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A particularly—and legitimately—moving character in this blockbuster would be the man who today remains one of the few upright participants in the story. Here's how Walesa explained to me the role of Pope John Paul II: "After the martial law, when I told [various foreign politicians] that in Poland we had begun to overturn communism and that we would overturn it, no one believed me . …But our compatriot had become the pope [in 1978]. At that time, I had maybe 10 people per 40 million citizens in Poland who wanted to fight communism. The rest didn't believe, they didn't want to fight. Some of them were afraid, some were part of the communist system. The pope arrived in Poland [in 1979]. A year after that, I multiplied those 10 people into 10 million . …People began to believe in themselves, they stopped being afraid, and this allowed for the party we called Solidarity. If not [for] the pope—and the pope is faith—if not [for] our compatriot, we would not have accomplished this."
The script from Time continues the story: After prime minister Wojciech Jaruzelski imposes marshal law in 1981, Solidarity is outlawed and Walesa is either under arrest, "watched closely by secret police, or harassed" for the following seven years. Eventually, the protagonist beats the odds. The happy ending is the ouster of totalitarianism and the establishment of what many thought was going to be democracy, with the electrician becoming Poland's president. This is where the movie would have to end.
Alas, the "happily ever after" never follows. What does follow is material for an ambitious indie movie, with a much lower budget. In the last decade, ambiguity set in. The moral roles became gray, complicated, murky. The communists and their former foes exchanged their black hats and white hats for multicolored and gray ones.
Lech Walesa is a perfect example of this.
He has given, as he told me, "hundreds, many hundreds" of lectures at American colleges and universities. He speaks to Americans about democracy and globalization, proposing "that we make the United Nations into a global parliament and make the u.n. Security Council into a global government," governed by new principles and laws. With the Warsaw Pact now obsolete, nato should become the Ministry of Global Defense, Walesa told me. "We'd give them topics that are uncomfortable for the United States to handle on their own—terrorism, Israel and Palestine, anti-Semitism, and racism."
"Each one [of my American lectures]," Walesa pointed out, "has ended so far with standing ovations. So, my message gets to them and I am liked there." He may have been exaggerating the numbers, but not the warmth of his reception. When it comes to Walesa, Americans still live in the early '80s. The invitations, the effusive audiences, the ever-increasing number of honorary degrees, as well as about 50 awards that include six Man of the Year titles from publications such as Time (1981) and Saudi Gazette (1989)—they all inadvertently feed his delusions of grandeur. One wonders if Walesa was joking when he once retorted to someone, "I know the law better than that. I have, after all, honoris causa from many a university."
Even insightful chroniclers such as Peggy Noonan still seem to see things from an outdated perspective. In April, her account of her interview with Walesa ran on the first page of the first issue of The New York Sun. Although he lost two bids for re-election to an ex-communist (receiving a meager 1.01 percent of the vote in the last election) and hasn't made any substantial news since, Noonan gushed over him with the absolving gullibility of a high-school girl talking about a crush. Walesa, "who is a great man," has gone "from being one kind of romantic to another." Having once been an "Extremely Important Person," he has turned into a "Guy You Don't Look Twice at On the Street," she says. Oh, how the Poles wish this were the case! The truth is, his megalomania won't let him return to ordinary life. He's already volunteered to become the president of the United States of Europe, "because long ago, it was my idea to form [such a federation]," as he told me.
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