Monimbo

...The police blotters of the top Sandinista leadership should surprise no one...

...President THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1984 41...

...Two novels into Robert Hockney's colorful career, we've got lots of good adventures to associate him with, but not much of a personality...

...In Monimbo, we actually meet Fidel Castro, holding forth with various unpleasant co-conspirators in July 1980, at a town in Nicaragua called Monimbo...

...Although Messrs...

...Running parallel with this disparity is the sensationalism of these novels - - t h e pornography, the violence, the foul language--all of it gratuitous and a poor substitute for good writing...

...I had just begun when I read Epstein's essay on names, in which he writes, "Jacques Derrida is fortunate in not having been named Gerald or Jerome...

...Senator with important information on the illicit drug trade is murdered by Cuban agents in Puerto Rico...

...The games intellectuals play with themselves are his stuff: the neuroses, anxieties, overcompensations, denials...

...What terrible youthful trauma must have induced such powerful denial...

...yet there they are, arguably with a disarming first-strike capability, not to speak of holding all of Western Europe hostage...

...he is, you might say, our leading psychoanalyst of it...

...Clearly, the target here is the culture of detente, the sense fostered by Western governments in the 1970s that the Soviets are not that different from us and we could teach them to trust us if we displayed a sincere trust in them...

...The T. S. Eliot Award for Creative WriUn8 Jorge Luis Borges Buenos Aires, Argentina The Richard M. Weaver Award for Scholarly Letters lames Burnham Kent, Connecticut T~ Ingersoll Fou~ffom of Rockford, Illinois Clayton R. Gaylord, Chairman John A. Howard...

...Moss and de Borchgrave are to be thanked for putting so much recent history at the disposal of a reading public undoubtedly larger than that which follows these matters for professional or masochistic reasons, they have given us some American heroes who are less interesting and believable than one would like them to be...

...Robert Hockney, star of The Spike, is on the scene, combining pleasure with his wife's business (she works for the Senator...

...This is not to say Epstein is immune to the contemporary intellectual angst...

...This culture led to moral and psychological (not to speak of military) disarmament which we are now only beginning to try to pull ourselves from...

...Bullying other intellectuals is so easy in America...

...Thanks, Aristides...

...He is at his wicked best on the academy...

...Epstein isn't Mencken (he would be the first to say), though they do share a rootedness that is reflected in balance, sobriety, and wit--qualities one can easily lose in the transfer station that is New York...

...But laden as it is with stereotypes and clich&s, the book cannot move beyond cheap thrills and schlock summaries of recent news toward what one would much prefer: an explanation...

...We can accomplish things that would make the riots in Florida look like a sunshower...

...After making some disparaging remarks about "El Gran Cacahuete" (the Big Peanut) in the White House, Fidel says: "The yanquis cannot even begin to imagine the capabilities that we have in their country...

...He also meets a Cuban-American businessman named Julio Parodi, who is "both a doper and a double agent, an expert in betrayal who almost appeared to live for the thrill of stabbing people who trusted him in the back...

...And as a matter of fact, what happens next does make you think wistfully about small affairs as ordinary and manageable as race riots...

...The authors' altogether commendable aim in these books is to demonstrate how vulnerable we are to the totalitarian assault...

...The Cubans have agents working for them in unlikely places and have sent hit-men and provocateurs to the U.S...

...Parodi and the Brigada have a role to play in the "Monimbo Plan" to destabilize America from within, and as Hockney and Maguire follow through on what they at first take for a dope case, the contours and the contents of a dreadful, shocking, sinister, murderous, and Communist plot gradually become apparent...

...When I finally met him, I told him how it is played: Several intellectuals sit in a circle and, _9 one by one, admit to having not read various famous writers--Fielding, Keats, Schopenhauer, you name it...

...We all want education and success, and we are all ashamed to have either...

...While the enemy is able to concentrate powerful and expertly coordinated resources on its objective, we are left with a lone reporter and a maverick cop...

...The Communist side of the plot is credible, all too credible, since it is taken from recognizable contemporary events...

...You all read about the i'iots in Miami this spring...

...Parodi, among other things, finances a paramilitary, para-political outfit named the Brigada Azul, which is more or less inspired by Omega-7, the secretive anti-Castro organization said to have perpetrated acts of violence...

...It was, I like to think, an Epsteinesque situation...

...Monimbo may well be the most dire critique, in fiction, of this culture, and of the paralysi.s and national self-denigration that it has engendered...

...Other aspects of the novel are based on credible stories that have circulated about Castro's subversive plans...

...Knowing this I thought Epstein might like to learn about my recent discovery of the "shame game...

...It seems to me, however, that they overstate their case...

...These are revealing psychological admissions...

...After all, 140 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1984 only a few alarmists believed the Soviets would develop the SS-series of missiles as soon as they did...

...American intellectuals can take anything but being out-proled, and the grandmasters of this sport are Chicagoans...

...So we cultivate and preserve our proletarian roots--real or imagined--and use them to beat up our bourgeois betters...

...Laing: If you answered incorrectly, return to another year as teaching assistant at Eastern Illinois University...

...On the other hand, I have to say that our side of the plot is less convincing...

...it seems I had cribbed the game from him, and how dare I pass along...

...preciate it you have to believe the Soviets are capable of manipulating the Western media...

...I can believe all this because it really is quite well documented...

...Even before it became clear that the Communists had turned Grenada into a terrorist base, even before Sandinista intelligence officers like Miguel Bolanos began to defect and tell all they know about the kinds of plans their friends and their Cuban masters entertain in all seriousness, we knew full well that pathological criminals and dedicated revolutionaries are a virtually indistinguishable species of degenerate twentieth-century man...

...The one burden Epstein does not mention is Chicago itself...

...In the essay on cliches he speaks of: the ephemeral veritists, those philosophers who sail in on a phrase--Norman O. Brown ("polymorphous perverse"), Marshall McLuhan ("the medium is the message"), Herbert Marcuse ("repressive toleration")---and sail out again...

...As for The Spike, the first novel by de Borchgrave and Moss, to apRoger Kaplan is a frequent contributor to The American Spectator, This World, Commentary, and other publications...

...I am perfectly able to believe that what with all the technology we and our allies have been selling them since Armand Hammer's first trip to Moscow in the early 1920s, plus what they've been able to steal, the Soviets, despite sixty years of scientific mediocrity, may well develop and deploy, if they have not done so already, doomsday weapons as fearsome as the ones described in Death Beam...

...In Death Beam, a handful of outsiders, forced to work on the edges of, if not in opposition to, their own nation's intelligence services, is all that we've got going in the final battle for civilization...

...And I can certainly believe that among the Marielos were skillful and dedicated undercover men, as well as common criminals who not only contributed to the further deterioration of some of Miami's neighborhoods but could be used, as they are in Monimbo, as expendable hit-men against prematurely alarmed Americans...

...Is this necessary...

...A longer and much funnier account of this game was given in the next Aristides column--without attribution...

...Large portions of the critical background data for Monimbo, for example, read as if lifted almost verbatim from press accounts of trials of Cuban drug smugglers apprehended by Florida and federal authorities...

...Just recently I had been cowed into thinking I could no longer call myself an educated man unless I finally boned up on the work of the French literary deconstructionists, especially of Jacques Derrida...

...Answer: the English psychiatrist R.D...

...A U.S...

...Paragraphs like this are good intellectual hygiene...

...Following the case, and putting up as well as possible with the hostility of his leftist colleagues on a fictional version of the New York Times, he meets an embittered but dedicated Miami policeman named Jay Maguire...

...Quelle differdnce (sic...

...I am willing to believe that the Soviets have bought and blackmailed Western journalists from time to time, have practiced the classical techniques of disinformation and made use of forgeries and other vile below-the-belt tricks...

...Having nearly been quoted in print for the very first time, and feeling cocky in knowing where Epstein got the story, I cleverly arranged a conversation so I could drop this impressive tidbit on one of my colleagues...

...The conspiracy is helped along by Americans with leftist sympathies, as well as by dedicated Communist agents...

...Pick a question card: "Who in the late 1960's said that in an insane society the most truly sane person was a schizophrenic...

...Perhaps some day they will be used as names in an intellectual trivia game--let's call it Doctorate...

...Monimbo, the new best-selling novel by Robert Moss and Arnaud de Borchgrave, is based on the idea that Cuba's secret services are resourceful enough to operate a guns-anddrugs racket between Florida and Colombia and to provoke race riots in Miami and New York...

...if he had he might have been known to family and friends as Jerry Derrida...

...But Joseph Epstein wears his Chicago lightly...

...Now how am I supposed to read seriously a book about l'lcriture by a guy named Jerry...

...He was not amused...

...The object is to have not read more books than anyone else (without, of course, embarrassing yourself too much...

...He bravely admits of a pleasant, comfortable upbringing (in"The Crime of a Happy Childhood"), and complains of no extraordinary barriers or burdens in his professional life...

...It was, in fact, The Spike that popularized the term "disinformation," although the book was concerned more with journalists susceptible to blackmail and bribes than with the real thing, disinformation, which has to do with misleading your opponent about the significance of realities you cannot conceal...

...God pity the Chicago writer (and painter, and scholar), and God save us from him...

...If there are Epsteinesque situations, there are also Epsteinisms...

...He loves the city because it is home, the way Mencken loved his Baltimore--though in "You Take Manhattan" Epstein confesses to an ambivalence about Gotham that the Sage would never admit...

...Either he lets his exile from the East Coast turn him into a defensive, tedious borem"actuaUy, the restaurants are quite good here,", "the museum is one of the best in the world," "the symphony is one of the best in the country' '--or he becomes a self-assertive bully who never lets you forget how hard-boiled he really is...

...on the Mariel boat-lift, an event Americans naively referred to as the "freedom flotilla...

...h/s clever story (without attribution) to a well-known writer...

...If you answered correctly, take credit for two master's degree courses, and apply to Columbia...

...I don't think so...

...There is no better way to shut up someone from Scarsdale than to tell him you come from Detroit, or Cleveland, or Milwaukee (since no one comes from Brooklyn anymore...

...Now much as I can believe all three plots, I should confess at the outset that these books are so poorly written that I would not be surprised if I am the only one who can...

...as one expert put it, they are a gang of Sons-of-Sam armed with AK-47s and Marxist-Leninist buzzwords...

...Death Beam, a recent novel by Robert Moss, hinges on the possibility that the Soviets have the capacity to develop and deploy a "giant neutron bomb" and moreover can--nearly--convince us, through the clever use of double agents, that our situation is much safer than is in fact the case...

...Half the reason to read Aristides is to savor (or crib) his motsjustes and those he collects from others...

...Most of them are difficult to render out of context...