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Friday January 3, 1997

Behind glitz, pose of compassion, Evita was a peril

Rabbi Roberto D. Graetz

"Don't Cry for Me, Argentina"...Everybody knows the tune. A department at Bloomingdale's sells out the fashions that made her look like a star...Her picture, with a look of innocence, is published all over the world...Evita, everybody's girl, a woman for our time. Or is she?

In a very short time, she did a lot of damage. Some say she was the brains behind her husband, the dictator Juan Peron. She reduced difficult issues into small sound bytes long before the term "sound bytes" was coined.

Why was she so beloved -- and so dangerous? She had a feel for the huddled masses, the poor her husband brought into the city from the countryside by the hundreds of thousands. They came after a promise and a dream cemented on a lie. And she could manipulate, involve, fool and betray them and they would never know it. She had a feel for them, but she felt nothing but the pleasure of control and power, of knowing that in them her strength rested.

From the time I started school, every classroom I entered had her picture hanging on the front wall. Every textbook I used until the Peron regime crumbled had her likeness on the first page. Beautiful, large, in full color in an otherwise drab text book. And a caption under the picture: "The only privileged beings are our children." And we believed it. We, Evita's children, the children she never had.

I guess that children and poor masses are both impressed by the same things -- the glitter, the easy words, the color we would want in our own lives. For the poor, she was one of them, one who made good in the world of the rich.

When she died, every school in the country held a special service to honor her memory. I came home from school crying, saddened by the death of this other "mother" the state had provided. My father, a kindly man who rarely ever raised his hands on his children, asked me why I was crying. I responded, "Evita has died, didn't you hear?" He slapped me once and said, "Now you have a reason to cry!"

After her death, the Peron regime started to crumble. Little did we know that the succession of military regimes that would follow would be as bad or worse, that the walk to democracy would take more than 30 years. When Peron finally fell from power, my father, for the first time in memory, raised the Argentine flag in celebration in front of our small home. We lived in a working-class neighborhood, surrounded by people who obviously still believed the lie. The next morning, the flag was torn down and in big black letters graffiti was painted on our wall, "Jews go home."

Evita and her myth lived on. The casket containing her embalmed mortal remains made several trips across the ocean. Just when Argentina became mature enough to reject the idolatry of a woman of little worth, the musical hit town. And now the movie...Don't worry, Argentina no longer cries for you...even if we like the melody...even if we wear the fashions you made popular.

Just as her expensive furs came from the hides of animals, Evita's metamorphosis came at the expense of the poor and the oppressed of Argentina. There was a lot of pain on her account, and few memories worth saving.

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