Marie Yovanovitch represents something Americans are desperate for: decency
Donald Trump finally jumped the shark on Twitter last week when he smeared the former ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch while she was testifying to the House intelligence committee.
Immediately the words of Joseph Welch, a native of Primghar, Iowa, and general counsel to the army in 1954, sprang to mind:
“Have you no sense of decency, sir?” They were written on her stunned face and echoed in the standing ovation Yovanovitch received as she was escorted from the Capitol hearing room on Friday.
This woman of understatement and restraint has become a symbol of something America yearns for down to its very core, as it did in the McCarthy era ended by Welch’s seven words of exasperated pleading.
Decency.
Marie Yovanovitch was cloaked in it. You could hear it in the timbre of her quiet voice and see it in her downward gaze as congressmen, even Trump’s most ardent backers, praised her patriotism and selflessness for 33 years of diplomatic service – including five hardship postings in places like Somalia.
Trump calls her “bad news” to world leaders. He told the president of Ukraine that she would be going through some things.
She felt threatened. She was told by a friend to watch her back in Kyiv. What does that mean? Get home on the first flight, she was told at 1am. What was going on? She took the call not long after her corruption-fighting Ukrainian patriot friend had been murdered by acid. We imagined her fear.
Why did Trump and Giuliani smear her? To what lengths will they go? And what will stop their recklessness and lawlessness?
Yovanovitch and others of courage stood erect, raised their right hands to tell the truth, and defied Trump’s orders not to testify.
The deputy assistant secretary of state George Kent and William Taylor, the acting Ukrainian ambassador, provided a sober recitation of the facts on the first day of the impeachment hearings: President Trump demanded that Ukraine investigate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, on trumped-up corruption charges already proven baseless. We knew that before the impeachment hearings. Public opinion was not going to change by repeating the facts out loud. What, or who, could move the Senate Republican caucus still standing firm with a corrupt but feared president?
The daughter of refugees from the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, that’s who. An immigrant, no less, who earned her citizenship.
America knew from the moment she spoke that she represented honesty and true loyalty to the constitution, that safe harbor we always seek in a storm. Yovanovitch is our lodestar, just like Joe Welch, himself the son of immi
grants.
She said her service was an expression of her gratitude for what this country gave her family, and what she sought to spread to Ukraine through diplomacy: freedom.
That’s the powerful stuff that we were taught in school to believe. Who could rebut her? Not Representative Jim Jordan in shirtsleeves, certainly.
Trump could not resist bursting out his tweet trying to defame her. That’s where the reality TV circus stopped.
Yovanovitch told Congress she felt threatened and intimidated. Devastated.
She looked down at the table and moved the paper cup from her right side to her left, took a brief sip through pursed lips, and then looked up and sideways wishing to avoid the attention. Most right-thinking Americans – truth be told, secretly, some Republican senators – wanted to embrace her right then.
Or name her ambassador to the United Nations. Or secretary of state, if she would take it for the needless scars already suffered.
House Republicans could not defend Trump in the face of this 61year-old woman whose song was her work in the cause of freedom by means of rooting out corruption.
She rooted out Trump in the middle of the hearing as he blurted more bile. It changed the course of the impeachment hearings. It will change the course of politics, just as Joe Welch did. We were reminded of the redeeming power of decency, which properly resides in a healthy sense of shame that is very much alive right now. It will take down Trump and revive the Republic.
Art Cullen is editor of the Storm Lake Times in Iowa and won the 2017 Pulitzer prize for editorial writing. Cullen is the author of Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper
film’s 212, after all: they’re nine thoroughly transfixing minutes, to be fair, a testament to the increasingly rare, tactile thrill of spectacular Hollywood action realised entirely through physical means.
But what else do you remember from the film’s remaining three-plus hours? The arduous rowing in the galleys, most likely. Charlton Heston’s neck veins glistening and threatening to pop at scattered points throughout the narrative, maybe. But if you remember Ben-Hur fondly, chances are you’re selectively forgetting some drab, extended passages – that interminable visit to the leper colony, or any of the wooden, chemistry-free romantic dithering between Heston’s Judah and Haya Harareet’s Esther – or the excruciating (yet Oscar-winning) brownface hammery of Hugh Griffith’s Sheik Ilderim. Burt Lancaster famously turned down the title role because he deemed the script a bore: he wasn’t entirely wrong.
An avowed atheist, Lancaster also dismissed the project as blatant promotion for Christianity – a charge the film-makers had pre-emptively made some effort to address. It was based, of course, on American writer Lew
Wallace’s 1880 adventure novel BenHur: A Tale of the Christ, which had already been filmed as a silent epic, under the same title, in 1925. (Then as now, remakes were big business in Hollywood.) It was an overtly Christian text, culminating in Ben-Hur’s miracle-fueled conversion from Judaism to Christianity.
Religious fervour was, of course, no obstacle to box-office success in the 1950s, Ben-Hur having been made in the immediate wake of Cecil B DeMille’s blockbuster The Ten Commandments. Yet shedding that fusty “Tale of the Christ” subtitle was a telling sign that Wyler’s version was aiming for more universal reach. The conversion remains, yet the screenwriters’ strenuous efforts to treat Judaism with measured respect were palpable, while Wyler’s decision to keep Christ an entirely peripheral, faceless figure in the film may have been in line with Wallace’s own wishes, but it also kept the film from feeling too, well, Christian.
Yet by the time Ben-Hur was filmed yet again, only three years ago, it was no longer approached as universally populist entertainment, but expressly tailored for the faith-based audience: a globally marginal market that nonetheless proves continually profitable within America’s borders. Produced by Mark Burnett and former Touched by an Angel star Roma Downey, the husband-and-wife team behind Christian-oriented production company Lightworkers Media, Timur Bekmambetov’s chintzy, loosely adapted new version gave Christ not just a face (a handsome one, courtesy of actor Rodrigo Santoro) but a vastly expanded role. “Expectations of the faithful will be honoured by this one,” said Rob Moore, vice-chair of Paramount, the film’s distributing studio; the tacit admonishment of Wyler’s version for being comparatively secular was all too audible.
Whatever its beefed-up Christian credentials, the new Ben-Hur certainly made the older one look a relative classic: even the chariot race was botched in a swamp of CGI, while its turgid messaging made it feel rather more ponderous. (It was 90 minutes shorter.) To no one’s surprise, it was savaged by critics and tanked at the box office, taking in less than $100m worldwide, and failing even to engage America’s sturdy Christian cinemagoers: since the seemingly anomalous phenomenon of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ 15 years ago, which fed off violence and controversy as much as devotion, no biblical epic has captured the popular imagination on a blockbuster scale. In a little over half a century, the story of Judah Ben-Hur went from world-beating Hollywood goldmine – the superhero spectacle of its age – to a cautionary tale within the faith-based niche. Perhaps a better remake would have shored up the legacy of Wyler’s film: as it is, a YouTube clip of the chariot scene, currently with over 3m views, may be its most enduring edit.