| Dispatch
#28: The Fall of General Stroessner
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And now, for a change of pace, a blast from the past: a piece called "The
End of the Tyrannosaur," about the all of Paraguay's long-time despot,
General Alfredo Stroessner, that was published in the September, l989 Vanity
Fair, with Goldie Hawn doing an exuberant shimmie on the cover. Not many
American journalists were writing about the rest of the world, and Tina
Brown, impressed by my ability to move around in exotic places, had me
writing about a succession of tropical dictators who were toppled in the
late eighties and nineties: the Central African Republic's Emperor Jean-Bedel
Bokassa, Paraguay's Stroessner, Ethiopia's Mengistu Haile Meriam, and Zaire's
Mobutu Sese Seko. It was a new genre for me, having been attracted to the
tropics by their flora and fauna and traditional people, but I was
beginning to realize that everything in these places-- including saving
their rainforests and traditional societies-- depended on politics, as
everywhere. To delineate the trajectories of these bad guys, I developed
a more worldly and ironic voice than the gentler, more lyrically descriptive
natural-history travelogue of my far-flung New Yorker pieces.
Here is Tina's Editor's Letter for that month:
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| An environmentalist
or cultural preservationist might ask what is this piece doing as a Dispatch?
Because it is about flux, and what this site is really about is the flux
and diversity of the life on this planet (for now, until we get some
extraterrestrial input), whether "natural" or "cultural" -- a distinction
that I don't find, in the end, necessary or very useful. The era of these
grand monstres is over, Tina Brown left Vanity Fair in l992 and ran the
New Yorker for a few years, then started her own magazine, Talk, which
went under, and I don't know what she's doing now, except probably going
on weekends to my mother's best friend's house in Bedford, which she and
her husband Harry Evans bought in the nineties. Looking back on her, I
realize that I was never sufficiently grateful to Tina for her efforts
to make me a star. The world of 15 years ago already seems so innocent
and quaintly passe. The modern culture is flipping every year and a half
now.
We apologize for the typos that
have crept in from the scanning process.
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