Word: canings
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...John Grimes, takes a headlong run down a hill of melting snow: "At the bottom of the hill, where the ground abruptly leveled off onto a gravel path, he nearly knocked down an old white man with a white beard, who was walking very slowly and leaning on his cane. They both stopped, astonished, and looked at one another. John struggled to catch his breath and apologize, but the old man smiled. John smiled back. It was as though he and the old man had between them a great secret...
...connected John Grimes and the old man, while pleasant enough for the occasion, was historically speaking a lapse of judgment, a slip of the heart. If Baldwin had been writing news instead of fiction, John might never have thought to apologize, and the old man might have swung his cane like a war club...
...people caught in the crossfire between guerrillas and government soldiers, Salvadorans display a remarkable ability to keep up business as usual. Trucks carrying sugar cane and coffee beans still crowd the highways, shops remain open, the buses run. Most people now seem to feel that the guerrillas will eventually be defeated. Many are much more frightened by the right-wing death squads, which apparently intend to kill anyone tainted by the left...
Meanwhile, the minuscule economic elite of El Salvador is doing very well, living off the export of coffee, sugar cane, and cotton. Two per cent of the country owns over 60 per cent of the farmland, and 5 per cent of the people receive 50 per cent of the income. A corporation president in El Salvador recently told the truth: "It is a class war," he said. It does not take Fidel Castro to tell people they are being repressed, starved, taken away in the middle of the night, and shot down in the streets. A revolution was coming...
Jocelyn Davey is the nom de plume of Chaim ("Rab") Raphael, who has been an Oxford don, a Foreign Office functionary and spokesman for the Treasury, and is as volubly at home in the fleshpots of North America as he is among the ar cane outer reaches of literature, music and art. It is no secret that Ambrose Usher is modeled on Sir Isaiah Berlin, the high-wattage Oxford intellectual, government adviser and nonstop conversationalist. Sir Isaiah is 71. The ebullient Ambrose, of course, has the fictional hero's privilege of suspended birthdays. Or else cloak and mortarboard...