A wake for Danny boy - support for Nicaraguan Sandinistas at Park Slope Methodist Church

National Review, April 1, 1990 by William Tucker

BROOKLYN, N.Y.-you would not think my neighborhood in Brooklyn would be fertile breeding ground for a peasant revolution. With its tree-lined streets and stately old brownstones, Park Slope is bursting with young professionals, old Irish families, and a potpourri of every other race and nationality, all quietly marveling at how well they get along with each other.

Yet things being as they are, it is precisely in this environment that a small cadre of gentrifiers have turned Park Slope into Brooklyn headquarters for the Sandinista revolution. Daniel Ortega, who visited here three years ago, was greeted with wild enthusiasm. By all odds, he will probably end his career running a liquor store on Seventh Avenue.

The epicenter of this revolutionary ferment is the Park Slope Methodist Church, a modest little congregation that has distinguished itself in the "borough of churches" by planting cardboard tombstones in its back yard for victims of American aggression" and sporting a pastor, Finley Schaef, who argues that the Sandinistas have every right to censor the Nicaraguan press because they are at war with the United States Government.

Thus, when the inevitable notices went up last week calling an "informational meeting" about the Sandinistas' recent election defeat, I couldn't resist dropping by.

Perhaps the most gratifying thing about the event was that of the 350 people who crammed into Park Slope Methodist's narrow pews, I didn't reorganize a single soul. I halfway feared that the local librarian, the bookstore owner, and my son's second-grade teacher would turn out to be secret agents for the Sandinistas. Instead, the crowd turned out to be the usual misfits: deliberately unattractive lesbians embracing ostentatiously, frizzy-haired girls asking you to sign their petition, grey-haired radicals reliving the glory days of the Sixties, puzzled young blacks trying to make sense of their black-studies education.

The featured speaker was Philip Agee, the renegade CIA agent who has been traveling recently on a Nicaraguan passport. Agee spent the better part of an hour reminiscing about his own adventures in Latin America, and told how the Truman Administration had rigged the Italian elections of 1948-"so that the Christian Democrats rule Italy even to this day."

Next came Brian Glick, a radical Manhattan lawyer who is still defending the "Manhattan Seven" (or whoever they were) and who was introduced as "one of the founders of SDS" (who wasn't?). Glick spent another half-hour reminiscing about the 1960s, when the FBI tried to persuade Martin Luther King to commit suicide.

AFTER MORE than an hour of this, one of those lovable old radicals stood up in the audience and said, "Can I ask a question?"

"I'll take questions after I'm finished," Glick dismissed him.

"Well, I'm going to ask it anyway. Look, the Sandinistas are trying right now to examine themselves and figure out what they did wrong. Couldn't we dispense with all this?"

Heads were bobbing around the congregation and it was obvious the man had much sympathy. But the hard-liners prevailed. "Sit down and shut up!" one man shouted, and others picked up the chorus. Glick resumed his monologue (which turned out to be a pitch to buy his book). A few minutes later, the old-timer conspicuously got up and left, followed by a steady stream of others.

It was not until the audience was considerably depleted that we were finally introduced to four humanitarians who had served as election observers in Brooklyn's "sister city," San Juan del Rio Coco in Nicaragua.

Martha Anderson, introduced as a journalist, had a sweet naivete about her. She recounted how San Juan (population seven thousand) had once been attacked by the Contras and how "the whole two weeks we were there, we didn't see a single election poster for UNO. The whole town was plastered with signs supporting the Sandinistas."

Nevertheless, San Juan voted for UNO by 75 per cent. "In retrospect, we feel we probably spent too much time talking to the mayor and the other Sandinista officials and too little time getting to know the people of the community," she concluded.

Mary Powers, a theology student, came away with similar thoughts. "We spent one day at a church service and noticed a few UNO candidates there," she said. "When we told our Sandinista hosts about it, they scoffed and said, 'Oh, they're all UNO down there.' I think one of our big mistakes was in overlooking that 95 per cent of the people of Latin America are practicing Catholics."

Only Peter Kondradt, introduced as another journalist, showed any signs of cynicism. "Flying back on the plane, one of my fellow observers turned to me and said, Come to think of it, I did see evidence of massive fraud in that election."'

"What did he mean?" asked a sweetly innocent voice from the audience. Kondradt gave a knowing smile, but declined to elaborate.

For the most part, however, the audience was excruciatingly unrepentant. "I've been encouraged by what I've been hearing on WBAI," said one speaker. "The Sandinistas have passed laws saying the new government cannot change anything without a two-thirds vote. Even though they have a majority, we still retain power."