BOOKS
629
There is much more in this cool, balanced, and insightful book
that one could comment on: it packs an amazing amount of fact and
good judgement in its brief 260 pages.
It
recognizes what capitalism
cannot do, and what it can, and has, done. But what it has done is
what most people seem to want, and what socialism promises, and
does worse at providing, a better material life. Not enough to die for,
as Berger recognizes, but enough to make it worth defending against
alternatives that cannot even provide that, and would to boot take
away the degree of personal freedom with which capitalism coexists
very comfortably.
NATHAN GLAZER
NICARAGUAN JOURNEYS
WHERE IS NICARAGUA?
By
Peter
Davis. Simon and Schuster.
$18.95.
THE JAGUAR SMILE: A NICARAGUAN JOURNEY.
By
Salman
Rush·
die. Vi ki ng . $12.95.
Commenting on the scores of writers and intellectuals
who journeyed to Spain during the Spanish Civil War, Simone Weil
noted some fifty years ago that it was "in fashion
to
go on a tour
down there, to take in a spot of revolution, and to come back with
articles bursting out of your pen." Weil realized that such endeavors
had to be superficial, since "principles get completely out of phase
with realities," and any objective criterion for judging events disap–
pears. How, Weil asked, could a writer "report something coherently
on the strength of a short stay and some fragmentary observations?"
Would that both these authors had heeded Weil's advice before
they put pen to paper. Both of these men toured Nicaragua for three
weeks - Rushdie as a guest of the ru ling Sandinista Front for Na–
tional Liberation (FSLN)-and yet, we are supposed to trust their
accounts as definitive. What they reveal is less about Nicaragua and
more about their intellectual role as modern-day political pilgrims,
ever ready to bring back their enthusiastic accounts of revolution,
despite the realities that somehow evade their notice. They fulfill
Leon Trotsky's shrewd observation that they succeed only in produc–
ing a "kind of contemplative, optimistic, anything but destructive
