Mood Swings in Managua
O'Rourke, P. J.
P. J. O'Rourke MOOD SWINGS IN MANAGUA The father of modern McCarthyism chronicles the Great Nicaraguan Bourgeois Counterrevolution. O n the morning of February 26, the day after Violeta...
...Denton, Martin, Slawek, and I didn't have the proper credentials to enter polling places, but we did anyway and, for the most part, got away with it—though at the price of being treated like ex-husbands...
...We expected victory, especially the mothers," said a mother...
...This propaganda palace was built with money donated by patsy Swedes, named after their bumped-off prime minister, Olof Palme, and hence called, by the small contingent of con18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1990 servatives present, the "Good Socialist Press Center...
...People will be even more committed...
...I'd gone to Nicaragua with the head of the National Forum Foundation, Jim Denton...
...These can now be profitably recycled by the Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise outlets soon to open in Nicaragua...
...But, looking closely at the uniform ponytails and earrings (many of the women wear them too), I notice the tresses that were still long in back were ofttimes gone on top, and, the lady sandalistas, their underarm hair was streaked with gray...
...Back in the U.S...
...Martin and Slawek did not...
...Lined up behind Daniel were most of the Sandinista nomenklatura, pouting and sniffling and generally looking like dear Uncle Bill had died and left his fortune to the cat...
...A billboard for city youth (voting age is 16 in Nicaragua) showed a moonstruck couple in Ortega T-shirts walking hand-in-hand toward a voting booth beneath the headline, "When you do it for the first time, do it for love...
...And it was punctuated with more pauses for dramatic effect than a high school...
...What was I going to say about a loathsome Sandinista victory...
...Jimmy Cliff, the Sandinistas' Washington lawyer Paul (where's-the-Smith-Act-when-we-needit) Reichler, and Ed Asner, who didn't look like he'd missed any meals due to the injustice of the capitalist economic system...
...Here they'd blown their semester break and mom was going to have a cow when she got the VISA bill for the plane ticket, and then the Nicaraguan people went and let them down like this...
...But there's a little bit of the pigeon in every good confidence man...
...At the Inter-Continental, across the lobby from Bianca, Paul Reichler was excusing the Nicaraguan people to the news media, saying they had "voted with their stomach...
...And he went on to claim that Nicaragua would be making the same changes soon and, also, had made them already...
...If Ortega doesn't give in, the people will rise up," said a cobbler...
...After half an hour of walking around with our hands over our wallet pockets, we decided our little group of wing-tipistas belonged back at the Chamorro party or—even better by the standards of the bourgeois propriety revolution now afoot—home, asleep in our beds...
...Me, I was singing myself, making up little tunes and dancing and capering around: Benjamin Linder was blown to a flinder, Brian Willson run o'er by a train, Now it's hasta luego to Danny Ortega, And United Fruit's come back again...
...I guess this tells us all we need to know about Bruce's political future...
...The Sandinista "victory party" was, on the other hand, a massive street disco populated by kids who in the U.S...
...When a genuine newsman asked Carter about a report of UNO poll-watchers being arrested, the backpack journalists hissed...
...The Dog Is Dead But the Tail Still Wags...
...Denton took two of these interns, Slawek Gorecki from Poland and Martin Weiss from Czechoslovakia, to Managua...
...He touted a "perestroika atmosphere" in Nicaragua, predicted "foreign policy compromises," and, in response to needling from Slawek, said, "As to the changes in Eastern Europe, I haven't heard any criticism from the Sandinista leadership...
...Some of these lifestyle leftovers had gone so far as to don the red and black Sandinista neckerchief, an item of apparel identical in design to the neckerchief worn by the Boy Scouts of America...
...Ten years of revolution have produced nothing but the Olof Palme Press Center...
...He claimed he was looking forward to national reconciliation and hoped the UNO parties would play a part in it...
...Some say the sandalistas are just young and dumb...
...And we told the policeman, "They let Teddy Kennedy vote in the Senate...
...With the improved sensitivity and increased intelligence that hindsight brings, I detect some loyal opposition bullpen warm-up from Solis...
...Everything dates from the Somoza era or before...
...They weren't angry, really, just deeply, deeply disappointed...
...Yes...
...Solis said he was confident of an Ortega victory and of a large majority in the new National Assembly...
...That is," said Solis with the aplomb of a born politician, "campaign rhetoric...
...Every voter had the ballot-marking process explained to him personally so that the election went forward at the speed of mammal evolution...
...But if the Sandinistas had wanted truth-telling groups that's what they would have asked for...
...CFD observers were at an UNO rally in the town of Masatepe on December and they saw a Sandinista mob set upon Chamorro supporters with machetes...
...Here we had a not very bright, fortyish, discarded rock star wife, trapped in the lonely hell of the formerly cute—one bummed out show-biz lefty...
...f course people don't stand in line for twelve hours in drizzly weather at the ass end of nowhere to vote for the status quo...
...The Sandinistas had done everything they could to insure the validity of this election in the eyes of the world...
...He dismissed the statement by Interior Minister (and head of the secret police) Tomas Borge that the Sandinistas were "prepared to lose the election but not to lose power...
...Jim Denton said, "That's Bruce Babbitt," but for the life of me I couldn't remember who Bruce Babbitt was even though I'd covered the 1988 primary races...
...I wonder what my hip friends and I in the summer of love would have thought about people wearing zoot suit jackets and reat pleat pants with key chains dangling to the ground...
...And we saw former Democratic presidential hopeful Bruce Babbitt standing around at one polling place, looking clueless...
...The same bunch of backpack journalists was here, too, hissing even before anybody asked a question...
...Even the lamest People's Republic cosmetic touches were missing...
...People were afraid," said a man in a barber shop...
...I even believed the February 21 ABC/ Washington Post poll that had Ortega leading Chamorro by 16 percentage points...
...At first glance the Birkenstock Bolshies seem young...
...No, thought, I'll have to go shoveling in the manure pile of political science, trying to uncover the appeal that Marxism and other infantile world views still hold for people...
...We did see a truckload of soldiers being hauled around to vote...
...Peasant, I'm an inquisitive and frightening stranger...
...The U.N., the OAS, and the Carter group were all going around doing about the same thing we were in the way of checking for vote fraud...
...We have other countries that will help us...
...Carter was the head of one of the three principal international election monitoring groups which were fluttering around Nicaragua pronouncing everything they saw fair and equitable...
...Then the line of men shoved the line of women off the school porch and into the rain...
...Everywhere we went it was the same: awful roads through beautiful scenery to lousy towns...
...T hus I was in a grim frame of mind 1 when I went to the press conference held by that most ex- of America's ex-Presidents, Jimmy Carter...
...They were all in jean skirts and draw-string pants, clogs, folk art jewelry and tie-dyed tank tops—fashions fully twenty years out of style...
...Another customer began yelling, "All we had to eat was old lard and the kind of sugar they feed to cattle...
...I was wearing around my neck...
...One particularly impassioned and bearded fellow named Carlos explained how the fact that the CFD was an observer group in the first place and came to Nicaragua at all proved its members had no respect for Nicaraguan sovereignty...
...Who are you for...
...All over the world we're bringing down dictatorships—or at least forcing them to go condo...
...People love to say one thing and do another...
...I supposed I'd have to natter on about the unfair advantages of using state resources for party ends, about how Sandinista control of the transit system prevented UNO supporters from attending rallies, how Sandinista domination of the army forced soldiers to vote for Ortega and how Sandinista bureaucracy kept $3.3 million of U.S...
...In the village of San Ramon we saw some horseplay...
...I understand Jimmy Carter had tracked Danny down in the middle of the night and told him—loser-to-loser—the jig was up...
...We didn't see any cheating like that, and the U.N., the OAS, and the Carter group said they didn't either...
...The Nicaraguan people just wanted change...
...They laughed...
...Sandinista graffiti is the only fresh paint in Nicaragua...
...But then the forlorn, sagging little shape of Bianca caught my eye, and, all of a sudden, I felt EVEN BETTER...
...The press conference was at the Sandinistas' imposing media complex, one of the few buildings in Managua that won't fall down if you urinate against the side of it...
...These are the last people on earth that sandalista types would consort with back home...
...I confess I believed the Sandys had all the corners nailed down, and I spent the last couple of days before the election committing that original sin of journalism, "writing the lead on the way to the ballpark...
...But now the CFD's credentials were downgraded so that its observers couldn't enter polling places, and more than fifty CFD observers had been denied Nicaraguan visas at the last minute...
...I especially wanted to gloat over the Americans—the ripe suck liberals and MasterCard Marxists—see them backing and filling and blowing smoke out4heir pants cuffs...
...O n the morning of February 26, the day after Violeta Chamorro's victory over Danny Ortega, I walked into the Inter-Continental hotel in Managua and Bianca Jagger was sitting alone in the lobby...
...As was Danny—pestering babies, attempting dance steps, wearing Ed Begley, Jr...
...Uno," said one little fellow in the back, and they all giggled and made as if to pummel him...
...Even more than disgusted, they were mystified...
...a network television newsman with (don't be shocked) left-wing connections came by looking agitated...
...he shouted...
...21...
...and, "Don't you think it's idiosyncratic that yours is the only observer group complaining about credential problems...
...the turkeys"), the OAS ("the chickens"), and Carter's group, the Council of Freely Elected Heads of Government ("the geese...
...So that was three hints I'd been given that Ortega might lose...
...Or, "What's the matter with your legs, Toots, don't you know `Fur is Dead...
...That is, they popped their heads in and made sure there was no Sandinista with a pistol in a toddler's ear saying, "Vote for Danny or the rug monkey gets it...
...We have to give credit to the German people for establishing an excellent electoral process...
...And there were Sandinista ad campaigns tailored to every segment of the electorate...
...There are no brief excuses for Communism...
...after which half the press conference attendees would clap...
...Or we'll get rid of her too," she added in the tone of an experienced democrat...
...The women confided to us that the men were going to vote for Ortega...
...I hadn't been keeping up to speed on Nicaraguan nonsense and had no idea why the lefties were heckling the Center for Democracy...
...We think these changes are positive, democratic...
...Everybody makes mistakes," the drunk told us...
...A few yards away that human rum blossom Senator Chris Dodd was telling reporters the election "wasn't a victory for UNO...
...But the old sandalistas, the New Left geezers, they looked like they'd gone to hell in a bong...
...Banners for the countryside showed a fierce portrait of Ortega with the motto Daniel Es Mi Gallo, "Daniel Is My Fighting Cock...
...God knows who I work for...
...Would you care to ostensibly support the dictatorship which controls every facet of your existence, or shall we put you down as in favor of the UNO opposition and just tear up your ration card right here and now...
...But those folks are only half right...
...There was the U.N...
...Sometimes it's hard to remember that bourgeois propriety is the real revolutionary force these days...
...The mob killed one person and chopped the arms off a couple others while the Sandinista police stood around like potted palms...
...One nice thing about being a conservative, at least I wouldn't feel betrayed by the masses...
...Were they surprised that UNO won...
...The Danny for President slogan todo sera mejor (meaning "everything will be better" and not, as I momentarily thought, "major dried toads") was as perfect an all-purpose campaign promise as I have ever heard...
...The early returns show them getting . . . " Getting what the billboard said, when you do for the first time, you should do for love...
...campaign aid from getting to UNO while Danny spent $3 million donated by overseas pinks, and millions and millions more from the Nicaraguan treasury, and so on...
...We can't abandon the people of Nicaragua," he said with a straight face, and, "The struggle will continue...
...But was he...
...Oh, it was almost too sweet for telling, how they bellyached and sourpussed and went around in sulks...
...Bianca had been ubiquitous during the election campaign: there was Bianca looking smart in an unconstructed linen jacket and yellow socks to match, Bianca looking serious with press pass and camera, Bianca looking thoughtful listening to Jimmy Carter, Bianca looking concerned conferring with Senator Christopher Dodd, Bianca looking committed in simple tennis shoes and neatly mussed hair, Bianca looking important wearing sunglasses after dark...
...I suppose they should have voted with their ---hole, Paul Reichler...
...I'm a member of the working press...
...Jim and I thought the sandalistas were funny...
...All of Ortega's people are really upset...
...Sandinista songs played from every radio...
...But all sorts of big, homely, dirty-haired American girls in stained T-shirts and dweeby little chicken-necked American boys in ripped jeans were fraternizing the hell out of the lumpen Nicaraguans (who were dressed in their Sunday best, by the way...
...When we came back through Sebaco late in the afternoon, some of the same people who'd been standing in line to vote at seven that morning were still waiting...
...Solis was master of the world-weary idealist act—lots of rueful smiles and I confess I believed the Sandys had all the corners nailed down, and I spent the last couple of days before the election committing that original sin of journalism, "writing the lead on the way to the ballpark...
...But there's no getting through to the highly perceptive...
...What Carter thought he was doing, besides proving there are worse things than Marines that the U.S...
...If the election is certified as honest and fair, the United States should lift sanctions," said Carter...
...My favorite thing to do was just make a little pistol motion with my hand THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1990 and shout, "Nicolae Ceausescu...
...He admits that he's drunk," the Sandinista policeman told us...
...Forum has been sponsoring interns from newly decommunized Eastern Europe, bringing them to the United States so that they can see how democratic institutions work and learn to avoid making terrible mistakes like electing Jimmy Carter...
...I hadn't come to Nicaragua prepared 1 for such joy...
...What about the polls...
...Trying to explain American lefties to Martin and Slawek was like—simile fails me trying to explain American lefties to two reasonable and intelligent people who'd never seen any...
...His manners were gracious and welcoming, his grin warm and genuine...
...20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1990 speech, old Landslide Daniel...
...we yelled...
...we've got a House of Representatives full of bed-wetting liberals to prove it...
...They were sickened and enraged that citizens of a free nation would go somewhere to promote dictatorship...
...Democracy is only one of human liberty's safeguards and not always the most effective one...
...The only Nicaraguan we heard complain was a guy who wasn't allowed to vote because he was drunk...
...Thus the press conference questions directed to Center for Democracy president Allen Weinstein weren't questions at all but diatribes capped with little rhetorical inquisitions such as, "How are you going to overcome your bias...
...The trouble was that the Center for Democracy got caught telling the truth...
...Inspection of credentials showed most of them to be correspondents for the Xeroxed newsletter of the Berkeley High-Colonic Liberation Front or television reporters from the Boulder Reincarnation for Peace Coalition's public access cable program...
...It's the Latino culture," said Carlos...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1990 19 care-laden brow rubs...
...Why were they so wrong...
...Cinco...
...The men and women had decided to get in separate lines...
...CFD was the first election monitoring group invited to Nicaragua...
...can send to Nicaragua, I don't know...
...It wasn't until another journalist told me the Sandinistas were in trouble that I believed it...
...Cinco...
...Each polling place was run by a brisk, snippy, managing Sandinista woman of middle age, the kind of woman who, in a free society, is known as "my first wife...
...I headed for the Olof Palme center to rank on the backpack journalists...
...I awoke to the sound of lugubrious 1 Spanish on the television...
...We'd gone back to the Olof Palmecenter to wait for returns...
...And he nodded toward the Congressional Press Gallery I.D...
...Danny's speech was a long one...
...The whole country is cracked, shattered, dirty, worn-out...
...Maybe he could have gotten Hitler some help rearming...
...The younger sandalistas looked like they'd just seen Lee Atwater open for the Grateful Dead...
...The American people just wanted Michael Dukakis ground into a heap and sold as fiber supplement...
...Lakers...
...Quite a bit of "crow in red sauce" has been served around the globe this year...
...Around 11:00 p.m...
...But there he was, the man who gave the store away in the first place, still grinning like a racoon eating fish guts out of a wire brush and still talking in that prissy, nose-first, goober-grabber accent, except this time in Spanish: " . . . newWAY-vuh Knicker-RAH-wuh deh-muhcrat-TICK-uh ." Carter oozed moral equivalence...
...Although it's something of a puzzle why rebellious middle-class Americans went to Nicaragua to help Sandinistas wreck Central America, instead of, say, going to South Africa to help Boers chase schoolchildren with whips or to Uganda to help Idi Amin eat people...
...We've been in line since four in the morning, since three in the morning, since two in the morning," one person told us with cheerful rural vagueness about time...
...The Sandinistas' black and red, doberman mouth party colors were painted anyplace paint could stick...
...The Ortega-snugglers were dressed as though they were going to a Weather Underground Days of Rage costume party...
...Carlos, the professor of "Chicano Studies," tried to look on the sunny side...
...The poor misguided fools...
...It was Danny Boy giving his concession Some of these lifestyle leftovers had gone so far as to don the red and black Sandinista neckerchief, an item of apparel identical in design to the neckerchief worn by the Boy Scouts of America...
...Chamorro's coalition was holding its election night party at a restaurant in one of Managua's few remaining middle-class enclaves...
...You can imagine the P J. O'Rourke is the author, most recently, of Modern Manners (Atlantic Monthly Press...
...And the 1988 presidential race wasn't a victory for Republicans either...
...Furthermore, when I arrived in Nicaragua I found an Ortega political machine that was positively Bushian in its relentless drumming on the issue-free upbeat...
...It's a shame Jimmy was too young to be an international observer at Germany's elections in 1932...
...Carlos is a professor at Glendale College in California where he teaches "Chicano Studies...
...Martin and Slawek—and Jim and I too, for that matter—preferred meeting with Comandante Rafael Solis, president of the Sandinista National Assembly...
...Lots of beer and cane liquor was being consumed and much smooching in the shadows was being done and fist-fights and up-chucks were beginning to dot the crowd...
...I was feeling great myself, ready to turn somersaults over the Ortega defeat, full of good cheer and pleased with all the world...
...But the CFD delegation—which included such dyed-in-the-hair-shirt liberals as Bob Beckel—was outraged by the Sandinista attack and said so...
...The effect was of a scout troop gone deeply, seriously wrong, growing older and older but never graduating to Explorer and earning merit badges in "Lenin," "marijuana" and "poor hygiene...
...near-racism in his attempt to explain why the polls said Danny would win but the voters said otherwise...
...That is—I blush to admit this—I accepted the results of an opinion poll taken in a country where it was illegal to hold certain opinions...
...There were Sandinista music videos with singing and dancing that could send Paula Abdul back to wagging pom-poms for the L.A...
...I asked...
...Now they had to eat what they cooked...
...But the real show was these sandalistas: prosperous, educated lefties from the United States who've flocked to Nicaragua for a decade to . . . well, to help...
...thedog-was-sick-on-the-carpet shirts and tossing free baseballs into crowds of squealing totalitarianism fans...
...And in that BMW, or hoping to be there soon, were all the regular Nicaraguans down at the Eastern Market...
...And that set off a passing drunk who ,may have been confused about geopolitics—or maybe not—but, anyway, had the right attitude...
...It's still a good title—I'll save it for my review of Christopher Hitchens's next book...
...you'd think I'd know better than to listen to journalists...
...The OAS observers at the Masatepe rally obligingly waffled and claimed "both sides" were to blame...
...A number of celebrity fellow travelers were in Nicaragua for the vote-offJackson Brown...
...In fact I couldn't resist it...
...The place was all clean shirts, hearty handshakes, polite honorifics, and, "How's your brother in Miami...
...We have to give credit to the Nicaraguan people for establishing an excellent electoral process," said Carter...
...That was what I planned to call this article...
...Get a job...
...poll-taking process: "Hello, Mr...
...In 1968 these kids would have been in the ham radio club or Future Stenographers of America...
...There have been serious problems in the campaign process on both sides," said Carter...
...they shouted, holding up five fingers to indicate they were voting for the fifth line on the ballot, the Sandinistas...
...Tomorrow, Japan...
...It was difficult to picture these decent, hardworking, prosperous, common-sensical people overthrowing a government...
...He was the kind of Commie who'd never ship anyone to a concentration camp in a boxcar, he'd send them in a taxi...
...The nation looks—and smells—like that paradigm of socialism, a public restroom...
...The crowd was a model of bourgeois propriety...
...Like most readers of papers and watchers of newscasts, I thought the Sandinistas were supposed to win this one...
...They wear "youth" clothes and have adolescent body language—constantly distributing hugs and touches and squirming with emotion rather than sitting still in thought...
...Ifs into the trash can with this sixties litter, and you could see they knew it...
...There was no evidence of Danny difficulties at the street dance, really no trace of politics except the general air of thuggishness that hangs over all "mass" political movements...
...The voting was done in dingy schoolrooms with all the window glass broken or missing and bare wires running across the ceiling to 15-watt light bulbs...
...Danny's smiling (I presume they used a photo-retoucher) face and Danny's heartthrob-of-thepoli-sci-department moustache were everywhere to be seen...
...People were waiting in line by the hundreds to vote...
...would be selling crack, getting the name of their favorite heavy metal band tattooed on their butts, or planning a drive-by shooting...
...It was invited by both sides and had been observing the election campaign since spring of last year...
...All the mothers are happy," said another mom...
...That afternoon I attended a less complacent press conference given by the Center for Democracy at the Inter-Continental Hotel...
...The UNO people had heard the same buzz and were in a mood of contained but swollen hope...
...And if it is necessary we will stay here until .. . ten," said another man, naming the latest hour of the evening he could think of offhand...
...production of Macbeth...
...They looked like Abbie Hoffman was looking the last couple years of his life, as though every night when they go to sleep a BMW chases them through their dreams...
...The center is one of those painstakingly bipartisan, painfully fair organizations that I myselfusually heckle...
...Occasionally someone would stand on a chair and say "Viva UNO" in a loud voice, but that was about it...
...But this morning Bianca looked . . . her age...
...J., I was just over at Sandy headquarters and something's gone seriously wrong," he said, meaning the opposite...
...The same old experts who always come here came here and gave us the same old results they always give," said the barber...
...Now, it's all right for observer groups to observe such things, that's what they're there for...
...But, in the end, Carlos was reduced to...
...Driving through the streets of Managua, seeing American hippy-dips all fiddle-faced and dejected, it was hard to resist the temptation to yell things out the car window...
...rr he Carter press conference was on 1 Saturday morning, the day before the election...
...But this seemed like weak tea, crybaby stuff...
...A number of college-age kids were present, too—earnest and homely and not at all the type who would have been lefties in my day of high fashion revolt...
...We hope Violeta fulfills her promises," said the proprietress of a shoe store...
...t sunrise on election morning we headed around Lake Managua and north into the mountains, visiting polling places in Sebaco and Matagalpa and little villages in between...
...The TV cameras pulled back to show the Olof Palme press corps singing along through their tears...
...The "press" at the press conference were a dirty and confused bunch, even by press corps standards...
...At the end of Danny's speech, he and his pals raised their fists in the air and warbled the Sandinista battle anthem, the one with the last line about Yankees being "the enemies of all humankind," singing us farewell in the manner of the Mickey Mouse Club except this crowd couldn't carry a tune on a shovel...
...Then we drove farther north to Jinotega in what had been contra territory...
...Here was a comprehensible scum-bag, somebody who was making a buck off the evil he espoused...
...I rushed out to gloat...
Vol. 23 • May 1990 • No. 5
