The Talk of the Town

...Emma's the kind of woman who'll make a special effort to make newcomers feel welcome...

...The Captain is a handsome man in that Central Asian way, but tall for an Armenian...

...We returned to the highway to find the service truck from Hammerville Exxon...

...She told the Captain that there was a terribly sweet Russian fellow who had come to Vermont not so long ago, a writer by profession...

...T h i s month's award for runaway prose is divided between the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and the Baltimore Sun...

...If someone had elected to attend the "seminar," we might today be spared headlines proclaiming Mr...

...We're supposed to rendezvous with our group in Manhattan,' said the Captain, 'but I guess we'll be late.' He withdrew a large map from his pocket and unfolded it...

...I rapped a bit on the turret and finally an engaging young man appeared...

...Most of the time, we can drive along with the turret open to see a bit of the scenery, fill our lungs with fresh 22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1980 mountain air, and even enjoy a cigarette without fouling the interior of our tank...

...Where you bound?' asked the serviceman laconically...

...I f you're as cold as I am,' I said, 'you could do with a hot drink...

...The train up from Montpelier, for example, never ran on time...

...I am sure Joe will get you rolling again,' I said...

...I used to be assigned to one of the units in East Germany,' he explained, 'and the only time I ever really thought I ' d ever taste this wonderful cocoa is when we rolled into Amsterdam and could have the real thing...

...I think we'll bivouac in a place called the Algonquin.' ""I suppose they're on their way and I realized that they will be staying not so far from your offices, so I just wanted to alert you...

...At this point the Russians began to engage in animated conversation among themselves...

...Even so, we were a bit unprepared for the recent increase in traffic, especially the olive-drab vehicles which have been seen here with increasing frequency...

...He told us that, before the great Revolution, his family had been dealers in carpets, and that he still had a feel for a well-woven rug...

...We go where we're sent,' said the Captain, 'and this is better duty than we usually draw...

...Jack Anderson: Do you really think that Khomeini's first name is "Ayatollah...

...But our political people did say that the local population would almost certainly be friendly in these parts...

...They have access to elaborate intelligence detailing what goes on inside the Kremlin...

...You might think Bill Satire, George Will, or Joe Kraft...

...change American thinking...

...We have a friend who lives in Vermont who writes: "When we came up here, we opted for the northernmost part of the state, tucked up beneath Canada, hoping that the great mass of travelers would give out before reaching our environs...

...He said be envied those among his colleagues who had an opportunity to pick up a few of the genuine articles in the bazaar at Kabul...

...He hoped that he would be able to make it into Iran some day, if for no other reason than that, as a result of the upheavals there, the export of Persian rugs had been disrupted, and prices had soared sky high as a consequence...

...The Captain explained that we were referring to a counterrevolutionary propagandist...

...There must be fascists around here if the likes of Solzhenitsyn are allowed to live in this vicinity,' the Captain said...

...I guess we'll take 96th Street over to the West Side and then we'll be down to West 43rd...

...The commander, who turns out to be a Captain in one of the Soviet armor divisions, had never expected to find a cup of hot Dutch chocolate waiting for him in the Vermont hills...

...The shortage of snow this year has sent the winter sports enthusiasts a bit further north in search of the powdery white stuff...

...But the correct answer, at least in the Iranian-Afghanistan phase of the Carter debacle, is Jack Anderson...

...I told him I ' d be happy to ring Hammerville Exxon, where J o e Hammerville displayed the Triple-A good service award he had won annually for the past 31 years...

...We have had to get used to a bit more activity in these parts, and the more than occasional automobile that now passes by our farm...

...Week after week, Anderson has attacked the President for inviting Soviet aggression against Afghanistan, ignoring intelligence reports warning about the Russian buildup, and sending signals of such ostentatious weakness that the Kremlin could hardly resist the temptation to invade...

...We began to talk...

...My handbook says we don't have to look out for Muslims and other kinds of fanatics...

...Like many of those who had moved up here from the City, I had playfully referred to some of our Republican friends as the local fascisti, but I assured the Captain that it really wasn't the same thing...

...Let me see,' he said, 'we can follow the interstate down to Westchester, turn off onto the Parkway, and come right down into Manhattan via the Triborough bridge from the Bronx...

...Which major columnist has been toughest on Jimmy Carter's weak foreign policy...

...Emma asked how it was that a group of such pleasant young men found themselves so far from home...

...Even so, Anderson's old, bad habits die hard...

...But I won't tell a soul,' he said with a wink...

...Finally, four fellows climbed out...

...He was kind enough to do so, and it took him no more than a minute to pronounce our once-valued floor covering a fake...

...Emma asked the Captain whether he would have time to examine the Isfahan that had sat on our living room floor for a number of years...

...The conversations of Kremlin THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1980 23...

...Alvin Broxtree, an older farmer who has been living at the adjoining farm for more than 60 years, says they look like tanks...

...I apologized for being out of Constant Comment, though our visitors were happy to receive a steaming cup of Droste's cocoa...

...The serviceman had gotten the tank restarted, and the fuel-efficient diesel --the Captain said that all tanks were powered by diesel--purred like a kitten...

...I t ' s not a quarter of a mile to the house.' "The fellow disappeared inside the vehicle and I could hear a bit of jabbering...

...We are not much for snowmobiling-hate it, in fact--and we were inclined to look the other way when the green things first came by...

...I hope they'll take my suggestion and drop by...

...The game was won by a single point, 17-16, "in a game," according to the Herald Examiner, "closer than the score indicated...

...The leader--I guess he was their commander-explained in rather heavily accented English that their tank had indeed broken down and that it was more than a little chilly out on the highway...

...My driver here speaks passable French, so when we got separated from our column somewhere in Quebec, we had no problem being pointed in the right direction.' "Emma reminded me that the Russians we had met in Vermont, and there were a small number of them in fact, seemed like friendly people...

...She suggested that I trudge out to the vehicle and invite the crew in for a cup of hot chocolate or a bowl of soup...

...She couldn't think of his name but I assumed that she must have been referring to AI Solzhenitsyn, the bearded novelist who had created all the fuss back in 1975...

...By this time, Emma had cracked open a bag of Pepperidge Farm oatmeal cookies, which both the Captain and his crew appreciated...

...According to Anderson, "these conc|usions are not the wild guesses of eggheads who suck them out of their thumbs...

...Just remember to keep the kettle going...

...This after noting that American journalists knew virtually nothing about the condition or location of the American hostages, had had virtually no interviews with leading Iranians, and had failed to follow up on an invitation from then-Foreign Minister Abot Hassan BaniSadr to "hold a one-day seminar with American journalists to tell them how to Michael Ledeen fir Executive Editor of the Washington Quarterly...

...That's a real advantage to operating in North America...

...Emma said that if people wanted to get excited over a harmless crank, there was nothing much sensible folks could do about it...

...Bani-Sadr a "moderate...

...Who were the authors of this modern philosophers' stone...

...The East Coast winner is Douglas Watson of the Sun, who concluded an article on American press coverage of Teheran prior to the expulsion order early in January by saying " I f Iran had been covered half as well by the American press during the decades of the shah's modernizing but arrogant, friendly but cruel and corrupt rule, Americans might have understood better how to avoid the disaster that has occurred there...

...The grandfather clock I had inherited from my great-uncle Nathan chimed three o'clock, reminding the Captain that it was time to go...

...I'm glad to see that not everyone believes the nasty propaganda about US.' " I had to admit that Vermont tended to be a Republican state, though we elected a Democrat every once in a while...

...To look at him you would never imagine that anyone could get all worked up over him,' Emma said...

...He's a citizen of the Soviet Armenian Republic, though he assured us that he speaks Russian flawlessly...

...J u s t yesterday, one of the things seemed to have been stalled on the road, and Emma imagined that we might as well find out whether we were in for a new craze in winter sports...

...A little bit larger than what we had seen before, most of them with metal treads, and the highway has now become pock-marked...

...I t turns out that the Captain i s n ' t a Russian at all, not by nationality at least...

...By the time we had reached the farmhouse, Emma had the tea kettle whistling away...

...His wife, noting the red star which adorns them, has gone so far as to suggest they are Russian tanks...

...I told him that I wished Edmund Wilson were still around to chat with him, but that we would have to make do with Yankee English for the time being...

...The Herald Examiner gets its 50 percent of the glory for its coverage of the Rose Bowl game between Ohio State and Southern California...

...On January 10, in a performance right out of the fifties (when types ranging from Joe McCarthy to Drew Pearson-Anderson's mentor--and Walter Winchell breathlessly announced they had come into some secret documents that finally exposed "the real story"), Anderson purported to relate the essential themes of a "secret analysis" of how Carter's refusal to respond to previous Soviet initiatives was responsible for "precipitating the Soviet intervention" itself...

...They've been waiting quite some time for their liberation from fascist oppression...

...On January 7, Anderson wrote in the IVashmgton Post that, "in contrast with Soviet boldness in Afghanistan, Ayatollah Khomeini has said tauntingly that Carter lacks 'the guts' to take military action against lran...

...According to Watson, not a single journalist accepted the offer...