OFF IN NICARAGUA

Selective blindness is a malady common to Western leftists whenever they are visiting their new-found utopia. First it was the U.S.S.R., then Cuba, then Vietnam, and now Nicaragua. Director Alex Cox is but the latest of the gullible to have found “paradise” under communism.

Leftists like Alex Cox love to show their political machismo by questioning President Reagan’s Central American policy. Yet when dealing with his communist hosts, Cox’s critical faculties are strangely suspended.

Thus, Cox shows no curiousity as to why the Sandinista dictatorship was so enthusiastic and cooperative with his production. The prospect of his film being used as a propaganda tool seems not to have troubled him at all. Nor could the supposedly anti-dictator Cox see any irony in his using the Archbishop’s residence as a location setting, given the Sandinistas’ brutal oppression of the Catholic Church.

Although he is described as a “maverick,” Cox, as far as the anti-American politics of the trendy far left are concerned, could not be more conventional.

LANCE T. IZUMI

Gardena