Republican Party Reptile(47)

Until the last years of the Eisenhower era, WASPs wore wonderful haberdashery. They went about in perfectly blocked and creased homburgs, jaunty straw boaters, majestic opera hats, and substantial bowlers. A gentleman would sooner wear two-tone shoes to a diplomatic reception than appear in public without a proper hat. Then something happened.

Adult male Protestants of the better-off kind are a prominent social group. They make up a large percent of our national leaders in business, politics, and education. Maybe it’s no accident that the rise of the silly hat coincides with the disappearance of a coherent American foreign policy, the decay of business ethics, the increase in functional illiteracy, and the general decline of the United States as a world power. The head is symbolic of reason, discipline, good sense, and self-mastery. Putting a fuzzy green Tyrolean hat decorated with a tuft of deer behind on top of it means trouble. Our native aristocracy, those among us with the greatest advantages, the best resources, and the broadest opportunities to do good, have decided to abrogate all civilized responsibilities, give free play to the id, and run around acting like a bunch of . . .

Wait a minute! Down by the dock—I just saw a WASP with a pitcher of martinis trying to put a fedora on his dog. Does this mean Henry Kissinger will be made Secretary of State again?





The Ends of the Earth





In Search of the Cocaine Pirates





I had money in the bank, a pretty girlfriend, an assignment from a slick magazine to interview some business executives. That is, I was bored, restless, and irritable. The difference between journalists and other people is that other people spend their lives running from violence, tragedy, and horror and we spend ours trying to get in on it. Blood was running through the streets of San Salvador, commie choppers thrashed the hills of Afghanistan, Africa was positively in the toilet from Addis Ababa to the Cape, and here I was in a goddam luxury hotel waiting to have lunch with a friendly corporate VP. I longed for stray mortar rounds, typhus epidemics, starving babies at the very least. Please understand, this isn’t courage or a desire to tell the world the truth. It’s sloth. Nothing makes an easier lead sentence than a stray mortar round hitting a starving baby in a typhus hospital. That is Pulitzer stuff. But try writing even a dependent clause about an honest comptroller giving you net sales figures over pasta salad.

In this funk of self-pity, a headline caught my eye: “Caribbean Islands’ Top Officials Held in Drug Smuggling Plot.” It seemed that on March 6, 1985, in a Miami Ramada Inn, the Drug Enforcement Agency had arrested Norman Saunders, the chief minister and head of state of a British Crown Colony called the Turks and Caicos Islands. Saunders was videotaped stuffing $20,000 into his pants pockets. He and two other officials from the islands’ eleven-member parliament—Minister of Commerce and Development Stafford Missick and legislator Aulden “Smokey” Smith—were charged with seventeen counts of conspiracy to smuggle narcotics. Thus, at day’s end, 27 percent of the Turks and Caicos elected government was cooling its heels in a U.S. slammer.

That was more like it. No national magazine had done a story about drug smuggling in the Caribbean for, I don’t know, a week. I could fly to the Turks and Caicos in between chats with fiduciary nabobs and get trouble plenty.

Nor was this the first spore of dark narco evil to come whiffing out of these airstrip-dotted, many-harbored cays at the remote southeastern reach of the Bahamas chain. We journalists keep up on such things. For years the English press had been running articles like “Paradise for Pedlars—Island Colony Key to a Multimillion Drug Trade” (Daily Express, September 7, 1982). The London Times said that in the late seventies “law enforcement officials reckoned that 90 percent[!] of the marijuana entering the United States was being moved through the Turks and Caicos.” The Sunday Telegraph warned, “Narcotics money is so influential that it is rapidly bringing about the creation of a completely new power structure in the Turks, a whole new political system.”

I checked the Saunders story in various newspapers. Apparently the Turks and Caicos natives were not grateful for the DEA’s efforts. “Talk of retribution, of hostages ... and of British warships rushing to the scene” was reported by the Washington Post under the front-page headline “Drug Arrests Raise Islands’ Tension—British Governor Urges Populace Not to ‘Take to the Streets.’” The New York Times said the new acting chief minister, Mr. Nathaniel “Bops” Francis, “declared indignantly that Mr. Saunders was ‘framed’ and he spoke angrily of a racist plot hatched by white Americans.” “Aftershocks . . . rumbled through the eight-isle British territory,” read the lead on a Miami Herald story which quoted the commerce minister’s nephew as saying, “It’s not a disgrace that they were interested in money. It is a disgrace that they got caught.” And what kind of country has members of Parliament with names like Bops and Smokey, anyway? The place must be a new pirate republic.