Getting to Know the General
Greene, Graham
whelming force and win spiritual vic- tories that will be remembered when we ourselves are long gone to dust? Not from the teachings of liberal humanism, that is for sure. This somewhat...
...He heaps billow upon billow of undeserved scorn on those American liberals--President Carter, Secretary of State Vance, Archbishop McGrath-who took upon themselves the thankless task of selling the unpopular treaties to the Senate and the American people...
...Now, he does not actually say this, but bringing to bear his still very considerable literary gifts, he fashions a marvelously complicated innuendo, which utilizes all the standard polemical tricks, including the initial refusal to believe what one has decided to conclude in advance...
...An interesting comment...
...who appoints his own ministers and members of his legislative council, and is "constantly on the move, listening to complaints, taking with him the ministers concerned who had to reply to the people...
...It is not merely that he accepts wholly and without the slightest reservation everything the Sandinista comandantes tell him, but that among their number he should select two of the most sinister--Interior Minister Tom~s Borge and Defense Minister Humberto Ortega--to be his special friends...
...Greene accepted the offer, and a few days later flew out from Amsterdam on a first-class ticket provided by his host...
...Greene returned for several more visits, always at the expense of his host, on one trip expanding his itinerary to include revolutionary Nicaragua...
...Torrijos's system] might work well in Panama, a small country...
...The choice was between its institutionalization in a political movement or its disappearance altogether...
...Indeed, for Greene as for many left-wing intellectuals and para-intellectuals in Germany, Scandinavia, Holland, and sadly the United Kingdom, anti-Americanism has become the acceptable substitute for anti-Semitism...
...Idols for Destruction can be read on two levels, in two differing frames of mind...
...Schlossberg would say no, science and enterprise are merely tools...
...In spite of Torrijos's earlier support for the Sandinistas, by that time he was deeply disturbed by political developments in Managua...
...The American Spectator| P.O...
...Even though much of what opponents of the Canal treaties in the United States said about him (and his brother) were true, it is undeniable that he possessed a kind of raffish charm which Anglo-Saxons so heartily appreciate in foreign leaders (but cannot forbear in their own...
...So much for the intellect...
...More importantly, neither can it convey the underlying passion, devotion, and conviction of that work...
...But the real piece de r~sistance of this book is Greene's allegation that the United States government was somehow responsible for the plane crash in which Torrijos died...
...When Greene makes his side trip to Nicaragua, one longs, truly, for the relative lucidity of his Panamanian perceptions...
...To admit all this, of course, would exile Torrijos from his honored place in Greene's "anti-imperialist" pantheon, so it is better to repeat the Soviet line on ,the subject, pass over the facts, make dark allusions to a (conveniently unpublished) Canadian investigator's report on the causes of the crash, and hope that readers and reviewers will reach the right (that is to say, the wrong) conclusions...
...whelming force and win spiritual victories that will be remembered when we ourselves are long gone to dust...
...As if to anticipate critics, he adds, "I have never hesitated to be 'used' in a cause I believed in, even if my choice might only be the lesser evil...
...It was Torrijos's rule--not Panamanian history--which began in 1968...
...It was changed not to please the United States, but because Torrijos himself understood that it could not possibly have survived his person...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1985...
...Next time the students want to demonstrate against the States," he urged Torrijos, "can't you tell them to burn all those Donald Ducks...
...The impact of a great work of literature--such as, for example, The Brothers Karamazov--goes in an emotional, spiritual way far beyond such a work as this...
...Moreover, whatever his darker impulses, he firmly stuck to the bargain his negotiators eventually struck with the United States on the Canal...
...but I do not think it is the one being offered here...
...What is the true state of this nation, which must be regarded as the main bulwark against totalitarian barbarism...
...That is at least an arguable proposition, however shaky...
...To Somoza...
...One thing we know from history: Our lives, our fate, our agony are only a grain in the sands of time...
...It is certainly possible and perhaps desirable to recognize the deep cultural roots (and even historic necessity) of such a regime in certain places and times--say, fifteenth century England--without perverting the meaning of words...
...Greene finds it intolerable that the American negotiators in 1976 should have sought to get the best possible deal for their own country, and odious that the final document contained some compromises on the Panamanian side...
...His hand-picked successor Aristides Royo steered Panama back towards more orthodox economic policies, and relations between that country and the United States by 1981 were "good--and getting better" (evidence given me by a senior Reagan Administration official...
...Need we remind Greene that some of the leading democracies are small countries, including his own...
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...Then there is Torrijos himself-about whom Greene writes in frankly adoring tones...
...The South of France is a lovely place, and no one will mind, surely, if among the shuffling Tories at the quay, there is one florid gentleman who keeps repeating, to no one in particular, "Omar Torrijos was my friend, my very good friend...
...THOMAS MORE INSTITUTE OF LIBERAL ARTS For Catalogue and Brochure Write To: Dr...
...you ask...
...Several years ago Ralph Mclnerny suggested in these pages that Graham Greene's Catholic theology, which for many years was the principal undercurrent of his novels, had become politics, and worse than that, "the most predictable kind of anti-American gobbledygook...
...This is the stuff of novels, but in the present context the only thing which seems to interest Greene is the fact that at the time of his first visit, the Torrijos government was locked into some nettlesome negotiations with the United States over the return of the Canal, as well as Mark Falcoff is resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute...
...They are still there...
...For as long as they rule Nicaragua, its people will never be allowed to wallow in what (for Greene) is the moral squalor of bourgeois democracy, much less a lifestyle of private consumption and private happiness...
...From this standpoint, one must conclude that societies without a viable concept of God are unstable and will decay and self-destruct...
...Everyone has to retire sometime...
...Now, clearly, Torrijos was a fascinating figure, and from many points of view a very attractive one...
...It was closer to the democracy of the Athenian agora than the democracy of the House of Commons, and not for that reason to be despised...
...Greene's "explanation" suggests a blood feud over the Canal treaties between the general and the Reaganites who came to power in early 1981...
...No other periodical contains these well-balanced ingredients...
...So--this little volume, a chocolate ~clair of a book, really, which affords its readers some notion of what Panama must look like when viewed from the suites of luxury hotels, the cabins of military planes appropriate to officers of flag rank, or the hushed tranquillity of a presidential villa...
...that he cannot imagine the defection of Eden Pastora or the opposition of Archbishop Miguel Obando y Bravo in anything other than terms of corruption or personal vanity...
...What uses are we making of our power...
...He was not even quite the revolutionary figure in Panamanian politics which Greene makes him out to be...
...But he also suggests more broadly that Torrijos was somehow part of a regional movement for the "liberation" of Nicaragua and El Salvador, a movement which threatened to challenge the hegemony of the United States in the Caribbean area...
...perhaps what bothers him is that, by some lights at least, it was not necessarily a defeat for the United States...
...Peter V. Sampo Thomas More Institute of Liberal Arts One Manchester Street Merrimack, NH 03054 Please send me information about thrs program...
...The Athenian agora was open only to "qualified" citizens, effectively excluding most of the population...
...As social pathology abounds on all sides, as more and more citizens demand a living at someone else's expense, as we cover our ears and hide our eyes at mortal danger, as we occupy ourselves with games and sink in a trough of materialist slop, as our art becomes mindless doodling and our literature spiritual vomit, as husbands abandon wives and mothers abandon children, as serial murderers tear off the nipples of young girls and lawyers and psychiatrists free them to walk the streets and kill again, one is bound to ask the question: "Does God intend to destroy America...
...It is odd to hear him describe Torrijos as having ended the rule of the Arias family "and the oligarchy related to them, which lasted almost entirely to the benefit of the United States for half a century," when as recently as last year Arnulfo Arias almost won the presidential election...
...Name Address City State Zip Telephone In 1976 the English novelist Graham Greene was awakened in his flat in Antibes by a mysterious phone call inviting him to visit Panama as the guest of a man he had never met--Omar Torrijos, then its president and generalissimo...
...So what...
...But he was not a world-historic figure, or even the potential arbiter of Central America's destiny...
...a strip of territory (the "Zone") which the first Panamanian government in 1903 had ceded to the United States "as if it were sovereign...
...he is stricken by the presence along so many country roads of Walt Disney figures announcing the names of provincial hamlets...
...This somewhat arbitrary and incomplete prolegomenon of a complex and thoughtful work can hardly do justice to that work or reveal the full range of perception and insight within it...
...However, the analysis and reflection of ldolsfor Destruction can make a powerful impression on the mind prepared by experience and by great literature, an impression essentially religious in character...
...Admittedly, this was a political phenomenon of its own, although one may be permitted to doubt that "direct democracy" is really quite the way to label a system in which a dictator treats a country virtually as his own personal property and its citizens as one's wellbeloved children...
...In time the two men met and became friends, even intimates...
...Our college program is based on the Humanities as discerned in the great books of Western civilization and as seen through the eyes of the Christian humanist...
...which sometimes expressed an almost maniac humor, an affection, an inscrutable inward thought, and more than all other moods, a sense of doom...
...It can be read as a study of recent history, as a philosophical reflection on our times, as an informed and reasoned and scholarly speculation on our fate...
...These are sobering but penultimate questions...
...But Greene will not let us off that easily: In England, I think, more than ever before, we are prepared to recognize other forms of democracy, even under a military chief of state...
...GETTING TO KNOW THE GENERAL: THE STORY OF AN INVOLVEMENT Graham Greene/Simon and Schuster/S14.95 Mark Falcoff citizens do not feel particularly well equipped...
...Things would never be the same again, and Greene has not returned to Panama...
...Can the marvels of science and the wonders of enterprise save an adulterous nation from destruction...
...In another place Greene has frankly avowed that if the only choices open to him were a Gulag or Southern California, he would unhesitatingly opt to live in the former...
...Alas, he writes, "my suggestion was never taken up...
...This is hardly news, but grounds only for the charge of character assassination...
...Not from the teachings of liberal humanism, that is for sure...
...Indeed, throughout this book Panama is called upon to serve as the very negation of the United States-an unlikely mission for which its IF YOU ENJOY 9 R. Emmett Tyrrell's musings 9 political and economic analysis 9 incisive book, movie, and saloon reviews 9 idiotic quotations culled from around the world You should not go another month without The American Spectator...
...He was particularly struck by the dictator's eyes (where have we heard this before...
...Box 1969 Bloomington, IN 47402 $11.95 for 8 issues D New [] Renewal [] Payment enclosed [] Bill me Name Address (please prim) City State Zip I 4MAW I I THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1985 39 detached himself from Torrijos's entourage and went exploring the interior on his own...
...Outside of Panama City and the circles around the president, as well as those districts abutting the Zone where the clash of cultures was predictably nasty and intense, Panamanians could be said in many respects to like and admire the United States and its people...
...And he overlooks the fact that most objective observers regarded the entire affair as a victory for the Panamanians...
...The real question is whether the United States has recovered sufficiently from its recent bout of self-hatred to resist the blandishment of the New York literati who tout this book and others like it...
...This is what Greene discovered, in fact, when on one occasion he THE GREAT UNIVERSITIES provided the ground for the important political leaders, philosophers, theologians, scientists, lawyers, poets, and religious of the past...
...Only some future biographer will be able to tell us why a man who has lived so richly, so creatively, and so fully is so determined to foreclose-even now, in that bitterest of seasons, extreme old age--a tiny portion of his pleasures to others...
...Things have only worsened since then...
...Indeed, by some lights he may have actually won it, but was cheated of the fruits of victory by the self-same "oligarchs," whose presidential candidate, Nicolas Ardito Barletta, was certainly more to the taste of the United States...
...His initial offer to train the new Nicaraguan army had been turned aside, and in a fashion which deeply offended the proud and sensitive Panamanian caudilitx In his final months he was openly expressing concern about the evident Cuban and Soviet penetration of Central America...
...And why not...
...Why would the United States want to kill Omar Torrijos...
...The voice is that of one of the world's greatest novelists, but the words--to our acute embarrassment-approximate those of a sociology graduate student, a recently defrocked Maryknoll nun, or someone, at any rate, who cannot distinguish between fact and fiction, and what is worse, who does not even want to try...
...But to what, precisely, is a Marxist dictatorship "the lesser evil...
...As for Greene himself, he has had a long and useful career as a writer...
...This nicely ignores all of the reasons why Washington had come to appreciate Torrijos warmly at the time of his death...
...This comment points to the special charm the Sandinistas hold for him...
...And odd, too, because Arnulfo Arias, an unscrupulous demagogue but doubtless the most enduringly popular figure in Panamanian politics, owed much of his success precisely to his willingness to collaborate with any enemy of the United States--including Nazis, Nasserists, and, needless to say, Communists-according to the requirements of season, fashion, and convenience...
...He reports in utterly astounded tones of one peasant's good opinion of the Peace Corps, and indeed gringos in general...
...The use made of the tools is the all-important issue, and that is determined by forces above and beyond the tools themselves...
...and that he should choose so easily to brush aside the abundant documentation on the mistreatment of the Miskito Indians produced by the InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights in favor of private assurances from a single American nun who claimed to have visited the camps where they were forcibly relocated ("She found them well-housed and well-fed and better cared-for medically than they had ever been before...
...It may even have been a step away from democracy [sic]when, after signing the [Canal] treaty, to please the United States, the General formed his own party to fight an old-style parliamentary election with old labels, Conservatives, Liberals, Socialists, and Communists...
...There is, in the first place, the'country: a narrow land bridge linking North and South America, site of a transoceanic canal built by the United States, point of reconnaissance for races and cultures, as well as since at least the eighteenth century for traders, smugglers, political exiles, conspirators, and criminals of every type...
...These passages betray a political illiteracy one would not have imagined possible in the cultivated author of The Power and the Glory, The Comedians, even The Honorary Consul...
...And the "system" which so enamored Greene in Panama was no system at all--simply one-man rule...
...In other words, if God is dead then so are we, sooner or later and probably sooner...
...Then, in 1981--his bags packed for yet another visit--he received a new phone call, this time informing him that Torrijos had died in a plane crash...
...The Wearing O' the Greene," TAS, February 1981...
...But the only "evidence" he offers are two loose documents, one of them undated and unidentified as to source, which establish that Torrijos was not much beloved of the Republican right...
Vol. 18 • April 1985 • No. 4
