Politique Internationale/The Colonel's Comedians
Taki
But both she and the movie warm up once we return to England. The turning point is the famous skinny dipping scene where the Reverend Beebe, George Emerson (who met and kissed Lucy in Italy), and...
...The scene is both touching and hilarious and brings us closer not only to these three characters, but also to Lucy and her priggish fiance, Cecil Vyse, who happen upon the scene...
...A modern Trojan Horse was constructed and sent into every American living room...
...The turning point is the famous skinny dipping scene where the Reverend Beebe, George Emerson (who met and kissed Lucy in Italy), and Lucy's brother frolic naked-and full frontal, at that—in the forest...
...I wonder what he would have said had Miss Lillian, Rosalynn, and that ghastly Amy been blown out of a jet long ago...
...POLITIQUE INTERNATIONALS THE COLONEL'S COMEDIANS by Taki If you think comedy is dead, you should have been in Europe the week following the Libyan raid by Uncle Sam's air force...
...Greece, as usual, led the way...
...Fred Barnes in the Wall Street Journal "I've read at least a hundred books while commuting to and from work ...but not one of those books moved me enough to laugh —or curse—out loud...
...It was Greece that provided safe haven...
...AS XJJX 2 P.O...
...Jackson's career...
...bombing raid selective would be a gross understatement—a bit like calling Qaddafi unstable...
...Emerson, George's bohemian father, who does not come off in either the book or the film...
...Any police...
...To call the BBC's coverage of the Taki Theodoracopulos is a European editor of The American Spectator...
...Check or money-order for *12.95 is enclosed, or charge my ^ VISA ^ MASTERCARD number Exp...
...But it is wrong to have the major partner of Qaddafi to dinner, and then bomb his partner...
...This is what happened when three TWA passengers were blown out of the airplane after a female terrorist had planted the bomb...
...If you're Christian, youl l seethe at his self-serving use of the pulpit...
...The mauvaise langues have it that Marshall fell off his chair twice while reading this drivel...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1986 33...
...But the working out of the tale is full of pleasures, and Forster added the nicetouch, which Mr...
...The President works hard and needs to be amused after hours...
...If you're black, you'll fume about his treatment of black author Barbara Reynolds...
...Vann Woodward in The New Republic Odyssey through America's racial politics—including Jackson's life, the civil rights movement, the Black Muslims, Chicago politics and relations between blacks and Jews...
...Unlike the poor Greeks, he got his message across free...
...George is all awkward instinct, while Cecil is a cultivated cad...
...sorry Mario...
...prove that there are more pinkos running key posts in the BBC than there are radiation victims in Chernobyl...
...Why not have clowns to dinner...
...Qaddafi, you see, owns as little as 12 percent or as much as 15 percent of Fiat, the auto giant that is controlled by the Agnelli family, and whose CEO is Gianni...
...Yes, you guessed it...
...Agnelli had dinner at the White House, along with Jerry Zipkin, Ronald Perelman and Claudia Cohen Perelman (Perelman owns pantyhose shops), and other such luminaries, including the greatest phony since Baron Munchausen, Karim Aga Khan, the man who is said to collect rather than pay taxes...
...Yet the day after the raid, Italian newspapers parroted Tass in denouncing the attack...
...Though the Europeans were as supportive of the American retaliation as, say, McGovern was of Eagleton back in 1972, we Yanks were not far behind...
...There is a fat man by the name of Jimmy Breslin who writes a column in the New York Daily News, and who hates Ronald Reagan more than he hates the police...
...This is the message Marshall delivered in a stentorian voice, and theone that is sure to win the false advertising prize for the year: "Greece, that loving and lovely land, is getting a bum rap...
...Ivory edited them out for the sake of a more romantic fade-out...
...Reid Buckley...
...It gave a platform to Abul Abbas, the mastermind of the Achille Lauro seajack, and never even charged him a fee...
...Adie's coverage of the raid made it obvious even to Arab-loving people like myself that her script had been written by the Libyan Information Ministry...
...Quite the opposite...
...It is Forster's small tribute to the god Pan, and it works better in the movie than it does in the book...
...While reading Jesse Jackson and the Politics of Race, I did both...
...But as the year was 1908 and he wanted to publish, the plot revolves around the competition between Cecil and George Emerson for Lucy's hand and the gradual unwinding of Lucy's self-deception as to where her true affections lie...
...Indeed, the world's leading aviation agencies have declared Athens air-port safe and secure...
...Of course, we know that George will win...
...The flim-flam man himself, Andreas Papadoc, was the first prime minister outside the Arab world to congratulate Qaddafi for surviving the raid...
...NBC television out-did even the fat man...
...Read the truth about the erect-walking chameleon of our time...
...Now there's nothing wrong with dining with Agnelli...
...His oil company was doing business as usual with the Libyans before, during, and after the raid...
...Date Signature Telephone orders: 815-434-7905 1 1 1 name 1 1 address 1 city state zip ' 1 Illinois residents please add 6%sales tax Money-back guarantee: If you are 1 not completely satisfied, please return the book within 15 days, and we'll refund your *12.95 in full, no questions asked...
...The terrorist act against a TWA jet was not a Greek incident...
...I would wager that Miss Jhabvala kept the lines in her screenplay, and that Mr...
...Mind you, she's nothing of the kind...
...George and Lucy have eloped to Florence and are back in the Room pawing each other and not paying much attention to the view...
...She has also cut some interesting lines at the end of the novel...
...at best, it never happened) "he would have sworn as long as his life existed to retaliate...
...What those closet commies did manage was to make sure the viewers remained in the dark about the reasons for the raid, while no effort was made to put the attack into the context of the many outrages perpetrated by Qaddafi's murder squads against civilians...
...And speaking of non-presidencies, what about Bettino Craxi, the Italian version of Carter, a man who makes Neville Chamberlain look like Patton...
...Until then, the audience is alternately amused and bored but never drawn into the story...
...Ironically, most of the newspapers in Italy are owned by my old friend Gianni Agnelli, who on April 18 was a dinner guest of the "man whose tongue speaks with death, bombs, and flame" (no, not my prose, but that of a lasagna paper...
...The trouble is that Qaddafi's and Assad's heroes occasionally manage to murder Greeks, too, even if they are Greek-Americans...
...But soon after, word got out that the embattled Yankee tourist may not be flying over this summer, and the greedy ones got worried...
...Craxi's continued appeasement of Arab terror has not spared Italy from terrorist attacks...
...And speaking of buffoonery, there is a lady (well, she's not, really...
...In fact, if it wasn't so pathetically funny—as well as predictable—one would have to call it the greatest anti-Western and anti-American propaganda show since Idi Amin used the press as a platform for his murderous buffoonery...
...If you're conservative, you'll boil with indignation over his fast and loose juggling of government money...
...Ottawa, IL 61350 Yes...
...Box 738...
...Miss Carter begins—well, not exactly to act, but her pouts become more expressive...
...Apart from the terrible syntax, the peanut-skinned one conveniently forgot that only this past December Natasha Simpson, the eleven-year-old daughter of an American newspaper man, along with other innocent people, young and old, were brutally slain at the Rome air-port...
...She and John Mortimer are the best current practitioners of the "Masterpiece Theater" school of screen-writing...
...And if I know my old friend, he will soon be dining once again at the White House, along with Jerry, Karim, and the pantyhose one...
...My only complaint is that she did not try to do more for the character of Mr...
...Clarence Page, Chicago Tribune EVERY NOW AND THEN YOU NEED TO GET DOWNRIGHT MM-WAVING, POUND-ON-THE -TABLE "Well-written, insightful and highly unflattering account of Mr...
...But back to high comedy...
...He called Reagan a baby killer and left it at that...
...In Reagan's America, too, comedy is king...
...What she is, is a good old-fashioned propagandess, reminding me at times of that other female defender of radical leftist causes, Christabel What's-her-name...
...George makes two remarks about Lucy's cousin Charlotte which add a necessary final note to this interesting character...
...Personally, I would give Marshall an Oscar for his performance, because as everyone including the last bearded thug in Beirut knows, Athens is a "safe" haven for terrorists as long as they shoot Yankees but leave citizens of the Republic of Grease minding their olives...
...The whole TV coverage was made up of shots of weeping children, grieving mothers, and outraged Libyans singing hymns of hatred against Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and the United States...
...you can only work so much exposition into a scene whose main purpose is to show the handsome blond actor Julian Sands finally getting a full repast on Miss Carter's lips...
...And why not...
...Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's screenplay has kept the witty bits in the novel while mercifully excising the gay didacticism...
...Send me the hard-cover Jesse Jackson & the Politics 1 of Race by Thomas Landess and Richard Quinn for 15-day examination...
...National Review JUST READ THIS BOOK...
...George has passionately kissed Lucy under the golden Tuscan sky in a field of violets, while Cecil only reads of such things in books...
...Needless to say, it required all the control I could muster not to roll on the ground when I read what the 39th non-President of the USA had to say following the raid...
...Confirm what you've suspected all along...
...It came in the form of a 60-second television commercial using the actor E. G. Marshall...
...But the best, as always, was my old friend Armand Hammer and Sickle...
...As it is, we should be thankful that the Merchant Ivory team was able to translate a beautiful small book into such a fine film with no further insult to either medium...
...Her subsequent denial to the three major networks—as well as to the Greek government—was vintage Marx Brothers...
...The peanut-brained Georgian once again shot himself in the foot when he said we were wrong to bomb Libya because if he had lost a daughter as had Qaddafi (a fact I suspect is as false as the denials issued by Palestinians after every outrage—at worst, Qaddafi adopted the victim after her death...
...the details are fascinating...
...The American Spectator which is half Anthony Quinn playing Onassis, and half Zero Mostel in The Producers, declared the female terrorist innocent because "she denied having planted the bomb...
...ANGR1L "Jesse's reputation suffers devastating disclosures...
...If Forster had had his druthers, the story would have ended with the Reverend Beebe running off with Cecil Vyse...
...If you're Jewish, you'll rage about his *200,000 connection with the Arab League...
...The fact that she flew to Athens, Rome, and right back to Cairo was explained by Tsimas in quasi-Freudian terms: "She loves to fly, she feels liberated...
...If you're white, you'll grind your teeth over his blackmail of neighborhood businesses...
...Gianni made Qaddafi partner in a major coup (his words) in 1979, and by doing so gave the murderer the kind of cachet he's been unable to buy despite millions of dollars spent...
...Now the movie finally comes to life...
...No mention was made of the way Libyan authorities monitored and censored TV film, nor were the viewers made aware of the tight control imposed on journalists in Tripoli...
...I wish you a long and happy life, and hope that you continue to win your battles against women, children, and the unarmed...
...As it is, we are left with an unfair impression of the spinster...
...If you're liberal, you'll bridle at exaggerations of his relationship with Martin Luther King...
...Ivory has delicately kept intact, of making Cecil quite sympathetic once Lucy has dumped him...
...Hardcover, 260 pages...
...But not to worry...
...and Maggie Smith stops being merely fussy...
...But being the good trooper that he is, he finally managed to finish the commercial...
...Not for long, however...
...At your bookseller or use this coupon: •S E--=============== 1 _ To: Green Hill Publishers, Inc...
...I've done it hundreds of times...
...Which only goes to...
...But such are the demands of the medium...
...Philadelphia Daily News "Treat yourself to a gripping portrait of a dangerous demagogue...
...That old clown Tsimas, a man I've written about before, who heads the Greek anti-terrorist squad, once again put on heavy make-up and in an accent 32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1986 "The authors are especially skillful...
...what I mean to say is that she counts herself among the wimmin) by the name of Kate Adie, who is the BBC's soi disant reporter in Tripoli...
Vol. 19 • July 1986 • No. 7
