Editorials/Grenada Cries Uncle/Nincompoops
Jr, R. Emmett Tyrrell
E D I T O R I A L...
...But somehow the power arrangements in Manila were declasse...
...Peace has replaced political terror...
...Some also played the role of sages and seers...
...He retired after an unsatisfactory election...
...Now that is power...
...Nonetheless it does not prepare one to govern a country that is in a state of political and economic crisis...
...but while they were at work and at play their political system went haywire, and they found themselves living through years of fear and pillage...
...I lift weights, I do sit ups, I do splits," said Mr...
...As with most of the islands in the region, Grenada is a waif of history, forced to rush through a hundred years of development in but a generation or two...
...Marcos's Philippines brings to mind the back streets of Tijuana...
...In the Philippines all things are possible, and he has a prime minister who is not bad...
...Marcos wanted a palace, a throne, and a carriage...
...The country's social life is haunted...
...But young democracies such as Grenada face threats that even older democracies have difficulties surmounting...
...Sir Eric, head of the Grenada United Labor Party (GULP), has always been a supporter of the United States, but those other things that he supports suggest the problems that countries such as Grenada have had to confront and overcome...
...Bishop is the shanty Marxist who clamped his New Jewel Movement down on the people of this exquisite little island in a 1979 revolt...
...Strong-man...
...Marcos's supreme hauteur, which he manifests so often especially when questioned by American TV journalists, merely emphasizes the extraordinary dimensions of his absurdity...
...They think their rush to political modernity is behind them...
...and, because he is a student of "magnetism," judged the 1970 Miss World contest where a Grenadian won...
...She served coffee...
...President Marcos is a ridiculous man who would almost certainly adjudge a ridiculous election plausible...
...They want stability and prosperity...
...Clines continued: "I'm fine and strong, I'm quite ready to go to combat," he said, surprising the nation anew by somehow managing to pop up wraithlike on the screen of a different television channel after the rebels had seized the government station...
...Much better to be like Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev—the heirs of Lenin...
...Others, particularly younger Grenadians, are not so sympathetic...
...In truth Mrs...
...his first was that we had"no capacity for abstract thought...
...Had he instead invested in barbed wire, watchtowers, a Mindanao gulag, the left would have Tom Bethel...
...In the 1970s Sir Eric made a prodigious name for himself worldwide...
...It is the great weakness of people like Marcos—and the real reason why they are so despised by left-wing idealists—that they really do seem to enjoy the trappings of power more than the reality of it...
...Then as the glow comes over this intolerable clown, tell him how De Gaulle assured his place in history...
...To-day he obviously wants to return to power, and many older Grenadians lean toward giving him a last hurrah...
...George's Harbor, he is trying to account for his amazing achievements and for what went wrong—he was the first and reigning prime minister when Bishop went into revolt...
...The question remains relevant...
...In American circles of influence, conservatives and liberals insist on viewing the Philippine political scene as though it were something other than ridiculous...
...The army is ineffective...
...Marcos probably thought that such unvarnished Realpolitik still prevailed in Washington...
...But no bank accounts—possibly not even money in their pockets, just like tasteful heirs and aristocrats...
...Marcos that he really is a great statesman, an Asian De Gaulle...
...Contrary to the hopeful reports on her in our media, she gained no political acumen while her husband-vas alive and conferring with political allies...
...Is His Excellency President Ferdinand E. Marcos, wearer of beach shirts and husband of the costly Imelda, satisfied and perhaps even a bit proud of his nation's recent election manque...
...ambassador...
...that beauty from outer space who accosted (This column appeared before President Marcos's fact-finding trip to Guam and Hawaii...
...The squalor of Mr...
...He had become an anachronism—hopelessly out of fashion, a generation behind the times...
...Bishop and his comrades exploded in a ferocious power struggle, and President Reagan sent in the 82nd Airborne along with other military elements to end the nightmare...
...Gaulle...
...C A' P I T O L I D E A' S...
...Cory Aquino whom the credulous on this side of the Pacific are trying to transform into that wonder of American folklore: the amateur who grows and deepens while in office...
...Wasn't it part of the deal that they would stay loyal to you...
...Just the other day an armed band was arrested while training in the hills...
...Marcos was a relic from the time (1937) when Franklin D. Roosevelt said of Rafael Trujillo: "A sonofabitch, but our sonofabitch...
...Those who led their people from subservience to nationhood in three decades often doubled as labor organizers and founding fathers...
...He invested in Manhattan property...
...Philippine civic life is grotesque...
...He was new money, nouveau riche, with vulgar furniture, bank accounts, and tasteless gifts for Ron and Nancy: mother-of-pearl, chiffon, and satin...
...Someday Philippine historians may remember him as the De-spoiler of his country, and it is still more evidence of his absurdity that hesees himself as the Father of his country...
...WEAKMEN by Tom Bethell Poor old Marcos surely never knew what hit him...
...E D I T O R I A L S...
...Grenadians are arguably the most politically mature people in the East Caribbean...
...Marcos, wearing a windbreaker, as he lapsed into his standard reassurance about his health...
...Marcos declared rather casually to the nation as he sat behind a large presidential shield...
...Sir Eric opened the First World Congress on UFOs in Acapulco...
...Dictator, they called him...
...Perhaps our diplomats ought to tell Mr...
...Nowadays we make better coffee, but some of us are no better at thought, abstract or otherwise...
...From time to time you entertained the U.S...
...remember Carter...
...But for some reason it's not considered to be in bad taste...
...He seemed to visualize his audience merely as an enlarged version of his own immediate household of family, flatterers, and retainers...
...President Carter sent him "materials" on UFOs, for the 39th President, too, once witnessed such marvels...
...His approval rating here must be close to 100 percent...
...A ridiculous man recognizes few limitations...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1986 11...
...GRENADA CRIES UNCLE by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...It wasn't power, Washington adores power...
...That feat brought astonishment from other leaders in the region, causing them to exclaim, he will tell you, "What manner of man is this...
...These are exuberant, fun-loving, industrious people...
...You were their sonofabitch...
...on God and UFOs...
...One of the locals most eager to greet him was the Right Honourable Sir Eric Gairy (Right Honourable, for the Queen once asked him into her Privy Council...
...He lost these and other properties during the revolution, including an electric vibrating chair which he now advertises for in his paper, the Grenadian Guardian...
...Here again the answer is sure...
...no one...
...Now in courtly gestures and eloquence that would put most American congressmen in the shadows, he savors the great days: the "dancing horses" shipped right from Guyana...
...Marcos must appoint a competent replacement...
...Consequently in speaking about it both sides sound ridiculous themselves, as when President Reagan lauded the emergence of the Philippine "two-party system...
...Acknowledging her own vacuous governmental background, she pledged to govern through a panel of fifty experts ("I think it would be logical for me to assume that I would be able to inspire at least fifty qualified and dedicated men and women to help me run the government," she pronounced upon declaring her candidacy...
...After all, that shrewd French statesman of decades past, Georges Clemenceau, depreciated Americans for just this shortcoming, serving bad coffee That was his second complaint...
...They invited in a small army of Cubans and technicians from Iron Curtain countries to transform Grenada into an anti-American military base—the huge installations that remain leave no doubt about that...
...All about the nation, citizens paused to watch one more performance by him on television...
...What a half-hearted dictator Mar-cos really was...
...Serving coffee is no trivial matter, particularly good coffee...
...The deal was: you helped the Americans by fighting Communism and in return accepted bases and aid...
...During three decades, he led his people from peonage to national independence, beginning as a labor leader and ending as a prime minister who governed with equal ebullience from his government houses by day and either of his two nightclubs by night...
...All Gorbachev has is thousands, indeed millions, of state slaves who must obey his commands under pain of death...
...Yet consider whom the fates presented him as an opponent, an NINCOMPOOPS 10 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1986 ingenue politico who actually spoke of accepting into government representatives of the New People's Army, a guerrilla band that has displayed in rural areas a ferocity comparable to that of the Khmer Rouge...
...Bishop's dreams is at hand, though it menaces Adapted from RET's weekly r Washington Post column syndicated by King Features...
...Nevertheless, silliness has its place in statecraft...
...Here I am," Mr...
...Today the Grenada of Mr...
...assistance has mended the country's infrastructure...
...On the campaign trail, where his gifted wife sang love songs into a hand microphone combining with her husband on an occasional duet, he compared himself to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln...
...As for Mrs...
...In fact, on any street corner one could put together a political seminar more worldly and astute than any of the confabulations heard at the recent PEN Convention in New York...
...is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...They now recognize that threats to their liberties are real, and that democratic leaders are preferable to utopians...
...From all I can tell, he is...
...On February 20 they turned out in large numbers when "Uncle" Reagan visited them...
...Sir Eric was all these things, and to-day in a framed house of shocking pink high above the sparkle of St...
...He actually got a lot of laughs traveling the country asking what their identities might be, though he himself frequents seers and other quacks and though the flyblown condition of his country might never have gotten so bad had his government employed solely nincompoops...
...What Americans saw on their television came as a shock," Time exclaimed, unconvincingly...
...Weakman would have been nearer the truth...
...The latter could be funneled through your personal bank account...
...You allowed your friends to steal...
...While in office Sir Eric was accused of corruption and violence, though he was assuredly insufficiently violent in dealing with Bishop, whose machinations he indulged throughout the 1970s...
...They have power...
...He didn't dictate that much either—not the way the heirs of Lenin dictate—telling you to inform on your parents, where to work, not to leave the country, not to go to church .. . Francis X. Clines of the New York Times gave us a good vignette of the dictator's last day in the Malacanang Palace, "clinging to his gold-tipped executive throne and uttering rambling lawyer's monologues about the orderli-ness he claimed to see all about him...
...It was a set piece become surreal, as gunfire occasionally sounded outside...
...Whether young Grenada or any young nation can thwart such brutes re-mains an open question...
...What is more, Grenadians have acquired that "sense of community" that was promised in so many of Bishop's Marxist harangues —though it is not cemented by class hatred...
...He had been on TV many times, all over the world no doubt, and he seemed pathetically out of touch: deluded enough to think that if only he repeated in an incredulous tone the numerous charges against him, projecting an imperial disdain for his accusers, then the charges would somehow melt away into implausibility and he would be vindicated...
...In our progressive twentieth century...
...You lived in a palace You preserved law and order after a fashion...
...Aquino is as ridiculous as her dictatorial opponent and as improbable a head of state as Woody Allen...
...Marcos promptly dubbedthese unnamed persons her "fifty nincompoops...
...But before exiting, Mr...
...Why not Churchill and De Gaulle...
...Now she talks of ferocious Communist ambushers as though they were Social Democrats and of closing down American bases vital to the security of the region—though there is no groundswell for doing so...
...Aquino, were she to trundle into the Malacanang Palace she might gain an even less enviable title...
...Maurice Bishop, whose body has never been found, did make good on his vow to improve Grenada...
...He held an election, he bought votes, he let in the TV cameras and crews and reporters and outside observer teams to record the details minutely...
...Maybe they didn't love you, but they treated you with respect...
...But Mr...
...Grenada, West Indies—In a way the late Mr...
...Here we are speaking of Mrs...
...the all-gold room of the Pleasure Palace, his nightclub where the champagne flowed nocturnally and matutinally...
...Marcos supporters were "buying votes with money and rice . . . " Buying votes...
...Pursuant to a wholesome society vouchsafed by scientific Marxist principles, he and his brutes terrorized the island's defense-less populace, jailing, maiming, and murdering thousands...
...remember Quixote...
...Prosperity blooms...
...The economic crisis will take some time," he announced, smiling tightly, his eyes flooded as usual with the tears that many say are the symptom of some chronic illness...
...During the campaign his speeches did indeed approach those of Churchill and De Gaulle if only in their capacity for derision...
...Rather, Grenadians have been brought together by a renewed love of liberty and a keen concern about Communist subversion...
...Since the 1950s, Grenada has come from a pre-industrial plantation system, governed as a remote outpost of crumbling empire, into being a liberal democracy complete with awidespread, if elementary, bourgeoisie...
...Grenada's new democratic government with U.S...
...And does he envisage himself as a political leader cast in the same precious mold as such twentieth-century giants as Churchill and De him on a moonlit beach and became his secretary (I believe I met her).livice he lectured the U.N...
...I am not sick of anything that is malignant or incurable," he said...
...In two decades he has ruined an economy once second only to Japan's in Asia...
...You were loyal—you stayed bought...
Vol. 19 • April 1986 • No. 4
