Spectator's Journal/Grenada Libre

...It is probably true that we are running out of growing-up time, but we aren't going to get that message from Hollywood (from which vantage point the only imminent dangers are rightwing conspiracies and nuclear apocalypse...

...I jogged almost daily past a warehouse wall-towall in RPGs (Soviet Rocket-Propelled Grenades), and to be told that "in proportion to population, this could have given Grenada one of the largest military forces of any country in the world" is merely to add so many zeroes to an already unassimilable figure...

...Well then, does Chill succeed in being anything besides witty and charming...

...A bomb disposal squad checked the valises out and found them kosher...

...Wall's reference to the Sinn Fein vote as 42 percent of the nationalist vote disguises the fact that they only won about 10 percent of the valid first preference votes cast in Northern Ireland, against 70 percent for parties standing for Northern Ireland continuing to be part of the U.K., and perhaps most important of all, nearly 90 percent for parties specifically rejecting the violence of the IRA which Sinn Fein supports...

...The sheer loot lifted--either from the island's exchequer or Cuban drug money or both--seems to me an important aspect of any analysis of what might now be called the Old Jewel, though no identification of it is included in the excellent USIS Grenada: A Preliminary Report, currently running in the Grenadian Voice under "Anatomy of a gruesome period in our history...

...Firstly Mr...

...but in the Republic also...

...U.S...

...dollars, though this I didn't personally verify...

...The obstacle to aUnited Ireland is not the British, nor indeed any other government, but in the 1980s, as in 1912 and 1920, the united opposition of a fifth of the whole Island, geographically concentrated in the North and with a clear local majority wholly committed to the preservation of the union...

...For the obfuscations achieved at times a kind of genius...

...Sinn Fein's electoral support in the Republic has consistently been even lower...

...You have a foul sense of humor...

...That's not a bad metaphor for the USA in 1984...

...In fact, they contained between four and five million genuine U.S...

...A couple of months after hostilities had ceased in Grenada two local lads were rounding up their goats near my grounds at Pointe Salines when they stumbled on some satchels hidden under dried-out bush...

...They wished to be known by their handles...

...For those on either side of the ocean who seek a United Ireland, the problem is to overcome that rejection...

...Thus it is (unfortunately) remarkable even that Chill does not stack the deck against conservative values, although the Kramers think it does...

...So was Vince...

...All because some time ago you decided to widen the paper by half an inch, so wider American Spectators must perch upon narrower ones...

...They l~ave chosen to underline their wish for unity with their fellow countrymen by killing many hundreds of them over recent years including police from the Republic as well as the North...

...My huge stack of American Spectators has just fallen over...

...To expect more than this of Hollywood would be--fantasy...

...It is true that male Grenadians have nicknames...

...Patsy Summerside Pierre, South Dakota Yale and Rim Kramer reply: We appreciate Patsy Summerside's thoughtful comments on the movie and our review...

...Most British people are conscious of our bad historical record as regards Ireland and recognize the many ethnic and emotional ties between Ireland and the USA, but the support of terrorism and illegal forces saddens and bemuses not only responsible parties in the U.K...

...Finally both Assistant Professor Swan and Mr...

...And for some folks, it may be the first time it's occurred to them that this is not a contradiction in terms...

...Sydney Shenton Stockport, Cheshire United Kingdom THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1984 47...

...In the same issue we were left in no doubt that support of the INLA and IRA was coming freely from Russia and Libya as was discussed at the Houston conference on world terrorism...

...Thus Leon Cornwall was Bogo, Randolph Callender Baboo, Fitzroy Williams Mashie, and so on...

...But then Jewel's contempt for grammar is also part of the affair...

...Many conclude in the suffix -man...

...All the more authoritative because it is written by one of the architects of the conservative movement?' --PAUL LAXALT (R., Nev...

...In short, they were a South Bronx street gang trying to dress up in an abstract rhetoric way beyond them, one which today most adult Grenadians slip their eyes over with a shrug (where are the cricket scores...

...Frankly, all of us here-white-collar, blue-collar, no-collar-knew of the arms build-up...

...To my mind the language of the Grenadian revolution shows an Orwellian evasion of reality...

...This book is the culmination of a brilliant understanding of the American right?' --ORRIN HATCH (R., Utah), U.S...

...We find what questioning there is superficial and the answers pat...

...shallow now, and doubtless were shallow back when...

...It reads with the ease that only a polished writer can accomplish?' --PHILIP CRANE (R., III...

...For instance, Harold, the most conservative of the principal characters, is also the most likeable...

...Some sleepy village of a handful of inhabitants is thus seen divided into Economic Objectives, Military Objectives, Enemy Forces, Our Forces...

...One deals with his confrontation with a power rival Chalkie Ventour: "I asked him how things were going at the level of the CC as things were beginning to get rough on the ground...

...Greer understands and sets forth the issues admirably but I would be glad if you would permit me to add and reinforce two particular aspects...

...The first concern of locals was to locate the missing (my maid lost a father and son...

...George's courtroom where he and ten others were escorted for arraignment...

...For if they were they might be found out...

...U.S...

...Indeed, it was partly for such purposes they instituted the curfew...

...They did not want to be understood because they barely comprehended the politics they espoused...

...The errand of the affair was simply those satchels, stuffed with imperialist greenbacks...

...The minutes of the NJM Central Committee, found in a document bonanza in the DGI house abandoned near my own, are a frantic effort to define what that power was for: ostensibly, destruction of "the corbeau of imperialism" and its "eater of babies" Ronald Reagan (as so named in the last issue of the New Jewel) and the installation of hard-core Communism together with, hopefully, "inner party democracy...

...Under the proportional representational system used in local and provincial elections in Northern Ireland the final results give a much better picture of the depths of a party's support than does the crude ~breakdown of first preference...

...Is the chief that starts that shit.' " Chalkie then told Vince that "Maurice was a psychopath," to which Vince returned, "I told Chalkie that he was mad...

...All those satchels of money, man...

...House of Representatives, Former Chairman, American Conservative Union "An insightful and comprehensive history...

...would like better than to leave Northern Ireland to its own devices, and if the majority there wish to leave the United Kingdom the British Government would not stand in their way and has repeatedly said so...

...Let us not mince matters: Bishop began life as a pimp in London, and ended it as a pimp, selling his country off rather than Grenadian girls in Shepherd Market...

...And it's hard not to notice that while not as glib as the others, he is the one most truly generous, the one most willing to take risks for others, and--let's face it-the one with the resources to help others...

...One concluded: Let them come, let them come, We will bury them in the sea...

...There was even one leading light whose handle was Stalin, while Bishop was always Bro...

...I still find it awkward to address my cheerful car mechanic by his preferred moniker Blackman...

...Subconsciously Jewel constructed, and partially inherited, a rhetoric that was an impediment to understanding...

...Jewel self-parodied its "revo" again and again, until it ended in madness...

...And not to Newsweek's crusty critic from the left, who finds the film too tolerant of its characters' departures from said mentality...

...Cosgrove, our thanks for their praise...

...In the USIS publications it is "corrected throughout to facilitate reading...

...It does seem these people can only learn the hard w a y . . . ) Michael is a slick and opportunistic journalist, but does any movie viewer out there think he was anything but a slick and opportunistic revolutionary...

...this was an impossible task since during the curfew RMC chopped up, burnt, and then deposited in the sea the bodies of those they had murdered...

...The second local concern was revenge against Bernard Coard and his minions...

...The US1S Grenada papers cite the articles of power...

...The Big Chill brings to vivid life an assortment of people who have half grown out of their sixties illusions...

...The P~ovisionals' regard for those democratically elected but with whom they disagree has been tragically demonstrated by the murders of a Member of Parliament and a Northern Ireland Assemblyman in the past two years...

...No matter that Comrade Einstein T. Louison (real name) comes back from Russia's Vystrel Military Academy after six months, he is still "suspended and confined for his opposition and petty bourgeois behavior...

...Subconsciously they did not want to be understood, even by themselves...

...The Kramers think he's too much of a pussycat to be a tycoon, but at least a pussycat is a novel departure from the usual tycoon stereotype...

...Similarly, Sam and Karen are comes through loud and clear...

...No wonder the Cuban DGI readers added contemptuous marginalia like infantilismo to their copy of the minutes...

...She does question Meg's fertility fantasy ("I don't think it's quite that s i m p l e . . . " ) but later is caught up in the camaraderie of the weekend--an accurate reflection of the film's ambivalence...

...Fourteen years of murder and atrocity have simply made it more bitter and resolute than ever...

...A lively, candid, autobiographical account of the modem conservative movement...

...Power for the people, which is to say us...

...They reported their find to Airborne Intelligence, mindful that the Cubans had learned some savage tricks from their Russian masters who have lately been boobytrapping children's toys in Afghanistan...

...Take the handles...

...Karen's literary pretensions and Sam's altruistic pretensions are and were just that...

...They wore Leninism like a lapel badge, none having read the master in depth, and called anyone in their way, even their former leaders, Petty Bourg...

...Chalkie said, 'What rumors that...

...In other words, when the rhetoric becomes so venal you have to amputate part of your mind to say it, then you assume an alter ego...

...Senate RISE OF THERIGHT WILLIAM A.RUSHER $15.95 I 05 Madison Avenue New York N Y 10016 Minister, was divested in Richmond Hill Prison of a corselet containing half a million U.S...

...Spelling didn't matter...

...No one in America understands more clearly than Bill Rusher, or has articulated more consistently than he, the growth, the ethics, the conflicts, the cohesiveness, the inner secrets, and the philosophies of American conservatism...

...Calypsonians have always traded in such nomenclature...

...I forged through a tumultuous crowd throwing rocks and screaming for his blood outside the St...

...The Big Chill is gentle with its generation's fantasies, but it refrains from idolizing them and indeed frequently questions them...

...Senate, General Chairman of the Republican Party "Excellent...

...The handle was a persona...

...Our differences seem to be ones of degree, a matter of just how questioning The Big Chill really is of its characters' values...

...Consequently their lovemaking begins in desperation and ends in disillusionment...

...Vincent in 1980, referred to himself publicly as Bumper...

...Sam and Karen are rather obviously in love with their own images and each other's images (not with each other): Karen is in love with the image of a contemporary male sex symbol (providing escape from her "dull" husband...

...I think it does...

...There is nothing more the people of the U.K...

...dollars--a figure and fact I verified with the Airborne Intelligence colonel in charge (519th MI BN)--plus fifteen Cuban passports...

...That's where I disagree...

...If the eyes of the Grenadians glaze over the CC deliberations, it is because hoisted them on their own semantic petard...

...Phyllis Coard, for instance, Jamaican wife of the former Deputy Prime I I I I "Vivid and engrossing" --WILLIAM E BUCKLEY, JR...

...The letters of CC member Vincent Noel are also being published in our Voice...

...He's also dead...

...There is a strong rumor that fellowprisoners tried to dry-drown Coard in the prison courtyard (Goat's Pen locally) with a live fire hose...

...United Ireland Despite the full and detailed coverage of the U.K...

...Here one must draw pause before the tergivensations of the inner party or CC, the bloodshed boys ("We have to be coldblooded and cast all emotions a s i d e . . . The situation demands Bolshevik staunchness...

...Even so, the one thing that struck 82nd Airborne's interrogation team was that their prisoners always advanced nicknames first...

...Another Marxist hothead, who "captured" Union Island from St...

...He was...

...You don't send an Ambassador to Cuba, you send Bogo...

...Karen's hypocrisy in exploiting the security her husband offers her (while they know what Jewel wanted power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . she simultaneously ridicules it) also for...

...Nor is Sarah as mindless as the Kramers portray her...

...TAS Fails Curse you...

...Meg is unrealistic about childrearing, but not about her low-income legal clients or about the joys of singlehood after the sexual revolution...

...To Daniel R. Kronemyer and K.M...

...Farrell raise the canard that the United Kingdom is in some way determined to "hold" Northern Ireland regardless of the wishes of the people who live there...

...Sam is in love with the image of the unattainable goddess of his "idealistic" college years (providing escape from the crassness of his current life...

...We do agree, though, that it may be unrealistic to expect much more of Hollywood...

...Economic Objectives might comprise some small rum shop or bar owned by someone rude when you didn't pay your bill, or possibly a one-pump gas station ("bowser"), while Enemy Forces would be enumerated, all three of them in some instances, as " P e t t y Bourg-Dangerous...

...No one had spoken this language before in the exBritish Caribbean, at least not while in power, and in the six days before Maurice Bishop's death the inner party spent fifty-four hours deliberating semantics...

...Geoffrey Wagner is an Emeritus Professor o f English CCNY who lives in retirement in Grenada...

...This CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 7) the right, who f'md the film too tolerant of its characters' remnants of sixties mentality...

...And while she may not feel sufficiently guilty about her affair with Alex, she recognizes that the results were not what the sixties' worship of sexual "openness" had led her to expect...

...They did not want to be understood...

...The boys got a bounty of U.S...

...If its utter lack of erotic appeal was unintended by the film's makers, they sure fooled a lot of us out here...

...three grand each and the money was put into custody with the other fortunes found on or about the absconding leaders of the New Jewel Movement (NJM) and their Revolutionary Military Council (RMC...

...Thirdly, local interest in the USIS documents has been high because of the hit lists of communities compiled by the faithful over four years...

...Peter Samuel Washington, D.C...

...I mentioned the rumors...

...A People's Revolutionary Army Captain who called himself Flying Turkey wrote calypsos for children to sing in school...

...Irish issue in the correspondence columns of your February issue I wonder if I may add a few more words from this side of the Atlantic...

...Recently working for me were burly youths called Margaret, Snail, Sarge, and Madman...

...Note that almost without ex46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1984 ception every member of the inner party had some handle or nickname, in common with the graffiti artists of New York's IRT...