Word: guyana
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Industrial production is declining, consumer goods are in short supply, and political repression is mounting. That is not usually the kind of record that keeps incumbents secure in office. Yet in Guyana, President Linden Forbes Burnham, 57, felt more than confident that his 16-year-old regime would be returned to office in this week's national elections. As he boasted to cheering supporters of his People's National Congress party, "We are the only [party] that can produce for ourselves a 75% majority after the votes have been cast...
Indeed. Since coming to power after Guyana gained its independence from Britain in 1966, Burnham, an Oxford-trained lawyer, has often been accused of rigging his own election-day heroics. Critics claim that in 1973 he padded his first post-independence victory with the votes of 70,000 dead or nonexisting people. Guyana's army seized the ballot boxes after initial returns seemed to be turning against Burnham. When the results were announced a day later, he had won a satisfying two-thirds majority...
Under a new constitution that Guyana's rubber-stamp parliament approved in October, Burnham gained virtually limitless authority as President and Commander in Chief. Nonetheless, he called for another show of support-specifically, 75% of the electorate. Opposition candidates were not allowed to see a list of eligible voters, even after the government blithely removed more than 111,000 names, or about 20% of the electorate. There are accusations that other names have been added, including those of victims of the 1978 Jonestown massacre...
BACK AND FORTH ALLEN wanders between life and art, between comedy and drama. He is making a transition, but he himself seems unsure precisely where he wants to go. He experiments with tastelessness (jokes about Guyana, rape and human lampshades). He steals from his own short stories, and even from Interiors. But he can't seem to find what he's looking for. "Doesn't he know he has the greatest gift anyone could have, the gift of laughter?" says a critic. "I don't feel funny," responds Woody. "I look around the world and all I see is human...
...From the inside-of Woody Allen's head-celebrity is all of this, and ain't it awful? It means being introduced to a woman who wrote "the definitive cinematic study of Gummo Marx." It means being offered unproducible scripts, including a musical-comedy treatment of the Guyana massacre. It means being solicited to join committees for Soviet dissidents, to help stamp out leukemia, to donate a personal item to a celebrity auction for the blind ("Somebody told me you wear a truss. An old truss would be just wonderful"). It means being asked...