TT: Not sure if to thank President Reagan for Grenada

The writer of this editorial may not know, but Grenadians and St. Lucian's surely do.

The editorialist is having a really hard time writing a fair assessment of Pres. Reagan's Grenada action. Though he writes this:

"Had Reagan not acted," according to John Compton, St Lucia's prime minister at the then tumultuous times "then the history of the Caribbean would have been much different from what it is today."

Certainly the history of Grenada would have been, although since the Marxist ideals that the still imprisoned Bernard Coard and his cohorts espoused became rubbished with communism's dramatic collapse almost the whole world over, the question is moot whether that regime would have long survived.

Still, Sir John may know of what he speaks. The bloody anarchy that gripped Grenada dealt a mortal blow to the left in the Caribbean even before the communist implosion in Russia itself, along with its former satellites, consigned much of what was considered to be radical 19th Century thought to the dustbin of history.

He manages to conclude with this:

Indeed, if we owe Mr Reagan anything and if Sir John is right, it is the space we now have to settle on our own truths in the full knowledge that other people's "truths", whether they come from the "left" or from the "right", and even when they are worthy of examination and particularised selection, can never rid us of the need, responsibility even, to discern and implement our own, based as they must be, on individual insight derived from the collective of native wit and imagination.

Don't ask me what he's talking about or what he means. I'm only five-three, and this post-modernist twaddle that he spouts here is about nine inches over my head.

In spite of what Grenadians say concerning the late President Reagan, the editorialist -- who was living fat and happy in TT, or even the U.S., during the years of Grenada's communist adventure -- cannot bring himself to be gracious and accept the U.S.'s role in the freeing of a people. I suppose, were he to accept that role in relation to Grenada, he would also have to assent to it in regard to Iraq.

Then, lest TTians become kindly disposed to Republicans, the Express runs this story about how blacks and gays suffered during the Reagan administration. Where do they find this liberal twaddle, and how come they never run articles that accurately reflect history?

Here's another leftist screed from a British journalist, Gwynne Dyer. According to him, Reagan was just a good actor who had no great accomplishments to speak of.

That is the Trinidad Express's response to the death of an American president. Wait for him to be buried? De mortuiis nil nisi bonum -- even if you don't believe it? Hah! It's all about "settl[ing] on our own truths," doncherknow?!