Word: tinhorns
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...consequences if their rhetoric is translated into policy. Time after time in Texas last week, Ronald Reagan thundered about the canal: "We bought it. We paid for it. We built it. And we are going to keep it." As President, Reagan vowed, he would say just that to any "tinhorn dictator" in Panama who sought to gain control over the waterway. The Reagan theatrics, designed to win him support in his dead-even showdown with Gerald Ford in the Texas primary on May 1, drew strong applause...
Naturally, American liberals were disillusioned. For most of them, both the real alternatives in Vietnam--the victory of the National Liberation Front, and the continuance of what liberals were beginning to call a "tinhorn dictatorship"--were still unacceptable. But the United States, after all, had no compelling interest in Vietnam...
...Soviets-and most other U.N. delegations, for that matter-the cause célèbre of the week was not China, but a cowardly sniper attack on a roomful of Russian children, apparently perpetrated by an adherent of the tinhorn terrorist Jewish Defense League. One evening at midweek, four rifle bullets crashed through an eleventh-floor bedroom window in the massive East Side Manhattan building that houses the large Soviet mission to the U.N. The shots were not heard by the 700 guests attending a lively reception on the lower floors, but they narrowly missed four embassy children...
...last day in Oriente, we went to the Moncada barracks in the center of Santiago. On July 26, 1953, 135 Cubans with a strong love for their countrymen and a burning hate for tinhorn dictators with rich American friends tried unsuccessfully to capture the barracks in an attempt to spark an insurrection which they though would topple Batista's government. There is a huge school now in the long, pink building with seventeen-year-old bullet holes still pock-marking its walls. That day the fourth-graders had filled a bulletin board with a photo exhibit of Vietnamese children...
...when it finally does, the question that has been forming in your mind--why Shea decided to write about Lermontov and not Pushkin--begins to dissipate. Of course Lermontov is a tinhorn, a two-bit mock-up of Pushkin, a caricature of a radical artist who is grotesque rather than tragic (though, by some trick, he becomes almost tragic in the end). That is precisely the point; Pushkin was above revolution, though he was a friend of revolutionaries. He saw through it. Lermontov was beneath revolution; he was merely bored, dissatisfied with things the way they were for some vague...