‘Reagan Faces a Gut Check’

Come on now, Michael Novak, get off your high ideological horse. Look at the sad circumstances your arrogance and cynicism create in your article (Editorial Pages, April 10), “Reagan Faces a Gut Check on His Nicaragua Policy.” The crude, polarized representations you draw of a defender of the right-good guy-us versus a filthy Mongol horde-bad guy-them just don’t play in post-Vietnam War reality.

The price the world ends up paying to indulge your type in their paranoid obsessions--the price paid anytime a strong nation attempts to annihilate a weaker nation’s right to self-determination--is simply too high. The world has paid this price before and it doesn’t want to do it anymore.

You label the Sandinistas “Leninists.” You might as fruitfully attempt to label Tommy Lasorda, “a big Angel fan.” The game is right--Lenin seized control away from a brutal and mismanaging Russian czar while the Sandinistas seized control away from a brutal and mismanaging Nicaraguan dictator. But the league is wrong--in Russia the czar’s brand of mismanagement and brutality were replaced by Lenin’s own brand of mismanagement and brutality, while in Nicaragua the people boast today of free elections, a constitution that guarantees liberty and justice for all, and a government that is capable of managing at least well enough to hold their U.S.-administered and funded opponents to a few potshots against farmers, schoolteachers, and lumberyard workers in the north.

Please, Mr. Novak, save Lenin and the other Russian personality cult figures for the Soviets. Nicaraguan children have their own home-grown heroes to learn about in school when they aren’t dodging contra bullets. It’s like the way our children learn about Jefferson and Washington. But since the names “Fonseca” and “Sandino” don’t register as high on our dead-foreign-figures scale as the name, say, “Lenin,” you pull up the red ribbon on your Selectric and rename them. Next time try the more obtuse, “Hegelian-Trotskyite,” or the old-time favorite, “commie-pinko,” and see if you get better mileage.

As the other patriotic Americans, we declare your brand of cynicism and arrogance full of baloney. We are tired of supporting militaristic, “freedom fighter” goon squads, capable of murdering unarmed women and children, yet unable to wage, let alone win, a war. We are offended by journalists and government leaders who frighten us more than convince us when they say, “It isn’t a question of right and left, it’s a question of right and wrong.” Finally, we are ashamed and saddened by an obscene $312-billion defense budget driving our nation to the brink of bankruptcy, while people from nations spending a fraction of what we do on defense hastily buy up our land, our buildings, and our companies with their inflated currencies.

Come on Michael Novak. Come on Ronald Reagan. Thomas Paine teaches us that, in America, the law is king. The people of Nicaragua have not declared war on the United States. Why, oh why, do we continue to break the law by waging a war against them? Isn’t it time for us to repudiate the heavy rhetoric and to stop killing innocent people in its name?

DONALD ADAMS

Lakewood