Farewell to stereotypes

Not long after the commercial jet plane ceased to be a miracle and became the usual means of crossing the Atlantic, the New Yorker – the magazine – published a long piece about a day in the life of a jet pilot.

It followed him from breakfast time in his house in Queens, a New York City borough, through the whole day of his flight to his arrival in Rome. He mentioned that the drive in his car from his home to Kennedy Airport was the most dangerous part of the whole journey. He then went into the weather briefing, the assembling of the crew and a long section on the checking of the instrument panel.

About the actual flight, from take-off to touch-down, he said, 'It's seven hours of boredom enclosed by two minutes of panic, one at each end'. For then, as now, the main hazards of air travel were the ascent to cruising altitude and the descent to the landing. In between, there's always the chance of manageable turbulence and a very, very slight possibility of hitting an air pocket which can trigger an alarming lead-balloon drop of several thousand feet, but on 99 per cent, perhaps more, of all transatlantic flights, the boredom for the flight crew sets in as soon as the plane has reached its 26, 30, 32,000 or whatever prescribed altitude. 'Then,' the man said, 'you are more than less on automatic pilot.'

Well, it seems to me generally agreed that the Reagan administration is back on automatic pilot after one terrifying plunge and a period of bouncing turbulence. Most, I think, of the aides in the White House hope for no more trouble ahead and are busy, like the stewardesses after such scares, telling the passengers to lean back and please tell us if there's anything we can do to make your flight more comfortable – thank you again for flying with Reagan All-American Airways.

What is not forgotten, though, is the lead-balloon drop and the following scramble to gain altitude was due not to an act of God but to pilot error, to the captain's dozing at the command or not knowing what the co-pilot and the navigator were up to. And while we're all reassured, even impressed, by the new crew that happen to be on the flight and has been brought up front to the cockpit – former Senator Baker as chief of staff, Mr Webster as head of the CIA, Mr Carlucci as the new head of the National Security Council – there are plenty of people among the passengers who are still keeping their fingers crossed about the potential stamina of the captain.

Most serious newspapers and the TV networks have at least one reporter assigned to trying to find out what the joint congressional select committee is privately finding out. Most of us are content to wait for the official, neutral, investigation of the accident that begins in May.

In the meantime, there is one initiative of the Reagan administration and, for once, I think the word 'initiative' is right, that has taken on a very vigorous life of its own. It's the carrying out of the agreement Mr Gorbachev and Mr Reagan signed late last year to revive and enliven what we've come to call 'cultural exchange' between the Soviet Union and the United States. It's been practised in a very wary form under previous administrations. The Bolshoi Ballet would come here, Leonard Bernstein would take the New York Philharmonic to Moscow. We've seen troupes of Russian acrobats, they've seen the Harlem dance troupe and so on.

In the early Sixties, the Kremlin even decided that classical or old-time jazz was, if not a good thing, at least not a bourgeois diversionary activity and, I remember the shock and delight with which the father of jazz piano, old Earl Hines, told me that he was going to be rescued from an obscure dive in San Francisco and dispatched – under the auspices of the State Department no less – to bring the 'St James Infirmary' and 'Blues in Thirds' to previously benighted audiences in Leningrad and the Crimea.

But it's fair to say that until now, cultural exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union has trodden a narrow and circumspect path. Under Khrushchev and Brezhnev and Andropov and Chernenko, from 1958 to 1985, there were a few cultural institutions, musical mostly, that both sides considered safe for export, not likely to seduce the other side, although down those years, there were enough Soviet ballet dancers ready to make the leap to freedom, to defect, for the Politburo to bring constant, though unsuccessful, pressure on the general secretary to stop these troupes from touring.

When defections happened, the Americans made a point of stressing the fact that no Americans touring in the Soviet Union ever defected. Recently this point has been dropped as we saw, I think, as many as 50 Soviet citizens who had emigrated to the United States and decided that American life was too hard or turbulent for them and they went back home. It was time, then, for the Russians to publicise these changes of heart while nothing, of course, was said about the many thousands of Russian immigrants who chose America and stayed.

So for over a quarter of a century, straightforward emigration and cultural exchanges have been riddled with suspicion on both sides or used as debating points in the unending argument over which is the superior society. Well, with the 1985 changing of the guard in the Kremlin, there has been the most dramatic change and it must not be put down alone to Mr Gorbachev.

Under the prodding of Mr Charles Wick, head of the United States Information Agency, President Reagan has acted, you might say, way out of character. By that I mean you have to remember that this is the president who condemned the evil empire, who once tried to picture the confining darkness of the Russians' life by telling us that they have no word for freedom.

The White House, so far as I recall, never issued a correction, as it so often does, saying that the president had been misunderstood. There is, of course, an old and perfectly familiar Russian word 'svoboda' – freedom. Now we've learned to parrot the new word – new to us – 'glasnost', Mr Gorbachev's label for his new policy of openness. The literal meaning to Russians is even more of a novelty. It means 'available for public knowledge'.

So, it appears that with the unqualified blessing of both leaders, cultural exchange has gone far beyond the swapping of your ballet company for our orchestra. The striking innovation in the past six months or so has been the trekking between both countries of legions of scholars, scientists, doctors and, most surprisingly, a delegation of Russian nuclear scientists to California to visit an American missile site and to stay there and practise and discuss the means of verifying each other's arsenals. This is a move – not very widely reported here – that's impossible to imagine happening at any time since the Second World War. Of course, sooner or later it was bound to happen if both sides ache, as they say they do, for an agreement that will once for all safely contain those arsenals.

And now, there came out of Hollywood even more heartening news for those of us who believe that the actual knowledge that Russians hold of American life and Americans of Russian life is on the whole pitiable. So that no Englishman or German or Australian shall preen himself on his superior insight or character, make that, that the pitiable knowledge of Russians about the West, and Westerners about Russia.

Last week then, in Hollywood, an unofficial delegation of Soviet film directors and writers sat down with their American opposites not to exchange polite hopes or mumble pious wishes, or better, not to parrot official dogma, they met to look at and discuss for one week the sort of films that each makes about the other's life. Nothing could have been less like a Soviet-American friendship seminar.

They showed each other, for instance, a 1984 American film, 'Invasion USA', in which Russian soldiers watch a little girl decorate a Christmas tree and then blow up the child, the family and the house. And the 1953 Russian film, 'Silver Dust', in which former Nazi scientists now working for the United States manufacture a radioactive powder to poison Russians. They saw Russians torture the saintly Sylvester Stallone in 'Rambo'. They saw a Russian film that showed American military leaders on the golf course with sinister industrialists decide to work against arms control because it would disastrously reduce profits.

They saw a Soviet film which represented the famous U2 flight over the Soviet Union not as an exposed reconnaissance mission, but as a deliberate plot of the CIA to stimulate a crisis in Soviet-American relations. They screened films about each other covering 40 years from Lubitsch's clownish 'Ninotchka' to the brutal 'Invasion USA'.

What they were doing was to reveal – and be embarrassed by – a 40-year habit of trading stereotypes. Of course, we all live by accepting stereotypes of other countries for our self-respect. If we didn't, if we came to see that we are all variations of human types and that the same variations exist in all countries, we'd be in danger of losing our patriotism, which would never do, would it?

I think the best practical thing that came out of it was the news that an American company is doing a feature film on the Chernobyl nuclear accident and that it is to be co-produced with the Russians. The producer concluded the best thing you can do now is to create a climate in which you can achieve a positive picture of a Russian.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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