Gringos 'R' Us

HSTFridays
Mark IV

Ever ask yourself how Latin America is like Iraq?

We'll, even if you haven't, here are a couple of stories from a young Dr. Thompson and a slightly not so younger Billmon and his other side of the world sidekick Bernhard that are worth pondering if for no other reason than they say a heckuva lot about the white man's burden, especially when he finds himself banished, most often for monetary reasons, to his own of heart of darkness without a decent set of links anywhere nearby.


"One of my most vivid memories of South America is that of a man with a golf club - a five-iron, if memory serves - driving golf balls off a penthouse terrace in Cali, Columbia. He was a tall Britisher, and had what the British call 'a stylish pot' instead of a waistline. Beside him on a small patio table was a long gin-and-tonic, which he refilled from time to time at the nearby bar.

He had a good swing, and each of his shots carried low and long out over the city. Where they fell, neither he nor anyone else on the terrrace that day had the vaguest idea.....Somewhere below us, in the narrow streets that are lined by the white adobe blockhouses of the urban peasantry, a strange hail was rattling down on the roofs - golf balls, 'old practice duds,' so the Britisher told me, that were 'hardly worth driving away'.

It is doubtful that the same man would drive golf balls off a rooftop apartment in the middle of London. But (it) is not really surprising to see it done in South America. There, where the distance between the rich and the poor is so very great, and where Anglo-Saxons are automatically among the elite, the concept of noblesse oblige is subject to odd interpretations.

The attitude, however, does not go unnoticed; the natives consider it bad form indeed for a foreigner to stand on a rootop and drive golf balls into their midst. Perhaps they lack sporting blood, or maybe a sense of humor, but the fact is that they resent it, and it is easy to see why they might go to the polls at the next opportunity and vote for the man who promises to rid the natiuon of 'arrogant gringo imperialists'.

Hunter S Thompson, The National Observer, August 1963
Reprinted in the Great Shark Hunt, Warner Books, 1979, pp404-05.

****

Bernhard, a Whiskey Bar reader in Germany, has made a spectacular catch - or cache, I should say, since it comes from the bowels of the Google data base.

What he stumbled across is the diary of one Joe Ryan, a frequent caller and on-air personality at station KSTP, a conservative talk radio station in Minneapolis. More recently, Joe has been serving as a military interrogator at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and KSTP has been posting his diary on their web site.

For some strange reason, though, the radio station recently removed Joe's diary from its site. Unfortunately for KSTP - and, I suspect, for Joe - the page has been cached by Google. A copy also now resides on my hard drive.

The diary is a fascinating read - not least because it documents the fact that as of last Sunday, one of the private contractors identified in the Army's own internal investigation of the torture scandal was still at Abu Ghraib, and may still have been supervising or conducting interrogations......

.....here's what Joe Ryan, our radio personality turned military interrogator, put in his diary entry for April 25:

'I got to take the rest of the day off after our long booth time. This gave us a nice evening after dinner to head to the roof and play a round of golf. Scott Norman, Jeff Mouton, Steve Hattabaugh, Steve Stefanowicz*, and I all took turns trying to hit balls over the back wall and onto the highway.'

Billmon, The Whiskey Bar, May 2004

So, why would all those poor, sick and hungry Venezuelans keep on voting for a crazy man like Chavez?

And why was it so important to neutralize Al Sadr before the Iraqi elections?

Is it because they both hate golf?

Maybe.

But my guess is that it might have more to with the fact that they both have convinced their people that the only way they are going to get out of those slums and away from the white hail that never melts is to send the Gringos and their Beastly Burdens packing - for good.



____
*Turns out that Seymour Hersch had reported that Mr. Stefanowicz was actually a merc working for CACI International who had already been reprimanded, stripped of his security clearance, and recommended for firing by General Taguba before the golfball diary entry was written by Mr. Ryan.