Word: hoaxes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...much reprinted poem called The Satraps, said to have been written by Neruda shortly before the coup, was released by a Cuban news agency staffer in Buenos Aires. The verse, which describes President Nixon and Junta Leader Augusto Pinochet as "hyenas ravening/ Our history," is a hoax. Apparently Buenos Aires leftists "updated" a Neruda poem from the 1950s, changing the names of Latin American Dictators Trujillo, Somoza and Carias to Nixon, Frei (Allende's predecessor as president) and Pinochet...
...issued unqualified denials of U.S. complicity-perhaps suspect in light of recent revelations about, say, the secret bombing of Cambodia in 1969 and 1970. There were equally strong denials from leaders of the junta that their coup had outside help. Most tellingly, the CIA called the Centaur plan a hoax...
McGuane's own trademark is the monstrous practical joke that is at the center of all his books. In The Sporting Club, a demonic hoax-artist contrived to destroy an exclusive hunt club in northern Michigan. The Bushwhacked Piano contained a lunatic scheme to cash in on antipesticide sentiment by selling tall towers stocked with insect-eating bats...
Within a half hour, his face now ruddier than usual, Erviri returned to his Senate Caucus Room microphone to announce that he had been the victim of a hoax. Ervin had just talked to a man "who really assured me he was the real Secretary Shultz, and he informed me that he had had no conversation with me today." Protested the embarrassed Ervin: "It is just an awful thing for a very trusting soul like me to find that there are human beings?if you can call them such?who would perpetrate a hoax like this...
...police skepticism vanished when the boy's mother received his letter and two phone calls, apparently from one of the kidnapers. "At first I thought it might be a stupid joke," she said, "but then I understood it was serious." To prove that the kidnaping was not a hoax, the caller said he would send the mother one of her son's fingers. Grandfather Getty, meanwhile, said that he would not pay a ransom. Although he sees his grandson infrequently and is not particularly close to him, Getty said he loves him nonetheless. Yet love, in Getty...