Editorials: The Worst Book of the Year / The Small Island That We Rescued
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIALS by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. The Worst Book of the Year It is my privilege every year at this time to serve on the committee that judges America's only literary prize...
...Another fantasy is that he is morally superior to those whom he served...
...The locals were enraged with us...
...Fourteen years ago on this island the stage was being set for one of the final acts of the Cold War...
...Then, too, the political correctness of a writer's enthusiasms is always taken into account...
...All other awards—the Pulitzers, the National Book Awards, the National Book Critics' Circle Awards—are won as a consequence of politics...
...Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Times column syndicated by Creators Syndicate...
...Unlike us red-blooded males, Vinton's rejected men are mystically happy and always forgiving after losing girls to whom they have pledged their entire lives...
...As I say, down here surrounded by all the pro-American Grenadians, I am thinking about politics, history, and human stupidity...
...Yet not all Americans recognize these obvious facts...
...Now readers might object to the selection of Rollins, citing that gaudy flop published last year under President Bill Clinton's name, Between Hope and History...
...With Bishop's takeover they went right to work building an airport capable of landing the most modern war planes...
...Thus a coup was instigated against him, much like the coups that kept overthrowing the Soviets' Afghan puppets in pursuit of the perfect Soviet puppet...
...One fantasy is that a political consultant is essential to a politician's success...
...He claims high principles but demonstrates adherence to none...
...It rather makes me wonder why present-day Grenada does not gaily fly the hammer and sickle...
...Hence he passes on such inaccuracies as that Lee Atwater gave the world Willie Horton, not Al Gore campaigning for the 1988 Democratic presi25 YEARS AGO IN The American Spectator Since 1962 Bobby Vinton has produced perennial chart-climbers with a revised Tristan-Iseult myth as his theme...
...though many artists are proud to win Oscars, and their movies are as a matter of course quite dreadful...
...Their anti-American propaganda was broadcast throughout the Caribbean...
...Actually his insights are banal and wrong...
...Bishop was exploited by the Soviets...
...What is surprising is his artless exposé of his own mean and stupid little self...
...When I first visited the island a year after "The Rescue," grim-facedlocals upon inquiring as to my nationality would say gently, "America — Number One...
...No large media conglomerate has ever even bothered to lobby the Coogler Committee on behalf of one of its writers...
...In fact it was a small-scale demonstration of how the Soviets manipulated events from about 1946 onwards to their historic bankruptcy...
...In this publicity-mad world no one has yet to harvest publicity for writing the worst book...
...Yet he was not just another progressive messiah capable of embarrassing the West at the United Nations...
...Were the beginning and end not so far apart this reminiscence of his life in politics might have been less injurious to Rollins's reputation as a gentleman, an intelligent gentleman, an honorable gentleman...
...Bring back the enlightened days of—of whom...
...Agriculture prospers...
...Once again America won and the Soviets lost...
...Grenadians had been terrorized by the Cubans...
...And who would have thought that one of the mightiest military powers on earth would be defeated more by economics than by a bad day on the battlefield...
...Incidentally, the personal blunders that he catalogs show him to be his own personal political failure...
...After the fashion of a more successful book, Profiles in Courage, supposedly written by Clinton's hero John F. Kennedy, Between was written by a ghost writer...
...Medical services are improved...
...With the Coogler Award only literary quality matters...
...Bishop and his allies were butchered, and in came a truly Stalinist regime...
...I should add that, though one of Rollins' many conceits is that he has been peerless in advising on the art of communicating, he has turned to another writer, Tom DeFrank, to assemble this crudely written book...
...The reason, I suppose, that there is so little conniving for a Coogler is that the award honors the year's worst book...
...The Coogler Committee's sages do not consider the President's book a book, though it has been sold and remaindered in bookstores...
...When I first came here, and for years thereafter, the island was subdued...
...Bishop's fate made them still more fearful...
...Rollins presumes to be a man of honor, but throughout this book he betrays practically everyone whom he has served...
...At any rate I can now announce that the worst book of 1996 was the vulgar and repellent Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms by retired conservative political consultant and self-proclaimed toughie (who protests that American politics is no longer polite and high-minded) Ed Rollins...
...They thank Reagan for their lives...
...Boy meets girl, an obstacle occurs, and boy loses girl...
...This ghost writer might now actually be a ghost, for the writer who composed Between was clearly on the verge of being brain dead...
...Does anyone believe that an obvious creep such as Rollins has superior political skills to his old boss Ronald Reagan...
...The New York Times will throw its weight behind a story by a Gannett writer in Podunk who has reported on Bull Snort, Georgia's new ordinance against public nose-picking, if the Gannett people will cast a ballot for that marvelous series by a Times writer on gay cookbooks— or was it the heart-rending series on the needless and painful hysterectomies that fat-cat veterinarians are wont to perform on house pets...
...The same can be said for Bill Clinton's Rollins, Dick Morris...
...Bishop was the possessor of a piece of real estate that could serve tremendous strategic uses for Moscow...
...It has a beginning and an end...
...Moreover Grenada, given a proper airport, could be an unsinkable aircraft carrier right there in the Caribbean...
...Another fantasy is that Rollins is wise and intelligent about the great world of public affairs through which he hitched a ride...
...Ever since the 1970's Grenadians had feared the billy-club of tyrants and the corruption of a one-party state...
...though, to be honest, many writers from major media conglomerates have become Coogler laureates...
...The American invasion was viewed by the locals as "The Rescue," and still is...
...The roads, though bad, are better...
...Visit T.15 Online at NN .spectator.org The Small Island That We Rescued 20 May 1997 • The American Spectator...
...A typewritten note explains: "Head of the Libyan People's Bureau and counterpart being placed at their lowest by US forces...
...When will Rollins win election for anything...
...George's, ' -- in a glass case in the national museum, is a black-and-white photograph showing two recumbent civilians surrounded by American soldiers...
...Rollins's rise from the authenticity of a working-class Democratic family to the artificiality of chauffeuring Republicans off the golf course and into political eminence (one even became president), the book is actually a compendium of fantasies...
...Bud Fulsom, "The Desultory State of Contemporary Music" MAY1972 18 May 1997 • The American Spectator dential nomination against Horton's benefactor Michael Dukakis...
...As it is the hundreds of pages of trite thoughts, vulgar sentiments, and coarse language expose Rollins as an ass, a stupid ass, and a spectacularly dishonorable ass...
...Some years ago a Public Broadcasting Service show, "Frontline," explained "The Rescue" as another of America's foreign policy disasters...
...Or at least the stupidity of the American left...
...Reagan had again risked nuclear holocaust...
...In time he was deposed by the usual third-rate Marxist seer with a graduate student's grasp of politics and the world, the late Maurice Bishop...
...Yet all did not go the way the Soviets and the Cubans would have had it...
...Billed as a factual record of Mr...
...It was not a vastly momentous act, but it was an act of moment nonetheless...
...Moreover, his book reveals him to be such a shameless self-promoter that he may be the first Coogler laureate to boast about it...
...He is the winner of the 1996 Coogler Award for a very bad book...
...Here in St...
...This triumphant...
...For a Washington operSt...
...Now there is democracy and the rule of law, all of which was vouchsafed by Ronald Reagan in one of the final dust-ups of the Cold War...
...I am thinking politics, history, genuine human idiocy...
...Thoughts of paradise and mermaids are not on my mind...
...Most importantly, the average Grenadian no longer fears for his life...
...Ronald Reagan and his colleagues believed the Soviets could be stopped, and in October 1983 they sent in the 82nd Airborne along with other American units...
...Unfortunately for Moscow, the Old Cowboy was now resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue...
...Moreover this idiotic text was not actually written by the Boy President...
...Documents now in the hands of our intelligence services make clear that the Soviets and their surrogates were active on the island before Bishop's coup...
...It is, after all, a slim collection of speeches that are not actually speeches but more like a series of the yell lines of cheerleaders...
...Grenada became a genuine East Bloc satellite, albeit a lazy and very inefficient one...
...At any rate, Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms is a real book...
...admiration for America C remains...
...Soon plans were afoot for building facilities for super-submarines...
...though without the missiles...
...Major publishing houses, in the case of the book awards, and the news conglomerates, in the case of the journalism awards, lobby and horse trade...
...A sense of menace and fear was palpable...
...Mark it down as another demonstration of the shamelessness of a Washington hustler's hypocrisy...
...Their lives have markedly improved...
...The tourist trade, though modest by Caribbean standards, has picked up...
...In the 1970's this island was governed by a right-wing strongman who had led his little country out of colonial rule by controlling the labor unions and the requisite flowery oratory...
...According to the left-wing American's view of the world, the United States never did have a wise and sensible foreign policy throughout the Cold War...
...Read RET's editorials everyneck...
...The island is not far from very deep waters that might provide excellent cover for Soviet submarines with missiles aimed at the United States (during World War II the Nazis had the same idea,ator that is not surprising...
...The Worst Book of the Year It is my privilege every year at this time to serve on the committee that judges America's only literary prize awarded solely on literary merit and irrespective of politics, the J. Gordon Coogler Award...
...Bishop was too much the dreamer...
...George's, Grenada pecking away on my keyboard here in the sun and the balmy breezes, I am not thinking what the tourists on the beach are thinking...
...Over the years I have met scores of Grenadians who feared that with Bishop's death a typical Stalinist purge was about to sweep the island...
Vol. 30 • May 1997 • No. 5
