View - Editorial

Interview, June, 1994 by Ingrid Sischy

letter from the editor june

While we were putting together this issue, Richard Nixon died. As his life was being summed up in the press, it was fascinating how many words were devoted to a characteristic that had not only made his political career possible but had also led to his downfall as President of the United States. People, his enemies as well as his admirers, kept writing and talking about the fact that Nixon wasn't a quitter, that he was a fighter who never gave up. As I was reading all those observations about Nixon's tenacity, memories were coming back of marches on Washington and elsewhere in which so many of the signs we carried said things like TRICKY DICK--GIVE UP AMERICA'S PRESENCE IN VIETNAM.

Not giving up can be a form of tyranny as well as a form of heroism. In my mind Nixon's perseverance was potentially tyrannical, for among other things, it led him to his obsession with keeping power and to the crimes of Watergate. Surely the real issue is what people will and won't give up. Sometimes giving up certain things is the beginning of sanity, of health, of freedom, of justice; sometimes things work the opposite way, and not giving up is, as they say, the only way to get to that light at the end of the tunnel.

There is much in this issue that in one way or another is about all this. There is a piece on South Africa, a country where the giving up of racism, and the not giving up of hope that someday the reign of apartheid would change to a reign of democracy, have been the bottom line of the struggle. For our feature we chose to interview Mangosuthu Buthelezi, since his story seemed to represent the tragic infighting that was also a consequence of apartheid. The complexity of what this inhumane system wrought is so enormous that we wanted to capture certain issues an American and European audience might not be as aware of as they are of other aspects of apartheid. We believed it was vital to reveal the history of Buthelezi and his people as the picture begins to change.

Pictures representing change are exactly what we got this past April, both violent and peaceful. Every time I saw a news image taken in April during South Africa's first open elections, I found myself thinking about hope--a subject that can get very sentimental, but not in this case. There hope is and was a life-saving, life-changing force. I remember the terrible hopelessness and helplessness that I saw all around me and sometimes experienced as a child growing up in Johannesburg. I remember being about eight years old and in a car with my father when he suddenly pulled to a halt. I remember looking out of the window and seeing him trying to stop a group of white Afrikaner cops from beating a black man who was lying on the ground--his so-called crime was having been found by the police without a "pass." I remember my father failing in that attempt to help another human being and I remember what it did to him. So all those photographs that were in the papers more than thirty years later of the black citizens of South Africa standing in lines--so long they looked like rivers--waiting to cast their votes for the first time, felt to me to be the most beautiful pictures I had ever seen. In them one can find dignity, hope, and change in action.

Of course, what lies behind the history of the struggle for equality in South Africa is the right of individuals to break the inhumane boundaries that were placed on them; and the former government had to give up all those boundary-infused notions such as skin color. We all know boundaries exert their presence in our lives in lesser and greater ways. In this issue you will also find various features that in various ways are about breaking unnecessary, limiting boundaries. There's a special section on sports, done Interview-style. There's a fashion feature inspired by the days of the Bauhaus, that very creative nonmovement movement of the '20s, which blasted through the boundaries that are usually placed on the arts and forever changed architecture, design, and photography. There's a remembrance of the Stonewall riots, which happened exactly twenty-five years ago and which were so pivotal to the contemporary gay liberation movement and its fight against a different kind of apartheid--that which promotes inequality if one's sexual orientation doesn't fit some antiquated idea of "the norm." Stonewall brings us back to the subject of giving up and not giving up. It's a landmark in a landscape where biases have to be given up, and where dreams for the day when that will happen haven't been given up.

Dreams are not only to be analyzed, they are to be respected as forces that keep us going. That, in addition to many other reasons, is why we chose Leonardo DiCaprio as our cover story. With DiCaprio it's all beginning right now--his dream of becoming an actor the world will remember is beginning to come true. I went along when Bruce Weber photographed him for our story, and as I watched this young man switch from character to character to character in a way that was completely spellbinding, completely convincing, I felt a great sense of privilege at witnessing a true and natural talent. What makes DiCaprio so magical goes way beyond the fact that he's dreamy. It has to do with the power of giving up. He gives up everything that's deep inside him, so deep I think he doesn't even know what it is or where it comes from, and he gives it up to us--the audience--so we can see the inside of a human being.