatible.

Perhaps since “Amerika” does fall under the rubric of fiction, politicians feel constrained to comment on what is, after all, a matter of artistic license. But it’s become apparent from so many reports that “Amerika” has crossed over the boundary of entertainment into a propaganda piece beamed into millions of homes.

What is it that “Amerika” is showing us that’s so pernicious, outrageous or absurd? Shouldn’t we expect some commitment to intellectual clarity from our experts and political spokesmen?