El Salvador elections

We've talked before about how in our time, in the past 30 years anyway, since the universal spread of television, the thing seen leaves a more indelible impression that the thing read. I anticipate an immediate protest from studious people and voracious book readers like me because the very idea that they are just as susceptible to a vivid picture as any simpleton is somehow offensive.

However, as Dr Freud pointed out at the beginning of this century, 'We're all children in our unconscious mind' and when some of his first patients were impressive intellectual types, he was quick to remind them, as he put it, 'intellect is the great opportunist'. He was talking about the power of the mind to invent motive, to think up respectable, reasonable explanations of some act, some bit of behaviour that, in truth, springs from a simple desire to show off or to hide or to get your own back, or whatever.

Of all the devices since the invention of photography that have burned images on our minds, nothing, I believe, has been so searing, so hypnotic, as the zoom or Zoomar lens. Unless you're luckier than I've been, you'll ransack in vain the almanacs, the cyclopaedias, the encyclopedias, even the film guides, dictionaries and companions and find no mention of the man who invented it. The zoom is a lens which can drastically vary the focal length so as to make an almost instantaneous transition from a long shot to a close-up and vice versa. The word has passed into the language as a verb so that people who've never heard of the device, talk about 'zooming in' on something or somebody.

In the past week, I'm pretty sure that Americans watching the evening news, have had printed on their memories unforgettable, heartbreaking close-ups of the faces of people in El Salvador lining up in long queues to vote in an election conducted against the rattle of gunfire less than a block away. 'How', asked a horrified friend of mine, 'how can the cameraman survive so close to the firing?' Well, one or two of them have been killed or injured for moving in too close but mostly they are poking their cameras round trees or street corners a couple of hundred yards away from the action, holding the camera with one hand and with the other, turning the zoom lens and moving in to a giant close-up of the face of a vengeful soldier or a racked old woman or a puzzled baby.

Well, to move from the tragic to the delightful, I should say that few human events have gained more from the zoom lens than the televising of sports. Forty years ago we had movie newsreel coverage of a Cup Final or a tennis match with the cameras planted solidly in a bird's-eye view station. It was a poor substitute for being there. And I know old sports correspondents who still go to the stadium or the horse race or the golf course in the stubborn belief that their dateline will prove that they were there and saw it all. In fact, today they are much worse off than the viewer a thousand miles away who's watching it on the telly. The zoom lens makes it possible to see, in larger-than-life close-up, the tennis grip of Martina Navratilova, the swivelling eyes of her opponent, the swishing right hand of the jockey giving a well-timed fillip to the flank of his horse.

There are two sports in which it is impossible for the spectators on the spot to get anything like the running view of what's going on that's enjoyed by you and me sitting opposite the box. Next Wednesday I hope to pay my annual visit to Augusta, Georgia and wallow in the rolling greenery and the orgy of blossom and wild flowers of what is technically the Masters golf tournament but also offers the daily privilege of roaming through more than a couple of hundred acres of a great tree nursery and flower garden.

Now since there is action and, on the last day, crucial, decisive action going on on holes very far apart, it's plainly impossible for a reporter without wings to commute between the three or four three-men teams who'll decide the outcome. And there's something, it seems to me, brave and comic about the efforts of newspaper and magazine writers to pretend that they sensed or saw the decisive shots which are being played on several different greens or fairways half a mile apart.

So why am I staying in Augusta next Sunday? I'm not. I don't ever any more, since the invention of the zoom lens. On the last morning, I fly home to New York, beat it to my telly, plug in the video tape and settle down for four hours of alternately god-like, bird-like, worm's-eye like, whispering confidential agent buddy-like viewing.

The other sport that has fretted its promoters by driving its most passionate fans indoors is baseball. When you're there, even on the front row of the stadium, you see the whole field and the large motions of the distant midgets. It seems, especially to foreigners, a slow, irritatingly easy-going game except in the moments after the ball has been slugged. The pitcher kneads, with a K, the ball, sniffs, scratches his ear, looks off to left field, coughs, tugs his cap, begins to wind up and finally delivers.

But see this on television and you know – and if you're a true aficionado can guess – what the pitcher is doing with all these tuggings and sniffings and sidelong glances. They're all signals to the pitcher and to a couple of fielders, not least to the manager in the dugout, the cave beneath the stands where the batting team, all but one of them, sit or stretch. The camera zooms in on the pitcher. He flicks his nose with a thumb. Cut to another zoom shot of the team's manager in the dugout. He yawns or he frowns or he turns his back. These too are signals back to the pitcher who then performs some other small gesture to warn the catcher what sort of ball is on its way.

I had a very old friend, dead these three years, a distinguished movie writer who from boyhood remained a baseball maniac and he told me in the year before he died, 'I've had on the whole a reasonably lucky and contented life. I have only one big regret. I wish I'd been born 20 years later and enjoyed 20 more years of the zoom lens at work on televised baseball.'

So, for me, the other Monday night, amid all the razzle-dazzle of the Oscar ceremonies in Hollywood, there was one totally unexpected and thrilling moment. It was the moment when a big, 90-year-old man shambled up to the podium and the microphone and received his very long delayed award. He went into the movies as a cameraman in 1914. The citation on his Oscar praised him, in a lumbering sentence, for exceptional, long-term accomplishments by an individual who has made substantial contributions toward the advancement of the science or technology of the motion picture. It should have said simply, 'He invented the miracle of the zoom lens.' His name is Joseph B. Walker. Will Mr Halliwell and Whitakers and the Encyclopaedia Britannica please note and copy and print.

I mentioned at the beginning the heartbreak of the shots we've been seeing every evening for many weeks now of the ordinary people of El Salvador. Too often for our composure, they've been shots of bewildered villagers, mostly very old and very young, looking down on a dead youth, the distracted, hand-wringing mother, the suspicious young men, the stolid middle-aged, an interview with one or other of the family who says that young José or Luis or whoever was never a guerrilla, took no part in politics, was standing at the front door or out in the road when a car came hurtling round the corner. Two or three soldiers jumped out, shot him and went away.

Or another weeping mother and her daughters begging to know from a social worker, or the cameraman even, what has happened to her son. A car or a van had arrived, bustled her son inside and he's not been heard of since. Or, one morning, his dead and mutilated body was found in a ditch a mile away. The people blame the army, the regular army of the Duarte government, the government blames the guerrillas, other people blame the death squads of one or other of the three right-wing opposing parties that oppose both the government and the guerrillas.

In this fly-by-night scene of death and hiding and casual torture, an election took place. President Reagan made the necessary point that Americans ought to be ashamed of the fact that under these terrifying circumstances, 63 per cent of the qualified voters of El Salvador went to the polls against the 51 per cent of Americans who chose to vote in the presidential election. The scenes of the El Salvadorans voting... one old woman was shot and wounded but refused to go to the hospital till she'd voted. These were brave and heartening scenes.

But there was little else about the election to hearten Americans whose government has decided, for better or worse, that Central America will be less open to domination by Cuba and the Soviet Union if El Salvador and after her, Nicaragua and Guatemala is governed by a centre-right party rather than by a Marxist-trained guerrilla movement.

The trouble is that the centre-right party, the Christian Democrats, under President Duarte, got a plurality of the vote but not a majority, a distinction that Americans always make in elections since in some state elections a party can only govern if it has a majority over the accumulated vote of all the other parties.

Duarte got more seats than any other party in the new assembly, 24 out of 60. The right-wing national conciliation party got 14, the extreme right-wing nationalist republican alliance, under the rather terrifying Major D'Aubuisson, got 19. Two fringe parties got three.

So Duarte has 24 seats and the right-wingers together 36. In their system, President Duarte cannot take over unless the United States can bring effective pressure. Otherwise the government could be a coalition of more or less extreme right-wingers agreed only on suspending the Duarte land reforms and ruling the country with a grip of iron.

We applauded the El Salvadorans holding of a democratic election and we like to think that no people will freely vote in a totalitarian government. Well, the Salvadorans seem to have done it. It's been done before. The German people in 1933 democratically elected Adolf Hitler.

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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