Taki Magazine

Actually, Joe set himself up. From the moment he set foot on Israeli soil, our vice president was in full pander mode.

First, he headed to Yad Vashem memorial, where he put on a yarmulke and declared Israel “a central bolt in our existence.”

“For world Jewry,” Joe went on, presumably including 5 million Americans, “Israel is the heart. ... Israel is the light. ... Israel is the hope.”

Meeting Shimon Peres the next day, Joe confessed that when he first visited at age 29, “Israel captured my heart.”

In Peres’ guestbook, he wrote, “The bond between our two nations has been and remains unshakeable.”

He then told Peres and the world, “There is absolutely no space between the United States and Israel when it comes to Israel’s security.”

As Peres spoke, Biden took notes. When Peres called him “a friend,” Joe gushed, “It’s good to be home.”

Even at AIPAC, they must have been gagging.

Walking around the corner to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s office, Joe called him by his nickname, “Bibi,” declared him a “real” friend and said the U.S. relationship with Israel “has been and will continue to be the centerpiece of our policy.”

Then the sandbag hit.

Interior Minister Eli Yishai announced construction of 1,600 new apartment units in Arab East Jerusalem. Stunned and humiliated, Biden issued a statement saying he “condemned” the decision.

He then retaliated by coming late to dinner at Bibi’s house.

Netanyahu has apologized for the timing, but they are going ahead with the apartments. What are the Americans going to do about it? At this point, nothing but bluster.

Indeed, a day later, at Tel Aviv University, Joe was back at it: “(T)he U.S. has no better friend ... than Israel.”

On his departure for Jordan, Ha’aretz reported that Israel plans to build 50,000 new homes in East Jerusalem over the next few years.

Biden may feel he was played for a fool, and Americans may feel jilted, but we got what grovelers deserve. And if we wish to understand why the Arabs who once respected us now seem contemptuous of us, consider that battered-spouse response to a public slap across the face.

Consider also the most remarkable statement of Biden’s first 24 hours.

“Progress occurs in the Middle East when everyone knows there is simply no space between the United States and Israel.”

Biden is saying we are a more effective force for Mideast peace in a region where Arabs outnumber Israelis 50 to one if everyone knows we sing from the same song sheet as Israel and have no policy independent of Israel’s.

How can America be seen as an honest broker between Arabs and Israelis if there is “no space” between America and Israel?

Even with the closest ally in our history, Britain in World War II, there was space between Winston Churchill and FDR on where to invade—North Africa, Italy, France, the Balkans?—whether to beat Stalin to Berlin, Prague and Vienna, who should be supreme allied commander, even whether the British Empire should survive.

Israel keeps its own interests foremost in mind, and when these dictate actions inimical to U.S. interests, Israel acts unilaterally. David Ben-Gurion did not seek Dwight Eisenhower’s permission to attack Egypt in collusion with the French and British in 1956, enraging Ike.

Israel did not consult JFK on whether it could steal enriched uranium from the NUMEC plant in Pennsylvania for its atom bomb program.

Israel did not consult us on whether it could attack the USS Liberty in the Six-Day War, or suborn Jonathan Pollard to loot our security secrets, or transfer our weapons technology to China. They went ahead and did it, knowing the Americans would swallow hard and take it.

Ehud Olmert did not consult President-elect Obama on whether to launch a war on Gaza and kill 1,400 Palestinians. Nor did Netanyahu consult us before Mossad took down the Hamas minister in Dubai.

What Netanyahu and Yishai are telling Obama with their decision to keep building on occupied land is, “When it comes to East Jerusalem and the West Bank, we decide, not you.”

And if Netanyahu has jolted Joe and others out of their romantic reveries about Israel, good. At least now we no longer see as through a glass darkly.

Israeli and U.S. interests often run parallel, but they are not the same. Israel is concerned with a neighborhood. We are concerned with a world of 300 million Arabs and a billion Muslims. Our policies cannot be the same.

If they are, we will end up with all of Israel’s enemies, who are legion, and only Israel’s friends, who are few.

And if our policy and Israel’s are one and the same, the Arab perception will be what it is today—that America cannot stand up to Israel, even when her national interests command it.

Joe’s performance before he got the wet mitten across the face only underscored the point: The mighty superpower is a poodle of Israel.

I certainly don’t know much about investing, but I can give you one solid tip: don’t bet in the movie box office futures market.

Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald expects to get federal regulatory approval to begin trading movie pseudo-shares in April (and a start-up called Veriana Networks also hopes to get into the business). The rationalization is that movie-makers could unload some of the risk of a flop on investors, but the appeal is that it’s more fun than gambling on pork bellies.
What could be a more perfect embodiment of our post-modern economy? While the Asians manufacture everything, Americans will try to get rich by selling each other cinematic synthetic financial instruments.

Betting on box office numbers isn’t a new idea. For a decade, hobbyists with too much time on their hands have been competing on the Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSX) for pretend money by predicting how well new movies will perform.

How does the HSX prediction market work? Consider, for example, the remake of the 1981 film Clash of the Titans (with Liam Neeson redoing Laurence Olivier’s role as Zeus), which will be released on April 2. The consensus among HSX players is that it will be a big hit, earning $193 million in its first four weekends of domestic release. If you think Clash will do even better, you can “buy” it for 193 dollars in play money, with any excess over that amount going into your account for more bets.

Trying to outsmart other members of the public about what the public really wants might sound overly meta to you, but HSX claims to have 200,000 players. Some bettors seek validation for their tastes, others confirmation of their acuity.

Back in 2001, Cantor Fitzgerald bought HSX, intending to turn it quickly into a real money futures exchange. Tragically, the firm’s world headquarters happened to be on floors 101-105 of One World Trade Center. On 9/11, 658 workers—two-thirds of its employees—were murdered. (That’s almost twice the 343 dead lost by the Fire Department of New York.)

I’m glad Cantor Fitzgerald’s dream has survived 9/11. And I’ve found their HSX useful over the years in figuring out whether I should bother RSVPing to invitations to screenings.

It’s not that the HSX prediction market is tremendously accurate. This year, it notoriously underestimated the popularity of Alice in Wonderland. Similarly, Avatar traded mostly at a little under $200 million through the fall of 2009, but wound up paying off at over $400 million. Most notably, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ dropped as low as $6 before taking in $296 million in its first four weeks.

Yet, HSX is still quite useful for the kind of order-of-magnitude guesstimates I need to decide whether a release will slip beneath the waves so quickly it won’t be worth reviewing.
For example, today I was invited to a screening of The City of Your Final Destination. It stars Sir Anthony Hopkins, was directed by James Ivory, and was written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Those of us of a certain age will recall them as the surviving members of the classy Merchant-Ivory team that made The Remains of the Day in 1993. But how many people in 2010 will care about this geriatric crew’s latest?

A quick glance at the Hollywood Stock Exchange shows that punters are expecting The City of Your Final Destination to garner less than a million dollars at the domestic box office.
In contrast, last November I received an invitation to a preview of another little movie with an aging lead, Crazy Heart. Yet I quickly heard that, even though the film was still being edited, the movie industry had already made up its mind that it would serve as the occasion for finally giving Jeff Bridges his Best Actor Oscar. So, I went.

And that illustrates exactly why you wouldn’t want to bet real money on box office futures. What makes Cantor Fitzgerald’s Hollywood Stock Exchange helpfully accurate is that it has always encouraged insider trading. Its website currently advises “Insider Trading: Trade with any information you can find.”

As well it should.

Screenwriter William Goldman famously noted, “Nobody knows anything” about which movies will be hits. For instance, why did Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland enjoy a huge $116 million opening weekend? My theory is that the public reasoned: “It’s in 3-D, it’s by a famous director, and it begins with the letter ‘A,’ so it must be like Avatar!” Yet, even in the unlikely event that were true, it wouldn’t stay true for long.

On the other hand, studio executives, agents, set caterers, and their pool guys do know something about which movies probably won’t be hits. And they gossip about it.

Good films are hard to make, and quite a few productions are palpably not good enough to catch the public’s fancy. You wouldn’t want to bet real money against the people who were there.

Like most butchers, Muhammad Bouyeri of the Hofstad Group is not a man of many doubts. When asked why he slaughtered the Dutch film-maker Theo Van Gogh, he was succinct: “I was motivated by the law that commands me to cut off the head of anyone who insults Allah and his prophet.” 
Most likely, Bouyeri was inspired by Chapter 47, verse 4 of the Qur’an which advises: “When you encounter the unbelievers on the battlefield, strike off their heads until you have crushed them completely” or Chapter 8, verse 39, which commands war against unbelievers until ‘all chaos ceases and all religion belongs to Allah alone.’

As Ibn Khaldun pointed out centuries ago:  “In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the mission to convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force… Islam is under obligation to gain power over other nations.”

In this spirit, terrorists are not alone in their borderless inquisition: Enter the Organization of Islamic Conference, the self-described custodian of the worldwide Muslim community.

Playing Good Cop to terror’s Bad Cop, the OIC has been waging a campaign since 1999 to impose an international treaty that would make the criticism of Islam illegal. For this global outsourcing of Shari’a, the United Nations proved to be the ideal backdoor:
 
On December 21, 2009, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution to ‘combat’ the ‘defamation of religions’—creatively peddling blasphemy as a human rights violation.

When numerous governments and over 200 NGOs strongly urged the UN to abandon its subversion of freedom, the pleas fell on indifferent ears.

Or rather, it fell on Muslim ears.

A little investigation reveals that this resolution, which originated in the Human Rights Council, was submitted by the OIC itself, the same organization that explicitly rejected the Universal Declarations of Human Rights which the General Assembly disingenuously ‘recalls’ and ‘reaffirms’ in the preamble of its resolution. 

Citing the Shari’a as its sole source, on August 5, 1990, the OIC adopted and ratified The Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam to replace the UDHR because the latter was replete with ‘Judeo-Christian’ secularism and freedoms which ‘precludes Muslims from implementing them without transgressing Islamic law.’

Rendering all satire obsolete, one-third of the seats at the Human Rights Council is held by the OIC, which represents totalitarian dystopias like Saudi Arabia, which only banned slavery in 1962 and Iran, which still insists on ‘elevating’ Muslim women by hanging them from cranes. 

Clearly, religious censorship can be achieved without the violence and public relations disaster of terror. As Sayed Abul Ala Maududi explained in 1937: “Islamic jihad is both offensive and defensive at one and the same time…As a party…[it] does not attack the home of the opposing party, but launches an assault on the principles of the opponent.”

Over decades, this assault on freedom has been so brilliant that a Do-It-Yourself jihad is now taking place in Holland, where on January 20, 2010, the leader of the Dutch Freedom Party, Geert Wilders, went on a heresy trial largely for producing the movie Fitna.

Adopting Kafkaesque double-standards, the government charged Wilders with ‘hate speech’ for the apparent ‘crime’ of documenting incitement and acts of mass murder made against non-Muslims by jihadists. 
From the Islamist perspective however, Wilders is not guilty of blasphemy as much as he is guilty of exposing the religious imperative of Taqqiya, which urges Muslims to conceal their beliefs from non-Muslims in order to advance the cause of Islam.

Because terrorists and tyrannies have successfully presented sacred Islamic texts justifying cultural and military imperialism, it is only strategic that the powerful elixir that weaponizes young men into becoming ‘martyr’ bombs should remain above any questioning. 

For its part, the OIC condemned Wilders’s revelation of hate speech by Islamist ideologues rather than the ideologues themselves. The OIC also condemned reporting the death threats Wilders receives even as it threatened the very principle that allows Wilders to speak in the first place: freedom of conscience.

Not surprisingly, it was the OIC who urged ‘the Dutch Government to complete its legal inquiry and examine steps to prosecute the author of the documentary under the Dutch law.’

As the chairman of the OIC declared: ‘I don’t think freedom of expression should mean freedom from blasphemy. There can be no freedom without limits.’
Keeling at the idea of boycotts and strategically stoked mass hysteria, the Dutch government agreed:

When Wilders requested to bring in witnesses to establish whether his ‘hate-speech’ is a repetition of truth, the prosecution (or the persecution?) stated: “It is irrelevant whether Wilders’s witnesses might prove Wilders’s observations to be correct, what’s relevant is that his observations are illegal.”

And so, with the zeal of a colonial overseer, the Ministry of Justice eliminated fifteen of Wilders’s list of eighteen witnesses and barred the remaining three from testifying publicly. To enhance Wilders’s prospects of getting assassinated, the prosecution also refused to provide him with a secure courthouse. 

Lest anyone misunderstand, this is not a matter of agreeing or disagreeing with Wilders—a modern day thought criminal if ever there was one. Nor is this about the ‘defamation’ of religion: only living persons can be defamed, not their ideas. This is about the stealth sacrifice of the most precious of human rights at the altar of Islamic ideology, all the more dangerous because it dons the irreversible garb of legitimacy and legality.

Quaerite Prime Regnum Dei. When someone asks me where I’m from, usually after listening to me speak, then curiously cocking their head in a vain attempt to place my accent, I hesitate.

I don’t hesitate because I’m not sure where I’m from. A few months off from high school trying my hand at door-to-door encyclopedia sales in the bitter Atlantic winter, meeting thousands of our hardworking men, women and children. An elderly mother in a small port village told me she had 22 girls, and then switched her fisherman husband’s diet from pork to chicken and finally bore a boy. Why not fish, I asked?

I don’t hesitate because I’m embarrassed. The first colony of the British Empire, the most strategic north-easterly point of land, the origination of the first transatlantic wireless signal, the birthplace of the gas-mask, the worlds largest dog. We can be proud.

Nor do I hesitate because I have some dark lust to forget my origins. I love my old stomping ground, the language, the food, the arts and culture, the friends and friendly enemies, the deep seeded community feel, the lack of ‘chip on the shoulder’, the fish ‘n chips, the benign nightly news, the low crime rate.

I hesitate because the reactions to my proud, confident, and passionate answer range from ‘Huh?’ to ‘What did he say?’ or ‘Where’s that?’ or the most soul-destroying response ‘Ahhh, New Zealand. You don’t sound like a Kiwi!’. The latter makes me gag like a vegan in a slaughterhouse.

Newfoundland. Born 1497 when, as a great (or soon to be great) man offers:

“In fourteen hundred and ninety two, Columbus sailed the ocean bloooo, in fourteen hundred and ninety seven, Cabot sailed his way to heaven” (at the behest of King Henry VII). The source of salt fish for the Empire, wood for the boats that carried it across the Pond, and soldiers for the Great Wars that protected Her. ‘Hells Angels on steroids’, the Vikings set out to ravage Northern Europe in the ninth century, and left in their brutal wake a settlement in L’Anse aux Meadows, on the northern tip of the island, which coincidentally shares its latitude with London, where the future of my postman’s forbears was decided with impunity, and not generously so.

Newfoundland. With eyebrows of terraced houses high above the most northerly ice-free harbor in North America, each wooden salt-box inspired two-story painted in jellybean colors, the hues of rainbow left over from the identifying hull tint used by a fisherman to point his boat from the boats of his countrymen. Defended during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries against invaders from every member of the future European Union, who then in the twentieth century, with advanced knowledge of science, politics and economics proceeded to rape its fisheries to within a shred of extinction, and then take the fast lane back to their ports to unload the last of le morue, el bacalao (or bacalhau, if that’s the way you’re facing).

Who hasn’t read the book made famous by that limpy bloke from the films, the movie of the same name which wasn’t actually filmed here; seen the reality footage of a highly strung polar bear tranquilized on a cliff; watched a one-legged woman (formerly of ill-repute, now proven of ill-mental health) struggle to communicate her impression of the winter hunt (while our eyes were watching Sir Paul squirm in the cold). How can it not be known that our capital city, the oldest city in North America; the home of the second Pan monument; and the landing site of more than a few of those brave transatlantic flight pioneers; that it shares a latitude with Salzburg, Satu Mare, and Seattle. ITS NOT IN THE ARTIC CIRCLE!

Granted we have pack-ice on-shore for six weeks a year, I’ll give you that. And that we see icebergs for three months, peppered with seals, the odd polar bear, and multitudes of whales. That you can have as well. Choose between any of our well-deserved titles: the foggiest, windiest, cloudiest, wettest (?) and snowiest. We are also the some of the happiest.

So ask me where I’m from, after a few nonchalant jokes to powder your ignorance I’ll tell you “I was born in Newfoundland” Your response will make me chuckle, a warmth will emanate like a mother watching her infant try to take their first steps. You’ll say “Ah, Noo-FOWND-Lend?” and I’ll say “No, say it like this… Un-der-stand New-found-land”. I’ll say “You know it?”, you’ll muster all your educational chestiness, and say “Of course, its way up North, right?” with the glint of a first-time smoker, teary eyes and held back choke intact. And I’ll tell you, with no uncertainty, that it’s further south than London, the fifteenth largest island, half the size of Great Britain with one-hundred-twentieth the population, and that it’s a land of beauty unparalleled. I should let the conversation die there, before you ask with simple incredulity ‘Did you go to school there?’ as if my intelligence could only have been nurtured by a foreign service…

I write this dispatch from London, where I am a minority. I may possibly be the only Newfoundlander some will ever meet, dine with, or share a hearty guffaw. You may be a member of the lucky few who really get what it means to have grown up in the pine-clad hills, where summer spreads her hands for only days of the year, but where traditions and dialects exist in modern times.

      Zurich has a reputation for being stodgy, but it ain’t so, at least not after hours. On one of my first visits, I met a Dublin girl by the name of Mary O’Connell downstairs at the hotel bar, which was an Irish bar and a hot spot. She worked as an au pair for a rich family somewhere in the suburbs. Mary smoked incessantly, her working papers were undated, and I could barely comprehend a word of what Mary said. Her brogue was thick, her words were slurred on top of that, and she talked non-stop with a cigarette stuck in her mouth, from which she blew smoke right into my face.

      Mary was a knockout, a real sweetheart. The only problem was she had a Turk for a boyfriend. And her daffy girlfriend from Killarney was in love with a Greek. Aside from cigarettes and Guinness, the biggest pleasure these two Celtic wonders had in life was keeping their boyfriends dangling at the end of a rope. According to Mary, the poor fools were hypnotized. Mary informed me that she did not dance, but we made a date to go dancing anyway.
   
      I did not use her first name. Instead, I assumed a slight brogue and pronounced her name in a formalistic way. It was “Well, Mary O’Connell…” and “Now, Mary O’Connell…” With the Guinness, it worked. I became a kind of slave or attachment. I was lighting up Mary’s cigarettes and hanging onto her every word. What she had to say was not earth-shaking by any means. It was just the fact that she was saying it, that it was coming out of her big beautiful mouth, along with the smoke.
   
      When I observed her ordering the waiters around like they were her personal factotums, it gave me pause. She knew them all. It turned out that most were either Irish or Anglo-Irish, so it figured. They seemed eager to do anything and everything Mary told them to do, no matter what. The question I kept asking myself was, why? But I was just like them. Mary gave me a color snapshot of herself in the nude, embracing an old poster of Clint Eastwood in one of those spaghetti westerns. To reciprocate, I forked over a pack of English “Craven A” cigarettes. It delighted her to no end. 

      The next morning I had breakfast at a sidewalk cafe on the Bahnhofstrasse, one of the wealthiest streets in the world. I was stoked. If it had been another city at another time of day, I might have jump up on the table and done an Irish jig in honor of Mary O’Connell. If I had done that, however, it would have been grounds for deportation. Zurich is not New York or Mexico City. It is ground zero of the Western World, the lock box of civilization.
 
      Supposedly, there was a mile of gold bullion in vaults beneath the street. Zurich was and remains the last safeguard in a world rapidly going to the dogs. In Zurich, on that day not long ago, there was no mayhem, and the whole downtown area was mercifully free of jarring noises. (It was not techno weekend.) I could have sat at the cafe for a month and never encountered a horn or an obscenity. The trams and buses were electrified.
 
      To calm down, I stopped drinking coffee and took a walk up to Lindenhof, a pocket park on top of a hill overlooking the Limmat  and the Old Town on the other side of the Limmat.  Pensioners played chess under the trees as if in the countryside; the world of business and banks was in another gallaxy. The Limmat is crisscrossed with classic stone bridges. Every time I crossed one of those bridges on my way to an art gallery, I made a point to observe the majestic swans below and looked for a herd of amber ducks. The ducks were going nowhere in particular. The swans paddled against the current and dipped their long, snowy necks down into the water, to get at some vegetation growing on the river bottom. Then they capsized, which left me watching two black, webbed feet, sticking straight up in the air. Momently, the swans flipped right side up, as dry and dignified as before.

      Isn’t Silvana an unusual name? It is derived from the Roman divinity, Silvanus. He was (or is) the god of forests and uncultivated fields. Silvana was another girl I met at the Irish bar, when Mary O’Connell was at work. Silvana pulled me into Lake Zurich. She was a Swiss girl, almost twenty-five. She looked and acted seventeen. Even so, she had traveled as far west as Minneapolis, U.S.A. and as far east as the Chinese border at Nepal. In fact, Silvana had recently returned from an extended walking tour of the Indian Subcontinent. Her smile shined through an enormous mass of wavy, ash-blond hair which she never bothered to comb. 
   
      Silvana worked in one of those imposing banks on the Bahnhofstrasse, where all the gold was. She specialized in East European and East Asian currency. She made mistakes all the time. There was so much money involved, it did not matter. Her job was straightforward and repetitious. Outlanders from points East walked into her bank. They would be carrying suitcases full of strange-looking currency. They handed over the cash to this little Swiss girl with the wavy hair and a big smile. Their fate was in her hands. Back home, they would have been shot or thrown into jail. In Zurich, they got a receipt from Silvana and left with an empty suitcase.
   
      After lunch in the Zeughauskelle—which was the second time I had ever laid eyes on her—Silvana invited me home to have dinner with the family. Later, that same afternoon when the bank closed, we went to an open-air dance, a tea dance, at the magnificent Baur au Lac. Silvana is like Mary O’Connell in one respect: she does not dance. So we sat in the walled garden and drank English tea with lemon and ate tarte aux fromboises. We might have been snacking in the courtyard of the Plaza Athénée in Paris. The tarte was as scrumptious as any in Paris, and the surroundings could not have been more refined.

      The following afternoon found me and Silvana on one of those electric commuter Swiss trains out of Zurich, heading south along the lake, to the so-called golden coast. It was like a jet plane that never runs into turbulence. Every stop timed to the second. The train circled Zürich somehow, through various-sized tunnels, then breezed through the neat suburbs, with the dark lake of Zürich below us, to our right.
   
      Silvana was in the habit of going for a swim every afternoon after work. Today, I was to join her. We arrived at her apartment house, which was in a sleepy village at the edge of the lake. Silvana’s mum was up in a window, and she looked almost as exceptional as Silvana. We were introduced, everybody speaking English. In Switzerland, everybody speaks four or five languages: German, French, Italian, maybe Rumantsch, and English. Then Silvana steered me into papa’s bedroom to grab a bathing suit. He was away in Lugano on business. I was trying on the suit, which fit okay, while Silvana’s mum cooked spaghetti sauce down the hall. Silvana sported a bikini and did a headstand in the corner. The Indian influence at work.
   
      On our promenade down to the lake, I was veering into Silvana and forcing her off the sidewalk and into the bushes. Silvana retaliated by bumping me with her shapely and exceedingly firm hips. Presently, we arrived at a park the size of a postage stamp where a sign as big and as clear as daylight stated that swimming was verboten. Silvana kicked off her robe and jumped into the water. 
   
      The surrounding scenery was magnificent, out of a Maxfield Parrish mural. Silvana swam away and plunged beneath the surface and started doing somersaults. Reemerging, she proclaimed, “The water is cold.” I asked myself, how can that be? It was the middle of summer. Silvana smiled enigmatically. I stepped awkwardly down onto some large boulders just beneath the surface. The shock was immediate and immense. The water was freezing, not at all like Florida or St. Barth.
   
      Without further ado, Silvana swam over and pulled me into the lake, just like that. Help! I’m freezing!  I was screaming to myself, while attempting to grab Slivana. She was too fast and too smart. I was having enough problems just staying afloat. She swam away from the shoreline, and I followed her, toward the center of the lake. As with Mary O’Connell,  I was reduced to a sidekick. “Where are we going?!” I heard myself shout. “Until we can see the church,” she replied. I was rapidly becoming numb all over.
   
      We swam or drifted further from shore. At last, Silvana stopped to point out the church. I could just barely make out a steeple with a clock on it, in the distance. It was St. Peter’s in Zurich, next to Lindenhof. The lake was hemmed in by hills and mountains, and it dawned on me what a qualitative difference there is between ocean water and lake water. You sink much, much faster in a lake. I was sinking, and sinking fast, into Lake Zurich, with the giant church clock, one of the largest in Europe, as a backdrop.
   
      Silvana went into her mermaid routine again, doing somersaults, as I realized I had cut my big toe while being pulled into the lake. The current, meanwhile, was steadily carrying Silvana and me away from our little park where the sign warned that swimming was verboten. I took this all in nonchalantly, while desperately trying to stay afloat. Then Silvana swam over and gave me a kiss. I was laughing and sinking like a stone at the same time. Before it disappeared entirely, I took charge at last and instructed Silvana, “Zum park, sofort!”

      Silvana’s mother was seriously interested in world affairs. America appeared to be her special area of concern. She watched TV, but she had also been there in person, and it made an impression. She was a graduate of the New York Port Authority Bus Terminal. She had traveled on a Greyhound Bus through the northeastern states and out to Chicago. She was more intrigued with America than ever. I was somebody worth talking to, a strange being from a doomed continent.
   
      Silvana was at my side at dinner, being quiet and attentive, like an aide-de-camp or executive assistant. I was regarded as an emissary from the New World whose mission it was to bring fire to the Old World. But I had no fire to bring, and I was in possession of no new wisdom. If there is a flame, I thought, it remains at its source—Europa. All I cared about was eating spaghetti, drinking Fendant, and squeezing Silvana’s knee under the table with my free hand. In a contest between America and Silvana’s knee, Silvana’s knee was a sure bet. What was America? America was just an extravagant idea in everybody’s mind, a concept. Silvana’s knee was reality, a call to action. No analysis was required.

      After dinner, Silvana and I returned to the little park by the lake. It was dark, but the sky was clear and the stars and the moon were out in full force. We smoked a mild blend of hashish and cloves, or maybe it was just a strong Indonesian cigarette, which she had picked up on her travels in the East.

      On the opposite side of lake, a train blinked through a village on its way to Zurich from Italy, and we could hear it all distinctly, not just the whistles. I had lost track of the wonderful Swiss white wine I consumed at dinner. It was a considerable amount. After dinner, I drank half a bottle of an Italian digestivo, which bottle I did not recognize. Silvana liked to throw her head back so I could kiss her neck. It was a fantastic neck, and as soon as Silvana realized how fond I was of it, she started throwing her head back.
   
      There was a handful of night fishermen over in the opposite corner of the park, but they paid no attention to us. The ground was a luxuriant greensward, very fresh and somehow amazing. Silvana gave me some instructions on various methods of kissing, as if I were born yesterday. When I asked Silvana about related matters, she smiled and said, “There are many possibilities…” It was a simple statement that might have passed unappreciated, except for the Fendant, the digestivo and the cloved cigarettes.

      Or was it the way she said it? In the same tone and with the same disarming smile as she had earlier said, “The water is cold.” What could it mean? It meant that there are rare and decisive moments in the lives of human beings in which the mind gets everything into focus, and snaps. Another train, as if in a dream, echoed across the lake. I looked up at the numberless stars, latitude Zurich. They were bright and cheery, revolving counter-clockwise. I punched one of the three buttons on my Patek Philippe split-second chronograph. The rattrapante hand whirled. “There are many possibilities…” That’s the beauty and the horror of it. Like the Patek Philippe, a masterpiece manufactured on another shore in Switzerland, we rotate at the center of an unknown universe.

Much as it pains me to do so I fear that I must praise a left leaning economist. Dean Baker, please stand up and take your bow. He’s told the truth, always a bad career move in the political arena, about the current financial crisis and recession.

We’re not deep in the economic doo doo because Wall Streeters are greedy, not because they’re incompetent and not because they’re evil. They may be all of these things but the ordure piled up around our ears is not because of their actions or existence, but because we’ve just had a huge housing bubble. Dean’s right about how we can prove this too, we can prove it in one word: Spain.

Spain, Ireland, the UK, and the US all have deep recessions, this is true. However, Spain, uniquely, does not have a problem with its banks. They didn’t fall over, they had decent levels of reserves and have not needed bailing out by their government. Yet Spain still has a deep recession (a very deep one: unemployment among the young is now rated at 40 percent or so). So it isn’t the financial system that caused the recession.

What the four countries do have in common is that they all had a huge housing boom which then burst. In the US, the bubble was $8 trillion in size. That bubble bursting is what has caused the recession: and we’d still be having a recession even if no one had ever securitised a loan, bonuses were not paid on Wall Street and mortgages came only from the neighbourhood Savings and Loan. All of these things describe what happened in Spain and yet Spain still has a recession: so it isn’t the structure of the financial system which caused it then.

For we know what happens when people become wealthier. They spend some of that new wealth on current consumption. This is true whether it’s houses going up or stocks or the stamp collection from boyhood days. This is just something people do. And when bubbles burst, as they all do, people stop that extra consumption and the technical name we give to a fall in consumption is “recession”. The collapse of the housing bubble blew a large hole in the amount consumers were willing (or able) to spend and that’s what caused everything else following, as sure as night follows day.

The importance of this cannot be understated: I think we’d all like to try and make sure that this doesn’t happen again some day, no? If that’s so, we’ve got to understand why it did happen so that we can take the appropriate steps to prevent a repeat. Which means that if we all hare off after Wall Street, lay all blame at their doors, then we’ll end up trying to reform Wall Street. But if that’s not where the problem started then we’ll not prevent the next recession, will we?

So let’s place the blame where it squarely belongs: on the housing market. Then we can try to do something to prevent the next blow-out. That something would and should be looking at interest rates. For Ireland and Spain their interest rates were way, way too low as a result of being in the Euro where rate were being set of the French and German economies, not those of Spain and Ireland. In the UK and the US rates were also too low but this was a policy choice. In both countries the central bank (Bank of England, Federal Reserve in turn) had an inflation target but that target was aimed only at the prices of goods and services. They deliberately (in the UK example, were told to ignore) ignored inflation in asset prices. So nothing was done to try and prick the bubble before it got out of hand.

Now that we’ve got the correct diagnosis of why the economy fell over we can write our prescription for stopping it happening again. Inflation targets for central banks should include asset prices as well as the prices of goods and services. Thus, in the future, interest rates will rise when a bubble is forming, stopping its inevitable bursting from becoming a system threatening event.

Sure, we might want to reform the financial system, we might be interested in curbing bonuses, restricting the power of Mammon, for all sorts of other reasons. But preventing the next recession just ain’t one of them, for it wasn’t the financial system that caused this one. It wasn’t even the central banks that did: it was what the politicians told the central banks to concentrate on. Or not concentrate on perhaps. By insisting that they ignore asset price inflation the politicians allowed the bubble to grow and made the mess, pain and dislocation of the bursting induced recession vastly worse.

Gstaad. A lovely liquid lunch in a mountain hut with my friend Nicola Anouilh after two hard runs. Blue skies, gentle winds, a few puffs of white cloud, and the sound of bells from the nearby cow shed. If there’s a better way of communing with nature, I haven’t come across it yet. The natural beauty of the Alps is unspoiled and majestically alluring.  White wine helps one dream and feel at peace with the world, until, that is, we’re back on skis and losing altitude fast. The bumps come up fast and in a blur, and turning uphill in order to avoid them one feels he’s about to ski off a crest and into the valley couple of miles below. But it’s only the wine doing its work on one’s head and legs. Weaving through the pine trees toward the bottom, past wooden huts and beginner skiers, we finally reach the parking lot—as unromantic a finish after the stupendous scenery as I can think of.

I once flew from Saanen (a tiny airport near Gstaad)  with three friends to some moon-like place, where a guide waited. It was exactly 33 years ago because the mother of my children was pregnant and the guide advised her not to try it. Roman Polanski, Ludovico Antinori, and I took about three hours to reach Kleine Scheidegg, and when we got there we were informed that we were white as sheets from exhaustion. Those were the days. Polanski was and is a tough skier, and I could carry my weight, as they say, but we sure gave it to poor Ludovico when at the Eigergletscher he momentarily lost his nerve and asked if we could signal a chopper to come and get him. In 1975 there were still twenty years to go before the world’s most annoying invention came into being. So on we went, skiing, turning, braking, desperate for breath, our legs on fire, but we made it and if memory serves, no food or wine has ever tasted better once in the inn at Kleine Scheidegg. In more than fifty-five years of skiing I’ve had some memorable runs, none more than when Sadruddin Khan, Caroline Townsend, Nikki Rommel, and I went down the front of the Vidmanette mountain in Rougemont, in 1959, the year before it was closed to skiers because of the danger involved. If one falls one keeps falling until they can fall no more. Once we got down we were busy congratulating each other when we spotted three Swiss guides shussing down the front. All three were carrying accordions and were playing them rather vigorously. We kept the bragging to a minimum after that.

Now that the ribs are mending I’m back skiing, however gingerly. This week I will drive to Lenk, a 30-minute drive and ski down to Adelboden and places I haven’t been to in years, Anouilh as my guide. That’s the part of the Bernese Oberland I love the most. The craggy peaks of the surrounding mountains in their pink haze, and the majesty of the Jungfrau make for some breathtaking viewing. There is no glitz there, no choppers disgorging tarts on high heels, or fat Russians with cigars sticking out of their mouths. In 1860, the burghers of Grindelwald had begun to hack away at the glaciers. It was the beginning of the rot. By 1866, 100,000 francs’ worth of ice had been packed in straw and dispatched to Paris and beyond. The good time Charlies chez Maxim’s could enjoy their oysters at last. In no time ice had become a major export. The railway system came next, a funicular railway that wound its way from Grindelwald to the Jungfraujoch, traversing the Eiger on its way. Similar plans were made for the Matterhorn, but the wise Swiss soon put an end to them. Grindelwald, Murren, Villars, Adelboden, Kleine Scheidegg, all wonderfully old fashioned ski resorts without an Abramovitch in sight.

And then there’s Verbier, or oik haven, a place where John Terry would feel at home if he weren’t busy vacationing in Dubai. I’ve spent two nights in Verbier, and although I was there to attend Jamie Blandford’s wedding, and a very good party it was, I hated the atmosphere. The main street was like the King’s Road, with more drunks due to the altitude.  Verbier is for the birds, as they used to say, but now my fight is right here in Gstaad, trying to stop progress, a synonym for ill mannered nouveau riche, unacceptable Hummers carrying old women in furs with very fat lips and stretched foreheads, and the dreaded Russkis. Oh for the days when we feared their tanks and their intercontinental missiles. Those were nice Russkies, with cheap suits, rubber shoes and wide peasant faces with mouths full of gold. Today’s bunch are bad, fat, covered in gold but with dead eyes and manners not seen since the fall of Berlin. Back in 1900, cautionary novels and articles warned peasants in Alpine villages not to sell to foreigners, depicting them as thieves. “Don’t sell your soul for lucre,” was the message. The peasants ignored it. The Cresta Run first appeared in St. Moritz in 1884, and skiing was introduced from Norway in 1892 by the British travel agent Henry Lunn. His son invented the slalom some thirty years later. It’s been downhill ever since. Still, I’d rather be here than in Dubai, or Palm Beach for that matter. 

New York seems to be full of people who go to shop openings and social events just to be seen. I don’t much care for these parties because I would rather see my friends privately, and have an actual conversation, than feign interest in something I don’t care about like a handbag with Tinsley Mortimer’s name on it. Being photographed at one of these events in the hope that I might appear in some magazine that will be looked at by people I don’t know isn’t the sort of validation I was brought up wanting. I would prefer instead to be liked for my ability to think independently, or better yet, my valuable contributions to society if ever I make any. Furthermore, the idea that I might be deemed important enough, or that I might take myself seriously, especially without having the accomplishments to support the adulation, would be totally unwarranted and ridiculous, like Paris Hilton. 

Against my initial instincts I attended a screening at Soho House recently for The End of the Line, a documentary about fishing. I went not because I secretly do want to be seen at so-called chic events, but because my pal asked me to, and because I thought I might learn something. Dennis Paul and his sophisticated wife Coralie exhibited the film as part of their React to Film campaign, intended to spotlight a variety of issue-based documentaries for fashionable New Yorkers. The invitation email said they try to provide an enlightened alternative to the average screening, which they say is often upstaged by celebrities and photographers. This also peaked my interest, especially since a handful of names like Kelly Rutherford, Dylan Lauren, and Nigel Barker were attached to the event.

When I got to Soho House I ran right into a trio of socialites and wannabe celebrities being photographed. My first instinct was to turn around and walk out. Instead I sat down and watched the room full of fashionites mingle before the show. I couldn’t help but notice how many women were carrying enormous handbags. I wondered what they could possibly need to require such humongous “purses”. Were they all Avon ladies toting merchandise for sale? Surely none of them contained any works of fiction, encyclopedias, life-saving equipment, or even gym clothes. So what is it with these bags that are not dinky purses but carry-ons that could only ever be filled by someone taking a long-distance trip? I suppose Birkins are a status symbol no fashionable person wants to live without. Every so-called stylish woman has one. But who are we kidding, Birkins are an obnoxious display of wealth, which is neither stylish nor elegant. Over-exposure has squandered Birkins dignity, and turned it into nothing more than the applauded trend of silly nouveau-riche socialites thin enough to fit into these suitcases they call handbagss.

After a few short minutes of people watching I was antsy, and so I grabbed my lesser known Hermes bag and went to the screening room in search of a good seat. As it turns out the documentary was produced by my old friend, Alexis Zoullas. At last someone I wanted to see, and so I discovered the film was based on a book by British journalist and fisherman Charles Clover, chronicling the big business surrounding the world’s edible fish. The documentary suggests underwater populations are in danger from overfishing. Scientists and other experts outline the history of commercial fishing since the 1950s, the effects of which have apparently devastated many underwater ecosystems. According to the filmmakers however, the future for fish-eaters is grim unless we take a more ecological approach to fishing rather than a covetous one. Species like the bluefin tuna are fetching such exorbitant prices, it seems likely they will go the same way the as cod that were wiped out by over-fishing. Despite the sad realities that will no doubt upset nature lovers, The End of the Line paints a surprisingly optimistic picture of the future if action is taken on an individual level now.

React to Film seems a positive step taken by socialites that deserve a good rap because they are actually doing something other than trying to have their picture taken by Patrick McMullan. Of course, this point is still debatable. Coralie and Alexis, for their part, deserve kudos for moderating an intelligent and informative question and answer session which left me feeling more equipped to make good decisions regarding my consumption of fish. Bluefin tuna is no longer on my list of fishes to eat.

But I wonder, can one really make a difference? I hate to think of the arrivistes with five bucks in their pockets who will no doubt need to show off at Nobu and continue to order bluefin by the pound. Perhaps I am rushing to judgement. But do people realize they are spoiling their own oceans? When they stop enjoying cruise ships and mega yachts and polluting the ocean like there is no tomorrow I will believe them. Until then I might dump poster-sized flyers in all those Birkin bags explaining why nothing spoils a good thing like popularity, and why Ivana Trump had it wrong when she said “don’t get mad, get everything.”

“Is Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead simply glib and superficial?”

Some thirty years ago now, it was one of the English essay questions put to me in my final year at high school.  My written answer—‘Yes’—was perhaps itself a little glib and superficial and deserving of its low mark.  But I was eighteen years old and going for the laugh.  I suspect they would not ask such questions these days, for it would be deemed too demanding, too excluding, too elitist, too unfair.  After all, it would require a pupil to read, comprehend, think, and write.  Heaven forbid.  In the eyes of the liberal-left that simply will not do.

To elevate or dumb down, this is the issue.  And given the grey and spoon-fed nature of our age—in which no-one may excel or do better than the rest—it will be presented in a bite-sized and multiple-choice format with reference books allowed.  Nothing too challenging, you understand.  That would be to infringe individual rights, to raise the sight too high.  It is all part of the liberal-left agenda.  They claim to want everyone to start from the same point.  What in fact they desire is for everyone to end there.  How bleak and dull.  How uninspiring.  Small wonder our students prefer to sniff solvent.

Over the past fifty years or so in which it has dominated the British education establishment, the Left has created a system where ability is neutered and success despised, where the brightest are not stretched and the stupid become dumber.  None are permitted to thrive; none are allowed to fail.  Few benefit.  At each stage and at every level of the talent spectrum, there is a hemorrhaging of standards that leaks from the schools to infect society as a whole.  The liberal-left claims to be anti-elitist.  In reality, it is against all forms of excellence.  All get their lollipop and their A-starred grade, are patted on the back and told that though they cannot spell and can scarcely speak English there is ever welfare or a media-studies degree to scoop them up.  Then we are surprised to find almost 900,000 young Neets (Not in Education, Employment, or Training) living in our midst.  This is what soft leftism has done.  We cannot produce competent individuals to so much as work in a coffee shop let alone provide the entrepreneurs, skilled laborers, and economic-drivers of the future.  Just ask yourself if you would prefer to be served by a pretty and engaging Slovakian or Kiwi girl or by an indigenous and bun-faced troll coaxed from a nearby housing-estate.  We used to have an education system that provided a ladder from the ghetto.  Now we have an education secretary named Balls.  Funny that.

I sometimes think it is because they themselves are often third-rate and disappointed (and are products of their own flawed education process), left-wing educationalists resent success in their students.  But then, their time is taken up with fire-fighting and crisis-management, with shouting to be heard above the multi-cultural classroom babble, with struggling to hold together the collapsing structures their ideology has helped to create.  A culture of mediocrity and a creed of inclusivity prevail.  Pupils are not motivated or stretched or measured by ability; pupils are told weak grades are a symptom of disadvantage and that allowance will be made.  It has consigned generations to the trash.  From the lack of competitive sports on the playing-fields to the lack of discipline in the schoolroom, the leaden effects of the liberal-left can be seen.  A vicious circle (our illiterate young would probably spell it ‘viscous’).

We need electricians and plumbers; what we get are hard-working Poles.  We require scientists and engineers; we receive from the British education system youngsters whose opposable thumbs can just about master an X-Box.  We are crying out for savvy and articulate go-getters in the financial markets and wider industry; instead, we are infested with simians who mangle their words and can barely chew their burgers.  Meantime, the state-employed servants continue to work their vacuous magic on the state-designed curriculum in order to churn out state-supported rejects.  There is a limited market for semi-trained bird-scarers.

I was privileged enough to be educated at what the media would describe as ‘top private schools’.  Left-wingers would consider this disgraceful.  They are right.  It is disgraceful my parents were obliged to pay hundreds of thousands of pounds to educate me (and save money for the state) whilst simultaneously paying in taxes for the supposed education of others, disgraceful I was schooled privately because state-funded education is so lousy, disgraceful the mass of the population cannot benefit from the kind of education I enjoyed on account of political dogma and interference by the Left.  Look closely.  You will find it has little to do with wealth and everything to do with attitude.  If the state encouraged excellence, there would be excellence.  If the state allowed the best to thrive, the best would thrive.  Common sense—and spite and narrow minds have killed it.

When I was young, exams were testing, academic rigor existed and we left junior school being able to read and write and do arithmetic.  That would seem impossible today.  Indeed, summer classes are required to raise pupils to even a basic standard.  Many of the pampered, spoilt and undisciplined pupils from the state sector would simply not survive the boundaries and apparent privations to be found in the private sphere.  They would be wetting their beds and crying for their mothers within days of arriving at boarding-school.  Those who, like me, attended such establishments in the early Seventies – sleeping on horsehair mattresses, surviving on a diet of spam luncheon meat, and occasionally being beaten by the headmaster for our misdemeanors – learnt independence of mind and spirit and the value of learning.  I loved the place (apparently Prince Charles did not).  It is an era and philosophy that are vanished.  The ageing cook at my prep school had in his earliest years survived a maritime disaster in mid-Atlantic.  When eating his execrable cuisine I on occasion wished he had not.  The incident involved a little-known vessel named the RMS Titanic.

In synopsis, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, a lapidary first work of fiction by Silicon Valley computer scientist Zachary Mason, sounds like an overly clever postmodern literary jest. This elegant collection of very short stories consists of 44 purported pre-Homeric variations on the legends of the Trojan War and the pragmatic Odysseus’s homeward wanderings, as recounted in the arch manner of a more recent blind poet, Jorge Luis Borges.

Borges (1899-1986), composer of metaphysical conundrums about infinite libraries, has become a Siren for bookish young men of the computer age.

I first read Borges several decades ago. Overwhelmed, I immediately began to write a short story in the style of that sightless librarian. I resolved to fictionalize the true but oddly Borgesian story of how the economist John Maynard Keynes, as tribute to his favorite hero of the Enlightenment, Isaac Newton, bought a trunk of the physicist’s unpublished papers, only to discover that Newton cared more for alchemy and numerology than for science. In Keynes’s words, “Newton was not the first of the Age of Reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians …”

Then, however, I found a girlfriend, and the world was spared my ersatz Borges story.

The Lost Books of the Odyssey might have turned out almost as dire. Mason presents a pseudo-translation of a “papyrus excavated from the desiccated rubbish mounds of Oxyrhynchus,” as he explains with Borges’s deadpan combination of intimidating scholarship (Oxyrhynchus is an actual archaeological site in Egypt) and adjectival extremism (not “dry,” but “desiccated”).

John Updike listed Borges’s fixations as “Dreams, labyrinths, mirrors, multiplications approaching infinity, … Zeno’s second paradox, Nietzsche’s eternal return, the hidden individual destiny, the hard fate of … warriors, [and] the manipulations of chance.”

Predictably, most of these devices show up in Mason’s M.C. Escher-like reworkings of Homer: What if there were two Odysseuses? What if Odysseus was not a heroic fighter but a cowardly bard who concocted The Iliad and The Odyssey to cover up his desertion? What if:

“… the epics attributed to Homer were in fact written by the gods before the Trojan war—these divine books are the archetypes of that war rather than its history. In fact, there have been innumerable Trojan wars, each representing a fresh attempt at bringing the terror of battle into line with the lucidity of the authorial intent. Inevitably, each particular war is a distortion of its antecedent, an image in a warped hall of mirrors.”

The essential problem with spoofing Borges, however, is that nobody can match the Argentine’s own relentless self-parody. The second time I read Borges, I found him hilarious. The third time … well, I’d already gotten the joke.

Updike gently chided, “Few major writers granted long life have proved so loyal to their initial obsessions and demonstrated so little fear of repeating themselves.” Updike’s more outspoken predecessor, Vladimir Nabokov (who was born the same year as Borges), lampooned Borges in his Ada as Osberg, Nabokov’s own ultimately disappointing pseudo-doppelganger, “writer of pretentious fairy-tales and mystico-allegoric anecdotes…”

On a personal level, the criticism is unfair—Nabokov and Updike were supremely gifted with sight, while Borges went progressively blind, cutting him off both from nature and books. Still, it’s telling that Nabokov is more daunting to the would-be impressionist than Borges. Parodying Borges seems to demand decoding and diligence more than genius. Nabokov is analog, Borges digital. Not surprisingly, as measured by Google citations, Borges is now more than twice as popular.

Fortunately, Mason has been outgrowing the nerdier sort of literary gamesmanship, while retaining Borges’s “austere and dreamlike” prose style. The original limited press run of Mason’s Lost Books in 2007 included a fake scholarly foreword in the manner of John Ray, Jr., Ph.D. introducing Humbert Humbert’s memoirs in Lolita. It’s now gone. And Mason dropped one long story because it was so cybernetically recursive that his math Ph.D. friends couldn’t make sense of it.

By now, Mason’s Lost Books is what he rightly calls “forty-four concise variations on Odysseus’s story that omit stock epic formulae in favor of honing a single trope or image down to an extreme of clarity.” Mason’s sunlit Mediterranean is far from Borges’s claustrophobic cloisters.

In addition, in Odysseus, that most capable of men, Mason has a hero through whom his quiet but strong emotions—nostalgia, regret, and resignation, chiefly—feel wholly earned. In one touching story beyond Borges’s range, a Kathryn Bigelow-like goddess Athena proposes marriage to her favorite mortal at the end of the Trojan War:

“I need hardly add that I could not accept her. … She is beautiful and quick and her mind is like a lightning flash but she is a god … Not long after that things went bad. I do not think she persecuted me—that would be beneath her—but I have felt her absence …”

Moreover, by placing his story before the dawn of Western literature, Mason escapes the tendency, seen from Ulysses through both Borges and Nabokov and taken to new extremes in the heavily footnoted novels of the late David Foster Wallace, toward monstrous erudition.

Should the printed page try to imitate Wikipedia? In an age when any fact can be looked up online, the only limit on pedantry is the exhaustion of author or reader. Mason’s book responds to our profusion of information by returning to classical simplicity.

Last night, the world stopped what they were doing and tuned into the red carpet event of the century, the 82nd Academy Awards.

Since 1929, regular folk have been dazzled by the likes of George Clooney, James Cameron, and Gabourey Sidibe. We watch spellbound as they strut down the carpet in all the latest fashions and we learn a lot about our world in the process. Why, just four Academy Awards ago, Clooney explained to us how this supposedly “naïve” group of artists are responsible for the civil rights movement. If it wasn’t for Clark Gable for example, Hattie McDaniel wouldn’t have been able to attend her own premiere. You’re welcome America!

As someone who has been carefully analyzing people’s pants for the past 15 years, I am one of the few people qualified to translate this kind of fashion event into everyman terms. Let’s get started…

The hosts were: supermodelpreneur Kathy Ireland (who was so determined to have poise and be presentable, she came across like Vanna White with a gun to her head), portly pepper pot Sherri Shepard from The View, and finally, Entertainment Weekly’s diminutive editor, the presumably gay Jess Cagle. Each one of these hosts managed to ask questions that were so phenomenally bland and polite, I thought the entire thing was taking place inside one of my Grandmother’s wet dreams.

The first group we met was Monique, Maggie Gyllenhaal, two other chicks, and Penelope Cruz. Monique’s husband was nominated for The Horniest Man in the World but, like most people at the Oscars, lost out to Clooney. I thought Gyllenhaal looked stunning in her tie-dye swimwear gown but, as comedian @seanoconnz Tweeted, she’d need to have Jake’s face to be considered “A Perfect 10.”

While I was watching the perfect 11, Penelope Cruz, talk, I couldn’t help but wonder what my wife would do if I slept with the star of Nine. Then I realized I didn’t care. Not that such a thing could ever happen. I heard Penelope Cruz waxes her pussy with unobtanium.

George Clooney was there to promote the documentary about his ego, Up in the Air. He was a delight as usual and deflected comments like, “I want you” with “I know.” His Italian waitress girlfriend had apparently just seen District 9 because she was digging her claws into him like a Prawn. Incidentally, that movie’s working title, “What if Mexicans Were Smart Bugs?” would have killed all possible chances at an Oscar.

Sandra Bullock looked like an Ice Capade in her Marchesa gown. She later won an Award for “Most Working Class Sexual Appetite for a Multi-Millionaire.” No, but seriously, rumor has it Helen Mirren was furious after losing the Oscar to Bullock for “Actress in a Leading Role”. Johnny Rotten, who was sitting nearby, consoled Mirren with the wise adage, “Never Mind the Bullock.”

Speaking of Helen Mirren (pictured here in a Badgley Mischka dress and Chopard jewelry), I’m not sure who boomers worship more, this actress or her breasts. I’ve even heard them described as TILFs, which is a filthy acronym that doesn’t bear spelling out.

Matt Damon was asked what the hardest part of doing a movie in South Africa and he said, “Learning that accent.” I would have thought it was getting raped every day.

Morgan Freeman showed up with a head that looks like a homeless man dipped in gorgeous sauce. Kathy licked his ass with a giant, “Thank you for your philanthropy and your talent. Thank you. Thank you.” Apparently this obsequious line of “questioning” has been going of for years because his daughter is named Morgana Freeman! Let’s hope she names her daughter the same thing so the world can have it’s first female “The third.”

Freeman also showed some stunning jewelry he and his entourage were wearing. It was to be auctioned off at the end of the night to raise money for the Free Mandela foundation. By the way, wouldn’t it be cool if Freakonomics did the numbers on who is responsible for more deaths: all of the Nazi skinheads of the world combined or Mandela? I bet it’s 37 to 347 respectively and I bet that with all due respect.

J-Lo showed up to take her title back from J-Woww as the only female J-Abbreviation allowed in the tri-state area. She had put on a bit of weight but fortunately Sherri Shepherd speaks Pig Latina and was able to communicate with the actor perfectly.

I didn’t listen to any of Lopez’s interview because I was trying to get a better look at the chick with part of a mohawk on her head.

Mathew Broderick showed up with a tube of Chanel toothpaste that had pushed out a frizzy-haired JAP with an uneven spray tan whom Maxim voted The Least Sexy Woman of all time. Jess asked SJP if she remembered her first Oscar dress. She did, it was Calvin Klein. He then hit her with one of the toughest questions of the night, “Was it beige?” It wasn’t. Next!

Cameron Diaz showed up nude which was a little disappointing as her breasts are lopsided. I know this is more common than symmetrical ones but this is the Oscars, a night when everything is supposed to be perfect.

Once again Samuel Jackson showed up with a hat sponsored by his own insecurity.

James Cameron admitted that without 3-D Imax, Avatar is just an episode of the Smurfs, in Costa Rica, written by Janeane Garafolo. He also said he wished he had called it Blue Women Group. When asked which Oscar he was most excited about he said “Animated Long.” This makes sense because “Animated Shorts” are easy. All you have to do is dance without any underwear on.

Jeff Bridges was clad head to toe in Gucci and his wife was wearing Monique Lhuillier. I feel sorry for her. I know someone who sat next to Bridges at the Globes and apparently the only thing he deserves an award for is crazy farts.

Seeing Jess next to borderline midgets like Fey and Carrel made it painfully obvious he is even shorter than Oscar.

This guy behind Carrel is the personification of how we all feel when surrounded by celebrities: Blessed.

Kate Winslet looked like a space politician in Yves St Laurent. During her interview a large roar of applause happened in the background and Kate said, “Oh it must be George Clooney.” This loony for Clooney thing was a nauseating thread that permeated the whole awards show. Can we not get the ghosts of Christmas to fly this guy around and show him what a douche he is? His smug cloud is getting unbearable.

Incidentally, you may have noticed I’m taking it easy on Sean Penn. This is because I have an appointment with my proctologist on Friday and I don’t want to jinx it.

I found Precious’ Gabourey Sidibe to be incredibly sexy but I just got out of jail after 20 years. She wasn’t the greatest one at this event but as far as Ones go, she was pretty great.

Meryl Streep was wearing Chris March. That’s right, the eccentric bearded queer from Project Runway is doing red carpet fashion now. Weird. Streep said she loves the awards because she gets to see her friends all dressed up but she also admitted she can’t wait to take off these fucking Jimmy Choos.

I realized while looking at Tarantino that I had never seen him and the puppet Madam at the same time and place. Whoever he really is, I commend him on not going with a large prosthetic nose for Brad Pitt when making the Jewish nerd porn Inglourious Basterds.

Probably the greatest question of the night was to a child named Miley Cyrus. Ireland asked, “You’ve done music. You’ve mastered comedy. What’s next for you?” Somebody needs to tell Ireland the difference between, “done,” “mastered,” and “given a whirr.” Cyrus was later asked what she’d do if she ever won an Oscar and she said she’d throw it in the garbage because she’s seen Sesame Street and he really seems to like it in there.

After the red carpet, we had the awards. The whole thing looked like a telethon with no number. The sets all looked like they were designed by a 90 year-old Polish woman and all the break-dancing made the halftime show look like something out of Glee. Neil Patrick Harris did a dancey number that looked like he was heading his own coming out party complete with fancy dancers in nude hosiery.

I don’t know why I’m always surprised at how phony everyone is at a “Best Acting in the World” convention. They’re just doing their jobs.

I couldn’t stay awake for the whole thing but I faintly remember hoping it all ends the same way Inglourious Basterds did.

PS: I made half this shit up so don’t sue me. Jesus, you’re fucking rich. Why are you going around suing people anyway?

“Isn’t it just like a man to not let the woman talk?”

Yes, the most riveting face-off of the evening came early—when producer Elinor Burkett wrestled the microphone from director-producer Roger Ross Williams and uttered the above words. Salon has the full story, complete with interviews from both winners.

Gstaad. When I spoke with the mayor of Gstaad, as well as some other local stalwarts, they all assured me that they are ready for any invasion by the Libyans, and are confident they will kick the towels back into the Mediterranean where they came from. For any of you who might have missed it due to Gordon Brown’s bullying shenanigans, or John Terry’s, or even that David Cameron is close to blowing it, here is the latest: Col. Muammar Gaddafi, the great leader of Libya, has called for a jihad war against Switzerland over the Swiss minaret ban. This may have caused tremors among the hookers in Geneva and jewelry salesmen in St. Moritz,  but to the average Swiss burger it is like “San Marino or Monte Carlo declaring war on us.”

Mind you, the Swiss are not being over confident. In my not so humble opinion, both San Marino and Monte Carlo would beat odds in a war against Libya, a country whose two great victories of recent years have been in murdering a British unarmed police constable, a woman, and in blowing up an airliner, also unarmed, packed with unarmed men, women, and children. San Marino and Monte Carlo cops carry weapons, something the glorious Libyan armed forces are not used to come up against. But let’s be fair. There have been other Libyan victories, such as the one over the Filipino couple Hannibal Gaddafi imprisoned and beat up in Geneva a couple of years ago, and the other incident at Claridge’s only recently.

“Those who destroy God’s mosques deserve to be attacked, and if Switzerland was on our borders, we would fight it,” the brave Gaddafi was quoted by the Jamahiriya News Agency as saying last Thursday. Which means the Swiss can relax and concentrate instead on their cuckoo clocks, their banking and the fact that they are not part of the EU and not responsible for the Greek crooks who are demanding to be bailed out.

The EU, of course, has shown its mettle. No sooner had the Swiss invoked the Schengen Agreement against the Libyans, they were forced to climb down by the bureau crooks in Brussels. The charlatan in Tripoli has 140 billion greenbacks in his kitty, which makes him a very big man among the dwarfs who run our lives nowadays. Gaddafi’s problem is the hair dye he uses. It has seeped into his brain cells, hence the Prisoner of Zenda uniforms and the strutting about the world stage. The real problem, of course, is little old us. Our politicians claim that power belongs to the people, but it’s the biggest crock ever. The only ones who count are those with moolah, like the clown of Tripoli, or those other buffoons of the Gulf. Martin Samuel wrote a very good piece about a rice deal gone wrong and the reaction of the head camel driver’s brother. Issa bin Zayed, a member of the United Arab Emirates ruling family, got peeved at Mohammed Shapoor, an Afghani trader, and had him lashed with a plank of nails, raped with an electric baton and run over by an SUV. And reminiscent of a certain ex-president of Liberia, who was video-taped by the henchmen of his successor while his ears were being cut off—and I hate to think what else—Issa baby video taped the unfortunate rice trader during the torture. The Abu Dhabi torture tape barely caused a ripple in Britain, or in Europe for that matter. Medieval torture is okay if the torturers own a major Premiere League football club. The thinking is, so what’s an electric prod or two up one’s bum when the prodder can buy us a place in the top four.

Closer to home, in London’s Landmark Hotel, a Saudi multi-millionaire member of yet another ruling family is alleged to have strangled and bludgeoned his man servant to death weeks after he had beaten the poor man to a pulp, a beating that went unreported. The camel driver has a leading criminal defense barrister representing him. Looking into my crystal ball I predict the Saudi will go free, just as the Abu Dhabi bum did. The Saudis have oil and moolah, as do the Libyans and the Abu Dhabians. The Blairs, Browns, and Camerons of this world will kiss their arse and to hell with a few tortured or dead bodies. They’ve even got the Saudi on CCTV beating up his aide, but take it from Taki. The guy will walk.

Then there’s the British captive, David Proctor, held since twelve months by a Qatari shit, sorry, sheikh, a member of the Al-Thani family. Caught in a power struggle between camel drivers, the Cambridge educated financier is held hostage by those nice guys our civil servants and even the royal family spread their cheeks wide for. It’s really priceless and wonderful stuff.  How Europe shamelessly genuflects to the desert swine. The first to assail Switzerland for evoking the Schengen agreement was Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini, he of the tiny organ and oily hair. “By their action they have taken the rest of us hostage,”  said the dago. And I suppose he was right to side with Libya. After all, it was the only country the glorious Italian army managed to subdue in the last century, and as the great Greek militarist leader Taki said, “Disrespect your vanquished enemy and you disrespect yourself.” It makes one proud as hell to be a European.

Can a blackboard be beautiful? A liquor store car park? What about a sleeping bag? In Tom Ford’s hands the answer is always, “yes, darling”. When Colin Firth’s single man, Professor George Falconer, weaves his way to work through a catwalk throng of pristine students (not one fatso, not one freak), he reaches a lecture room of aesthetic rapture, a Mondrian-like portrait of black, white, and teak. When he later drives to a local store, a dusky sun transforms the parking lot into a glowing Eden. Even the sleeping bag, in which Falconer tries to kill himself, has a certain earthworm chic to it, particularly when jumpcut with enough art-house guile.

You’d think this prettification, this ability to make a silk purse out of a pig’s ear, deserves an Oscar alone. But you’d be wrong. According to the critics, Tom Ford’s A Single Man is way too beautiful for its own good. Even those who’ve praised the fashion designer’s debut have felt the need to distance themselves from its glossy chic. And those who came away unmoved have sought to skewer the film’s aesthetic good behavior. The Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw thought the film “an indulgent exercise in 1960s period style, glazed with 21st-century good taste”.

Hang on one minute? Good taste, style, beauty: since when have these been pejorative terms? Since when have you ever heard anyone deliver a stinging rebuke with the words: “You tasteful ****!” No, nor me. So why is stylishness an attribute when levelled at a person and an assault when directed at a movie? Why are critics so snooty about cinematic good looks? What’s their beef with beauty?

Bradshaw would probably point out that, in conflating beauty and style, I am confusing two very different things. On the one hand you have the flotsam of style—Professor Falconer’s glistening specs, his immaculate draws, his catalogue kitchen—a transient, flighty, whorish companion to fashion, a shiny but low-grade thought, a take-away ideal. On the other, there’s beauty: permanent, higher, greater, more profound and more searching. Style is about getting things to look right; beauty is about sometimes getting things to look wrong. Style is the fluffy pink Angora jumpers that Falconer’s boy-candy sports, beauty is Beethoven’s Fifth. A very false distinction, I’d argue. Or at least the two ideas used to be much closer companions.

Renaissance art was fixated with style. For Renaissance artists the idea of omitting stylistic details, fashion trends, a glossy appeal, the idea of not getting the right capes or coiffures, would have been absurd. Today, the transient tics that the great Renaissance works by Raphael and Titian would have had (like Ford’s au courant tiny collars and tight shirts) have worn off. A Titian can now simply irradiate wisdom and glow, in a way that A Single Man could never do, so weighed down is it with the stylistic arguments of its times.

Yet don’t think for one second that it wasn’t fashion that originally dictated the composition, the shape and line of the great Renaissance art. The rules that patrol artistic beauty are the same as those that dictate style. (Style is just a young beauty.) The rules for a beautifully composed lecture room, liquor store car park or, yes, even, sleeping bag are the same as those for a finely composed landscape. An investigation of line, proportion, context, and history are the principals that lie behind each and every great aesthetic endeavor.

In the 1950s we understood this. In the heyday of Hollywood, no one questioned that style had substance. No one tore down directors for their over-attentive eyes. It was a given that style was beauty. That the manicured rooms of the pent-up little cinematic gems by Douglas Sirk, his Magnificent Obsession or All That Heaven Allows, both provided candy for the eye and a resonant image for the brain. Some of Sirk’s combinations of lines, shapes, colors, and contours offer up a sensory experience that very clearly, very atmospherically, very mysteriously reflect that which is going on around them. Some don’t. Some just sit pretty, looking right. As does so much of A Single Man. And there should be absolutely nothing wrong with that.

We like to think in this age that we have gone beyond the beauty of rightness, beyond the beauty of correct proportions. We’re in an ironic age, an age in which we laud the beauty of wrongness. Ford’s A Single Man is therefore not just a pretty film, it is a bold attempt to reassert a noble and time-honored pursuit that has almost completely been expunged in the past hundred years: a pursuit of pure beauty.

Much of international discourse, international politics, is all about how they should become more like us. Quite how they should become more like us depends upon the speaker: if it’s Hillary then more attention should be given to strong, hefty, and mature women who’ve never had an original idea in their lives and if it’s Bill then more attention will be paid to strong, hefty, and young women who have some very original ideas about cigars.

The international aspects of religion are even more exclusive. Not only should they become more like us, they should become exactly like us: share our interpretations of obscure verses of a book they’ve never heard of for fear of losing their eternal souls. And in the more robust interpretations they should be forced to find out about those souls right damn now if they don’t agree.

Perhaps, as a modest proposal, we should be picking up on the ways that religions work out there and bringing those practices home? For example:

A self-styled Hindu holy man and a British Airways stewardess have been arrested in Delhi on suspicion of involvement in a multimillion-pound prostitution racket.

Having traveled on BA recently I can see why she was running the business, not staffing it, but other than that it seems like a perfectly sensible proposition. Temple prostitution is nothing new after all, it’s been common in South India for millennia and the Old Testament has many references (some of them even approving) to it.

If we were to translate this to the US just think how wonderful it could be? Churches are free of taxes so working girls would no longer have that particular bite taken out of their earnings (yes, for some decades now Uncle Sam has been asking for more than a mere pimp does). If Jimmy Swaggart had been employing, rather than merely hiring, he could have consorted with someone who didn’t look like the motel he was consorting in. Even Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker could have benefited. We’d have all been able to have a crack at Jessica Hahn and Tammy might have found someone who could help with her make up: even the most depraved of Painted Jezebels has a lighter hand with the foundation trowel. There would finally be some meaning to the name Oral Roberts—yes, matters would improve.

Further, we’d actually be getting something out of our attendance at church services. Currently we cough up at the collection plate to pay for their mistresses: at least things would be more honest and we’d get the warm tingly feeling of being properly and physically fucked ourselves instead of just at one remove.

Our Swami is said to have made $10 million from his business which is where we might have a problem. That’s not the sort of sum that’s going to get Pat Robertson out of bed in the morning, but given the preponderance of lonely old women in his flock perhaps he’ll be able to make it up in volume.

Some might say that this is slightly missing the point: the religious ecstasy of the Holy Rollers is supposed to be instead of sex, a replacement for it. Or that church is where you go to cleanse yourself of the sin of sexual activities. Which is to be hopelessly naïve about what actually happens in a Megachurch these days: the vacuuming of your wallet faster than any brothel madam of old would have the nerve to do.

Agape, that good natured Christian love of all is all very well in its place but there’s no reason to posit a Sky Fairy as a reason to practice it. Nor to purchase Cadillacs, fine houses, and private jets for those who take our money for scaring us into doing so. And the advantage of worshipping Eros is that we know he actually exists: he exists in every boner and damp gusset on the planet. More importantly, as we hand over our money to our fellow worshippers we know we’re getting something for it… The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it... if that’s what just a dream about God did for St Theresa just think what we can do with the S&M subchapter. 

Well, I guess that’s it, Holy Orders for me. I understand that you can get signed up for $50 these days and even the IRS agree that’s kosher. My only problem here, the only thing limiting my becoming as fat and rich as Jerry Falwell, would seem to be that another blogger has got there first:

Jesus himself seemed to have a soft spot for prostitutes. Many reputable scholars today think he may have been married to one. And Jesus showed radical inclusivity, breaking taboos by hanging out with prostitutes. So he would want us to celebrate and affirm their prostitution and give them a venue for making it their true vocation, a way of serving God by serving man—selflessly and with their whole being.

Now I know that I’m out of touch with the twenty-first century. Imagine being trumped on a matter of moral and sexual perversity by the Lutherans of all people?

Happy news! The government has come up with a 5.9 percent GDP growth rate in the fourth quarter of 2009. The recession is over.

Or is it? Statistician John Williams has informed us that 69 percent of this growth, or 4.1 percentage points, is the result of inventory accumulation. That leaves a 1.8 percent growth rate, and the 1.8 percent is likely due to the underestimate of inflation and other statistical problems.

The Federal Reserve’s own monetary evidence contradicts the recovery assurances from Fed chairman Ben Bernanke. The Federal Reserve continues to pour massive reserves into the banks. The monetary base, which consists of currency in circulation and bank reserves (the basis for new loans), has surged from $850 billion last year to $2.2 trillion on Feb. 24.

Despite this potential for massive new money creation, the broadest measure of money growth is still contracting. The banks are too impaired and so are consumers for the banks to create new money by making loans.

The economy, in other words, is going nowhere.

As I have emphasized for years, an economy that moves its high productivity, high value-added jobs offshore is going nowhere but down. Except for the super-rich, there has been no growth in people’s incomes for a decade. To substitute for the missing income growth, consumers took on more debt. The growth in consumer debt kept the economy going. However, most consumers have now reached their maximum debt load, and millions went beyond their limit, resulting in foreclosures and lost homes.

There are no jobs to which people can be called back to work. The jobs have been given to the Chinese and Indians.

The economy is set for a “double-dip,” that is, renewed decline. This, of course, means larger federal, state, and local budget deficits. The U.S. federal deficit is now so large that it can no longer be financed by the trade surpluses of China, Japan, and OPEC.

Currently the deficit is being financed by deterioration in the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet. The Fed is creating new reserves for the banks (thus the surge in the monetary base) in exchange for the banks’ toxic financial instruments. The banks are using the reserves to purchase Treasury debt instead of making new loans. This makes money for the banks, but does not grow the economy or create jobs for the millions of unemployed.

According to reports, recent auctions of Treasury debt have not gone well. China, America’s biggest creditor, has reduced its participation and is even selling some of its existing holdings. Whenever all of a new Treasury debt offering is not taken, the Federal Reserve buys the remainder. This results in debt monetization. The Fed pays for the bonds by creating new checking accounts for the Treasury, in other words, by printing money.

On Feb. 24, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke told Congress that the U.S. faced a serious debt crisis and that the Fed was not going to print money in order to pay the government’s bills. In fact, Bernanke would have no choice but to print money.

Bernanke’s warning to Congress is his way of adding Federal Reserve pressure to that of Wall Street and former Treasury Secretary Paulson for Congress to balance the budget by gutting Social Security and Medicare. In case you haven’t noticed, no one in Washington or New York talks about cutting trillion dollar wars or trillion dollar handouts to rich bankers. They only talk about taking things away from little people. It is not the Bush/Cheney, Obama, neocon wars that are in the cross hairs; it is Social Security and Medicare.

Other Obama economic officials, such as White House economist Larry Summers, a former Treasury secretary, have called for a middle class tax increase. The problem with this “solution” is that a good part of the middle class is now jobless and homeless.

Money will have to be found somewhere if the Fed is to avoid printing it. During the Clinton administration a Treasury official proposed a 15 percent capital levy on all private pensions to make up for their tax deferral status. This idea didn’t fly, but today a desperate government, which has wasted $3 trillion invading countries that pose no danger to the U.S. and wasted more trillions of dollars combating a crisis brought on by the government’s failure to regulate the financial sector, is likely to steal people’s pensions as well as to gut Social Security and Medicare.

The reason is that the dollar’s role as reserve currency is at stake. If the Federal Reserve has to monetize the federal deficit, the world will turn its back on a rapidly depreciating dollar. The minute the dollar loses the reserve currency role, the U.S. can no longer pay its bills in its own currency, and its days as a superpower come to a sudden end. Wars can’t be financed, and Washington’s pursuit of world hegemony will hit a brick wall.

The power-mad denizens of D.C. will do anything to further the expansion of their world empire.

Most people know Robert Crumb as that esoteric cartoonist from the 60s who did the “Keep on Truckin’” guy. Comic nerds like myself, however, see him as the second coming of Christ. He has completed dozens of graphic novels over the years and the drawings just keep getting better. His writing is another story. Crumb’s fiction almost always falls behind his auto-bio stuff and this latest work, The Book of Genesis, is no exception. It is a fifty-chapter opus that chronicles, er, dozens of people over, um, thousands of years. Here are ten reasons why the pictures surpass his words…

We start off with the most pedantic and unimaginative metaphor I’ve ever seen. Two young people in a magic kingdom enjoy all the fruits of innocence until they eat the wrong fruit and are banished from this place for good. Okay Crumb, I get it. Children lose their innocence when they discover sexuality and become adults. This is a shame. Way to hammer me over the head with a lead sledgehammer of subtlety.

Possibly an allusion to his horrible childhood (his brother committed suicide during the documentary Crumb), Robert randomly pulls in a brother who massacres his sibling and is banished from the first village ever, forever.

Again, this is in a magical world where nobody exists. So, how is it that Cain is “able” (get it?) to walk over to a new part of this world and start a village? Who did he procreate with? If masturbating can generate and entire village, I’d have created the favelas of Rio a hundred times over by now.

Jesus Christ Robert, can you squeeze more crazy names in this thing? It’s painfully obvious Crumb has been reading a lot of Dostoyevsky recently because he is constantly confusing the readers with crazy-named characters. Oh, Nebaloth begot Kedar and he begot Ishmael and Adbeel and Mibjam etc, etc, etc? Thank God this thing is illustrated because there is no way in Hell I could keep track of all Crumb’s absurd characters in just written form.

Crumb reveals himself as being twice as unimaginative as most writers by employing the exact same plot device, twice. At the beginning of the book, a guy named Abram pretends his wife is his sister so nobody will rape her. The head of the village starts dating her and is mortified to find out she’s taken. “Why did you not tell me she was your wife?!” he yells.

Then, about a fifty pages later, a guy named Abimelech pretends HIS wife is his sister. In classic Crumb half-assedness, the exact same thing happens and we’re left with yet another town leader saying, “How then could you say, ‘She is my sister’?”

Apparently the publisher couldn’t afford an editor.

One of the only fun parts of Crumb’s story was the annihilation of two orgy-fueled towns called Sodom and Gomorrah (the former no doubt being a shout out to sodomy). Crumb is a notorious pervert and his guilt for all this dehumanizing sex comes billowing out in a mind-blowing scene of pure carnage that makes September 11 look like a photo op for Air Force One. I wish the rest of the book retained this much action.

In another revealing look into Crumb’s perverted mind, we see a woman named Dinah get raped by “The son of Hamor the Hivite, prince of the land.” Her brothers then dupe the entire village into getting circumcised and then chop all their heads off and rob them. Crumb’s art rivals Michelangelo but his writing comes across as a pretentious Rob Zombie with a guilt complex.

Crumb’s unfortunate childhood is evident on almost every page. When a man tries to murder his son as an example of how faithful he is, Crumb portrays him as a hero. Yet, incest is portrayed as some kind of beautiful act. Save it for your therapist Crumb. I’m getting nauseous.

Not one to keep track of how old his characters are, Crumb lends himself the crutch of semi-immortality by making some guys live for hundreds and hundreds of years. This may have helped him avoid inconsistencies with who died and who’s son is who’s but it leaves the reader totally confused as to what legacy is over and what’s barely begun. Leave the immortal banter to New Moon, Crumb.

Crumb is constantly writing himself into a corner where the only way out is to wipe out everything and start again. He uses this disadvantage as a platform to bore us all to death with warnings of environmental disaster. In one instance, he has a guy named Noah fill a boat with innocent creatures so they will survive the imminent apocalypse. In a bout of hysteria that would make Al Gore proud, he pretends the entire world was wiped out with floods and every animal outside the ark is dead.

Eddie Izzard, who apparently has also read Crumb’s work, brought up a huge hole in this part of the plot. What about ducks?

Despite being a crucial part of the hippy zeitgeist in San Francisco, Crumb’s allegories are nothing but an enthusiastic tip of the hat to Obama and his big government policies.

Around chapter forty-two, a magic guy named Joseph purports to read people’s dreams and claims the country’s headed for a terrible drought. Joseph matter-of-factly claims government’s role is to move in and seize all of the villagers’ assets so they can be doled out later in systematic portions. By the end of Crumb’s book the government is bursting with wealth as farmers beg for their own food back. In Crumb’s heavenly Never Never Land this is seen as a good thing. Maybe Crumb thinks thirteen trillion is too little and is encouraging the rest of us to “stop impeding progress” as the Obamaniacs insist. I, for one, ain’t buying it.

Robert Crumb needs to understand his role is to entertain and not beat us about the head with motherhood statements about morality. He’s a great cartoonist, possibly the greatest, but it’s time he left the writing to us writers.

Greece is a country that thrives on rumor. Hearsay has been a part of the Greek DNA since time immemorial. Even Plato remarked on it. Demagogues used rumor and gossip to silence their opponents, demagogism being a Greek word, after all. Greeks also thrive on the spoken word. As was the case of their ancestors, the power of the spoken word sometime drives out reason. As I write, I hear a lot of my fellow Greeks say some very unreasonable things. Such as, the Germans and the French conspired to embarrass us and take over our businesses and natural resources. Or, the EU was a plot against Greece from day one. The one I like the best is that Europe without Greece will cease to exist.

Be that as it may, and as unlikely as it may sound, Europe, as in the European Union, might just cease to exist because of little old Greece, especially if the short-sellers of the Euro have anything to do with it. Or Goldman Sachs, for that matter. Goldman has admitted it helped Greece fiddle the books. Once allowed a peek into the country’s true finances, Goldman, I am certain, advised its hedgies to start selling Greek bonds short. Keep selling until the little greasers cry uncle, or words to that effect was the order from the Goldman Sachs Fuhrer, Lloyd Blankfein, one of the world’s greediest and most disgusting individuals. But before I go on, a word about those nice chaps who advised the Greek government how to mask the deficits while earning 192 million Euros for themselves. Goldman Sachs helped inflate and then profit from the worldwide bubble that eventually burst less than two years ago. In my not so humble opinion, no one except Goldman partners and insiders has ever made a bean, as all profits are intended for those who run this house of ill repute. Goldman Sachs has throughout its history invented new ways to screw the public and further enrich itself. It was typical of the Greeks to go to Goldman Sachs for advice. A crook in trouble does not call the fuzz. He calls another crook.

But back to the Greeks. I will not dwell too much on their present problems because they’ve been enumerated and debated on by every newspaper and television news service in the world, including the Mogadishu Daily News and the Monrovia Mirror. In brief, Greece’s deficit has grown to such a size, as compared to her ability to generate revenue, that it will now require a rescue package from her euro-zone partners. By this, of course, I mean Germany. However maligned the Germans might be, show me a day that American and European TV stations don’t show a Hollywood movie showing beastly German soldiers raping nuns and breaking the fingers of Jewish pianists, and I will gladly immigrate to Saudi Arabia; which, incidentally, does not show such films. When it comes to rescue packages, it is always Deutschland uber alles. The Americans are broke, the English even more so, the French talk sex but don’t pay, the Belgians are too busy molesting children, and the Dutch have their hands full trying to teach their citizens how to speak, dress, and act like Muslims. The rest of Europe are PIGS, except that Italy has replaced Ireland along with Portugal, Spain, and Greece. (The Irish have made an unbelievable recovery by dealing in drugs and kidnapping, hence their balance of payments has improved.)

So, what is it about Germany that we Greeks suddenly admire so? Well, that is not actually true. The sudden part, that is. German women have been welcome in Greece since the fifties. Although with the invention of blonde bleach their popularity isn’t what it used to be, there are more phony blondes in Greece than real ones in Sweden—a German lass is considered better than gold among horny Greek men. No, the reason for the Fatherland’s sudden popularity is that Germany was the first nation to hand out goodies to non-working stiffs and immigrants. The handout was called social justice, and it was exemplified by the fact that heads of working German families had less money in their paychecks than many unemployed people—mostly immigrants—receiving support payments from Santa Claus, aka the German government. The Greeks are smart people, and quick learners. What was good enough for Turks, Africans, and other Muslim migrants, was certainly good enough for us Greeks, who, after all, invented geometry, trigonometry, chemistry, medicine, astronomy, philosophy, tragedy, poetry, history, as well as buggery and cheating on one’s taxes. Which brings me to the Greek character.

The Ancient Greek we know all about. He was brave, proud, inventive, emotional, volatile, heroic, as well as jealous and vengeful. It is a given that we modern Greeks inherited not only the language of the Doric tribes, but certainly their defaults. Where once upon a time a Greek like Odysseus drew the wrath of the Gods through hubris and was sent peregrinating for ten years, most modern Greeks blame the United States and Europe for their problems. 400 years of Ottoman occupation did the trick. Greek intellectuals and historians have generally blamed the Turk for the nation’s ills. And it is a fact that, where humiliation persists through several generations, the oppressed begin, in defense of their own dignity, to imitate their oppressors. The cruelty, vindictiveness and harshness shown by warring political factions testify to this theory.

But this is not sufficient explanation. The volatility of the Greek character, probably the only link with the glorious past of antiquity, is another. The highly individualistic Greek is too self-seeking to submit easily to the dictates of others. His unruliness has helped him survive throughout centuries of oppression, as well as to rise above adversity, economic or otherwise. But it has also made him unaware of the advantages of a communal spirit and true democratic attitude. He will go to any length to attain his goals, not hesitating to lie and cheat in order to achieve them. This has—brutal though as it may sound—created a climate where cheating is a way of life, and where the highest and lowest of citizens do not hesitate to use dishonesty, especially where politics are concerned.

A direct result of this way of life has been the “spoils system.” Although not a Greek invention, nowhere has it been practiced more assiduously than in Greece. Succeeding governments have shamelessly brought in their favorites, returning favors and expecting new ones in the future, and changing laws to suit their purposes; thus encouraging resentment, divisiveness and a wait-until-my-turn comes way of thinking. No Greek government has ever come to power that has truly tried to reconcile the people. The worst, as far as the great historian Taki is concerned, was Andreas Papandreou, or Ali Babandreou, as the famous philosopher Taki named him. Andreas cheated and lied for close to twenty years, and after he croaked and went to that sauna-like place below, the second worst was Constantine Karamanlis, the fat slob who was responsible for the latest euro mess (The present prime minister, George Papandreou, Ali Baba’s son, is an honest and serious man not responsible for the mess). Karamanlis was supposed to be a conservative, but he ran the country into the ground by doing what every one before him had done, only more so. He never hesitated to lie where the deficit was concerned, believed he had Brussels in his pocket, surrounded himself with crooks, and when the you-know-what hit the fan, called in Al Capone from America in the guise of Goldman Sachs. The rest is history, as Herodotus said.

One of the world’s all time great economists, Taki, believes he has found a way out from the Greek dilemma. Tell the European bureau crooks in Brussels to go to hell, bring back the drachma, devalue it and then head for the beach. Peg it to 15,000 drachmas to one euro, and watch waiters and bus boys go out and buy shiny new Toyotas (also devalued) with the tips they got from the millions of euro suckers stepping over themselves to get to the cheapest place in the civilized (well, almost) world. Pay off the deficit with drachmas, and, presto, watch the euro suckers drool with envy. Tell Trichet (it means cheating in French) to shove it, and van Rompui, or whatever his name is, to eat some French fries, a Belgian specialty along with child molestation. Stop using the   language of entitlement which no longer has any resonance.  Language devaluation has done more harm for Greek politics than raiding the state piggy bank. Hyperbole is a Greek word, but stop using it. Greek civil servants are on a par with those appointed by the murdering Robert Mugabe in that once wonderful country known as Rhodesia in the good old days. There are more jokes about the inefficiency, laziness, vindictiveness and shabbiness of Greek civil servants than there were about Monica Lewinsky and the stained dress. Cut their benefits, force them to pay taxes like the rest of the people, and if they strike, fire them. Bring in a few old-fashioned Germans to run the country until it gets back on its feet.

Follow these ground rules offered by the world’s most preeminent economist, and after that go to the beach.

‘Live for the here…’

That was the unsolicited advice proffered by an aged Beat poet to a restaurant diner at a nearby table who would not leave his cell phone alone. A cigar for the poet. Because far from being liberated by mobile communications, we have become enslaved and tyrannized by them; rather than seeing our lives enhanced, we are squandering time, company, and true engagement and abandoning much of what is precious. 

I am no Luddite, neophobe, nor techno-hater; I see the need for the white heat of progress and technical innovation and easy and efficient contact. But discarded in all of this is stillness and balance and a small and quiet voice of calm. Trust me on this. Just as children now have the attention-span of an amnesiac gnat—a condition exacerbated by fast-cut television, cud-chewingly moronic computer games, and all-singing toys that close down imagination—so we have succumbed to the barrage of white-noise and background chatter that pursues us wherever we go and serves to drown our thoughts. Collectively, our attention spans too are heading for zero.
For instance: a young mother in the park will not be feeding the ducks with her child or pointing out the delights of flora and fauna. She will have stuck a pacifier in the youngster’s mouth and will be immersed elsewhere in a different conversation with a phone clamped to her ear. Recently, while on an overseas research trip, I was obliged to ask a friend why he had gone to the trouble of boarding a plane when— measured by the time he spent poring over his iPhone—he so obviously desired to be with his stockbroker, his vintage car dealer, his yacht master, and a myriad other companions back home.

Somehow, mere brands have become integral instead of adjuncts to our existence. Somewhere, cell phones, iPhones and BlackBerries have colonized our souls. As one wise old saw pointed out, the majority of cell phone calls interrupts business that is more important. Mobile telephony has created a neurotic, almost schizophrenic, state of affairs in which people are barely half-committed and only semi-engaged with whomever they are dealing. It is prioritizing; it is putting the face-to-face conversation on hold; it is the virtual-reality equivalent of looking over a shoulder to scan the room for more appealing guests; it is plain bloody rude.

Those most vociferous in claiming to be liberated by advances in cell phone technology (and often the loudest in their use) resemble most closely a hospital patient hooked up to multiple drips. They cannot do without their fix, can scarcely function without access to the feeds and life-support provided by others. Remove that support and watch them struggle. Ask them to lead a normal life freed of the addiction and diversion of constant ring-tones and they will surely shrivel and die.

Then there is the fickleness and unreliability brought on by easy communication. In this environment of flip-up screens and flippant comment, of glancing relationships and disordered lives, we have created a mountainous overload of detritus, toil and unnecessary messaging. Far from improving efficiency, we conspire to kill it off. Made a plan? Telephone all the way to the rendezvous with updates and sudden changes. Written a list? There is little point, for you can tweak it or phone for further consultation. Possessed by a crazy whim or notion? Feel free to inform or instruct all and sundry in an instant. Undisciplined blather is the rage. If people were honest—and generally they are not—they would admit that most of the time it is largely a case of crap in and crap out. I should know—I listen to enough of it expressed loudly in planes, trains and automobiles. Perhaps there should be room for the old-fashioned concept of having an idea and sticking to it in silence. Oh, and leaving the rest of us alone.

It is the simplest of things to grasp. Yet how we hate simplicity and opt for complication. If you want to meet friends, then damn well meet them. If you intend to converse, then damn well converse. If you want to visit a theatre, a museum, a store, a concert, a gallery or a party—do these things. Switch off your phone and switch on yourself. No-one wants the backwash of your conversation, your lack of eye-contact, your passing nod and dismissive gesture, your tilted head, your utter disrespect.

Well, there goes my sponsorship deal. Maybe I will be informed of their decision by text message and a glum-looking face with a down-turned mouth. So be it. I do not preach some strange counter-culture; I argue for a rebalancing, a reconnection through disconnecting the mobile phone. The effect could be startling and civility and civilization might improve. There you have it. Turn off. Tune in. Be human.

What’s the long-term future of spectator sports?

With the conclusion of the Winter Olympics, some new trends have come into focus. The Olympics, for instance, have established a niche as the Exception to the Rules of Sports Fandom: they’re the athletic event for people who like watching sports in highly limited doses, a couple of weeks every couple of years.

The audience for the Winter Olympics was 56 percent female. For women viewers, the Olympics in the 20th Century served as a prototype for the 21st Century reality television shows, with their human interest stories about a small group of good-looking rivals vying for a once in a lifetime opportunity.

Figure skating, for example, long let spectators indulge themselves in watching the backstage dramatics that have become a staple on reality shows such as Survivor. But unlike the contestants on Survivor, Olympians are highly disciplined professional athletes, so most aren’t as amusingly prone to hissy fits as reality show contestants, who, like Dr. Evil, will do anything for One Million Dollars.

Will audiences continue to demand all the expensive pomp and circumstance of the Olympics if the current trend in popular culture toward shameless gratification of audience urges continues?

Back in Baron de Coubertin’s day, people wanted a high-class pretext for enjoying spectator sports, so the Olympics were ostentatiously rooted in the “Glory That Was Greece”. Similarly, horseracing, which was long the most popular sport in America as measured by attendance, was drenched in classiness. You weren’t really supposed to admit what horseracing was all about (gambling). You were supposed to talk about “the sport of kings” and ponder pedigrees longer than those of most royal families.

In recent years, however, increased democratization and increased frankness have opened the door for entertainment entrepreneurs to cut corners on these kind of facades. Do we really need thoroughbreds to scratch our itch to wager? Why not just go to a casino?

The reductionist logic spins onward: Do casinos really need all those roulette wheels and other old-fashioned games redolent of secret agents in tuxedoes in Monte Carlo? Do slot machines even need handles? The underlying appeal of gambling is the addictive power of Skinnerian intermittent reinforcement, so why not just push a button?

Today, 70 percent of the average casino’s take comes from electronic devices, and it might be higher if the law allowed. Gambling in America has been transformed from part of a tradition-sanctioned pageant of man’s magnificent relationship with horse into a solitary vice.

Of course, not all viewers found the Winter Olympics interesting. The future of the Winter Games in an increasingly diverse America does not look bright. Nielsen ratings have been more than four times higher among viewers over 55 than among teens. Not surprisingly, the Winter Olympics appeal most to those whom John Derbyshire calls Ice People: 89 percent of the audience was white, with Asian-Americans the next largest segment.

Paradoxically, as male audiences have gotten more diverse, their favorite sports have become more homogenous. Male enthusiasm has become increasingly focused on a handful of team sports and unfamiliar sports are increasingly shunned by male viewers.

In 2010, it seems bizarre that one of the most popular sports shows of a generation ago was ABC’s Wide World of Sports (or as Cheech and Chong called it in the intro to their 1976 parody song Basketball Jones, “ABC’s White World of Sports”). This weekly Saturday afternoon anthology program featured a now-baffling array of minor sports: all the Olympic events, Winter and Summer, such as the biathlon and the pentathlon, plus snooker, jai-alai, logrolling, cliff diving, ping-pong, and hurling. As a child of my time, I respectfully watched them all, although I must confess that no matter how many times announcer Jim McKay explained harness racing, I never did figure out the difference between trotting and pacing.

And, in an increasingly indoor world, the concept of a season for each spectator sport seems outdated. Men want to watch their favorite sport right now. If you like soccer, why should you put up with something else just because of the calendar? Thus, soccer season has become like the forever war in Orwell’s 1984: it almost never ends. The world-dominant English Premier League’s regular season runs 38 weekly games from August to May.

Within the U.S., however, soccer has made almost no progress toward becoming a major spectator sport with non-Hispanics. Indeed, hockey, once one of the Big Four team sports, has largely been driven off the American fan’s mental map by the NHL’s folly of trying to compete with the American football season, which now runs into February. If the National Football League play weren’t so violently debilitating to its participants that they require an offseason to recuperate, it’s likely that the NFL’s schedule would now be as long as the Premier League’s, and football would be on the verge of driving basketball and baseball to the sidelines.

Hence, spectator sports are likely to become ever more calibrated toward the satisfaction of mass urges at the expense of tradition and idiosyncrasy.

We inherited the worst situation since the Great Depression.

That is the reflexive response of President Obama to the troubles from which he has been unable to extract his country.

Even before the inauguration, he says, there were projections of a $1.2 trillion deficit for 2009. That deficit is not my deficit.

Presidents are usually blamed for deficits run while they are in office. But, in fact, presidents do not write budgets. Congress does. Presidents sign them. And the mammoth deficits of 2008 and 2009 came from budgets approved by a Congress run by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. Did Sen. Barack Obama vote against those budgets?

As for the troubles he inherited, the president has a point. From day one, he has had to deal with two wars, a financial crisis, and an economy careening into recession.

But Harry Truman inherited two great wars, an atom bomb and an ally, Joseph Stalin, about to dishonor his commitments and enslave half of Europe.

Richard Nixon came to office a minority president in the year of Tet, urban riots, campus uprisings, and the assassinations of Dr. King and Robert Kennedy. He inherited a war in which 500,000 Americans were fighting, and came to a capital city dominated by a media that detested him and a Congress where, for the first time since Zachary Taylor, the opposition controlled both houses.

Ronald Reagan, too, inherited the worst recession since the Depression, a hollowed-out Army, a Soviet Empire that had overrun Vietnam and Southeast Asia and seized Afghanistan, Angola, Mozambique, Grenada and Nicaragua, and a NATO shot through with Eurocommunism and pacifism.

Undaunted, Truman went on to a historic victory in 1948, and Nixon and Reagan went on to 49-state landslides. Presidents have a way of coming back, and America has legendary recuperative powers.

So no one should write this president or country off. But neither should anyone minimize the problems confronting us.

First is the debt crisis. Federal revenues are running at 16 percent of gross domestic product, spending at 27 percent. Wednesday, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke warned that a Greece-like situation, where creditors refuse to buy U.S. debt unless we raise interest rates to cover the rising risks of a U.S. default, cannot be ruled out.

Yet there is no credible plan to get these deficits under control when the economy starts to recover. And this week came news that consumer confidence has plunged to a 25-year low and housing starts have plummeted to the lowest level in 50 years.

Economists at the International Monetary Fund have suggested the United States raise the inflation rate to 4 percent or 6 percent to float out of the debt crisis. This is another way of saying the government should clandestinely steal the wealth of the American people to pay off its debts. Bernanke says that will not happen.

Second is the war situation. Where Gen. Tommy Franks’ Army occupied Iraq in three weeks, Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s will require a month to pacify Marjah, a town of 80,000 in a nation of 28 million.

U.S. casualties are rising in Afghanistan even as Iraq’s elections, which are to lead to a U.S. withdrawal, appear to be moving that country back toward a Sunni-Shia and Arab-Kurd sectarian and civil war.

Meanwhile, pressure on the president is mounting for “crippling” sanctions on Iran that could lead to a third U.S. war against a nation with a population larger than Afghanistan and Iraq combined.

A third crisis is political: the perception that President Obama is a weak leader who cannot even impose his will on a Congress where Democrats had, until January, a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and a near 80-vote margin in the House.

Abroad, America is being defied by Japan on bases, by Israel on settlements, by China and Russia on U.N. sanctions, and by Venezuela and its compadres on everything. Dictatorships and democracies alike seem to be dismissive of American leadership.

While Democrats are despondent, facing almost certain defeat in the fall, Republicans seem united only on what they are against: Obama and Obamacare, cap-and-trade, civil trials for terrorists, socialism.

Perhaps that is enough for November.

But in 2012, the party of Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, and Ron Paul will have to tell the country how it proposes to end these wars without losing them, how to bring manufacturing back, and how to cut spending by $1 trillion a year, if taxes are off the table.

That Republicans failed under George W. Bush few Republicans today deny. That Obama and his White House are failing today few Democrats will privately deny.

The question raised by the successive failures is whether either party has a cure for the maladies that afflict America. Or are those maladies beyond the power of politics to heal?

Have we become a people incapable of accepting the sacrifices previous generations made, and of producing leaders with the vision and strength of character that our leaders of old possessed?

My instinctive reaction to what had just happened and indeed to the events of the day itself, was, of course, to head straight for the minibar. I found it lurking underneath the T.V on the right hand side of the room, a small brown camouflaged fridge between two sets of drawers. I squatted down and flung it open.
      “Okey-dokey,” I said out loud, “what have we here?”
      The two main shelves didn’t have anything of any use to anyone as far as I was concerned. On the top shelf there were two bottles of Heineken and two bottles of Coke while underneath it there were two bottles of Fanta and two bottles of water. “I think not,” I said disgustedly and turned my attention to the inside of the door. Bingo. I took out two miniature bottles of Scotch and two miniature bottles of brandy and emptied them into a glass. Then I took off my jacket, kicked off my shoes, and flopped onto the bed. “At last,” I groaned indulgently before tipping the entire contents of the glass down my throat. Unexpectedly, however, this oft-rehearsed routine suddenly produced an alarming retch which had to be followed up with an immediate yet well-judged swallow. I waited for a few seconds then got hit with another alarming retch which had to be followed up with another immediate yet even better-judged swallow. ‘Go easy there partner,’ I cajoled myself good naturedly but with a real feeling of fear. At length, the struggle came to an end I was able to lower myself, more cautiously this time, into a bolt upright position on the bed. I wiped the tears from my eyes with the back of my hand and stared out of the window.
      Given the hotel’s proximity to the sea, I had been hoping for, nay, counting on, some kind of sea view. A beach front panorama perhaps, or the hypnotic tilting this way and that of ships’ masts in the gentle Mediterranean breeze. Instead I seemed to have secured a room on the bum side of the hotel; the only view I had was of a brick wall and somebody else’s dirty air conditioning unit.
      I checked my watch: there was still an hour and a half left to go. The question was: what could I do in that time? I could go for a swim, I suppose. I had brought my swimming trunks and in a hotel like this there was bound to be a pool. Or I could fix myself another drink……actually on second thoughts, maybe not. There wasn’t really enough time to go to sleep, so then, what to do? I was pondering all of this when, as if by luck, I happened to notice a laminated brochure next to the T.V. ‘Adult Entertainment Direct to your Room,’ it said on it, and next to the words was the image of a well-endowed and exceptionally sluttish woman staring right at me. The answer immediately became clear: I would celebrate my first day in my new job with an expensive, high quality wank. What could possibly be better?
      As if working on a sub-conscious level, my arm had already snaked its way over to the bedside table and located the remote control. I had a quick flick through the channels and soon found exactly what I was looking for: 12 Hour Adult Zone, $34.99. Bargain. With a tremendous feeling of excitement churning in my stomach and a frenzied disregard for any possible consequences, I punched my room number into the remote control: Three……… Nine………… Six………

      I felt it was important to arrive early for my rendez-vous with the Captain so I allowed myself a good twenty minutes in order to negotiate the labyrinth from my room back to the lifts. To my surprise, I managed only a handful of wrong turns and found myself back in the lobby with a full ten minutes to spare.
      I also felt it was important to pay for the adult entertainment channel while it was still fresh in my mind, so to speak, and thereby preclude any unnecessary embarrassment when the time came to check out the following day with the Chief Pilot standing next to me. We weren’t due to leave until the following afternoon, but still, it never pays to leave these things to the last minute.
      Being aware, as I was, of the delicate nature of my predicament, I was smart enough not to head straight for the check-in desk but rather to loiter inconspicuously in the middle of the lobby until a suitable receptionist became available. There was no way I was going to have any further dealings with the same person who had checked us in when we arrived, nor was there any way I was going to suffer the humiliation of being tended to by a female employee whom I might otherwise have recourse to importune at a later stage in the evening. No. What was called for in a difficult situation like this was some level of sympathy or, ideally, complicity on their part which would hopefully be offset by a certain roguish, fun-loving approach on mine. I was mature enough to know that honesty was, as it always is, the best policy, nor was I about to debase myself any further than I already had by getting involved in a web of intrigue and deceit. Boys will be boys after all, I reminded myself philosophically, and besides, these people were professionals; they’d seen it all before and they’d probably seen every trick in the book.
      As far as I could make out, there were seven employees to choose from. They were well spaced out, which was good, but the desk itself curved round in a gentle arc and stretched so far into the distance that I couldn’t clearly make out what most of them looked like. I felt fairly confident that I didn’t recognize any of them from earlier, which was also good, but there was, on the other hand, a number of doors set back from the desk itself through which any member of staff could suddenly appear at any moment.
      The receptionist nearest me was obscured by two American tourists I’d seen earlier coming out of the lift, but when they moved away to reveal a regular looking Spanish male in his early twenties, I knew I’d more or less found what I was looking for. He was slightly thinner and nerdier than I would have liked but he definitely wasn’t female and, more importantly, he probably wasn’t gay. I glanced down at my watch: 19:55: five minutes to go. Right. It was now or never. I took a deep breath and, smiling broadly, set off in a swashbuckling swagger towards the desk.
      “Hello there amigo!” I called out when I was still some distance away, “como estas?”
      “Good evening sir,” he replied in a more subdued fashion once I had closed the gap between us to just a few meters. “How are you?”
      “Me? Couldn’t be better. Couldn’t be better.” I was now standing in front of him. I placed the palms of my hands on the marble counter either side of his computer screen and did a drum roll with them for a few seconds until he felt it necessary to ask:
      “And how can I help you, sir?”
      His English was encouragingly good with only the faintest trace of a Spanish accent. Fingers crossed this whole sordid business would be taken care of in no time.
      “Oh, I don’t know,” I began vaguely, “I was just wondering what time breakfast starts tomorrow morning.”
      “Breakfast is from six until eleven o’clock.”
      “Perfect!” I exclaimed and made as if to leave then clicked my fingers and turned back. “Oh and one more thing, it’s nothing really, I just need to pay for the adult entertainment channel now before I forget. I’m in room 396. Cheers.”
      “Sir?”
      “The adult entertainment channel, you know how it is,” I winked at him, “I‘d like very much to pay for it now if that’s O.K with you.”
      “The adult……I don’t think we……”
      “Yes you do,” I corrected him. “You have it upstairs. In the rooms. In my room. I put it on and now I would like to pay for it. Thank you.”
      “But all of our rooms are adult rooms.”
      “No, no, no. Listen to me very carefully.” I could tell that a queue was beginning to form behind me. I lent over the counter towards him so that our faces were nearly touching and hissed at him:
      “The porn channel O.K? Do I have to spell it out for you? Sex, T.V, money, capeesh? You. Me. Pay now. NOW!!!”
      I stayed where I was and fixed him imploringly with mad, bulging eyes. He started to back away from me with a look of terror on his face, feeling his way carefully for the handle of the door behind him.
      “No, wait!” I reached out towards him. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. Please don’t go!”
      But just like that he was gone, and I stood there trying to work out what had caused the young man so much obvious distress. I looked at my watch: 19:58, time to go. I waited half a minute longer then turned to leave but as I did so, the door opened and in front of me appeared the attractive blonde woman whose eye I had been trying to catch when I first arrived, flanked on both sides, however, by two burly, quite scary-looking security guards.
      I couldn’t believe what was happening. My first thought was that there had been some mistake so I raised my hands palms facing outwards in a gesture of pretend surrender and said jokingly:
      “Whoa! What’s all this?”
      “Sir. Please calm down,” said the woman, who was altogether more attractive than I had first thought.
      “Calm down? I am calm!” I roared back at her. At that point I saw the two men drop their arms to their sides as if they were limbering up for a fight.
      “Sir, please. I must inform you that one of our members of staff has made a complaint against you.”
      “A complaint? What kind of complaint?”
      “Sir, if you do not lower your voice, we will be forced to exit you from the premises.”
      I knew that if I didn’t change tack and fast, then an already bad situation was about to get a whole lot worse. I breathed in deeply before continuing: “O.K, I’m sorry. It’s just that I think there’s been some terrible mistake. Why don’t you tell me what this so-called complaint is and then maybe I can convince you that it has nothing whatsoever to do with me.”
      “Sir. Rodrigo has informed us that you have been harassing him.”
      “Harassing him? Harassing him how?”
      “Sexually, I’m afraid, sir. He says you tried to pay him to have sex with you.”
      “Are we ready?” Captain Johnson asked light-heartedly as he slapped his room key down on the counter. He looked first at me then at the three people behind the desk with an amused expression as if he was trying to fathom what was going on. “Not giving you any trouble, is he? You’ve got to watch it with these English pilots!” He looked back at me: “See you in the bar, O.K?” And just like that, he was gone. It had all happened so quickly and had been so terrible, so unprecedentedly nightmarish, that I hadn’t even had time to formulate a response. The moment had come and the moment had gone seemingly with no beginning, no middle, and no end; a glitch from a parallel dimension on the otherwise normal passage of time. I found myself looking at the woman, except that I wasn’t looking at her, I was looking through her at an imaginary object set some distance away on the other side of her head. I found I was supporting myself with one hand on the computer screen and that my whole body was gently pulsing to the rhythm of my heart. I snapped out of it:
      “So anyway. Where were we? Oh that’s right: sexual harassment. Of course.” I suddenly felt more in control of a situation than I had ever felt in my life. “Let me put it to you this way, sweetheart. What Gonzalez or Tonto or whatever his name is thinks I said, O.K? I didn’t say it. Whatever he thinks I did? I didn’t do it. Whatever he thinks I am, or whatever you think I am? I’m not. It’s all one big misunderstanding.”
      She turned slowly to the two security guards, said something to them in Spanish, and they backed away through the door, eyeing me stonily as they went. I felt like getting in a last word, something delivered in high-camp to really piss them off, but I thought better of it. I had already succeeded in extricating myself from an impossible situation as it was and besides, to pretend to be gay now after everything that had just happened would be in extremely poor taste. I simply said:
      “Sorry about all that.”
      “I’m sorry too, sir. You have to understand that here at the Hotel Palma we take all complaints, especially of a sexual nature, very seriously indeed.”
      I smiled. “Of course. I wouldn’t expect anything less.”
      “Is there anything else I can help you with?”
      “Help me with?” I glanced over in the direction of the bar where I could see Captain Johnson safely ordering a beer. “Well yes, as a matter of fact there is. Something rather unfortunate happened a couple of hours ago when I checked into my room.”
      “Unfortunate?”
      “Yes, I’m afraid so. You see, I thought it would be nice to watch one of the films on the Pay T.V channels, you know, the one with, uh, Brad Pitt in it, so I……”
      “Brad Pitt?” she frowned.
      “Yeah, I think it was him. O.K maybe it wasn’t him but it was someone like him,” I improvised cleverly. “Anyway that’s not important. What is important is that I entered the number for the film on the remote control but instead of getting Brad Pitt……” I turned around to check that the sizeable queue of people behind me wasn’t able to hear what I was saying, then I ducked my head down towards her and she, in turn, brought her face up close to mine as if we were about to kiss, then I whispered to her conspiratorially: “……I found myself watching the adult entertainment channel!”
      I pushed myself back from the desk and let the full weight of what I had said sink into her. I was now wearing an expression of great disappointment tinged with genuine concern, the kind of look you might have got at school from the cool teacher after he had been the only one to trust in you but you had ended up letting him down badly, while the woman, who, to give her credit, might not have been out of place on the adult entertainment channel herself, was staring at me with an expression of wide-eyed disbelief.
      “I know,” I agreed with her.
      “Would sir like me to deduct it from his bill?”
      “No, no. Well O.K, yes, he would. The thing is, I don’t mind paying for it – that’s not the point. My main concern is for the children.”
      “The children?”
      “Of course. Imagine if you’re a parent and your two children are in the next room. Let’s say one of them wants to watch, I don’t know,” I twirled my hand loosely in the air trying to come up with something, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, right? Little Katie enters the number for what she thinks is going to be a Walt Disney cartoon but instead she ends up with, oh I don’t know, White Girls Love Black Cock instead. Trust me, you’d rather have me complaining about it than some little girl’s dad.”
      “Yes sir. I am terribly sorry.”
      I was beginning to feel well pleased with the level of respect I was getting not to mention the fact that I’d managed to pull off what I considered to be one of the great escape stunts of all time.
      “It’s O.K,” I said sadly, “I’m just relieved it was me who discovered the fault and not somebody else.” I had got so far involved in my own lie by this stage that I had ended up believing in it myself. I went on: “What I do suggest, however, is that you get maintenance to go up and sort it out.” Then I quickly added: “Not now. I mean do it tomorrow after I’ve gone.”
      “Yes sir. I will certainly do that for you.”
      “And another thing: it doesn’t matter too much but make sure it doesn’t appear on my company bill whatever happens, is that understood?”
      “Yes sir. It is.”
      “Good.” I turned to leave but something else occurred to me: “Oh and one more thing; I probably won’t need to use it but……”
      “The minibar, sir?”
      “Yes!” I replied, both surprised and impressed that I had been second-guessed so accurately.
      “Don’t worry - that won’t appear on your company bill either.”
      “Fantastic! See you later then.” And with that I headed off in high spirits to join the Captain who was waiting for me obliviously at the bar.

Previously: An Excerpt From ‘The Wrong Stuff’

St. Moritz. As they used to say in Flatbush, I shoulda stood in bed.  So leaving the pretty village of Gstaad on a sunny Tuesday morning, I set out for St. Moritz to attend the annual general meeting of Pugs Club and to participate in the first Pugs uphill ski race on the new course laid out by our President Professor William H. Gimlet.

As the prof has only recently learned to ski—ironically there are no skiing lessons provided by British institutions for the criminally insane—I should perhaps have foreseen, in the words of Irving Berlin, “trouble ahead,” but I didn’t. I woke up with a fever and rang St. Moritz. Brain damage has been known to rob people of their sense of humor, and Gimlet was no exception. “Do you believe in clubs for small children?” he rasped over the telephone. It was a non-sequitur, so I used the W.C. Fields answer, “only when kindness fails.” It seemed to quiet him down, however, so in order to be nice I told the mother of my children, what the hell, let’s go, otherwise I’ll never hear the end of it.

Trouble began almost immediately. A brand new Mercedes simply stopped in the middle of the motorway between Bern and Zurich, like stubborn mules do in the Greek mainland, and also in some islands like Andros and Mykonos. I will not go into details, but we wasted two hours staring at cheaper cars racing by us.

By the time we arrived at Chantal Hanover’s house on the outskirts of St. Moritz, the meeting was in full session, my fever had gone up, so there was only one thing to do: drown it. Club matters were discussed, eight applicants were unanimously blackballed,  and Prince Nikolaos of Greece was elected, also unanimously. We are now 17 and the membership will close at 20. (Incidentally, Sir Christopher Lee wore his striped blue and white Pugs tie when he knelt before the Queen and was knighted).  After that Prince Heinrich von Furstenberg decreed the 2010 sailing regatta to be held off St. Tropez on May 20th, with Tim Hoare assuring us that last year’s winner will not be using the same tactics. (I am not one to make excuses but I did miss the starting line with the ensuing penalty as I was blinded by the black smoke Roger Taylor’s engine was pouring out).

The hangover next morning was nothing compared to the lousy ski conditions. A blinding snowstorm brought the visibility down to zero but Gimlet insisted the race must go on. Once on the slopes, I discovered the genius I employ back in Gstaad had not packed my skis, but those of my son when he was a baby. It was as good an excuse for not taking part as I can think of, yet Gimlet would not lay off the cheap jokes, jokes to do with Sparta, Thermopylae, and the Italian performance on the battlefield in 1940. I gave in. But first we all had lunch at the Corviglia Club, where Gimlet proceeded to grab a table reserved for others and where he ordered a magnum of champagne and two bottles of claret, despite the fact he does not drink. He then stuck the president of the Corviglia, Prince Augusto Ruffo di Calabria, and Count Bismarck with the bill, both of whom were seated far away trying to avoid him. It was a terrible show, but worse was yet to come.

Due to the zero visibility, we could not find the other racers. Arki Busson had dropped out in the spirit of the French army in 1940—actually he couldn’t get a signal on his mobile and Uma was trying to get hold of him—while Mark Getty, evoking the spirit of 1966 draft dodging instead of 1776, also dropped out claiming his house, Spa Getty, was on fire. Tim Hoare got lost in the fog, and by the time I took off the mountain looked like Shanghai the day the Japanese marched in—locusts-like skiers shussing, crawling, falling, and screaming, and above the din I heard Gimlet’s shout to turn left. I did and hit a rock-like ice patch at speed, and it was frigor mortis. I fell head first and knocked myself out. But not to worry, I came to after a few seconds. My nose was cut and bleeding, I had a terrible bruise on the right side of my face, and I had broken my ribs on the right side. I was taken to the hospital, treated, and then the mother of my children smashed the car on the way home.

That night at George and Lita Livanos’s party (George is a Pugs member), I had probably the best red wine ever, which made me forget the pain I was in. As I was leaving the next morning I told Gimlet and Chantal that “we must do this again soon.” They both burst out laughing, something I cannot do with broken ribs, but it seems to amuse Professor Gimlet as he’s off to India.

For those unaware, the literary world is currently aflutter over a scandal involving yet another freshman novelist accused of plagiarism.  Helene Hegemann, daughter of famed German dramatist Carl Hegemann, recently released her debut novel Axolotl Roadkill, which is currently working its way up a number of German bestseller lists.  At only seventeen, she’s heralded as a gifted writer, and the book itself is a finalist at the Leipzig Book Fair.

Sounds great so far, but accusations of plagiarism recently surfaced when blogger Deef Pirmasens discovered that several passages in the book, and in one instance almost an entire page, were copied straight from a little-known novel entitled Strobo by a blogger using the pseudonym Airen.  Surprisingly, Hegemann has not only admitted to plagiarizing Airen’s work, but actually defends the theft.  In a now widely circulated statement released by her publisher, she writes, “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” an awfully smug assertion for someone in her position.

But the young author is not without her supporters.  The New York Times quotes Volker Weidermann, a jury member for the Leipzig Book Fair, as saying of the novel, “Obviously, it isn’t completely clean but, for me, it doesn’t change my appraisal of the text.”  He continues, “I believe it’s part of the concept of the book.” It seems that this was not really theft at all, but a re-appropriation of found material, a “remix” if you will.

The novel’s literary merit, let’s be clear, is really beside the point; Hegemann could very well be the wunderkind people claim she is. What concerns me are the reasons why her re-appropriation of Airen’s material must be considered plagiarism and not, as Hegemann and her defenders argue, simply an accepted practice of the times.

Intertextuality didn’t begin with the Y generation remember.  Though the term itself was coined in the sixties, we can find examples of intertextuality going as far back as the Greek myths and the Old Testament.  Even the modernist master himself, James Joyce, took the title of his greatest novel, Ulysses, from Homer. The thinking men and women of letters used to be perfectly capable of making the distinction between inspiration, source material, and stolen goods.

Let’s examine, for argument’s sake, a more contemporary example of intertextuality, and one more relevant to the situation at hand.  Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, published in 2009, is a recent and successful example of novel as “mash-up,” a term Hegemann applies to her own work.  The book lists its authors as Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith.  It follows the plot and uses much of the text of Jane Austen’s original work, Pride and Prejudice, though with references to zombies and zombie fighting sprinkled here and there for comic effect.

So, what is so different about Pride and Prejudice and Zombies that it shouldn’t elicit the kind of outrage Axolotl Roadkill does?  Well, first of all, Grahame-Smith samples from an original novel resting comfortably in the public domain.  He wrote his “mash-up” legally, something Hegemann could have probably accomplished with a quick letter to Strobo’s publisher.  (I read today that Hegemann’s publishers are doing just that, albeit accompanied by a fairly generous check, I’ll wager.)

Secondly, but no less important, Pride and Prejudice, in addition to being in the public domain, is also part of our common literary heritage.  For the same reason journalists and scholars aren’t expected to cite sources when they mention facts that are common knowledge, literary “remixers” need not fear attacks of plagiarism when they sample from what are commonly referred to as “classics.”  Anyone capable of reading Seth Grahame-Smith’s novel can be expected to know that Jane Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice, and that the joke (albeit a crude and relatively unfunny one to my thinking) is that there are no zombies in the original at all.  The same can’t be said of first-time, diva novelists grabbing chunks from little-known books conveniently similar in subject matter to their own.  Transparency gives the reader a sense that the author is trustworthy, part of the very definition of the word authentic, and more important today because so much of what we read is “remixed.”

Hegemann can bitch about originality until she’s old enough to actually get into the clubs she writes about, but it doesn’t change the fact that her novel is less authentic because she chose to increase her page-count with someone else’s pages. With all this “mixing,” “remixing,” “mashing-up,” and “re-appropriating” going on, is it possible today’s writers are ceding too much of their artistic prerogative to existing ideas and material?  By relinquishing so much control over their own work, aren’t they running the risk their works will not only lack originality, but also authenticity?

“Progressive London Conference”: the phrase is simultaneously gruesome and narcoleptic. It hints at almost illimitable tedium, wishful thinking, a tincture of vitriol and much more than a soupcon of sanctimony.

It carries bland and bathetic connotations—like a recurring nightmare of rainy Friday afternoons in school combined with Sunday School lessons as excruciating as they are esoteric.

It conjures up visions of a hot and airless room (perhaps in a 1960s building) over-filled with blank-eyed or frankly dozing “delegates”, slide shows full of meaningless statistics and spelling mistakes, adenoidal or heavily-accented voices reading from looooong papers cut and pasted from sociology books and Wikipedia, puerile and poorly-delivered perorations, fake bonhomie and over-affirmatory applause.

There are desks at the back strewn with plates smeared with the remnants of vegetarian and halal food, in amongst mountain ranges of NGO handouts, barely-literate trade union bulletins, Labour News, Liberal Democrat and Green Party ‘literature’, the Independent, Guardian, and Mirror ‘newspapers’, and beautifully produced ‘academic’ texts dripping with clichés and non-sequiturs. Beyond this superficially sane material comes heavy-duty lunacy— Socialist Worker, secularist newsletters, deep ecology screeds, Muslim manifestos, Christian Socialist journals, Respect Party forms, Sinn Féin’s An Phobhlacht, Gay News, Black Student Union literature, Tribune, Gay Scottish Socialist, Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!......and so interminably on in a beyond-satire stream of indignation-heavy, information-lite agitprop.

There are government ministers (!) in that madcap room, and MEPs, and even His Excellency the Venezuelan Ambassador, moving amongst the multiracial, multicultural, multilingual, multisexual melée, pretending they are best friends with London’s most egregious monomaniacs and all the capital’s “community activists”—the kind of people who lean too close when they talk at you, and wear plastic shoes, and £99 suits with black shirts and white ties.

I snap awake with a shiver—but this is (or was) a real conference, which took place in London on 30th January, under the auspices of former London Mayor Ken Livingstone, and addressed by no less a personage than Harriet Harman (AKA Mrs Jack Dromey), the shrewish earl’s niece who is Deputy Leader of the Labour Party and Leader of the House of Commons—and Ed Miliband, the piscine Energy Secretary and younger brother of Foreign Secretary David Miliband.

The protagonists were all too real too, with their proudly-borne titles, which when run together make a kind of anti-poetry of amiable or not-so-amiable eccentricity (plus a few items of furniture):
  —Director, Jewish Council for Racial Equality
  —Vice President, Pax Christi
  —Spokesperson, British Muslim Initiative
  —Chair, Stop the War Coalition
  —National Secretary, Anti-Academies Alliance
  —GMB National Equalities Officer
  —Chair, Compass Youth
  —Former adviser to the Mayor of London on women’s issues
  —Director, Boris Keep Your Promise
  —Chair, Defend Council Housing
  —Founder, Campaign for Clean Air in London
  —Director, 10:10
  —Chair, Palestine Solidarity Campaign
  —Organiser, Hope and Remembrance Vigil Trafalgar Square 2009
  —Chair, Imaan–Muslim LGBT support group

Then there are some who need no title, because their organizations’ names proclaim their purpose and outrage to a sadly indifferent world. There is the delightful double-entendre “UpRise”, whose founder clearly does not watch Carry On films. There is “Love Music, Hate Racism” (as though these unrelated activities were inextricably conjoined—like, say, Eat Sausages, Treat Eczema). There is “Liberal Conspiracy”, which has a proudly defensive ring, as if the group’s Sunny Hundal was endangering his life or liberty in the cause of greater liberalism. There are representatives of Boriswatch.co.uk, Socialist Unity, and the Abortion Rights Executive. And to add a frisson of edgy excitement to the proceedings, there is one Azad Ali, Community Affairs Co-ordinator, Islamic Forum Europe—who when he isn’t too busy with this worthwhile job moonlights as a civil servant. The racist authorities suspended him from this job last year for blogging that Osama bin Laden’s favorite theologian, Abdullah Azzam, was “one of the few Muslims who promote the understanding of the term jihad in its comprehensive glory” as a doctrine “of self-purification” and “warfare”. He went on to cite approvingly Azzam’s son’s considered view that, “If I saw a British man wearing a soldier’s uniform inside Iraq, I would kill him because that is my obligation.”

He has now been reinstated in his job, so sadly has less time to impart his intelligent opinions to the world—which means he must have been doubly delighted to be asked to share a platform with Mrs. Dromey and a roll-call of Britain’s leading feminists and homosexual activists—of whose lifestyle choices he no doubt approves wholeheartedly.

The themes, too, were a delight for connoisseurs, including as they did “One Society, Many Cultures”, “There is no Progressive Imperialism”, “Capitalwoman”(no relation to Wonderwoman), “Gaza—1 Year On”, and “Proud London—Stopping Homophobic Hate Crime”.

There was an unfortunate occurrence when a man was ejected for asking the Sinn Féin speaker whether party leader Gerry Adams would be arrested for being an accessory to child abuse (Adams’ brother is facing pædophilia charges in Ireland). This goes to prove the terrible dangers and disabilities under which radical and controversial activists are forced to operate under the present New Labour fascist regime.

The good news is that those who were unable to attend this notable event can read reports online. When they have savored the accumulated wisdom, a veritable goldmine awaits them on the Links page, where they can click on the link for the London Socialist Film Co-op. This is unfortunately the only listing under the “Culture” heading, despite the conference’s “One Country, Many Cultures” theme, but then who could be disappointed by celluloid classics like Memories of Underdevelopment and Only a Bookseller?
Pity, oh pity the ultra-Left—not only because they know not what they do, but because this Kafkaesque gabfest is their idea of fun. But pity the rest of us much, much more—because amazing though it may sound these are the ludicrous people, and this the agenda, which govern British life.

The inflation from five to ten in Best Picture Oscar nominees means that to have any hope of keeping them all straight in your head, you’ll need to group them. Fortunately, the Best Picture nods fall into five obvious pairings:

—The Easily Confused Titles: Up and Up in the Air.
—The Exes’ Action Flicks: James Cameron’s Avatar and Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker.
—The Movies about 350-Pound Black 16-Year-Olds: Precious and The Blind Side. (Two films that, together, teach us that if you are going to be an impoverished but colossal teen, it’s better to be a guy than a girl.)
—The Foreign Films That Won’t Win: An Education and District 9.
—And, finally, The Battle of the Aging Wunderkinds: Quentin Tarantino’s violent Jewish heroes in Inglourious Basterds vs. Joel and Ethan Coen’s passive-aggressive Jewish villains in A Serious Man.

For many years, Tarantino and the Coen Brothers have dominated Hollywood’s niche for high IQ cinephiles who aren’t exactly Merchant & Ivory tasteful. Tarantino purees old genres of sleaze into talkative “action” movies such as Pulp Fiction, while the Coens, like their hero Stanley Kubrick, enjoy switching styles abruptly.

Unlike the Promethean Kubrick, however, the efficient Coens make a lot of small-to-medium sized movies. Some fail. (Personally, I liked even The Hudsucker Proxy, so what do I know?) At minimum, however, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and No Country for Old Men demonstrate their extraordinary expertise.

Inglourious Basterds and A Serious Man channel the very different public personalities of Tarantino and the Coens. The former is a big movie and the latter a small one. In interviews, Tarantino loquaciously blurts out the huge aspirations evident in his WWII quasi-epic. In contrast, the Coens’ interviews could make Tiger Woods’s press conferences sound revealing.

They diffidently promoted A Serious Man—their superbly executed but intentionally limited black comedy about the Job-like woes inflicted upon Larry Gopnik, a meek Minnesota physicist (seemingly much like the Coens’ own economist father), by his pushy children, wife, brother, and neighbors—with their usual shyness and deadpan impersonality. No, it’s not about their parents, they would boringly answer the obvious questions: it’s fiction.

Moreover, in an era when the public enjoys the triumphs and traumas of megalomaniacal auteurs, the Coens are strangely lacking in marketable individuality. If I didn’t know that Joel is 55 and Ethan is 52, I would assume they were identical twins.

Possibly, the Coens’ reticence merely reflects fraternal fulfillment. Blessed with a brother who understands the other wholly, neither Coen feels Tarantino’s urgent need to explain his movies to the rest of us. Or maybe their boring personae are their greatest concoction, opaque façades that serve to confine the inevitable tensions of sibling rivalry. 

Whatever the cause, their productivity together is formidable: 14 movies.

Lately, though, they may lately be working too quickly. After the triumph of 2007’s Best Picture, No Country for Old Men, 2008’s Burn After Reading featured so many stars it wasted George Clooney in an unappealing role and Brad Pitt in an abbreviated one. (As a partisan of the Coens since 1984’s Blood Simple, after watching Burn I worried, “Uh-oh, maybe I’ve been wrong and they really are the soulless snots that everybody says they are.”)

A Serious Man is much improved, but it has so few stars that sit-com supporting actor Richard Kind might be the most recognizable face in the movie.

Inglourious Basterds started out as a 16-hour miniseries, and ended up being roughly five movies crammed into one. Perhaps the most intriguing is the faint palimpsest of Tarantino’s fictionalized version of how Parisian film collector Henri Langlois, with the aid of a movie-loving German officer, heroically shielded from Nazi censors and precious metal scavengers countless unique movies, all on reels of highly flammable silver nitrate film stock. Unfortunately, the preservationist storyline is hardly visible amidst Tarantino’s other obsessions, such as depicting Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels as an oddly Tarantinoesque movie producer.

Tarantino doesn’t actually know—or care—about anything other than movies. For example, the famous opening scene in which the Nazi colonel hunts down the last of the four Jewish dairy farming families in a lovely and remote part of the French countryside is bravura filmmaking. Yet, it’s hard to avoid wondering, “What French Jewish rural dairy farmers? Were there any? How would they get to a synagogue on the Sabbath?” I can’t find any trace by searching on Google for “France ‘Jewish farmers.’” Presumably, Tarantino was thinking of Tevye, the Jewish milkman in a Czarist shtetl in the 1971 film Fiddler on the Roof, but that shows how little he cares about his purported subject.

In contrast, A Serious Man provides a painfully detailed portrait of a Jewish suburb of Minneapolis in 1967, with a collection of characters whose abrasiveness contrasts strikingly with the Coens’ own mildness. Its subtitle could be Why I Married Marge Gunderson—the sweet shiksa lady sheriff in Fargo, for which Frances McDormand, Joel’s wife, won the 1996 Oscar.

An invitation to a Vanity Fair dinner is not a bad one to have, though the very thought of having to communicate with famous and fabulous people makes me twitchy. Hollywood types really only like powerful people, and few of them are capable of polite conversation with individuals they don’t know. The conversation usually goes something like this: “Hello, I’m Mandolyna…” At this point the star usually produces an awkward smile, and walks away. But this night was going to be different, I said to myself. I was going to inquire and flatter the stars into a little dialogue. After all, I had been included in this intimate affair, I must have something to offer.

The dinner at Harry’s Bar was in honor of, Tom Ford, after the London premiere of his film, A Single Man. I was seated between Carlos Souza, a charming Brazilian jeweler part of Valentino’s entourage, and Jon Kortajarena, one of the film’s sexy actors on Madonna’s to-do list, ranked by Forbes as the world’s eighth most successful male model. I asked him about his career, his other interests, and even spoke to him in his native Spanish, but he had no interest in me, or in feigning interest, opting instead to chain-smoke Marlboros elsewhere.

This lackluster seduction was just a small obstacle on my climb to success with the glitterati, but no twenty-four year old model was going to ruin my plan. I made my way over to Graydon Carter’s table to check on my walker for the evening, the esteemed writer William Shawcross. I had much more success with this lot, but then, most of them were not actors, and people over forty are much easier to talk to than many of my peers. From my new perch at Graydon’s table I chatted with William, and my new besty, Liz Elliot, from House & Garden, while peering into the lives of people like Thandie Newton, Brian Ferry, Guy Ritchie, Elle MacPherson, Mario Testino, and Kate Moss.

Toward the end of the evening I found myself speaking to the film’s star, Colin Firth, and his enchanting wife, Livia. Success at last. An actor, and a gent, and an apparently normal person capable of a brief exchange. I nervously babbled on about how I had seen his colleagues revere him to excess for his charitable work on some English award show. He didn’t walk away. Then I thought, more flattery, maybe that wasn’t enough. I said he was infinitely watchable. He turned to his wife and asked her if she found him infinitely watchable. That lead absolutely nowhere, so I congratulated him on the film, and he thanked me for coming. This time, I walked away.

But just when I thought things couldn’t get any better, Tom Ford took my hand in both of his, and looked me in the eyes as if I were the only woman in the world he wanted to go to bed with. My persistence was really paying off now. This was the first time I have ever been fully acknowledged by a famous person. More nervous chatter flew out of my mouth, something about how my dinner companions had all seen the movie multiple times, and how I would go see it again and again. He smiled, all the while looking deeply into my eyes. Like heroin, one sniff, and I was hooked…The fuss over Ford is definitely merited. He must be a zen master. His grace and beauty alone make him a megastar. But the list goes on of course, and Ford has many accomplishments, and talents to his credit, including A Single Man.

Ford wrote, directed, and financed the film. Based on a Christopher Isherwood story, A Single Man is, as one might imagine, an aesthete’s dream, reminiscent of the 1967 hit, The Graduate. Ford’s interpretation of 1960s Los Angeles is thoroughly glamorous. For anyone who doesn’t know the city well, one is transported. The air, the light, and the loneliness of L.A. comes right off the screen. Ford’s measured personal nature is a powerful force in the movie’s rhythm, and he uses slow-motion to help the audience feel the weight a depressed person bears navigating daily life. The beat picks up with a deliciously humorous and macabre scene where Firth’s character, George, attempts to take his own life. This is interrupted by a telephone call from Julianne Moore’s, Charley, who lives an equally sad yet stylish life. She plays his best-friend and former lover impeccably. But Moore’s English accent is off. It is only slightly improved since her previous attempt in The End of the Affair, distracting from an otherwise captivating experience.

The number of homo-erotic scenes throughout the film may be off-putting for some, though the story speaks more to the isolation within us all, than to the life. That night at Harry’s Bar Nicky Haslam bemoaned homosexuality. “Being gay is so common, I can’t stand it,”  he said. Haslam is right, and anything but an ordinary gay. So too, Ford, who is irrefutably unique. Along with his debut film, and my brief encounters with cordial superstars, it was an exceptional evening indeed.

Anyone who’s seen Mike Tyson fight is aware of the benefits a violent childhood can bring. You don’t have to condone kids getting beat up every day to enjoy seeing him in the ring. You don’t want your children to follow the same path, but as far as Tyson’s shitty life goes, there’s no better job. Not just anybody can step in the ring. Athletic commissions regulate boxing licenses and make sure things don’t get too gory. Tyson himself had his license rescinded in 1997 after biting off his opponent’s ear. This is the way it should be. Boxing is a violent sport that can do serious, permanent damage. I have never been the same after challenging a professional MMA fighter to a fight. I didn’t have the experience to handle the guy and ended up in the hospital with cerebral contusions. I’ll never do that again.

Pornography is exactly the same. I love watching porn stars like Ava Devine get violated, but I’m well aware the odds of her having been sexual abused as a child are about 99.99 percent. You don’t have to condone sexual abuse to watch porn. It’s a great job for someone who is dumb, unambitious, and devoid of sexuality. In fact, the only way you can do “sex work” (as naïve feminists like to call it) is to have no sex left in you. Some perverted uncle or disgusting friend of the family robs a girl of her most intimate and valuable asset and it’s like a light switch goes off. Now they can have sex with anyone because they’re numb. I’ve talked to a lot of strippers and prostitutes about this phenomenon and have yet to meet one who denied the vast majority of people who have sex for money are abuse victims. An ex-prostitute I dated for a while made it all too clear. “Sex isn’t the same thing to me as it is to you,” she said. “To me it’s like playing soccer or swimming.” I spent about half the relationship thinking of all the different ways I was going to kill her dad for what he did to her. This obsession eventually ended the relationship.

There is no athletic commission to regulate who goes into porn and ensure no fragile eggs get trampled. The very nature of the business has always kept the innocent away. Until now. Until hipster porn: Also called alt porn, it’s a genre of pornography that is mostly pictures on websites but also includes actual pornographic videos. Hipster porn stars tend to be middle-class punk girls who come from pretty stable backgrounds and have been convinced what they’re doing isn’t porn at all and therefore doesn’t deserve a lot of money. These girls haven’t been molested as kids and are in way over their heads.

This sexist plague began with Scene Queens: Young, punk girls on social networks who put up titillating pictures of themselves for free. They get thousands of friends and often correspond with them online. I’d never allow my daughter to do this, but it’s not the end of the world. I don’t even think I’d call it misogynist. Unfortunately, once this became cool, a new wave of pornography took hold. Websites like Suicide Girls (the Playboy of the genre) and Burning Angel (the very NSFW version) popped up and convinced even MORE girls it was hip to pose nude for next to nothing. They weren’t porn stars, they were “pin-ups”, and the whole thing was lumped in with Roller Derby and Burlesque as a fun and empowering way to show your Girl Power. Pornographic video jumped on the bandwagon and guys like Eon McKai (named after the singer of a punk band from the 80s) has convinced a whole new generation of girls porn isn’t porn. But it is porn. And porn is supposed to pay. Real porn stars hate hipster porn because they see it as rich kids devaluing the sex dollar for laughs. You’re not supposed to get $100 to have sex on camera. You’re supposed to get $1,500. These girls are stepping into the ring with Mike Tyson and getting knocked out for free again and again.

When the religious right rails against pornography and portrays it as male predators taking advantage of vulnerable women, I roll my eyes. Porn is simply victims of abuse making the best of a terrible situation. Porn producers aren’t predators. They’re entrepreneurs. However, Pat Robertson is correct when it comes to hipster porn. The men who make money off this new breed of porn star are exactly the predator the religious right say he is.

In my twenties, I lived with two punk chicks who were lazy and wanted a job where they didn’t have to leave the house. They chose phone sex. Neither of these girls were molested as kids and despite the tattoos and pink hair, ultimately just wanted a nice boyfriend whom they would eventually marry and make babies with. Guess what happened. The job rotted them. I would come home after a hard day’s work and feel glares burning through the back of my head. I would turn around and find them staring at me like I habitually raped them both. “That job made me hate men,” one of them admitted to me years after quitting. “It messes with your head.” Their boss eventually convinced one of them to go to hotels and urinate on perverts for money. She recently described the experience as “damaging”—though she’d never have admitted it back then.

I’ve always said this kind of pornography is not cool, but it’s hard to prove something is damaging in the long run when it’s only been around for a few years. A few months ago, I was interviewed at dinner along with some other media types including a blogger/hipster porn star who called herself Baby Sinead. She told me her parents were totally cool with her doing pornography. I did my best to explain to her that her sexuality is actually very sacred and not something to be tossed around willy nilly. That’s why people pay so much for it. It has value. Lawsuits that include “violating a woman’s chastity” are a very big deal because the courts understand a woman unanimously seen as a slut is in for a lonely life. Now, if someone already took your chastity and threw it in the garbage, selling it isn’t such a big deal. She doesn’t fall into that category but I couldn’t convince her it mattered. “Take what’s left of your innocence and get out while you can,” I pleaded with her. “This job will ruin your life.” The eponymous Baby looked at me like I just told her Dick Cheney is sexy. In about ten years, when she’s a lonely cougar, she’ll realize I was right but by then it will be too late.

Cougar isn’t a good thing by the way. That’s another lie women are told.

Would it surprise you to hear that the New York Times has managed an economics fail? Again? No, I suppose it probably wouldn’t but you will at least be interested in finding out which part of the dismal science they’ve managed to entirely misunderstand I have no doubt.

It’s here, in one of the editorials, moaning about how big big business is:

Big Oil is so big that Royal Dutch Shell is the world’s 25th-biggest economy, bigger than Norway.

No, it isn’t. It’s not even close to that sort of level. This is entirely nonsense, nonsense upon stilts, nonsense that betrays a sad and woeful lack of knowledge about what an economy is and how we count and measure it.

The truth is that Shell is around and about the size of Luxembourg, number 68 or so on the list.

So, what is it that the New York Times has got wrong? Well, basically, they’ve looked at a few numbers, seen some that look about the same and then hared off cock-eyed to their conclusion: about what we expect from children just past the “why’s the sky blue, daddy?” stage.

The GDP of Norway is (I’m rounding everything here, just to conserve the world’s supply of digits) around $400 billion. The turnover of Shell is around $400 billion. Thus Shell is the same size as Norway, right?

No, entirely wrong. GDP is Gross Domestic Product. There are a number of different ways to think about it but the one we want here is that it is the value added in the economy over the year. What it isn’t is the turnover in the economy. Think of housing for a moment: you sell your house (umm, well, if you can at the moment of course) and someone else buys it. That’s a transaction and is it included in GDP? No, it most certainly isn’t. Total sales of houses in the US are around $12 trillion a year and the total economy is $15 trillion: whatever you might have thought of the past few years it isn’t true that housing is 80 percent of the US economy. No, the bits we include in GDP are the bits of added value: the realtors fees, the closing costs, the points you pay the mortgage broker. Yes, I know, tough to think of these as added value but to economists (a strange breed indeed) they are.

However, to get that $400 billion figure for Shell we’re not measuring value added, we’re measuring turnover. So to equate the two numbers is somewhere between the apples and pears thing and comparing apples to Rush Limbaugh: somewhere between inappropriate and surreal.

The value added at a company (and I’ll agree that there are different ways of doing this) is best represented by the profit that they make. Take all the sales, take all the costs, net them off and you’re left with that profit: the value that’s been added by incurring all those costs to make those sales. Shell’s profits are around $30 billion a year. So that’s the number that we want to equate to the GDP of a country and Luxembourg’s GDP is about $30 billion and so Shell is about the size of Luxembourg.

“But, but, wait” I can hear the confused leftist at the back of the lecture hall saying “Shell is still the size of a country and that’s bad, right?”

Well, no, not really sure that this is still bad. Shell employs a couple of hundred thousand rich world people in its business. Luxembourg employs a couple of hundred thousand rich world people in its business as a country. Why should anyone be surprised that a couple of hundred thousand rich world people produce about the same value added even if employed in different ways?

As to the New York Times editorial writers, well, next time they tell us that politicians run things better than markets, that taxes or the minimum wage should be higher, you know, the sorts of things that those arts graduates love to lecture us on, just remember that on matters economic they simply haven’t the first clue of what they’re talking about. They might know where to put, commas, and how to spell stuff but numbers clearly confuse them.

Handsome men born before 1970 were no different than any other, average-looking, men. I mean, they were the captains of the football team and they felt the breasts of every cute girl in school and they eventually ran huge marketing companies that made thousands of people rich but, on the inside, they were the same as you and me.

Nevertheless, something unprecedented happened with Generation X. Hunks became male bimbos: Himbos. Nobody’s sure what caused it but most experts agree the concept of Male Modeling—as a full time career—is primarily responsible. Somehow being seen as beautiful is apparently not great for your IQ.
As someone who always favors nature over nurture, I find this very hard to digest. What is it about being considered gorgeous that makes people so stupid? Identical twins separated at birth find each other decades later and are stunned to discover they have the same car, same dog, similar careers, same annual income, and even similar looking husbands. I used to think this was the errant thread that unraveled the whole nurture sweater. Whoops.

As a nation that idealizes the Northern European look, we have cursed generations of attractive blonde women with an allergic reaction to books. This curse seems to have run its course, thank god—dumb blonde jokes are starting to sound as ridiculous as dumb Polack jokes. It appears beautiful women have finally gotten over the flattery and caught up to the handsome men of the pre-1970s. After Kathy Ireland was featured in Sports Illustrated 13 years in a row, she used her dwindling fame to start a line of socks that eventually snowballed into Kathy Ireland Worldwide, a $10 million-a-year corporation Forbes credited with starting the “modelpreneur” trend.
Conversely, the most a male model can hope for is not to be lampooned in movies like Zoolander, in which America’s top comedians dance around runways like idiots puckering their lips and saying things like, “I’m pretty sure there’s a lot more to life than being really, really, ridiculously good looking and I plan on finding out what that is.” (Unfortunately for the Himbos, a sequel for Zoolander is in the works). 

I recently hired a breathtaking hunk intern and, as someone who was born in 1970, was looking forward to hanging out with a young bon vivant that has had as many women as he’s had hot dinners. Unfortunately, this kid was born in the late ’80s and has the IQ of a fish. “That’s a trip,” he said while looking at some hanging plants in the office, “How do those stay up there?” I had to answer his question with, “What?” to which he said, “How do you water those?”

I explained what ladders were and he raised the stakes by bringing physics into the equation, “OK, I get that. I just figured they’d get heavier when you water them and that would make them fall.” I couldn’t digest this kind of thinking and eventually erupted with the same question I’ve been asking here. Namely, how did handsome men get so stupid in just one generation. “I know,” he replied smiling, “My friend said she would have killed me by now if I wasn’t so good looking.” Yeuch.
Overcoming nature used to be reserved for extreme cases like being beaten as a child, or growing up on the verge of starvation. Today it seems a new factor has crept into the fold. Being considered beautiful reduces your IQ by at least 35 percent. Judging from dumb blondes, it appears it takes about two generations of making a living as a beautiful person before you get your shit together. This means hunks being born today will be almost as smart as their grandfathers. I can’t wait.

I think we’ve found the secret of Paul Krugman you know. No, really, an excellent little piece in the New Yorker gives us what we need to analyze the great man. Yes, he is indeed a great man but like all of us he has his flaws and this piece gives us the necessary clues to them.

Actually, what it is: he doesn’t understand politics.

A fairly brave statement about someone who is one of the leading commentators upon politics in our day, who has worked inside the belly of the beast, and one who is clearly and obviously vastly more intelligent than you or I.

We’ll try to claim greater intelligence when we’ve got our own Nobel Prizes, shall we?

If we look back at Krugman’s work there is some excellent economics in there. And if we look at his writing there is, on top of that excellence, a man with a real gift for both writing and for explaining complex subjects so that all can grasp them (his “Ricardo’s Difficult Idea” is a masterpiece). There’s even great fun to be had in his academic work.

I’m certainly not going to try to criticise his economics…well, except for one area….for if we were to try and get into a dick measuring contest I’m the micro-penis and he’s wielding the Ron Jeremy.

However, running through that New Yorker piece is Krugman’s incredible naivety about politics and the political process. It’s laid out for us: he didn’t pay much attention to politics, he consorted only with economists, he built his career, thought about economics and not the sausage grinder of the legislatures.

His work (his writing that is, not his academic work) in the 90’s has a lot of explanation and debunking of various silly ideas floating around. He famously defended sweat shops: not because they’re good per se, but because they’re better than the alternatives on offer to those who work in them. He pointed out that higher wages do not in themselves lead to less turnover of workers, do not lead to less absenteeism and so on—as those arguing for a higher minimum wage (or even a “living wage”) argue. It is having higher wages than the others in town that does this: you offer people a better deal and you get better labor. If everyone raises wages then you don’t.

Since he’s moved to The Times he’s moved, a lot, from measuring the proposals of others to having proposals of his own. This has become much more noticeable in recent times, since Obama ascended the throne. And you can see Krugman’s frustrations being writ large.

Now whether his proposals are indeed the ne plus ultra of possible economic ideas or not isn’t the point. What he’s ignorant of is the way that politics actually works.

There’s a view that politicians are in it all for our good. Perhaps, if you dare to be cynical enough, that they’re in it for the good of those who elect them, perhaps even the interest groups that fund those election campaigns. This is the sort of naivety that disappears with most adults’ first real contact with the political classes. No, they’re not in it for us, whoever us is. They’re in it for them.

Chuck Schumer, Trent Lott, Murtha, Webb—take any politician from any part of the political spectrum. They’re in the game so that they can stay in the game. They’ll do whatever it takes to win the next election….and in the interim they’ll do whatever else they can to feather their nests. We note and expect this behavior from bankers, businessmen, the school bully and all too often from our about to be ex-spouses. There is no illogicality in noting that politicians do the same. Indeed, the failure is to expect different behavior from those who gain their jobs from our votes.

This whole, adult, view tends to come under the banner of public choice economics. Politicians and bureaucrats tend to do what is good for politicians and bureaucrats. Just like we do and just like we would if we had the opportunities that politicians and bureaucrats do.

This is the part that Krugman hasn’t absorbed yet. Assume that his ideas are wonderful, that he really does know how big the stimulus should be, how health care insurance should be reformed, how to beat Wall Street in favor of Main Street. As of course he does believe of his own ideas: then watch his frustration as the politicians don’t do what he thinks they should be doing….what is obvious to him that they should be doing. He actually trusts politicians to do the right thing by us instead of the right thing by politicians.

And that’s the error, that’s his feet of clay. His head may well be far above the clouds that shroud our own plans for the world but he’s incapable of understanding the slime and the mold that his plans depend upon for implementation. He actually thinks that politicians are trying to do the right thing.

So despite my having already lost the dick waving competition I’d suggest that there is an area of economics which Professor Krugman really does need to study. It’s that public choice theory thing, the one where we start our economics by assuming that politicians are indeed lying weasel felchers right at the beginning. The world makes so much more sense that way. It’s also so less frustrating when you see your best laid plans going the way of all mice and men, to a dusty grave, when you start with the knowledge that of course they’ll fuck it up….they’re only in it for themselves anyway.

A good place for him to start would be the Nobel Prize lecture by his fellow Laureate, James Buchanan.

Joseph Stack, frustrated American, flew his airplane into an Austin, Texas, office building. He was one of the 79 percent of Americans who have given up on “their” government.

The latest Rasmussen Poll indicates that the vast majority of Americans are convinced that “their” government is totally unresponsive to them, their concerns, and their needs. Rasmussen found that only 21 percent of the American population agrees that the U.S. government has the consent of the governed, and that 21 percent is comprised of the political class itself and liberals. Rasmussen concludes that the gap between the American population and the politicians who rule them “may be as big today as the gap between the colonies and England during the 18th century.”

Indications are that Joseph Stack was sane. Like Palestinians faced with Israeli jet fighters, helicopter gunships, tanks, missiles and poison gas, Stack realized that he was powerless. A suicide attack was the only weapon left to him.

Stack targeted the IRS, the federal agency that had gratuitously ruined him. He flew his airplane into an office building occupied by 200 members of the IRS. This deliberate plan and the written explanation he left behind segregate him from deranged people who randomly shoot up a Post Office or university campus.

The government and its propaganda ministry do not want to call Stack a terrorist. “Terrorist” is a term the government reserves for Muslims who do not like what Israel does to Palestinians and the U.S. government does to Muslim countries.

But Stack experienced the same frustrations and emotions as Muslims who can’t take it any longer and strap on a suicide vest.

“Violence,” Stack wrote, “not only is the answer, it is the only answer.” Stack concluded that nothing short of violence will get the attention of a government that has turned its back on the American people.

Anger is building up. People are beginning to do unusual things. Terry Hoskins bulldozed his house rather than allow a bank to foreclose on it. The local TV station conducted an online survey and found that 79 percent of respondents agreed with Hoskins’ action.

Perhaps the turning point was the federal government’s bailout of the investment banks whose reckless misbehavior diminished Americans’ retirement savings for the second time in eight years. Now a former head of the most culpable bank is campaigning to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits in order to pay for the bailout. President Obama has obliged him by creating a “deficit commission.”

The “deficit commission” will be used to gut Social Security, just as the private insurance health plan is paid for by cutting $500 billion out of Medicare.

It could not be more clear that government represents the interest groups that finance the election campaigns.

Conservatives used to say that Washington’s power should be curtailed in behalf of state and local governments that are “closer to the people.” But of course state and local governments are also controlled by interest groups.

Consider Florida, for example. In 2004 the storm surge from Hurricane Ivan did considerable damage to the Gulf Coast of the Florida panhandle. At Inlet Beach in Walton County, the surge claimed two beachfront homes and washed away enough of the high ground as to leave other homes vulnerable to the next storm.

People wanted to armor their homes with some form of sea wall. When the county gave the go ahead, two houses on the West end hired engineers who constructed a barrier made of rows of tubes 60 feet long filled with sand, each weighing about 70 tons. The sand-colored tubes were buried under many tons of white sand trucked in, and sea oats were planted. It was a perfect solution, and an expensive one—$250,000.

Just East of the two homes, Ivan washed away a section of beachfront road and left three houses built on pilings sitting on the beach. Last year government with FEMA money rebuilt the section of washed away beachfront road and armored it and two adjacent houses. The government used interlocking iron or steel panels that it drove down into the sand, leaving six to seven feet of the rusty metal above ground. Hundreds of truckloads of sand were brought in to cover the unsightly sea wall.

It didn’t require a storm to wash away the loose sand and leave the ugly rusty metal exposed on the beach. The first high tide did the trick. Residents and vacationers are left with an eyesore on a beach ranked as the third most beautiful in the world.

The ugly rusty barrier built by government is still there. But the intelligent approach taken by the private homeowners has been condemned to death. As I write heavy equipment is on the beach slashing open the tubes and piling up the sand to be carried away. The homes will be left standing on the edge and will be undermined by the next hurricane.

Why did this happen? The official reason given by Florida’s Department of Environmental Policy is that the county could only issue a temporary permit. Only DEP can issue a permanent permit, and as the homeowners don’t have DEP’s permanent permit, out goes the expensive, carefully engineered and unobtrusive sea wall.

This is the way government “works” for ordinary citizens. For the vast majority of people, government exists as a persecution mechanism that takes great pleasure in ruining their lives and pocketbooks. The DEP has inflicted heavy stress on the homeowners, now elderly, and could bring on a heart attack or stroke.

The real explanation for DEP’s merciless treatment of citizens is that the agency is powerless against developers. It cannot stop them from destroying the Everglades, from destroying wetlands, from polluting rivers, or from building in front of the coastal setback line. As the state politicians protect developers from the DEP, the only people against whom the DEP can use its authority are unrepresented citizens. Frustrated itself, the DEP lashes out at powerless citizens.

In the small settlement of Inlet Beach, there are numerous examples of developers getting what they want. Over the years hurricanes have eaten away the beach and the dunes. As this occurs the setback line for construction moves inland. Back when the real estate bubble was being created by Alan Greenspan’s irresponsibly low interest rate policy, small beach front lots were going for one million dollars. In the midst of this frenzy, a well-connected developer bought a beachfront lot for $30,000.

The lot was not recognizable as such. It sits on flat land on the beach. Decades ago it was a lot, but as the Gulf ate away the coast, the lot is now positioned in front of the setback line. The developer got the lot for the low price, because no one had been able to get a building permit for years.

But the developer got a permit. According to the head of the neighborhood association at the time, the developer went to a DEP official, whose jurisdiction was another part of the state and who was a former employee of the developer, and was issued a permit. Because of its exposure, during the real estate boom the house sat unsold for years. The community, which had opposed the project, concluded that the developer just wanted to show that he was more powerful than the law.

Currently, on six acres next to a state park on the East end of Inlet Beach another well connected developer has obtained DEP permission to compromise Walton County’s highest and last remaining sand dunes held in place with native vegetation in order to build 20 houses. To protect the houses, DEP has issued a permit for the construction of a 15-foot high man-made sand wall, a marketing device that will offer little protection.

According to information sent to me, nine of the houses will be seaward of the Coastal Construction Control line. Apparently this was a result of the developer being represented by a former county attorney, who convinced the commissioners to allow the developer to plan on the basis of the 1996 FEMA flood plain maps instead of using the current 2007 maps. Since 1996 there have been a number of hurricanes, such as Dennis and Ivan, and the set back line has moved inward.

When state and local governments allow developers to set aside the rules governing flood-plain development, they create insurance losses that drive up the insurance premiums for everyone in the community. The disturbance of the natural dunes could result in a breach through which storm surge can damage nearby properties. Instead of protecting people, government is allowing a developer to impose costs of his project on others.

Joseph Stack, Terry Hoskins, and 79 percent of the American population came to the realization that government does not represent them. Government represents moneyed interests for whom it bends the rules designed to protect the public, thus creating a legally privileged class.

In contrast, as at the West end of Inlet Beach, ordinary citizens are being driven into the ground.

This is what we call “freedom and democracy.”

“This is our country, our land, and our lifestyle. If you are not happy—then Leave.”

At last a politician in possession of testicles and a backbone. By definition then, not possibly a British parliamentarian. The words were recently uttered by Australian PM Kevin Rudd, a Labour leader no less, who declared in uncompromising fashion that he was tired of worrying whether his nation offended some particular culture or individual and that it was the immigrant and not Australia which needed to adapt. Take it or leave it, he bluntly stated. All hail to Rudd.

For what the Australian has grasped—unlike his liberal-left compatriots lodged in the northern hemisphere—is that our liberty and democracy are anchored in our value system, our value system embedded in our very national identity. Mess with that identity, transform us into a multi-cultural and multi-valued swamp, and you risk dismantling the whole. Through negligence and sleight of hand, that is precisely what the Blair and Brown administrations have inflicted on Britain.

Give us your weak and your poor and your huddled masses, your illiterate and uneducated, your crack-heads and serial rapists, your paedophiles and murderers, your drug-traffickers and radical imams. Anything goes and all are welcome, regardless of background or how little they contribute; few are ever deported. Hijack a plane? Human rights legislation will ensure you stay. Commit a string of violent robberies? We must embrace you. Plot against us or plan to don an explosive vest? Have a house.  Because, in the lying and lazy parlance of the liberal-left, this tsunami of uncontrolled immigration brings ‘significant economic and cultural benefits’. Er, no it actually does not (just check the statistics). It is more a reflection of epic vote-rigging by the Labour government, of creating a captive voter-base dependent on state-sponsored welfare and state-provided jobs. We suffer and the health and wealth of the nation decline. And they say trust in politicians is much reduced. No shit.

Unlike the United States, we in Britain do not enjoy the luxury of saluting the flag or taking an oath of allegiance to bind ourselves close or at least paper over the cracks. We have no equivalent to the American Dream. Maybe that is part of the problem. Our identity and the legitimacy of our institutions have evolved over centuries, our language percolating through Chaucer and Shakespeare, our common law and basic precepts of justice and fair-play tracing their roots to the Anglo-Saxons and further back to an earlier Christian heritage.

We are neither a tribe from the African rift valley nor descended from a Pathan mountain village. We are neither Mongol horsemen nor Barbary pirates. We are neither part of a Caliphate nor a cog in a centralized socialist empire (unless you count the European Union). What we are is an island and a north European nation-state, a liberal democracy distrustful of ideology and extremes and happy with a constitutional monarchy. Englishness is at our core. We like our gardening, our cricket, our pubs and our dogs, are resilient and self-deprecating, value irony and humour and a lightness of touch, it works for us. Somehow, it is not enough. Somewhere, the soft Left persuaded us that to preserve our way of life was embarrassing and racist, that it was a good thing to have roadsigns in Urdu, women with their faces veiled, Somalians driving our London buses. The line peddled—and constantly reinforced with diversity directives—was that we owe the world a living.

We owe nothing of the sort. For sure, there are those fleeing persecution and slaughter. Yet given there is scant democracy in Africa, less in the Middle East, and none in China, we cannot offer a home to whoever takes to a raft with a clothes-bundle and a grievance. Most who come to Britain do so as economic migrants. Of course they want an easier life. We all do. But want does not necessarily equate to need and right. It is the permissiveness and undiscerning palate of the liberal-left that has helped to blur the distinction. Identify a portrait of our Great White Queen in a British town hall and you are almost half-way to gaining citizenship and a bank giro. Not to my satisfaction. Many of these newcomers have no stake in Britain, no loyalty or links save for an arranged marriage, a fraudulently–obtained permit for further education, an encyclopaedic knowledge of our football teams and a vague notion of free health care. None of their forebears ever bled for my freedoms. Yet I am expected to welcome them without question, to pay tax for them, to subsidise their children, their schooling, their housing, their welfare, their medical treatment, their own personal odyssey. By return, they are under no obligation to learn my native tongue or the history of my land. Call me churlish.

Where once we gave the world the English language, now we offer teams of translators in order that our ‘new Britons’ may communicate. Visit any hospital or benefits office and you will find queues of migrants aware of their entitlements and yet supremely ignorant of our customs and culture, our language and laws. The melting-pot so championed by liberals is in danger of becoming little more than a congealed stew of separated parts. And yes, I do blame those who promoted mass immigration, for what we have squandered and have failed to gain. Without pausing to put their agenda to the public vote, they have altered irrevocably the feel and demography of the nation. The arrogance and the stupidity. One day, we shall be forced to address the question not of who we are—but what the hell we have become.

Serbs, Bolivians, bankers, neo-Nazis, and terrorists from invented African republics: Hollywood has been attacked by them all. In Europe, the baddies have always been more thoroughly white and solidly Western. But Muslims, anyone? In the eight years that the West has been fighting its war on Islamic terror, a war that has thrown up enough drama, enough Oscar-winning, hook-waving evil for a good few summers of cinematic carnage, there hasn’t been one movie—not a single one—that has featured an unequivocal, irredeemable Islamic wretch. How so? They’re not exactly hard to find.

On this point, the arts establishment tend to disagree. Film directors seem to have lost sight, sound, and mind on Islamic wretchedness. And it is this mental blindness that is opening up a new front in the war on terror: the cinematic front, which, in its attacks on Western means and mores, is arguably more dangerous to the fabric of society than all the various fronts we face. The latest celluloid salvo is A Prophet, a French gangster movie as explosive and debilitating as any botched bombing, with more gongs attached to it than the chest of Kim Jong-Il.

A Prophet is not superficially malign. Rather its malevolence creeps up on you slowly. At first what flicks past you is an unoriginal but breezily violent mafia film: a poor man’s Godfather. Look closer, however, and the subtexts, the inferences, become a little sharper. In the good corner we have Malik, a lovable Arab rogue, and the irreproachable Muslims. In the bad corner, the abusers, thugs, and weasels: the white Corsicans and French prison guards.

At first subtly, then more clunkingly, the story begins to unfold like an Al-Qaeda book at bedtime, a little parable of Western involvement in the Middle East, the white Western Corsicans using and abusing Malik, until Malik enlists the aid of a band of irreproachable Muslims, turns on his former oppressors and enacts a spectacular revenge. Ring any bells? The contamination of spiritual Islamic irreproachability by Western secular thuggishness lies at the heart of the film.

The only glimpse of untainted innocence, the only intrusion of suffering, tenderness, and sympathy, comes with the arrival of Muslim children, Muslim women, Muslim mothers, crying, smiling, and caring. The implication and effect of this is clear: only Muslims can understand humanity; only Muslims can be humane.

It is not the only European film to have followed this political tack: Islam good, West bad. Michael Haneke has been the commander-in-chief of anti-Western maulings over the years. First, in 2005, came Hidden, a film about French guilt and complicity over Algeria, then, in 2008, The White Ribbon, which in a stroke of genius about 50 years out of date traduces traditional Western civilisation and its strictness and emotional and sexual repressions with the charge of causing the Holocaust. I didn’t know whether to laugh or yawn.

With A Prophet, neither laughing nor yawning is an option. This cinematic hatchet job is too good to be waved away. Firstly, the implications are more fundamental than Haneke’s bilious polemic. Second, for a film to be made about the innocence of Muslims languishing in Western prisons at a time when Muslims are, in their thousands, launching attacks on Western civilisation from these prisons is a rewriting of reality of the most dangerous sort. Only future historians will see the madness of current cinematic Western revisionism.

But maybe you crumple your forehead at this suggestion. You question how a mere foreign movie, an art house half-caste, could possibly be a danger to society. Why even bother getting irritated by A Prophet or the lowly Haneke? For better or worse, European movies are no longer the box office minnows they once were. A Prophet was one of the top ten biggest grossing films out in Britain last month. And Hidden parried well in the American market.

As membership and interest in political parties and the attendant political organisations of old fizzle out, the politicised film gathers pace and power. Today’s youngsters are as bored by politics as any generation. And the only amount of politicking that most can deal with is that which is neatly packaged within the glossy, light, loose celluloid frames of an entertainingly violent film. It is as a result of these sugary Goebbels-like silver screen baubles that the defeatist, appeasement politics of the public is gaining ground.

Imagine that you are a young fellow who likes being the center of attention as you spin around in the air. How would you choose among Olympic sports?

The Winter and Summer Games offer events whose varying conceptions of masculinity are so encoded in their apparel that American twelve-year-olds can develop an accurate gut feel for what they would be getting themselves into.

The sportswear of Olympic events range from Fabulosity Uber Alles (figure skating) to revealingly narcissistic (diving) to trimly functional (gymnastics) to overtly Lebowskian (halfpipe snowboarding).

To a man from Mars, figure skating and the halfpipe wouldn’t seem all that different—in both, competitors are primarily judged on gracefully executing aerial rotations—but their clothes demonstrate that they are wildly different in what kind of young Americans they appeal to.

Although Fred Astaire demonstrated that a man can dance perfectly well while well-dressed, male figure skaters typically pursue sparkliness over taste and even sanity.

In contrast, the 2010 American snowboard team espoused a uniform carefully designed to look like they found their clothes at the bottom of a trunk in Kurt Cobain’s mom’s attic: hooded flannel shirts and torn baggy jeans.

The snowboarder uniforms are actually made out of Gore-Tex with the slacker designs (including the rips in the supposed denim) merely printed on them. But neither authenticity nor aerodynamism is the point. The point is that they are not tight-fitting like the figure skaters’ outfits.

(The American women’s halfpipe team wears the same outfits, just with shorter jackets so that viewers can eventually figure out they’re girls, if they haven’t noticed from the fact that they aren’t doing as hard tricks.)

Athletes are determined to maintain certain distinctions. Consider gymnastics, the Summer Games equivalent of figure skating in that it’s one of the rare sports where men play second fiddle to women. If the women’s figure skating competition crowns the World’s Greatest Princess, the women’s gymnastics all-around title determines the World’s Greatest Pixy.

Yet, unlike figure skating, in which both sexes perform to music, women gymnasts do their floor exercises to music, but not the men. Female gymnasts are scored on dance elements, while American male gymnasts have resisted attempts to make their sport more entertaining.

This became evident on the last night of the 1996 Atlanta Summer Games, when the organizers imitated the figure skating tradition by putting on the first ever non-competition showcase. The impresarios gave it the unfortunate title of “gala,” and the American male gymnasts looked extremely uncomfortable at being required to perform to musical accompaniment. So, they chose that epitome of unemotional masculine cool, the 1962 instrumental Green Onions by Booker T. and the M.G.s.

Not surprisingly, I can’t find a video of the American guys performing to Green Onions. Indeed, it was dull, unless you got the joke. I can find, however, a video clip from the same gala of ex-Soviet gymnasts Rustam Sharipov and the great Vitaly Scherbo shirtlessly performing a parallel routine on the parallel bars to an opera aria that might be the galaiest-looking thing I’ve ever seen.

As far as I know, Scherbo is straight. And that seems representative of a general pattern: Eastern Europeans don’t worry quite as much about the things that set off Americans’ sports gaydar. For example, the 2006 men’s figure skating gold medalist, Evgeni Plushenko, got married for the second time last September.

What Eastern Europeans do worry about a lot is class. Male preening is okay in the ex-Soviet empire as long as it’s aristocratic. Today, Eastern Europeans care about class as Americans care about race: thus, it’s fine for NFL wide receivers to act like prima donnas because they are black.

European high culture developed over many centuries as an attempt to civilize the ruling warrior caste by introducing them to the arts. This social association of combat and aestheticism helped liberate the arts from suspicions of unmanliness. No doubt, the arts attracted a higher proportion of male homosexuals than did fighting, hunting, or plowing. But Europeans paid relatively little attention because if they wanted their families to move up in society, they needed to learn something about arts with snob appeal.

On the other hand, the American cultural matrix was primarily laid down by middle class New England Puritans. Southerners admired the aristocratic manner, but they lost the Civil War. At Appomattox Courthouse, Robert E. Lee, in full dress uniform, surrendered his jeweled sword to the mud-spattered Ulysses S. Grant, the epitome of the effective American who never won any points for flair.

Ironically, the Communist regimes invested in the elitist culture of the Romantic 19th Century, such as ballet, in order to keep out the pop culture of the 20th Century. Skating excellence is attractive to Slavic men due to their high culture’s traditional devotion to soulful self-expression.

But how long will men’s figure skating last even in Russia as anything other than a gay ghetto? Figure skating first appeared in the Olympics in 1908, while the halfpipe debuted in 1998. The trend seems clear.

My Feb. 16 column, “A Country of Serfs Ruled By Oligarchs,” received confirmation from high places on the very day it appeared. Popular Indiana Democratic U.S. Senator Evan Bayh announced that he was quitting the Senate. Yahoo News gave this account:

“In an interview on MSNBC this morning, newly retiring Sen. Evan Bayh declared the American political system ‘dysfunctional,’ riddled with ‘brain-dead partisanship’ and permanent campaigning. Flatly denying any possibility that he’d seek the presidency or any other higher office, Bayh argued that the American people needed to deliver a ‘shock’ to Congress by voting incumbents out in mass and replacing them with people interested in reforming the process and governing for the good of the people, rather than deep-pocketed special-interest groups.”

In short, Senator Bayh got tired of being a whore for the corporate lobbyists who rule the U.S.

As Shamus Cooke noted the same day, in the last election voters gave the Democrats a super majority in the mistaken belief that Democrats would remove U.S. policy from the corporate/neocon grip only to find that the result was a surge in America’s wars of aggression.

There are grounds for hope in the fact that some of the Tea Party people understand that Americans have been betrayed and abandoned by both parties.

An unusual candidate has emerged for governor of Texas. Debra Medina is doing well with popular support without machine politics. She has an intriguing idea to abolish the property tax in Texas.

Medina makes the valid point that the property tax is a permanent government lien on a person’s home. A person never owns his home even after the mortgage is paid off, because he has to continue paying government for the right to live in his home.

Many elderly people have found that a lifetime of inflation and rising real estate assessments have pushed up the tax on their homes so much that it accounts for a large percentage of their retirement incomes. In Alexandria, Virginia, for example, the local government has a program by which the elderly can avoid property tax in exchange for letting the government inherit the property. It is the heirs who are dispossessed.

The Texas Public Policy Foundation studied Medina’s proposal and concluded that a rise in the Texas sales tax from 8.25 percent to 8.8 percent would allow the property tax to be abolished as long as some untaxed services, such as mining services, drilling services, legal services, and limousine services were brought into the tax base.

If Medina is a real representative of the people, she comprises a threat to the oligarchy. The oligarchy will go after her with every known dirty trick. Will Texans stand by her?

Grounds for hope are not easily come by, but plentiful are the grounds for despair.  My recent article, “It Is Official: The U.S. Is Now A Police State,” also received confirmation on February 16 with the appearance of Pulitzer prize-wining American journalist Chris Hedges interview with Russia Today on Information Clearing House.

Asked about the Fahad Hashmi case, Hedges pointed out that Hashmi is a U.S. citizen whose every constitutional right has been violated just as if he were an “enemy combatant,” a designation used to justify holding non-Americans in indefinite detention. Moreover, Hedges reported that Hashmi is not being prosecuted for committing or planning an act of terror. He is being prosecuted “for what he believes,” or to be more precise Hashmi is being prosecuted for expressing dissent. The government’s evidence against him is tape recordings of speeches he made at Brooklyn College as a student activist denouncing U.S. policies.

These tapes will be played to a patriotic jury likely to convict him for being a Muslim and an anti-American.

As Hedges emphasizes, Hashmi’s conviction would make expression of dissent an indictable offense. If expressing dissent is a crime, then thinking it will also be a crime. The government will produce manuals for its police on how to read body language and facial expressions as indicators of thought crimes.

The rapidity with which the U.S. is being transformed into a police state is astonishing. It has occurred under the guise of “the war on terror,” itself a product of 9/11. Americans were told that the police state regime was only for terrorists, but like RICO’s asset freezes, which were only for the Mafia, and the war on drugs’ asset forfeitures, which were only for drug lords, the suspension of constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties now extends to all.

Americans regard such warnings as hyperbole. They think they are safe as long as they are not doing anything wrong. In other words, they think that anyone the government picks up must be guilty.

This view shows a remarkable ignorance of the 20th century. Nazi concentration camps and the Soviet Gulag were full of people who had done nothing wrong. Many were people demonized for being of the wrong race and class. Others were people reported by envious neighbors or by someone settling a score. The system didn’t care, because it existed independently of any concerns about justice or security.

In the 1990s I saw a Russian movie about the Stalin era. The main character was a Soviet war hero, personally praised by Stalin. In his home area he had enormous authority and could order off Soviet military maneuvers that impinged on the collective farm’s crops. One day a KGB agent shows up who wants the war hero’s beautiful wife. The war hero is amused that a mere KGB agent thinks he has power over him. “Wait until Stalin hears about this,” he says as he comes out in his military uniform with his medals and confidently drives away with the agent to be beaten and disappeared into the gulag. Even if Stalin would have cared, he would never have known.

Police states remove accountability from those in authority. One result is to remove constraints on behavior. Even when there are constraints, some spouses abuse one another and some parents abuse children. Some people abuse animals. Even many Americans have abusive tendencies as Abu Ghraib makes completely clear.

It starts with little things and works its way up. Tens of thousands of people have experienced unsatisfactory encounters with the Transportation Safety Administration, otherwise known as the airport police. In a recent case a police officer and his wife were taking their 4-year-old son to Disney World for his birthday. The child has to wear leg braces due to problems associated with his premature birth. The TSA screener ordered the braces removed before the boy could walk through the detector. But, of course, the boy could not walk without the braces. The police officer and his wife were stunned to find that TSA cannot tell the difference between an American police officer and his disabled child and a terrorist threat.

A police state has no need to differentiate. Those Americans who don’t care what happens to Fahad Hashmi, Aafia Siddiqui, Omar Khadr, and countless others are opening themselves to similar treatment and the rest of us along with them.

It’s hardly rare for social climbers on one side of the Atlantic to claim connections with part of the elite on the other side. We had in the UK just recently some no name from flyover country insisting that he was a Rockefeller. Managed to keep that one going for a decade or so. However, things don’t always work out that well which is what interests me in this report about a model and party girl in Manhattan called Kashmir Snowdon-Jones.

No, not what she’s alleged to have done, rather, what the background is alleged to be:

Kashmir, currently represented by Nous Model Management, is the daughter of British architect David Snowdon-Jones. She is the former stepdaughter of socialite Emma Snowdon-Jones.
Her father traces his lineage back to Lord Snowdon, a famous photographer who was married to Princess Margaret and sits in the House of Lords.

Fascinating stuff for those of us who understand the British aristocracy.

The blond beauty, whose family claims to be descended from British bluebloods…

Bluebloods eh? As someone who has worked with an Earl, a Baron, and a Life Baron; shared an apartment with an Hon; and once stole a girlfriend off a Viscount (although that last of that inferior, Irish, aristocracy it is true, and, err, she left me for the heir to a Marquessate)—if I could just explain what is wrong with this claim?

We can see where they’re coming from of course: Lord Snowdon is more formally known as the Earl of Snowdon and his last name is indeed Jones (something really not uncommon among those from Wales). We might not expect, or even insist, that the rubes of Manhattan will understand that this conjunction of the names Snowdon and Jones does not equate to having the family name, “Snowdon-Jones”. So we’ll have to explain why not.

The first point is that the Earl Snowdon is not in fact a blueblood. This is an apellation reserved for those who inherit their titles: he did not, he married it. When he married Princess Margaret it was thought an unpardonable breach of good manners that the children of a Princess might be fathered by a man with no title. Thus an old royal title (they have these things in the back cupboards like those of us with cats have ancient fur balls floating around) was dragged out, dusted down, and given to him. Various Snowdon titles have been known; it was one of those claimed by the Welsh royal family way back before 1282 when the English slaughtered the last of them. But Mr. Jones is the first Earl Snowdon: the title was chosen because Snowdon is in Wales, he is from Wales, and, well, no one really expects the royals to be all that imaginative. His background is not royal or aristocratic: he’s from minor (although artistic, the Messels are involved) provincial gentry. Nothing wrong with this—it’s a more august background than my own but blueblooded it ain’t.

Strike one therefore on this claim. Strike two is rather simpler to explain. Anthony, Earl Snowdon, is known to have four children. Two he had with the Princess, one from his second marriage, and a further illegitimate one called Penny Fry. He does indeed have a son called David but he is more generally known either as David Armstrong Jones, the Viscount Linley, or even David Linley. He makes very expensive furniture in London and is married to the heiress daughter of the Earl of Harrington. There is no David Snowdon-Jones in his line.

There’s also one further small problem which the perceptive will already have picked up on. Jones is not only a common name in Wales, it is the most common name. We’re not all that surprised when it turns into a double-barreled name then. Snowdon-Jones for example: someone called Jones from the area around Snowdon perhaps. That’s the likely source of the name our Manhattan party girl bears.

However, there’s no connection at all between this name and the man called Jones who also became the Earl Snowdon: for as a matter of fact, his name is “Armstrong Jones”. So that even if David Snowdon-Jones in Manhattan were a bastard child of Earl Snowdon (actually, with those with titles we tend not so use that word, more euphemisms like “born on the wrong side of the blanket”) his name would in fact be David Armstrong Jones.

That’s the third strike and they’rrrrrrre out!

On the other hand it should be said that Kashmir is indeed a beauty and I’d be delighted to offer an intensive, residential course in these matters so that we can concoct a better cover story.

Bravo Goldman Sachs. You’ve done it again. As in the U.S. subprime crisis,  this house of ill repute created a deal which helped the Greeks obscure billions in debt from the budget overseers, then charged the Greeks hundreds of millions of Euros for helping them hide the debts.  Classic Goldman Sachs policy, says the great economist Taki, the house of shame having been and being as I write the poster boy for banks behaving badly—exploiting whatever the situation, or rules that it helped to write. The man who led the Goldman Sachs team which helped Greece lie and cheat for so long is Goldman’s president, Gary Cohn, whose mentor is the chairman of Goldman, Lloyd Blankfein.

Cohn, Blankfein, the Greek government, a bunch of asset-stripper hoodlums that even Hollywood couldn’t make up. Mind you, the Greek prime minister, George Papandreou, son of Ali Babandreou, now roasting below, is a decent man who does not take after the great thief, and is committed to fixing things—as long as the Germans are around. Good old Deutschland, even without those great-looking Wehrmacht uniforms, she’s always there when the PIGS need her. The German taxpayer doesn’t count. Angela says pay and they pay. “Jav Wohl mein Fuhrer!”  Then the Greeks head for the beach. So what else is new? Only that the Brits might soon also have to contribute. (Perhaps even for Taki’s yacht.)

Seriously speaking, the fact that so many Greek governments have lied about the magnitude of their spending, that corruption is so rampant at every level of public administration, and that successive governments have proved incapable of purging themselves of such practices, have dealt a serious blow to Greece’s credibility. As things now stand, I cannot think of any foreign investors or international lenders who will take a chance on old Hellas, Bernie Madoff being out of action for the duration. Yet for an individual businessman and even more so for a country, nothing matters more than an honest reputation, which is where Goldman Sachs comes in. These Wall Street hustlers knew the score, yet they chose to pull the wool over our eyes for profit. Goldman Sachs and the rest of the crooks should be disbanded and forced to pay billions in reparations. In fact the opposite happened. The American taxpayer bailed them out. Something very wrong here, as the bride said when she discovered three naked babes in bed with her husband on her wedding night.

In England, of course, things are much, much better. The country was sold out for twenty safe Labour seats, so now it looks like Lahore with a little bit of Lagos thrown in for good measure. But the climate remains the same, and when it rains there are those of us who can still remember an England when English was spoken and when tablecloths were not considered everyday headgear. (Incidentally, did any of you read about Andrew Flintoff moving to Dubai? What did the poor man do to deserve such punishment?)

Britain is now bursting at the seams, and friends of mine ask me why I left the paradise for a dump like Gstaad. Well, out of stupidity and greed. I’m stupid not to appreciate the binge drinking and projectile vomiting of our glorious white youth—those swollen ankles of the slappers passed out on the streets—and I was reluctant to pay for the welfare of those bearded, sandal-wearing types who preach the advantages of Shariah law. Stupidity and greed is a lethal combination which leads to exile and Gstaad.  Poor little Greek boy. Perhaps in the next life I’ll know better. But the Brits are also a bit like Taki, stupid and easy to sway. Both the Iraq war and the ten years of unrestricted immigration were foisted on them by deceit, yet the architects of these great lies, the Blairs and Browns and Straws are still prancing around using official limos and getting on the telly to tell us how great their plans are for our future. How idiotic can a race get? These people would have been hanged and quartered in a more civilized time, but now they are still running for office. This is what Orwell’s Big Lie was all about. The state propaganda being so effective that the idiotic Brits care more about football and the hydrocephalic morons that play it, than what these major criminals have done to a once rather pleasant country.

But it sounds like sour grapes to complain, stuck as I am in misery here in the Bernese Oberland. A little bit like the late Princess Di telling that ambulance chaser for the rich Anthony Julius that she should not have gone German. Who the hell did she prefer? Æthelberht the Ist? Anyway, I don’t believe a word Anthony Julius says, he of how great it was to invade Iraq persuasion. Did anyone of his family serve, I might ask, but it’s yet another dumb question on my part. Almost as dumb as a ghastly French politician who claims he bedded Brigitte Bardot.  I know Brigitte and know of him, Patrick Balkany, mayor-MP of Levallois, and a great buddy of the dwarf Sarkozy. Balkany and his wife were convicted of corruption but are back on the saddle. He slept with Bardot as much as I slept with Keira Knightley, and trust me on this one.   

The Anarchists in Vancouver are not happy about the Winter Olympics being held there and recently marched through town smashing windows, covering their faces, and yelling about everything from capitalism to the seal hunt to indigenous land. Some of their beefs are valid. The Olympics is a big waste of taxpayers’ money and in a city where one junkie dies every day, the local government could afford to be focusing on more serious problems. However, when reading the “manifestos” of today’s anarchists, one thing becomes abundantly clear, they hate capitalism more than they hate government.

I grew up going to anarchist conventions and don’t regret the various A’s I have tattooed up and down my arms in the slightest (in fact, I just got two more). We looked exactly like the 2010 Olympic protestors when we did things like protest outside the Chinese Embassy for China’s human rights violations in 1988. But back then, only a handful of anarchists would cover their faces. It drove us nuts because we were out there screaming about government ineptness and guys are acting like our adversary knows what he’s doing. “You realize your assumption that they are recording your face and putting you in some kind of massive database implies they know what they’re doing, right?” we’d ask them. This seemingly small detail is actually indicative of a much bigger split in the anarchist community: government aptitude.

Anarchists with covered faces smashing the windows of retail stores are in fact, communists. Sure, the wage discrepancy between CEOs and factory workers is disgusting. I also hate the way big business ships in illegals and lowers the minimum wage to zero but if anyone has dealt with government at any level in their adult life they’d realize big business is the lesser of two evils by a long shot.

Today’s anarchists want money out of entrepreneur’s hands and into government hands where it can rot. They advocate unions like it was the 1930s and guys with tweed caps needed to get compensation for black lung. Nice sentiment but today’s teacher’s union is the most powerful political lobby in the world and has more cronies on both the Democratic and the Republican side than any other group in Washington. These unions are essentially mobsters who shake down anyone who dares pay electricians less than $50 an hour plus time-and-a-half for overtime plus double time-and-a-half for holidays. That’s more than architects and doctors make when they start out. Is $700 a day the fair wage the anti-capitalists want for the workingman? It’s more money than I ever made and I’m rich.

I often visit the anarchist squat Dial House where the founders of anarcho punk, Crass set up shop in the early 70s and are still there today. I had a seven-hour argument with the patriarch of the commune, Penny Rimbaud because I had the gall to point out it was ridiculous Mugabe was still alive and said if I was a Zimbabwean, he would have been blown up long ago. The Taliban did a seamless job of assassinating Massoud and all it took was a trick camera so why can’t the MDC do something similar? Like all anarchists, Rimbaud was stunned I didn’t know this wasn’t all part of the big government plan. “Zimbabwe is needed to cart diamonds out of South Africa,” he explained. “America needs him there the same way they need Iraq to get oil out.”

I don’t get it. If government is such a powerful monster, why do anarchists want to give it The Gap’s profits? They can’t seem to decide if the government is this elaborate network James Bond reports to or a quaint group of intellectuals who want to empower the poor. The truth is. It’s neither. They are not all-knowing they are know nothings. They are not a “secret society” (as Crass once said) they can’t even keep an infidelity secret. Since the president got caught using a cigar as a dildo, we’ve learned: John Edwards was screwing his biographer, governor Mark Sanford was boning his Argentinean mistress, senator Larry Craig was fishing for blowjobs in the bathroom, and Spitzer was fucking prostitutes with his socks on. Politics is Hollywood for ugly people and the White House is just a big DMV with Greek columns out front.

Danny Schechter’s new book Plunder! Investigating Our Economic Calamity and the Subprime Scandal, makes it crystal clear: the government is everything bad you can say about big business but without the “employing people and manufacturing stuff” part. This sentiment is what attracted me to the anarchist movement in the first place—not Marx’s intellectual claptrap about his “dialectic.”

This is why, as an adult, I’m drawn to libertarians like John Stossel. Sure there’s flaws like a love of open borders which I see as a chance for big business to go on an exploitation bender (anarchists also want open borders which I never quite got), but Stossel’s show spends 90 percent of its time pointing out government incompetence and exposing the way they oppress the everyman. During each episode he holds up a tiny book that’s about half the size of the communist manifesto and explains this is the bill of rights and the constitution combined. Then he shows us the endless piles of documentation the government uses for even the most insignificant rule. “This is all we need,” he says holding up the small book. That’s the closest I’ve seen to a plausible anarchist goal in America—ever.

Then Stossel gets specific. We learn about swimming pools that have diving boards revoked because of impending danger and then cause more accidents because kids no longer know where the deep end is. We hear local governments in Texas are strangling restaurants with insanity like “No Outside Dancing” laws (a bizarre rule New York’s previous mayor used to close down clubs he didn’t like). Stossel is very vocal about big money firms like Goldman Sachs and how much they’ve benefited from Obama’s new big government plans. From daycare workers being muscled into joining unions to California being bankrupted by bureaucrats, John Stossel has done more to mobilize hatred for government than any punk kid in black sweatshirt could ever hope to.

If the fashionable punks in Vancouver really cared about personal freedom and really wanted to abolish as much of the government as possible, they would swallow their prejudice, tune into Fox, get over his moustache, and take notes from the most articulate and driven anarchist in America today. In short, it’s time for crusty punks to Get Stosselized!

(I’m trademarking that so don’t even think about stealing it.)

The media has headlined good economic news: fourth quarter GDP growth of 5.7 percent (“the recession is over”), Jan retail sales up, productivity up in 4th quarter, the dollar is gaining strength. Is any of it true? What does it mean?

The 5.7 percent growth figure is a guesstimate made in advance of the release of the U.S. trade deficit statistic. It assumed that the U.S. trade deficit would show an improvement. When the trade deficit was released a few days later, it showed a deterioration, knocking the 5.7 percent growth figure down to 4.6 percent. Much of the remaining GDP growth consists of inventory accumulation.

More than a fourth of the reported gain in Jan. retail sales is due to higher gasoline and food prices. Questionable seasonal adjustments account for the rest.

Productivity was up, because labor costs fell 4.4 percent in the fourth quarter, the fourth successive decline. Initial claims for jobless benefits rose. Productivity increases that do not translate into wage gains cannot drive the consumer economy.

Housing is still under pressure, and commercial real estate is about to become a big problem.

The dollar’s gains are not due to inherent strengths. The dollar is gaining because government deficits in Greece and other EU countries are causing the dollar carry trade to unwind. America’s low interest rates made it profitable for investors and speculators to borrow dollars and use them to buy overseas bonds paying higher interest, such as Greek, Spanish and Portuguese bonds denominated in euros. The deficit troubles in these countries have caused investors and speculators to sell the bonds and convert the euros back into dollars in order to pay off their dollar loans. This unwinding temporarily raises the demand for dollars and boosts the dollar’s exchange value.

The problems of the American economy are too great to be reached by traditional policies. Large numbers of middle class American jobs have been moved offshore: manufacturing, industrial and professional service jobs. When the jobs are moved offshore, consumer incomes and U.S. GDP go with them. So many jobs have been moved abroad that there has been no growth in U.S. real incomes in the 21st century, except for the incomes of the super rich who collect multi-million dollar bonuses for moving U.S. jobs offshore.

Without growth in consumer incomes, the economy can go nowhere. Washington policymakers substituted debt growth for income growth. Instead of growing richer, consumers grew more indebted. Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan accomplished this with his low interest rate policy, which drove up housing prices, producing home equity that consumers could tap and spend by refinancing their homes.

Unable to maintain their accustomed living standards with income alone, Americans spent their equity in their homes and ran up credit card debts, maxing out credit cards in anticipation that rising asset prices would cover the debts. When the bubble burst, the debts strangled consumer demand, and the economy died.

As I write about the economic hardships created for Americans by Wall Street and corporate greed and by indifferent and bribed political representatives, I get many letters from former middle class families who are being driven into penury. Here is one recently arrived:

“Thank you for your continued truthful commentary on the ‘New Economy.’ My husband and I could be it’s poster children. Nine years ago when we married, we were both working good paying, secure jobs in the semiconductor manufacturing sector. Our combined income topped $100,000 a year. We were living the dream. Then the nightmare began. I lost my job in the great tech bubble of 2003, and decided to leave the labor force to care for our infant son. Fine, we tightened the belt. Then we started getting squeezed. Expenses rose, we downsized, yet my husband’s job stagnated. After several years of no pay raises, he finally lost his job a year and a half ago. But he didn’t just lose a job, he lost a career. The semiconductor industry is virtually gone here in Arizona. Three months later, my husband, with a technical degree and 20-plus years of solid work experience, received one job offer for an entry level corrections officer. He had to take it, at an almost 40 percent reduction in pay. Bankruptcy followed when our savings were depleted. We lost our house, a car, and any assets we had left. His salary last year, less than $40,000, to support a family of four. A year and a half later, we are still struggling to get by. I can’t find a job that would cover the cost of daycare. We are stuck. Every jump in gas and food prices hits us hard. Without help from my family, we wouldn’t have made it. So, I could tell you just how that ‘New Economy’ has worked for us, but I’d really rather not use that kind of language.”

Policymakers who are banking on stimulus programs are thinking in terms of an economy that no longer exists. Post-war U.S. recessions and recoveries followed Federal Reserve policy. When the economy heated up and inflation became a problem, the Federal Reserve would raise interest rates and reduce the growth of money and credit. Sales would fall. Inventories would build up. Companies would lay off workers.

Inflation cooled, and unemployment became the problem. Then the Federal Reserve would reverse course. Interest rates would fall, and money and credit would expand. As the jobs were still there, the work force would be called back, and the process would continue.

It is a different situation today. Layoffs result from the jobs being moved offshore and from corporations replacing their domestic work forces with foreigners brought in on H-1B, L-1 and other work visas. The U.S. labor force is being separated from the incomes associated with the goods and services that it consumes. With the rise of offshoring, layoffs are not only due to restrictive monetary policy and inventory buildup. They are also the result of the substitution of cheaper foreign labor for U.S. labor by American corporations. Americans cannot be called back to work to jobs that have been moved abroad. In the New Economy, layoffs can continue despite low interest rates and government stimulus programs.

To the extent that monetary and fiscal policy can stimulate U.S. consumer demand, much of the demand flows to the goods and services that are produced offshore for U.S. markets. China, for example, benefits from the stimulation of U.S. consumer demand. The rise in China’s GDP is financed by a rise in the U.S. public debt burden.

Another barrier to the success of stimulus programs is the high debt levels of Americans. The banks are being criticized for a failure to lend, but much of the problem is that there are no consumers to whom to lend. Most Americans already have more debt than they can handle.

Hapless Americans, unrepresented and betrayed, are in store for a greater crisis to come. President Bush’s war deficits were financed by America’s trade deficit. China, Japan, and OPEC, with whom the U.S. runs trade deficits, used their trade surpluses to purchase U.S. Treasury debt, thus financing the U.S. government budget deficit.

The problem now is that the U.S. budget deficits have suddenly grown immensely from wars, bankster bailouts, jobs stimulus programs, and lower tax revenues as a result of the serious recession. Budget deficits are now three times the size of the trade deficit. Thus, the surpluses of China, Japan, and OPEC are insufficient to take the newly issued U.S. government debt off the market.

If the Treasury’s bonds can’t be sold to investors, pension funds, banks, and foreign governments, the Federal Reserve will have to purchase them by creating new money. When the rest of the world realizes the inflationary implications, the US dollar will lose its reserve currency role. When that happens Americans will experience a large economic shock as their living standards take another big hit.

America is on its way to becoming a country of serfs ruled by oligarchs.

Thirty-nine years ago this spring I was in Vietnam, busy sending non-stop dispatches back home about how well the war was going for the good guys. When a year later the North Vietnamese took Quang Tri in the north and were about to attack Hue, Bill Buckley send me a cable asking for one thousand words on whether Hue could hold out this time. In 1968 the old imperial city had fallen to the Viet Cong and every priest, doctor, and community leader had been slaughtered by them. The Marines had retaken it at great cost and now forty NVA divisions were rumored to be advancing down from the north. I caught a flight from Da Nang on a Chinook and was there in no time. Everyone was on edge but the attack never materialized. I cabled my copy announcing the end of the war and pronouncing victory for Uncle Sam and the South Vietnamese republic. Bill sent me a nice telegram telling me that he was happy to see me leave that “miserable place” and looking forward for a piece about Americans in Paris. Three years to the day of the Hue non-event, Bill rang me in Athens and asked if I could get back into Saigon as soon as possible. I rushed to the South Vietnamese consulate where I had contacts, but in the four days it took for the visa to come through, there was no more Saigon and no more South Vietnam.

Well, the United States never understood the realities in Vietnam and it does not understand the realities in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, Iran, and so on. Which means as Uncle Sam and his few western allies gear up once again for a new round of fighting terrorists, they will have as little effect as they have had the last eight and a half years since 9/11. Here are the facts, this time without the American embassy’s brainwashing of 39 years ago. Iraq is a disaster, the surge a failure, and Bush’s exercise in nation building a total washout. No one doubts America’s ability to overwhelm other countries with its military might. But that is not the same as using US troops as part of a larger strategy to solve political problems. Fixing Iraq has always been more about politics than military matters. An ignorant George W. Bush followed Winston Churchill’s folly when as Colonial Secretary in 1920 he created an artificial country forcing three radically different peoples to combine under a single ruler. Both Churchill and Bush were under the sway of Zionists, the former for money (he was deeply in debt and was let money by Jewish bankers), the latter influenced by the neo-cons of his administration. As I write this, bombings and terrorism are ripe. The upcoming elections are a farce, as more than 500 prominent Sunni candidates have been disqualified by the ruling Shia–dominated Maliki government. The Militias have not been disarmed and the local Kurdish army, the Peshmerga, is holding the north separate. Which means the whole endeavor of the surge—the political, economic, and military rapprochement between the major Iraqi groups has conspicuously failed.

Afghanistan. Obama relies on hypnotic language that can easily be applied to Somalia or Yemen as Afghanistan. It conjures nightmares of failed states and offers remedies of nation-building and counter insurgency. It assumes that Afghanistan is predictable. It is not. Afghan tribal groups lack the coherence of even Iraqi Sunni tribes. There are no mass political parties and the Kabul government lacks the legitimacy, the base or strength of the Iraqi administration. It is a corrupt regime which has enriched itself through the narco-trade and Uncle Sam’s billions. The Taliban portrays the Kabul government as US slaves, and exploits the religious resistance that the West fostered in the 1980’s against the Soviets. What is needed to defeat the Taliban is a state, but you cannot build a state without defeating the Taliban. The US and Nato are seen as an infidel occupying force, and Washington is whistling Dixie if it thinks otherwise. The Afghan military has no literacy levels to administer a modern army, its loyalties are suspect at best, and its padded battalions of ghost soldiers are paid by Uncle Sam and go straight into the pockets of corrupt commanders.

Yemen is yet another disaster. President Saleh’s government is corrupt, unable to keep tribal leaders happy, and the country is ripe to go the way of Somalia. Yemen is a family corporation which is bleeding red ink. Saleh’s first priority is to stay in power and to be succeeded by his son. End of story, as they say.

So, what is to be done? Easy. Get the hell out of foreign entanglements, bring the troops home, tell Israel and the neo-con press to go to hell, and think of what the country can do for its own people for a change.

“Progressive London Conference”: the phrase is simultaneously gruesome and narcoleptic. It hints at almost illimitable tedium, wishful thinking, a tincture of vitriol and much more than a soupcon of sanctimony.

It carries bland and bathetic connotations—like a recurring nightmare of rainy Friday afternoons in school combined with Sunday School lessons as excruciating as they are esoteric.

It conjures up visions of a hot and airless room (perhaps in a 1960s building) over-filled with blank-eyed or frankly dozing “delegates”, slide shows full of meaningless statistics and spelling mistakes, adenoidal or heavily-accented voices reading from looooong papers cut and pasted from sociology books and Wikipedia, puerile and poorly-delivered perorations, fake bonhomie and over-affirmatory applause.

There are desks at the back strewn with plates smeared with the remnants of vegetarian and halal food, in amongst mountain ranges of NGO handouts, barely-literate trade union bulletins, Labour News, Liberal Democrat and Green Party ‘literature’, the Independent, Guardian, and Mirror ‘newspapers’, and beautifully produced ‘academic’ texts dripping with clichés and non-sequiturs. Beyond this superficially sane material comes heavy-duty lunacy— Socialist Worker, secularist newsletters, deep ecology screeds, Muslim manifestos, Christian Socialist journals, Respect Party forms, Sinn Féin’s An Phobhlacht, Gay News, Black Student Union literature, Tribune, Gay Scottish Socialist, Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!......and so interminably on in a beyond-satire stream of indignation-heavy, information-lite agitprop.

There are government ministers (!) in that madcap room, and MEPs, and even His Excellency the Venezuelan Ambassador, moving amongst the multiracial, multicultural, multilingual, multisexual melée, pretending they are best friends with London’s most egregious monomaniacs and all the capital’s “community activists”—the kind of people who lean too close when they talk at you, and wear plastic shoes, and £99 suits with black shirts and white ties.

I snap awake with a shiver—but this is (or was) a real conference, which took place in London on 30th January, under the auspices of former London Mayor Ken Livingstone, and addressed by no less a personage than Harriet Harman (AKA Mrs Jack Dromey), the shrewish earl’s niece who is Deputy Leader of the Labour Party and Leader of the House of Commons—and Ed Miliband, the piscine Energy Secretary and younger brother of Foreign Secretary David Miliband.

The protagonists were all too real too, with their proudly-borne titles, which when run together make a kind of anti-poetry of amiable or not-so-amiable eccentricity (plus a few items of furniture):
  —Director, Jewish Council for Racial Equality
  —Vice President, Pax Christi
  —Spokesperson, British Muslim Initiative
  —Chair, Stop the War Coalition
  —National Secretary, Anti-Academies Alliance
  —GMB National Equalities Officer
  —Chair, Compass Youth
  —Former adviser to the Mayor of London on women’s issues
  —Director, Boris Keep Your Promise
  —Chair, Defend Council Housing
  —Founder, Campaign for Clean Air in London
  —Director, 10:10
  —Chair, Palestine Solidarity Campaign
  —Organiser, Hope and Remembrance Vigil Trafalgar Square 2009
  —Chair, Imaan–Muslim LGBT support group

Then there are some who need no title, because their organizations’ names proclaim their purpose and outrage to a sadly indifferent world. There is the delightful double-entendre “UpRise”, whose founder clearly does not watch Carry On films. There is “Love Music, Hate Racism” (as though these unrelated activities were inextricably conjoined—like, say, Eat Sausages, Treat Eczema). There is “Liberal Conspiracy”, which has a proudly defensive ring, as if the group’s Sunny Hundal was endangering his life or liberty in the cause of greater liberalism. There are representatives of Boriswatch.co.uk, Socialist Unity, and the Abortion Rights Executive. And to add a frisson of edgy excitement to the proceedings, there is one Azad Ali, Community Affairs Co-ordinator, Islamic Forum Europe—who when he isn’t too busy with this worthwhile job moonlights as a civil servant. The racist authorities suspended him from this job last year for blogging that Osama bin Laden’s favorite theologian, Abdullah Azzam, was “one of the few Muslims who promote the understanding of the term jihad in its comprehensive glory” as a doctrine “of self-purification” and “warfare”. He went on to cite approvingly Azzam’s son’s considered view that, “If I saw a British man wearing a soldier’s uniform inside Iraq, I would kill him because that is my obligation.”

He has now been reinstated in his job, so sadly has less time to impart his intelligent opinions to the world—which means he must have been doubly delighted to be asked to share a platform with Mrs. Dromey and a roll-call of Britain’s leading feminists and homosexual activists—of whose lifestyle choices he no doubt approves wholeheartedly.

The themes, too, were a delight for connoisseurs, including as they did “One Society, Many Cultures”, “There is no Progressive Imperialism”, “Capitalwoman”(no relation to Wonderwoman), “Gaza—1 Year On”, and “Proud London—Stopping Homophobic Hate Crime”.

There was an unfortunate occurrence when a man was ejected for asking the Sinn Féin speaker whether party leader Gerry Adams would be arrested for being an accessory to child abuse (Adams’ brother is facing pædophilia charges in Ireland). This goes to prove the terrible dangers and disabilities under which radical and controversial activists are forced to operate under the present New Labour fascist regime.

The good news is that those who were unable to attend this notable event can read reports online. When they have savored the accumulated wisdom, a veritable goldmine awaits them on the Links page, where they can click on the link for the London Socialist Film Co-op. This is unfortunately the only listing under the “Culture” heading, despite the conference’s “One Country, Many Cultures” theme, but then who could be disappointed by celluloid classics like Memories of Underdevelopment and Only a Bookseller?
Pity, oh pity the ultra-Left—not only because they know not what they do, but because this Kafkaesque gabfest is their idea of fun. But pity the rest of us much, much more—because amazing though it may sound these are the ludicrous people, and this the agenda, which govern British life.

“Make a child smile—kill a counselor.”

A passable joke and an admirable sentiment. Face it, a kid cannot even fart these days without being offered counseling or Ritalin. We are enfeebled by prevailing victim culture, brought low by its burgeoning support industry of hand-holders and quack fixes; we are considered remarkable—borderline freakish—should we actually manage to cope.

The price paid for the bullshit peddled is high. Dignity is replaced by dependency, reserve by emotional incontinence; humor has given over to grim earnestness, stoicism and grit to flaccid self-pity. To ‘have issues’ is to be interesting (it used to be called flakey), to be ‘troubled’ is now the default excuse for any who intend to behave like an asshole. And happiness and contentment are nowhere.

There is much to commend the stiff upper-lip. After all, sixty years of driveling to therapists has failed to render a swathe of Americans any slimmer or less drearily self-absorbed. Things have gone so wrong, have become so gloomy and over-complicated, when on the face of it they should have gone so right. We have never been richer, safer or more pampered, never lived so long, never endured the privations and horrors of total war, never suffered the child mortality and loss to disease of a previous generation. In short, we have never had it so good. And yet…

Maybe my stepfather had it right. As a young surgeon he endured the London Blitz, operating on hundreds of civilian casualties in the heart of the East End and using his spare time to kick German incendiaries from the roof of the Royal London hospital. Later, as a paratrooper, he jumped into Normandy; later still, as a Commando, he was with the first medical relief team to liberate the notorious Changi Jail POW-camp in Singapore. Ever humble and easygoing, he went on to become a legendary surgeon of his age. And one of his favorite expressions was: ‘I don’t do psychological’. How quaint. How old-fashioned. How inflexible and out-of-touch. How utterly refreshing.

Our problem is we invent problems, pluck them from the ether to validate our foolish lives. In doing so we forget the simple things, ignore the advice of comedienne Joyce Grenfell to ‘live for the minute and thank God you’re in it’. She had a point. We are shallow and spoilt, have evolved into a pygmy race that prefers collectively to study its navel than to lift its eyes to the horizon.

People are no longer told it is their fault, their actions that cause the effects. Their flaws and failings, their weakness and absurdity, even their criminality, can be excused and explained. The liberal-left and its psycho-twaddle franchise hold out the apparent answer. Everything is a condition or disorder, an illness or syndrome, an addiction or compulsion; everything can be blamed on someone or something else, on the system or situation, on society, on discrimination, on your vulnerabilities, on your not being breast-fed, on your mother preferring your sister, on your being undervalued and a third sibling or having attention-deficit or low self-esteem. Hell, it might even be ME. Blah, blah, blah. Grow a spine.

Our sense of wellbeing and our very souls—our capacity to accept reality and see the truth—are corrupted by this bullshit. Individual responsibility is abrogated and elsewhere, proportion and perspective are dropped. Look at those who wailed and screamed along the funeral route of Princess Diana—a woman they did not know—while her own young sons walked behind the cortege and showed heroic self-control. It should be obvious which form of behavior was the more laudable. Yet by her own deeds, Diana reflected and legitimized an approach to life that says it is okay not to think or to know anything just so long as you Feel. A popular belief and one that infects all walks of life. Consider the contemporary art scene. Forget skill and draftsmanship—simply vomit out your inner angst. It is all so self-indulgent.

They now teach ‘happiness’ classes at my old school. God help us (or at least preserve us from this faux-empowerment claptrap). I’m beautiful, I’m special, I’m talented, I’m worth it, I’m unique…They are in for a rude shock. What should be taught is expectation management, that success and disappointment are part of the whole, that rigor and toil and excellence are the stuff of fulfillment, that no one escapes pain and loss and setback (and nor should they). We develop best when we push against adversity or resistance. Conversely, we collapse fastest when things become too easy and we grow too soft. Crap happens and happiness is not a right. That is the human condition and what our youngsters are not told.

Ultimately—however much we believe ourselves special—we are still each of us the ant pushing uphill a grain of salt before the boiling water of eternity washes us away. Accept it. At that fateful hour, the fripperies and foibles, the neuroses, hang-ups, envy and pride, the hours spent blaming and complaining, will mean nothing. Family, friends, flowers and a little faith are all that count. So be grateful and be joyous. Take life on the chin, stare death in the eye, and laugh. For you are blessed. And get up off your knees.

Soon after starting from “Junction” the first time on the Cresta Run, my mind went racing, “This cannot be happening. I am going way too fast and there is no control. Why didn’t somebody warn me?” Somehow I made it safely to the end, which was in Celerina, the next village over from St. Moritz. Sheer luck. I was simply holding on for dear life. Nothing can quite prepare you for the experience. Your nose is approximately 4 inches from the ice; due to that proximity, you seem to be traveling a hundred miles an hour, even though you are going less than half that. (The best riders do reach 85 mph.) Unlike skiing, there is no way to stop and regroup.

A past president of the St. Moritz Tobogganing Club, Roger Gibbs, has written: “To go down the Cresta Run for the first time is an awe-inspiring experience, and even for a skilled and seasoned performer of the highest class nothing can be taken for granted.” That was in a booklet published in 1985 to celebrate the centenary of the SMTC. This winter marks the 125th anniversary of the Club, known more commonly as The Cresta Run. I was never a member, but I have been an SL (“supplementary member”) rider for several Februarys in the late 1980s and then off and on in the 1990s. Under the direction of the legendary Club Secretary, Lt.-Colonel Digby Willoughby, I was the unofficial photographer at the Grand National race in February 1998.

The Cresta Run is open barely two months of the year. There is nowhere in the world where you ride head-first in a toboggan or a luge, except at the Cresta. You lie flat on your stomach on a steel toboggan—here called the skeleton—helmeted and padded, holding onto the sides of the vehicle, as your specially-equipped boots rake the ice behind, controlling the speed and direction. The boots are steel-tipped, with several points sticking out, like a stock market chart.

The Run commences at “Top”, which is up the hill from the concrete bunker of a clubhouse. Only the experienced riders are allowed to start there. It gets steep quickly, with some bone-chilling banks prior to passing the Clubhouse. As a sort of safety-valve to keep the unwise from going too fast into the lower banks, there is a wide turn called “Shuttlecock” which is the third turn down from Junction. You must negotiate Shuttlecock carefully or you will fly out of the Run, landing in an area of snow and scattered hay.

It happened several times each morning, and Colonel Digby would ring a bell when it did. Then everybody in the Clubhouse stopped for a moment to see if the rider was going to stand up and signal to Digby that he was alive and functioning. Digby was located in the “Tower”, atop the Clubhouse, from where he controlled the day’s events via a loudspeaker which reverberated down the valley. If the skeleton stayed in the Run without its rider, the Colonel would bellow: “Achtung Schlitten! Achtung Schlitten!” to warn everybody further on to stay clear. It was a heavy device, and would not stop until it had reached Celerina.

Digby was concerned for the wellbeing of each and every rider, member or SL. He did not discriminate and was not impressed by anyone. I saw him admonish more than one self-satisfied fellow after what seemed like a great ride: “Slow down dear boy! Please slow down!” On another occasion, he spotted a lady and child wandering too close to the Run somewhere past Junction. His response: “Take that child away from the Run for God’s sake…it might hurt one of my riders!”

Depending upon the number of members who showed up, and if there were a race that day—with names like “The Curzon Cup”, “The Gunter Sachs Challenge Cup”, “The Cartier Challenge Trophy”, “The Coppa D’Italia”, “The Grand National”—an SL like myself might get just one or two rides. The rest of the time, you watched for someone to go out at Shuttlecock and socialized in the Clubhouse. The SMTC is very clubby, the English being the founders of the Club when the British Empire was at high tide. They remain in charge of this little remnant of the empire.

Women have been banned from going down the Cresta since 1929, except on one day at the end of the season. The excuse given is that the sport is too dangerous and that, in addition, lying on one’s chest during the ordeal would be contra-indicated for the female anatomy. That may be true, or it may be just a fanciful yet plausible-sounding excuse given by the Committee.

Midday, Colonel Digby would call out “Terminato! Terminato!” and everybody would adjourn to the Sunny Bar at the nearby Kulm Hotel for lunch, more socializing, and more drinks. (There was, of course, a well-stocked bar in the Clubhouse.) By the time you had lunch on the terrace, overlooking the frozen lake, and especially if there had been a race and a prize presentation, and if you were inclined to have a few more drinks in the bright sunshine, well by then, the day was shot. Time for a nap.

To be a successful Cresta rider requires dedication, talent, plus more time in the day than some can manage. Most importantly from my perspective, Colonel Digby has retired. He passed away in February 2007 in St. Moritz, a day before he was to watch the Willoughby Cub. Terminato! Digby smoked incessantly and with utter abandon, like only an English gentleman can. Everybody assumed that he would live forever. They were wrong. He is irreplaceable. Happy Anniversary.

No, it is not 1860 again.

But with all the talk of the 10th Amendment, nullification and interposition, states rights and secession—following Gov. Rick Perry’s misstatement that Texas, on entering the Union in 1845, reserved in its constitution a right to secede—one might think so.

Chalk up another one for those Tea Party activists who exploded in cheers when Sister Sarah brought up the dread word in endorsing Rick Perry in the primary.

Looking back in American history, however, these ideas, these sentiments, decried as insane inside the Beltway, were once as American as “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.”

“I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical,” wrote Thomas Jefferson to James Madison from Paris in January 1787, about Revolutionary War Capt. Daniel Shay’s anti-tax rebellion in Massachusetts.

In the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions, both of these founding fathers sanctioned the idea that states could interpose their own sovereignty and nullify acts of Congress. Both were enraged by the Alien and Sedition Acts of John Adams and the Federalists, written into law to combat sedition during the undeclared naval war with France.

On taking office, President Jefferson declared the acts unconstitutional, refused to prosecute those charged and freed the imprisoned writers.

In 1814, Timothy Pickering, another veteran of the revolution and secretary of state to both George Washington and Adams, was a force behind the Hartford Convention, which argued for New England’s secession and reuniting with Great Britain. Massachusetts opposed Madison’s War of 1812 that had caused the British blockade that destroyed their trade and prosperity.

The war’s end and Jackson’s victory at New Orleans, however, aborted the Hartford movement and finished off the Federalists forever.

In 1832, it was Vice President John Calhoun who inspired South Carolina to vote to nullify the Tariff of Abomination that was killing the cotton-exporting South and enriching Northern manufacturers. To the chagrin of Madison, Calhoun invoked his and Jefferson’s Virginia and Kentucky resolutions in defense of Carolinian defiance.

In 1845, it was Massachusetts again. Ex-President John Quincy Adams declared that admission of Texas to the Union as a slave state might constitute grounds for secession and civil war.

With Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860 and Republicans, the Northern party, assuming power, South Carolina, Georgia and the Gulf states seceded.

But not until after Fort Sumter, when Lincoln called for volunteers to march south and crush the rebellion, did Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas secede, rather than remain passive or participate in a war on their kinfolk.

Unlike the issues of yesteryear that tore the Union asunder, Tea Party issues are not sectional but national. Yet, they are rooted in a similar set of beliefs—that the federal government no longer serves their interests, but the interests of economic and political forces that sustain the party in power.

In 1860, the South saw power passing indefinitely to a new regime, a Republican Party that represented high-tariff industrialists and New England radicals and abolitionists who despised the agrarian South and celebrated the raid on Harper’s Ferry by the terrorist John Brown, who had sought to incite a slave uprising, such as had occurred in Santo Domingo.

What called the Tea Party into existence?

Some are angry over unchecked immigration and the failure to control our borders and send the illegals back. Some are angry over the loss of manufacturing jobs. Some are angry over winless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some are angry over ethnic preferences they see as favoring minorities over them.

What they agree upon, however, is that they have been treading water for a decade, working harder and harder with little or no improvement in their family standard of living. They see the government as taking more of their income in taxes, seeking more control over their institutions, creating entitlements for others not them, plunging the nation into unpayable debt, and inviting inflation or a default that can wipe out what they have saved.

And there is nothing they can do about it, for they are politically powerless. By their gatherings, numbers, mockery of elites and militancy, however, they get a sense of the power that they do not have.

Their repeated reappearance on the national stage, in new incarnations, should be a fire bell in the night to the establishment of both parties. For it testifies to their belief and that of millions more that the state they detest is at war with the country they love.

The secession taking place in America is a secession of the heart—of people who have come to believe the government is them, and not us.

Obama’s problem, like the Bushes’ in 1992 and 2008, is that one thing these folks are really good at is throwing people out of power.

There’s nothing quite like a New York Times columnist for spouting gobbledegook on matters economic: perhaps only the editorials themselves are worse. Tom “Airmiles” Friedman gives us a lovely example here:

Banks, multinationals and hedge funds often hire foreign policy experts to do “political risk analysis” before they invest in places like, say, Kazakhstan or Argentina. They may soon have to add the United States to their watch lists.

Now he’s right so far, investors really are adding the US (and the UK) to their list of places where political risk is a concern. But Tom then goes on to waffle about leadership, strong government (and the lack of it), inflation, currency matters. No, these are not what people think of as political risk, these are economic risks.

Political risk is when politicians decide that they’re going to tear up the rule of law and stick it to some company or other that they or the public don’t like. Doesn’t matter what the original deal was, what it says in the contract, yeah, let’s get ‘em! Usually of course to get a short term poll boost for said politicians while right royally screwing over the long term economic health of the country.

This happened to Shell in Russia: they invested billions in the Sakhalin oil and gas projects. Once they were actually up and producing the Russian government sucked its teeth and decided to change the rules: no, you can’t export, we’ll change the royalty rates, oooh, my, see, you’ve broken an environmental law so we’ll just force you to sell the whole project, eh? Something very similar happened to BP over their investment in TNK.

Or there’s the example of the Zambian copper mines. No one would invest there because no one could be sure what the law would be next week. So a strong deal was cut: if you change those rules you’ve got to compensate us for the investments we’ve already made. Sure as eggs is eggs of course as soon as the copper was flowing again the government tried to quadruple the royalty rate, change the corporate and income tax rates and disallow depreciation charges against tax…..and they’re still desperately trying to wriggle out of paying compensation. There’s even a little case going on in El Salvador right now. A gold mining company spent $80 million prospecting and actually found gold. Under the contract, either they are allowed to lift the gold or they have to be compensated for their exploration costs. Guess what? The government in El Salvador doesn’t want to let them mine and also doesn’t want to pay back either the costs or the fee that was paid for the right to prospect.

That’s what political risk is, that politicians are slimeballs who will never live up to their part of an agreement. But why should anyone be worried that the US should be added to a list of countries where this might be a problem? Surely we don’t have these sorts of problems?

Oh Yeah? Anyone remember how the bondholders got crammed down in the GM bankruptcy? How the President of the United States overturned the settled law of the land so that his political supporters, the unions, got a better deal than they should have done?

Or how about this one?

In 1995, when oil prices were very low, Congress tried to encourage deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico by giving oil companies relief from some of the royalties they incur for producing oil and gas on public land. .....Representative Edward Markey of Massachusetts hopes to put things right with a bill that would clarify the law and prevent companies from signing new leases in the gulf until they renegotiate the old ones and pay royalties that are due.

Changing the rules of the game after billions have been spent by the companies. BP, as an example, went out and spent a fortune and was able to find oil 6 miles under the Gulf: the deepest anyone has ever drilled. Now that the money has been spent and the oil company is committed, up pops a politician claiming that the rules just be changed: we didn’t really mean it you know, ha, ha, ha, just joshing. Of course we’re not going to let you keep the profits we encouraged you to go and seek, don’t be silly.

That’s what political risk is, that politicians will, well, politicians will act like politicians. Overturn contracts, rip up the rule of law, if it appears that doing so will give them an electoral advantage.

The reason that investors are now beginning to consider political risk when investing in the US? Because the US has become the sort of place where you have to worry about political risk when you invest. This is not, to put it mildly, an advertisement either for the US or for American politicians. It will lower investment and that in turn will lower the living standards of Americans in the future. But it gets votes in the short term and that’s what political risk is, see?

        I was impressed. In less than five minutes, Magda here had managed to check us in, book us our wake-up calls, add our Ibis points onto our Ibis Elite Members Club Cards, and all that while being practically shot at through the hotel window. That’s a damned sight better than I could have done, let me tell you. I had a job as a receptionist myself, once. I did. It was while I was working in a hotel in a ski resort in Colorado for a few months during that period of my life when I was game to try any new job with half an eye on the possibility of pursuing it as a career. However, it soon became apparent to me and to my work colleagues that I was astonishingly inept at it. While the free hotel guest wine must be held accountable for my overall poor performance to a certain extent, I suppose, nevertheless some of the blunders I used to make are as follows: often, when someone would ring up the hotel, I would pick up the phone (I was under the illusion I was capable of doing this part of the job) and say: “Aspen Highland Inn, this is Patrick speaking, how may I help?” and when they’d ask to be put through to so and so or such and such a room, I would chirpily reply: “No problem sir……putting you through!” Then all I had to do was press the HOLD button, then the TRANS button, enter the room number on the key pad, then as soon as I heard a ringing tone at the other end, simply put down the phone. And yet it never failed to amaze me that I wasn’t able to get even that right. Roughly thirty seconds later, the same person would call up again, I’d go through the same routine: “Aspen Highland Inn, this is Patrick speaking, how may I help?” and a familiar voice would say: “Yeah Patrick, I think something may have gone wrong there. Do you think you could try that number again for me, please? Thanks.” To which I would reply: “Oh, I’m sorry about that sir, let me try that number again for you……putting you through!” And I’d go through the same process – all the time thinking ‘I know I’m doing this right’ – HOLD, TRANS, 105, ring tone, hang up. Good. Thirty seconds later the phone would ring again: “Aspen Highland Inn, this is……” and to my great disgust, the guy who had already rung up twice before would be on the other end of the line again, and he’d interrupt me, usually in quite an irritable tone of voice: “Yeah, look Pat. Whatever you’re doing, it doesn’t seem to be working. Let’s try it one more time and if it doesn’t go through, could you leave a message for Larry saying ‘could he urgently call Bill because his wife and children have been taken to hospital and could he call me back on my cell as soon as he can.’” Genuinely worried by this stage, I would stammer: “I really am very sorry about this, sir, but I’m sure that won’t be necessary. Sometimes up here in the mountains, we get what’s called a bad high altitude connection. Let’s try it one more time” (for the sake of tact, I would tend to omit the ‘putting you through’ bit at this critical stage of proceedings): HOLD, TRANS, 105, but this time I’d wait until the guy in the hotel room physically picked up the phone at the other end, then I’d say to him: “Hey, how are you doing? This is Patrick down at the front desk……yeah, fine thanks. Look, I’m sorry to bother you but I’ve got a call from a friend of your’s and he says it’s urgent……O.K great……putting you through!” Then I’d put the phone down and, appalled, sit there praying that that would be the end of it. Thirty seconds later, the phone would ring again and I’d grab the handset and sob into it: “Oh God! I’m so sorry about this, I don’t……” but this time it would be the guy in the hotel room and he’d say something like: “No, no, this is Larry in room 105, we seem to have got disconnected there……” That kind of thing. Do you get the general idea?
      What else? Oh yes – how could I forget? Listen to this: on more then one occasion, I would find myself having booked people into entirely the wrong room. The finest example would have to be the time I gave the wrong set of keys to a couple of newly weds who had got married earlier that day and had arrived for their honeymoon in the middle of the night. Bleary-eyed and half-drunk (me, not them, I mean), I gave them my warmest congratulations before handing them the keys to the Honeymoon Suite along with a complimentary box of chocolates and a bouquet of flowers for the bride. As they turned to leave, full of the first flush of love (them, not me, I mean), I gave the groom a knowing wink that was as if to say: “Good luck buddy. And remember- don’t fuck it up!” and he smiled back at me in that knowing kind of way that was as if to say: “Yeah, we’ll talk about it in the morning, dude……” It was a beautiful moment. Then, my work finished for the night, and feeling that for once in my life I had done something truly good, I retired to the office and went back to sleep on the sofa. Five minutes later, I awoke as if from a bad dream to the sound of shouting and screaming coming from the direction of the front desk. Totally disorientated and wondering if perhaps the hotel had caught fire or a grizzly bear had found its way into one of the rooms, I rounded the corner to be confronted by four of the angriest people I have ever seen in my life. I couldn’t understand it: the two newly weds were there, which was a pity, but so too was a couple I had checked-in the day before. The man was a Hells Angels-type with a long grey beard like the lead singer from ZZ Top, and his girlfriend was thin and muscly and blond and vicious. They were both standing there completely naked demanding to know why they had been burst-in upon half way through having sex. Can you imagine? It’s an experience I never wish to repeat. Never. Mind you, I did end up making the same mistake a few more times after that, just not with the same catastrophic results.
      Another lamentable incident that occurred during my sojourn at the hotel (this won’t take long, by the way) was the time I was working the night shift and was rudely awakened at the crack of dawn by a queue of about fifty German tourists wanting to know why they had each been charged four dollars for drinking the bottled water in the rooms. They had all paid their bills the night before and were about to leave on a coach that was waiting outside, when one of them had noticed that they had been charged for something that they had expressly been told they would not be charged for (oh no!). They weren’t angry, they assured me - they had very much enjoyed their stay at The Aspen Highland Inn - but would I mind simply deducting it from their credit cards then reissuing them with new invoices and new receipts. Now, the main problem I had with this, aside from the fact that there were fifty of them lined up in front of me, was that not once during my grueling and protracted training period (which never formally ended, come to think of it), had I shown the slightest proficiency at operating the credit card machine, much less the computer invoicing program. Yes, I had worked out early on how to access pornography on the internet and yes, I suppose I had fluked the odd transaction here and there, but generally speaking, the whole system baffled me. So anyway, to cut a long story short, I did what I usually did in such situations which was to act all professional, tap a few keys, move the mouse around a bit, frown, tap a few more keys, move the mouse around a bit more, frown some more, and then say: “Oh no. It’s done it again. I’m really sorry about this but the whole system’s crashed.” What I expected to happen at that point was what usually happened, ie. for them to go: “Don’t worry about it. It doesn’t matter. We leave now anyway. Goodbye!” But what happened instead was a dialogue probably much like this:
      “But vee must have zee correct bill. Zis is outrageous!” “I know. I agree with you but there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m very sorry.”
      “Every year vee come here and always vee pay zee correct bill.”
      “Yeah, I understand. I heard you the first time.”
      “I want to speak viss zee manager. Now!”
      “Look. I’ve been trying to call her but she’s not answering her fucking phone, alright?”
      “You have been drinking, yah?”
      “No of course I haven’t.”
      “Vee refuse to leave until vee speak viss zee manager!”
      “It’s only four dollars, for fuck’s sake! Does it really matter?”
      “Yah of course it matters! Always zeese zings matter!”
      You get the picture. After about twenty minutes of this kind of to-ing and fro-ing, I eventually stood up and announced to the heaving throng:
      “I tell you what. I’ve just had a good idea. Hopefully this should sort everything out. Wait here for five minutes and I’ll be back.” 
      And with one finger still raised in the air, I hurriedly vacated the front desk area, grabbed my jacket and keys, opened the back door, and charged up the road behind the hotel. Up and up I went, all the way to the top of the mountain that overlooks the town, where I perched myself on a rocky crag and gazed out at the snow-covered valley below. The sun was just starting to appear over the Eastern ridge and the cloudless sky was turning from grey to pink to blue. The air was crisp and, as I exhaled great plumes of steam, I knew then what it must be like to be a bald eagle surveying his mighty kingdom. A long way underneath me, I could see where the hotel was; I could even make out the coach that was still waiting outside, and at that moment I experienced a feeling of giddy exhilaration as I considered the pandaemonium that was going on in that building below and that I myself had caused. What exactly was going on right now, I wondered? Had they managed to summon the manager or had they taken it upon themselves to raze the building to the ground? Ha! None of that mattered any more. My God yes, there were more important things in life than money and jobs and bottles of water and German tourists and anything else you could care to think of as long as it wasn’t right here, right now, where I was at the top of the world! I stood up carefully and hoisted my arms high above my head and let out an ululation towards space, towards where the blue sky turned black, towards the very face of God Himself. Unsteady on my feet, I looked down and just at that moment, I caught sight of the coach, as small as a pin prick, moving slowly away from the hotel.
      That was the first time I got fired. I managed to sweet-talk my way out of it, though, somehow, incredibly, thanks to the sheer comic brilliance and audacity of my opening line as I strode back into the hotel some hours later (“Well I guess I won’t be getting employee of the month, then!”) and secondly to the fact that it was the staff party that night and, what with my skills as a guitar player and a prodigious consumer of alcohol, I was considered central to the planned festivities. Plus the lesser known but equally valid fact that my boss, who was a woman (theoretically), had taken quite a shine to me. Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: ‘Hey. Not bad! He gets to do whatever he wants while he’s at work and he can’t get fired because he’s having sex with the boss! Lucky bastard! Why can’t I ever do something like that etc, etc……?” NO: no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, NO. Alright? No. Why not? Because Sally was what you might call an almost unrealistically obese woman. She really was. Platonically, I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for fat people but there’s only so far I’m prepared to go. I’m not prepared to go anywhere near the bedroom, for example. Her constant flirting with me when I was trying to concentrate on doing my job (to the best of my abilities, I might add) eventually wore me down so much that my life became a living hell. I mean, there were only so many times I could lean back in my chair and squint at her all the way up and down and left and right before agreeing with her: “yes, you know what, I think you have lost quite a lot of weight!” Or making out one day that I never dated anyone I worked with, the next day that I had a girlfriend back in England, the next day that I was gay (all of these became virtually impossible to justify when I did end up going out with one of the maids who worked in the hotel). One night, she cornered me when I was drunk in one of the local bars and compelled to me to snog her. Before I took the plunge, I remember thinking: ‘Fuck it. I’ve watched the Jerry Springer Show. There are loads of guys who live in trailer parks who actually enjoy this kind of shit. Maybe I’m one of them and I just don’t know it yet. Here goes……!” I hoped that the experience would be maternal somehow, a symbolic regression to the womb perhaps, at least a legendary story for my friends down the pub, but it turned out to be none of these things. It turned out to be so unpleasant that it managed to put me off women for a while. Hell, it even put me off going out of the house for a while! (O.K maybe I’m exaggerating a bit.) No, but the thing is, I don’t want to be too nasty about her because she did have a beautiful personality and let’s face it, she did let me off about a hundred serious misdemeanors at work without so much as once carrying through with her numerous threats to give me the slip. And that goes a long way with me, let me tell you. Also, to be fair, she did have quite a pretty face, and bizarrely – get this - months after I had fled the hotel, I ended up involving her in some of my dirtiest lesbian fantasies (would you believe it?!), but that’s a story for another time.

The inflation from five to ten in Best Picture Oscar nominees means that to have any hope of keeping them all straight in your head, you’ll need to group them. Fortunately, the Best Picture nods fall into five obvious pairings:

—The Easily Confused Titles: Up and Up in the Air.
—The Exes’ Action Flicks: James Cameron’s Avatar and Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker.
—The Movies about 350-Pound Black 16-Year-Olds: Precious and The Blind Side. (Two films that, together, teach us that if you are going to be an impoverished but colossal teen, it’s better to be a guy than a girl.)
—The Foreign Films That Won’t Win: An Education and District 9.
—And, finally, The Battle of the Aging Wunderkinds: Quentin Tarantino’s violent Jewish heroes in Inglourious Basterds vs. Joel and Ethan Coen’s passive-aggressive Jewish villains in A Serious Man.

For many years, Tarantino and the Coen Brothers have dominated Hollywood’s niche for high IQ cinephiles who aren’t exactly Merchant & Ivory tasteful. Tarantino purees old genres of sleaze into talkative “action” movies such as Pulp Fiction, while the Coens, like their hero Stanley Kubrick, enjoy switching styles abruptly.

Unlike the Promethean Kubrick, however, the efficient Coens make a lot of small-to-medium sized movies. Some fail. (Personally, I liked even The Hudsucker Proxy, so what do I know?) At minimum, however, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and No Country for Old Men demonstrate their extraordinary expertise.

Inglourious Basterds and A Serious Man channel the very different public personalities of Tarantino and the Coens. The former is a big movie and the latter a small one. In interviews, Tarantino loquaciously blurts out the huge aspirations evident in his WWII quasi-epic. In contrast, the Coens’ interviews could make Tiger Woods’s press conferences sound revealing.

They diffidently promoted A Serious Man—their superbly executed but intentionally limited black comedy about the Job-like woes inflicted upon Larry Gopnik, a meek Minnesota physicist (seemingly much like the Coens’ own economist father), by his pushy children, wife, brother, and neighbors—with their usual shyness and deadpan impersonality. No, it’s not about their parents, they would boringly answer the obvious questions: it’s fiction.

Moreover, in an era when the public enjoys the triumphs and traumas of megalomaniacal auteurs, the Coens are strangely lacking in marketable individuality. If I didn’t know that Joel is 55 and Ethan is 52, I would assume they were identical twins.

Possibly, the Coens’ reticence merely reflects fraternal fulfillment. Blessed with a brother who understands the other wholly, neither Coen feels Tarantino’s urgent need to explain his movies to the rest of us. Or maybe their boring personae are their greatest concoction, opaque façades that serve to confine the inevitable tensions of sibling rivalry. 

Whatever the cause, their productivity together is formidable: 14 movies.

Lately, though, they may lately be working too quickly. After the triumph of 2007’s Best Picture, No Country for Old Men, 2008’s Burn After Reading featured so many stars it wasted George Clooney in an unappealing role and Brad Pitt in an abbreviated one. (As a partisan of the Coens since 1984’s Blood Simple, after watching Burn I worried, “Uh-oh, maybe I’ve been wrong and they really are the soulless snots that everybody says they are.”)

A Serious Man is much improved, but it has so few stars that sit-com supporting actor Richard Kind might be the most recognizable face in the movie.

Inglourious Basterds started out as a 16-hour miniseries, and ended up being roughly five movies crammed into one. Perhaps the most intriguing is the faint palimpsest of Tarantino’s fictionalized version of how Parisian film collector Henri Langlois, with the aid of a movie-loving German officer, heroically shielded from Nazi censors and precious metal scavengers countless unique movies, all on reels of highly flammable silver nitrate film stock. Unfortunately, the preservationist storyline is hardly visible amidst Tarantino’s other obsessions, such as depicting Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels as an oddly Tarantinoesque movie producer.

Tarantino doesn’t actually know—or care—about anything other than movies. For example, the famous opening scene in which the Nazi colonel hunts down the last of the four Jewish dairy farming families in a lovely and remote part of the French countryside is bravura filmmaking. Yet, it’s hard to avoid wondering, “What French Jewish rural dairy farmers? Were there any? How would they get to a synagogue on the Sabbath?” I can’t find any trace by searching on Google for “France ‘Jewish farmers.’” Presumably, Tarantino was thinking of Tevye, the Jewish milkman in a Czarist shtetl in the 1971 film Fiddler on the Roof, but that shows how little he cares about his purported subject.

In contrast, A Serious Man provides a painfully detailed portrait of a Jewish suburb of Minneapolis in 1967, with a collection of characters whose abrasiveness contrasts strikingly with the Coens’ own mildness. Its subtitle could be Why I Married Marge Gunderson—the sweet shiksa lady sheriff in Fargo, for which Frances McDormand, Joel’s wife, won the 1996 Oscar.

I often wonder as to why people are shocked, shocked—Captain Renault-like—to discover that modern football is a malodorous cesspit teeming with leeches and crooks, or that Tony Blair is a congenital liar not worthy of any position except that of orderly in a prison gym. The latest shock is the discovery that Jacob Zuma, the president of South Africa, has fathered his 20th child. Unlike football players, owners of football teams, and Tony Blair, I like Jacob Zuma, a polygamous roly-poly Zulu who preaches safe sex by advising those indulging to take a shower once they’ve finished the business. Zuma is a proud Zulu traditionalist who doesn’t much believe in white man’s science, and who has been married a total of five times, has had children by seven women, and has three wives at present. His latest child’s mother is not one of his wives, which is fine with Zulu custom, especially as Zuma has provided “inhlawulo,” the customary payment by a Zulu man after he fathers a child out of wedlock.

Actually I envy Zuma, and would love to provide inhlawulo to not a small amount of ladies. Alas, all I get is a red signal despite the fact my wallet is bulging with prospective inhlawulo pounds and dollars. (No one accepts Euros any more, especially not for inhlawulo purposes). Mind you, we are all Zulus now. Didn’t the ghastly John Terry pay inhlawulo money to that cute little French mademoiselle? Didn’t the unspeakable owner of the Chelsea football club pay his cute Russian squeeze inhlawulo? Not to mention the poor little Greek boy. (Who didn’t pay).

About twenty-five years or so ago, an English gel demanded inhlawulo from me before she had come up with the goods. I refused because I believed it to be a false alarm. Her father wrote to mine demanding inhlawulo and my poor old dad blew a gasket. “You have contributed nothing to the family’s fortune except for outrageous bills and expenses,” he wrote to me, “am I now supposed to pay for your incapability of keeping your pants on?” But all’s well that ends well. It was a false alarm and the lady went on to marry the big shot of the New York Times, a far, far better thing to do than have a Taki child, inhlawulo or no inhlawulo.

What I find surprising is the reaction to the president’s newest issue among South African big shots. The acting head of the Christian Democratic Party, the Rev. Theunis Botha, called Mr. Zuma a “Tiger Woods, Bill Clinton and Henry VIII all in one.”  The reverent did not mention John Terry, which leads me to believe he speaks with forked tongue, as Terry will be playing for England in the World Cup this summer. If one mentions boys who like slappers, they’ve got to include the ex-England captain. And it gets worse. In a front page commentary with the huge headline “Shame of the Nation,” a Sowetan newspaper said that in other democracies President Zuma would be forced to resign, but the paper did not mention which democracies. Not in France, that’s for sure, where past presidents have had children out of wedlock with much younger women, and once the news got out, their popularity had skyrocketed. Certainly not in Italy, nor Greece, and most likely not in Spain or Portugal.

Couple of weeks ago in Davos, the writer Fareed Zakaria asked President Zuma point blank about polygamy, and whether the Zulu thought the custom was unfair to women. Zuma answered like a true male: “As my culture, polygamy does not take anything from me, from my political beliefs. The problem is created by people who believe their culture is the only right one, the only one accepted by God.” I’ve met Fareed Zakaria and he is a very civilized and pleasant man, but I think he was wrong to ask a Zulu that question. The Zulus are great traditionalists and are a brave people. Chief Buthelezzi came over for both Jimmy Goldsmith’s and John Aspinall’s funerals. If the Zulus like polygamy who are we to question them. If anything, we should demand the Saudis to allow women their rights, and, incidentally, instead of locking them up to come up with some serious inhlawulo.

Back in 2005 Zuma was tried for rape and found not guilty. He was accused by a family friend much younger than himself. Again, his defence was – how should I put it - manly, claiming that the sex had been consensual and once the accuser had crawled underneath the covers of his bed, he gave in and had sex with her in fear she would otherwise accuse him of rape! (I’ll have to remember that one in the unlikely chance of ever being accused of rape myself).

But let’s be serious for a moment. There are 48 murders a day in South Africa (according to Assure Strategic Consulting), the days of white South Africans are numbered, the great murderer and crook Robert Mugabe is next door and tolerated, and the last thing we should be worrying about is polygamy, which in South Africa is legal. Plus the poor guy paid inhlawulo, which is a damn sight more than many so called upper class folk right here in Londonistan are doing as I write. Pay your inhlawulo and then you can sneer, is my motto. 

They are called the PIGS—Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain. What they have in common is that all are facing deficits and debts that could bring on national defaults and break up the European Union.

What brought the PIGS to the edge of the abyss?

All are neo-socialist states that provide welfare for poor people, generous unemployment, universal health care, early retirement and comfortable pensions. Most consume 40 percent to 50 percent of their gross domestic product annually, a crushing burden on the private sector.

Dying populations is a second cause. After two world wars, the Europeans lost their faith and embraced hedonism and materialism, la dolce vita. Large families fell out of favor. Women put off marriage and babies, and went to work. Birth control and abortion were made readily available in every country and, if not, just across the border.

For 30 years, the fertility rate of Europe has been below the 2.1 children per woman necessary to replace a population. In Russia and Ukraine, a million people disappear yearly. In Western Europe, the passing of the native-born goes on quietly, as Third World peoples come to fill the empty spaces left by the aborted and unconceived.

Turks are in Germany. Pakistanis, Indians, Arabs and Caribbean peoples are in Britain. Algerians, Tunisians and Moroccans occupy the southern coast of France and the banlieues around Paris.

These newcomers have neither the education nor skills of the Europeans. Hence, they earn less and contribute less in taxes, but consume more per capita in social benefits.

As the number of young entering the European labor forces shrinks, the number of seniors and aged grows. And thanks to advances in medicine, these retirees live lengthening lives. Thus the burden of pensions and health care grows steadily and the need for higher taxes and larger worker contributions increases.

Then there is globalization. In Europe, wages and taxes are high, regulations heavy, unions strong, and lawyers ubiquitous. Manufacturers, to cut costs, have been outsourcing production to where the labor is cheap and abundant, the unions are nonexistent or weak, and health, safety and environmental regulations are lax. Welcome to China.

Greece is the first European nation to hit the wall. As an EU member state, she is obligated to keep her deficit to 3 percent of GDP. But this year’s is 12.7 percent, and Athens needs to issue $75 billion in bonds alone to finance the deficit and roll over debt.

The markets, however, are rating Greek bonds as risky bonds. To borrow, Athens must pay more than twice the interest rate Germany pays. Faced with strikes by public employees and students, Athens appears to lack the political will to make the cuts necessary to bring the budget back toward balance.

As Portugal, Ireland and Spain gaze on, Greece approaches a moment of truth. Should she default, their bonds, too, will plunge in value out of fear of a copycat default, and the interest rate they pay would also rise. They, too, might then take the Argentine road.

The EU’s crisis would then be like a crisis in the United States should California default on its state bonds and interest rates on other municipal bonds surged to double digits.

Is there a way out?

One option is for the EU to bail out Greece with a huge loan. But if Greece cannot meet her debt obligations now, how could she pay back the loan? And if the EU cannot compel Greece to make deep budget cuts today, what leverage would the EU have after bailing out Athens and removing today’s pressure on the government?

A second option is to call in the International Monetary Fund, which imposes tough conditions on nations receiving IMF loans—the Third World therapy. But problems would arise here, too.

First, it would be an admission that the EU cannot manage its own household. Second, the largest contributor to the IMF is Uncle Sam.

Why should America bail out Greece, when the EU is larger and richer and did not help bail out California in 2009? The stimulus bill did that in 2009, to which Europe contributed nothing.

Where Greece is at today, however, we shall all arrive tomorrow.

In every Western nation, government is growing beyond the capacity of taxpayers to bear. Deficits and debt are surging. Not enough children are being born to replace parents. The immigrant poor who consume more than they contribute are coming to take the empty places. Seniors and elderly are growing as a share of the population. Companies are saying goodbye to the West and moving offshore to low-wage lands.

The West begins to look like yesterday, while the East begins to look like tomorrow.

The West is approaching a crisis of solvency and of democracy. We shall see if democracy, which grew popular lavishing benefits upon all, is strong enough to start clawing them away. Or will democracy try to keep piling the burden on the producers until they rebel or depart?

Hello,
 
I greatly enjoy reading your website, it is high up in my bookmark list along with The American Conservative and LRC. But why does the propaganda of James Jackson appear on your pages? If it is in the name of equal opportunity and fairness and free conservative debate, etc, that time was already long gone when Joe Sobran was kicked out of National Review for daring to criticize Israel and its tentacles in the United States. It was long gone when the neocons called Catholic University to make sure that Paul Gottfried wouldn’t get graduate professorship. James Jackson has chosen to side with the neocons and the Israeli lobby, repeating their falsehoods - but the deception falls flat, now that the paralyzing fear of September 11, that day he probably thanks God for, has subsided. Intelligent conservatives have moved on. I only need quote Taki’s words in Taki Mag’s info page:

“For the past ten years at least, the conservative movement has been dominated by a bunch of pudgy, pasty-faced kids in bow-ties and blue blazers who spent their youths playing Risk in gothic dormitories, while sipping port and smoking their father’s stolen cigars. Thanks to the tragedy of September 11, and a compliant and dim-witted president, these kids got the chance to play Risk with real soldiers, with American soldiers. Patriotic men and women are dying over in Iraq for a war that was never in America’s interests. And now these spitball gunners, these chicken hawks, want to attack Iran, which is no threat to the U.S. at all. One thing I can tell you for sure, there may well be some atheists in foxholes, but you’ll never find a neocon. They prefer to send blue-collar kids out to die on their behalf, so they get to feel macho and make up for all the times they got wedgies in prep school. It shall be our considered task to take on the chicken-hawks of this world, and give them wedgies again.”

But wait - James Jackson can claim privilege because he lives in a country with lots of Muslim immigrants, right? You can always find YouTube videos with some demonstrators in London with signs that say “Islam shall rule” and so on. So he is allowed some leeway, right? That doesn’t fly: I live in Sweden, a country full of Arab immigrants, and I still don’t believe the talk about “islamofascism.” James Jackson doesn’t get a free pass to vent against “the Muslim threat” just because he is British. And yes, I say “Arab” immigrants, not “Muslim”: the Christian Arabs, Turks and Kurds act in exactly the same way as the Muslims. And those who roam in gangs in the streets are not the least bit religious - they drink alcohol and the women don’t wear veils. People like James Jackson only talk of “Muslims” to cozy up to the Israeli lobby and the media owners, and to avoid that dreadful “racist” label that would come from talking about Arab immigrants as Arab immigrants.

Appeasing the Israeli lobby, how has that worked for conservatives so far, in the U.S. or in Britain? Any benefits yet? I’m still waiting.

Perhaps we should talk about the Catholic invasion of the United States, because Mexicans are Catholics? It must be a world-wide offensive led from the Vatican, right? And what about the domestic gangs in New York and Philadelphia, they must be part of a Christian menace. Why not point out that Jesse Jackson is a minister and warn of the Christian threat? The reason why we shouldn’t is that their religion is irrelevant. And so it is with Middle Eastern immigrants in Britain.
I would also like to point out that before the invasion of Iraq, Britain and America had been illegally bombing that country on average once a week for twelve years, deliberately destroying bridges and roads and power plants and water refineries, while killing half a million malnourished children through sanctions that Madeleine Albright said was “worth it” in an MSNBC interview. And now James Jackson is applauding “extrajudicial” killings, which in plain, honest English means murder. It seems to me that an Arab like Usama bin Ladin has good reasons to be angered, and it will take a long time before he has killed enough Americans to even approach the number of Arabs killed by the United States and Britain.

As for Iran, oh boy. There is CIA’s support for the Shah’s coup against Iranian democracy in Operation Ajax. There is the economic attack on Iran after the people revolted and threw out the U.S. puppet. There is the U.S.-funded and -supported Iraqi invasion of Iran, which killed two million people in the 1980s. There are the continued efforts to isolate Iran internationally and financially, and the financing of terrorist groups inside Iran which have killed and maimed government officials with their bombs - the Ayatollah’s left arm is withered from such a bomb attack. And even as the U.S. invades and occupies Iran’s western and eastern neighbors, allows nuclear weapons in U.S. allies Israel and India and Pakistan, and places missiles in nearby Georgia, it is Iran that is painted as the aggressor. Thanks, America.

James Jackson doesn’t want us to think of these facts. The neocon agenda he has embraced doesn’t work when people know the truth about what the U.S. and Britain have been doing in the Middle East. He doesn’t want us to know of this history. But too many conservatives know. Like the WHO vision of millions dead in the swine flu, the neocon scare tactics now ring hollow.

Best regards,

Ragnar Nord

By now, we all know the CW-like drama of Coco, The Chin, and The Peacock. It’s hard to think of a time when late night comedy has attracted more attention, and Conan O’Brien, in particular, was funnier then ever—which is the one facet of the debacle that failed to get enough coverage.

Conan’s very public firing by NBC’s draconian, corporate oversight board (led by uber-Darth Vader Jeff Zucker) ticked O’Brien off in such an acute way, that the red-headed step-child in him came out swinging. He told jokes that came from a place of deep and profound earnestness that meant something to Conan personally, and while doing so, he unwittingly hit a collective anxiety about job loss at large. During his last—and best—week on air, the tallest man in show business was finally pulling the kind of numbers, publicity, viewers, and ratings the network was hoping for all along.

Conan’s “Late Night” brand of immature, college-appropriate humor always catered to a small demographic. And when he took over The Tonight Show, he always seemed on the defensive, reactive, never comfortable at the helm trying to find a broader audience. That is, until he got fired.

It was so thrilling! He looked like it was his first night at The Improv, and all that bottled up rage, sarcasm, and smarts were caramelized around some witty balls and tossed squarely at NBC’s bulls’ eye. And his jokes hit: “I’ve been having a hard time explaining this whole situation to my kids, because they’re still very young. So I had a doll made of myself, and now I can show my kids exactly where NBC touched daddy.” Again and again and again.

On his last Tonight Show appearance, ZZ Top and Beck played and Will Ferrell sang “Free Bird” while Conan ripped a guitar solo alongside them. I don’t think I’ve seen a smile that big since “Police Academy’s” Commandant Lassard got a surprise BJ at the mic stand. Conan was having a great time being the fun, feisty, witty, captivating truant that the Harvard Lampoon and Lorne Michaels both found so attractive in him.

Losing a job he’d worked seventeen years for made O’Brien’s jokes very personal and very good. Because they dealt with what’s going on in the States right now: corporate oversight, working hard and getting screwed by the man, and looking for a job, any job. As he said, “I’m Conan O’Brien, future Donkey Kong champion.”

All of a sudden, his wealthy, entitled, insular world coincided with the fate of millions of Americans, and, in a twist of fate, his jokes were speaking directly to the audience he’d been so desperately trying to reach.  Finally he understood what regular Americans face every single day. Conan said upon his dismissal in one of his monologues: “Hi, I’m Conan O’Brien and I’m just three days away from the biggest drinking binge in history.” You can almost hear a laid-off worker telling that joke to a buddy over a beer at a bar.

Americans began supporting Conan in droves, even those who’d never watched his program, and though a Harvard grad and multi-millionaire, he became the Everyman who was on a very public soapbox telling the Man where he could shove it. And since nothing kills mendacity faster than a late night comic with a killer punch line, Conan, with his rifle loaded, began firing off jokes about NBC shirking its responsibility. (Hell hath no fury like a comic scorned.) NBC was summarily chastened, depantsed and TKO’d on national TV. Humiliating Jeff Zucker in such a public way is what many out-of-work Americans wish they could’ve done to their bosses.

Comedians, often picked over and picked on in high school, are the ones who learned how to turn their tears into jokes in order to survive high school. When O’Brien was fired so nakedly, millions of people watched him relive those traumatic years he thought were long behind him. The results were humiliating for him but marvelous for us. As Zucker dutifully played teacher’s pet, O’Brien turned class clowning into an art form. Though he didn’t get his time slot, he earned some serious underdog capital (and a cool 30 mil) and found a relevant comedic voice that, while off the air, he should build upon in some public way. Because if Conan does, wherever he lands in the fall, he’ll find a very rapt, very loyal, and very large audience upon his return.

‘He is plainly some crazed moral retard’.

That stuck it to him. Or not. Yet on the night of 9/11, as I sat in a BBC Radio studio helping to dissect the bleak events of that day, it was the only response I could summon to the Al-Qa’eda ‘representative’ the Corporation had thoughtfully allowed on air. Make no mistake, I loathe such extremists. And such extremists had been around and preparing for a very long time. On that same radio show I was asked about the long-term ramifications of the attacks on the Twin Towers and Pentagon. War, I replied. War in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I hate to say I told you so. But I told you so, and I told you often. It was obvious to any who cared to look or think that the threat posed by mass terrorism was on the rise, that Osama bin Laden had a penchant for the spectacular, that the window-dressing response of Clinton in throwing a cruise-missile at an empty adobe hut somewhere in Afghanistan was risible as it was pointless.

For over a decade before 9/11 I had warned in lectures and in print of the encroaching menace of more nihilistic terror outfits inspired by a concept of the purity of violence and committed to destruction as the endgame in itself. Their lethal potency and scale of ambition were on the rise and our vulnerability invited attack. A propaganda coup was called for. So the evolution from using traditional bomb, bullet, and booby-trap toward employing something far more sinister began. The rest, as they say, is grim history and an awful lot of video-footage.

In 1990 (Jane’s Defence Weekly, May 12) I wrote: “Commentators argue terrorists will follow established and predictable norms in tactics, target selection and choice of weaponry. This may be a mistake in that it encourages a preconception of future threat developments and limits flexibility in developing an adequate security response…Terrorist groups will search for new targets and customized forms of atrocity.” Two years later (Jane’s Intelligence Review, November 1992), I added: ‘Few of us should imagine that modern terrorist groups would refrain from doing as much damage as possible with whatever means are available’. For good measure, in 1997 I published the thriller Dead Headers to illustrate the kinds of scenario I believed would be soon upon us and to argue the case for pre-emptive strikes to ‘dead head’ the terror organizations before they could act. Well, we didn’t. They did. People died.

It is not that I or others who voiced similar concerns were especially prescient or blessed with the gift of foresight, simply that western governments and their intelligence agencies were shamefully myopic and slow to react. They should have seen it coming. They should have had the balls to introduce protective measures at home and clamp down on Islamic radicalization and extremism (an affront and anathema to any western liberal democracy). They should have had the brains to go after the terrorist leaderships abroad before ever resorting to the expense in both lives and resource of a full-on military land campaign. On almost every count, they failed.

I have never been overly squeamish at the notion of extra-judicial executions for terrorists. These players make their bed and their choice—have become outlaws and combatants as soon as they cross to the dark side—and are therefore fair game. Negotiation and political engagement were never their agenda. Targeted killing of them should be ours. It is a proportionate act taken in self-defense; it is discriminate and designed to prevent greater loss of life down the line; it is just.

On its own, this hard-hitting and kinetic approach provides no cure-all solution. But as part of a layered defense it has its place. Of course there should be process, diligence and careful planning and the minimizing of civilian deaths. And, naturally, there are flaws. Few should forget how Israel—with its Wrath of God operations against the Black September movement—was blind to the larger picture and the preparations by Arab states for the 1973 launch of the Yom Kippur campaign. Fewer still should be unaware of the possibility of backlash and increased Pakistani militancy caused by CIA Reaper-drone attacks on Taliban and Al-Qa’eda targets in Waziristan and the tribal areas. During WW2, Britain’s Special Operations Executive developed a toxic lavatory paper in order to assassinate senior Wehrmacht officers and Nazi Party officials (an entirely new meaning to the term ‘wiping out the enemy’, I suppose). It was never deployed for fear of causing indiscriminate casualties. We should learn that lesson. Better the finesse, fentanyl (synthetic opiate) and exploding telephone handsets favored by Israeli kidon units than a brute sledgehammer to crack these particular nuts. There is ever room and need for hearts and minds.

Forgive my tough stance and reluctance to swallow whole the line One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. If that is what you want to believe. Maybe I was conditioned by having an uncle who—as a burns surgeon—operated on victims of both the King David Hotel bombing in Jerusalem in 1946 and the Birmingham pub bombings almost thirty years later. Or perhaps it was knowing as a teenager three friends of mine who lost their fathers (a diplomat, a surgeon, a judge) to the murderous instincts of the Provisional IRA. I sometimes wonder how many of the ineffably brave members of the New York fire and police departments who gave their lives to aid others at the World Trade Centre, by default or inclination supported the IRA through contributions to Noraid and Sinn Fein. Irony can be a bitter and bloody thing.

Total casualties from acts of terrorism remain relatively low. That is not for want of trying on the part of the extremists. And with the skills-set of the terrorists growing and the bottleneck in availability of nuclear fissile material likely to ease in the years ahead, we are in for a challenge. Intelligence-gathering often demands still waters in which to fish. Occasionally, we need to dynamite the pond.
There was a scene in Dead Headers in which I wrote of a terror attack on New York.

In its aftermath, the silence spread across Manhattan and west throughout the land. It would not last. The Emergency had only just begun.

Some details were inaccurate, a common complaint with all prediction. My chief error was to describe the actions of a suicide-bomber in blowing himself up inside the Statue of Liberty. I judged that the readers would not believe me had I demolished the Twin Towers.

There are some people who can carry off this having a girlfriend in every town thing: sailors for one. There’s also a number who can’t, as Tiger Woods recently found out. Being of that age when the mid-life crisis moves one from simple envy of those who can to trying to work out quite how one can lead me to investigate.

A-Rod for example: I believe he’s something to do with what we English call “rounders”, a game we give up at 11 years of age. But apparently his inability to move on and learn cricket properly hasn’t stopped him from becoming both exceedingly rich and exceedingly famous. They might have something to do with his ability to date and then dump both Madonna, a rock star and Kate Hudson, ex-wife of one (apparently the Black Crowes drug scene was too much even for the daughter of an actress) and then move on to, as we’re told he currently is:

Alex Rodriguez is playing the field like a man possessed in the aftermath of his split with Kate Hudson, and has been on dates with a cavalcade of women in the past two weeks—including a meeting in Manhattan with old flame Madonna.

Sources tell Page Six the Yankee slugger has been seen with a pretty brunette from New York and a blond model in Miami, in addition to a secret rendezvous with the Material Girl while in town two weeks ago.

OK, so, wealth, fame and physical fitness perhaps. However, there are also other examples out there: John Mayer perhaps.

“I can text whatever I want to anybody in the world; I’m not married. I write a lot of dirty text messages to girls, and you’ve never seen any of them. Why? Because if a girl brought a dirty text message from me to the newspapers, they’d say ‘I don’t have an angle here. Someone wants to wear your ass like a hat? Big deal.”

Women as headgear doesn’t particularly entice as my own kink, middle age or not, but given that John Mayer isn’t hugely physically fit, hugely famous nor hugely rich maybe there’s a chance still?

Perhaps we can find the answer in our third example, a certain John Terry. No, none of you will ever have heard of him but in England he’s hugely famous, being captain until this afternoon of the England football side. He’s also hugely wealthy and physically fit. He did indeed have a string of lovers including, in a move that might have been unwise, the girlfriend of one of his team mates. Who he got pregnant and then procured an abortion for.

However, John Terry did not get away with it, when the news came out of his 8 sidelines there was a few days of dithering and then he was sacked as the captain. The newspapers have been full of “John Terry’s Shame” stories all week.

So of our four (fifth if we include the entirely non-famous, non-rich and non-physically fit such as your humble correspondent) two were able to get away with at least pursuing a harem fit for installation in a seraglio while two were not: John T and Tiger. What is it that marks them out as different from John M and Rod?

Perhaps it’s simply that we’re used to reading about the “loves” (the quotation marks are there because the time spans always seem far too short to support “love” unless we are using the euphemism for sex that we make when adding the word “making”) of Rod and John M in a way that we’re not of the other two? Who would be surprised to hear that either had a new girlfriend? Is it just that, that they are no longer news stories any more but olds stories?

Mr. Mayer to the microphone please:

Tiger Woods’ problems come from him being married.

Ahh, that’s it. As was John Terry of course (and as is your humble correspondent, it turns out that fame and fortune aren’t the limiting factors) and thus the failure of his plans to spread the seed.

If you think about it actually it’s all rather sweet. Quaint even: there was a time when we expected politicians to keep their promises while we accepted that a man might get a little frisky inside marriage. Now it appears that a politician is required merely not to fall over drunk while voting to keep our approval while something as mild as breaking a marriage vow is grounds for dismissal.

The last word though should go to the ex-captain, John Terry:

Terry finished the interview by saying his favorite sportsman is Tiger Woods.

Republicans already counting the seats they will pick up this fall should keep in mind Obama has a big card yet to play.

Should the president declare he has gone the last mile for a negotiated end to Iran’s nuclear program and impose the “crippling” sanctions he promised in 2008, America would be on an escalator to confrontation that could lead straight to war.

And should war come, that would be the end of GOP dreams of adding three-dozen seats in the House and half a dozen in the Senate.

Harry Reid is surely aware a U.S. clash with Iran, with him at the president’s side, could assure his re-election. Last week, Reid whistled through the Senate, by voice vote, a bill to put us on that escalator.

Senate bill 2799 would punish any company exporting gasoline to Iran. Though swimming in oil, Iran has a limited refining capacity and must import 40 percent of the gas to operate its cars and trucks and heat its homes.

And cutting off a country’s oil or gas is a proven path to war.

In 1941, the United States froze Japan’s assets, denying her the funds to pay for the U.S. oil on which she relied, forcing Tokyo either to retreat from her empire or seize the only oil in reach, in the Dutch East Indies.

The only force able to interfere with a Japanese drive into the East Indies? The U.S. Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor.

Egypt’s Gamel Abdel Nasser in 1967 threatened to close the Straits of Tiran between the Red Sea and Gulf of Aqaba to ships going to the Israeli port of Elath. That would have cut off 95 percent of Israel’s oil.

Israel’s response: a pre-emptive war that destroyed Egypt’s air force and put Israeli troops at Sharm el-Sheikh on the Straits of Tiran.

Were Reid and colleagues seeking to strengthen Obama’s negotiating hand?

The opposite is true. The Senate is trying to force Obama’s hand, box him in, restrict his freedom of action, by making him impose sanctions that would cut off the negotiating track and put us on a track to war—a war to deny Iran weapons that the U.S. Intelligence community said in December 2007 Iran gave up trying to acquire in 2003.

Sound familiar?

Republican leader Mitch McConnell has made clear the Senate is seizing control of the Iran portfolio. “If the Obama administration will not take action against this regime, then Congress must.”

U.S. interests would seem to dictate supporting those elements in Iran who wish to be rid of the regime and re-engage the West. But if that is our goal, the Senate bill, and a House version that passed 412 to 12, seem almost diabolically perverse.

For a cutoff in gas would hammer Iran’s middle class. The Revolutionary Guard and Basij militia on their motorbikes would get all they need. Thus the leaders of the Green Movement who have stood up to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Ayatollah oppose sanctions that inflict suffering on their own people.

Cutting off gas to Iran would cause many deaths. And the families of the sick, the old, the weak, the women and the children who die are unlikely to feel gratitude toward those who killed them.

And despite the hysteria about Iran’s imminent testing of a bomb, the U.S. intelligence community still has not changed its finding that Tehran is not seeking a bomb.

The low-enriched uranium at Natanz, enough for one test, has neither been moved nor enriched to weapons grade. Ahmadinejad this week offered to take the West’s deal and trade it for fuel for its reactor. Iran’s known nuclear facilities are under U.N. watch. The number of centrifuges operating at Natanz has fallen below 4,000. There is speculation they are breaking down or have been sabotaged.

And if Iran is hell-bent on a bomb, why has Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair not revised the 2007 finding and given us the hard evidence?

U.S. anti-missile ships are moving into the Gulf. Anti-missile batteries are being deployed on the Arab shore. Yet, Gen. David Petraeus warned yesterday that a strike on Iran could stir nationalist sentiment behind the regime.

Nevertheless, the war drums have again begun to beat.

Daniel Pipes in a National Review Online piece featured by the Jerusalem Post—“How to Save the Obama Presidency: Bomb Iran”—urges Obama to make a “dramatic gesture to change the public perception of him as a lightweight, bumbling ideologue” by ordering the U.S. military to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Citing six polls, Pipes says Americans support an attack today and will “presumably rally around the flag” when the bombs fall.

Will Obama cynically yield to temptation, play the war card and make “conservatives swoon,” in Pipes’ phrase, to save himself and his party? We shall see.

An invitation to a Vanity Fair dinner is not a bad one to have, though the very thought of having to communicate with famous and fabulous people makes me twitchy. Hollywood types really only like powerful people, and few of them are capable of polite conversation with individuals they don’t know. The conversation usually goes something like this: “Hello, I’m Mandolyna…” At this point the star usually produces an awkward smile, and walks away. But this night was going to be different, I said to myself. I was going to inquire and flatter the stars into a little dialogue. After all, I had been included in this intimate affair, I must have something to offer.

The dinner at Harry’s Bar was in honor of, Tom Ford, after the London premiere of his film, A Single Man. I was seated between Carlos Souza, a charming Brazilian jeweler part of Valentino’s entourage, and Jon Kortajarena, one of the film’s sexy actors on Madonna’s to-do list, ranked by Forbes as the world’s eighth most successful male model. I asked him about his career, his other interests, and even spoke to him in his native Spanish, but he had no interest in me, or in feigning interest, opting instead to chain-smoke Marlboros elsewhere.

This lackluster seduction was just a small obstacle on my climb to success with the glitterati, but no twenty-four year old model was going to ruin my plan. I made my way over to Graydon Carter’s table to check on my walker for the evening, the esteemed writer William Shawcross. I had much more success with this lot, but then, most of them were not actors, and people over forty are much easier to talk to than many of my peers. From my new perch at Graydon’s table I chatted with William, and my new besty, Liz Elliot, from House & Garden, while peering into the lives of people like Thandie Newton, Brian Ferry, Guy Ritchie, Elle MacPherson, Mario Testino, and Kate Moss.

Toward the end of the evening I found myself speaking to the film’s star, Colin Firth, and his enchanting wife, Livia. Success at last. An actor, and a gent, and an apparently normal person capable of a brief exchange. I nervously babbled on about how I had seen his colleagues revere him to excess for his charitable work on some English award show. He didn’t walk away. Then I thought, more flattery, maybe that wasn’t enough. I said he was infinitely watchable. He turned to his wife and asked her if she found him infinitely watchable. That lead absolutely nowhere, so I congratulated him on the film, and he thanked me for coming. This time, I walked away.

But just when I thought things couldn’t get any better, Tom Ford took my hand in both of his, and looked me in the eyes as if I were the only woman in the world he wanted to go to bed with. My persistence was really paying off now. This was the first time I have ever been fully acknowledged by a famous person. More nervous chatter flew out of my mouth, something about how my dinner companions had all seen the movie multiple times, and how I would go see it again and again. He smiled, all the while looking deeply into my eyes. Like heroin, one sniff, and I was hooked…The fuss over Ford is definitely merited. He must be a zen master. His grace and beauty alone make him a megastar. But the list goes on of course, and Ford has many accomplishments, and talents to his credit, including A Single Man.

Ford wrote, directed, and financed the film. Based on a Christopher Isherwood story, A Single Man is, as one might imagine, an aesthete’s dream, reminiscent of the 1967 hit, The Graduate. Ford’s interpretation of 1960s Los Angeles is thoroughly glamorous. For anyone who doesn’t know the city well, one is transported. The air, the light, and the loneliness of L.A. comes right off the screen. Ford’s measured personal nature is a powerful force in the movie’s rhythm, and he uses slow-motion to help the audience feel the weight a depressed person bears navigating daily life. The beat picks up with a deliciously humorous and macabre scene where Firth’s character, George, attempts to take his own life. This is interrupted by a telephone call from Julianne Moore’s, Charley, who lives an equally sad yet stylish life. She plays his best-friend and former lover impeccably. But Moore’s English accent is off. It is only slightly improved since her previous attempt in The End of the Affair, distracting from an otherwise captivating experience.

The number of homo-erotic scenes throughout the film may be off-putting for some, though the story speaks more to the isolation within us all, than to the life. That night at Harry’s Bar Nicky Haslam bemoaned homosexuality. “Being gay is so common, I can’t stand it,”  he said. Haslam is right, and anything but an ordinary gay. So too, Ford, who is irrefutably unique. Along with his debut film, and my brief encounters with cordial superstars, it was an exceptional evening indeed.

Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan answered that he had placed his trust in a flawed theory when he was called before Congress to explain why he, Goldman Sachs Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and Deputy Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, prevented Brooksley Born, head of the Commodity Futures Trading Corporation, a government regulatory agency, from doing her job of regulating over-the-counter derivatives.

The efficient markets theory is that unregulated markets are efficient and rational. According to this theory in which Greenspan placed his trust, unregulated markets produce the best possible result. Any regulatory interference worsens the outcome.

Greenspan blamed his own bad judgment on a theory. The theory, or Greenspan’s understanding of it, nevertheless still holds sway as Congress has proved impotent to re-regulate the gambling casino that is Wall Street. Clearly, the theory serves powerful interests.

But what is the truth?

The truth is that markets are a social institution. Their efficiency depends on the rules that govern the behavior of people in markets. When free market economists talk about markets deciding this or that, they are reifying a social institution and ascribing to it decision-making power. Socialists make the same mistake when they blame markets for the results of human action. But, of course, markets do not act or make decisions. People act and make decisions, and markets reflect the decisions and actions of people.

The entire debate over regulation is misconstrued. It is not the market, an efficient social institution, which is regulated. What is regulated is the behavior of people in markets. If you want good results from markets, good regulation of human behavior is a requirement.

The market is like a computer. Garbage in, garbage out.

If people who use markets are not regulated, they issue fraudulent financial instruments. They leverage assets with absurd amounts of debt. They market their instruments with fraudulent investment grade ratings. They deal themselves aces.

Did Greenspan not know this? Was he a victim of a theory or an enabler of greed unleashed by the absence of regulation?

The way to bring socialists and capitalists together is to recognize that markets are efficient and that self-interested human behavior requires social regulation.

The failure to regulate financial markets has produced enormous losses to all Americans except the super-rich. But the U.S. government is guilty of an even greater failure. Washington has not only permitted but also encouraged the unemployment of its citizens by enabling greed-driven corporations to send American jobs abroad in order to maximize profits for CEOs’ bonuses, shareholders, and Wall Street.

As Ralph Gomory has made clear, economic theory has been shattered because there is no longer any connection between the profits of American companies and the welfare of Americans. The profits of American companies are derived from the cheap labor in offshored locations and are at the expense of the American work force.

This dispossession of American labor has been heralded by offshoring’s pimps in the major universities as “the New Economy.”

The “New Economy” is a hoax like most everything else the bought-and-paid-for-media feeds to Americans. There is no new economy. There is an unemployed economy. The headlined unemployment rate is just over 10 percent. The real unemployment rate, as measured by the current methodology is 17 percent. The unemployment rate as measured by the methodology of 1980 is 22 percent.

If jobs offshoring is a benefit to America, as the hired pimps of the transnational corporations claim, why is more than one-fifth of the U.S. work force unemployed? Why does the U.S. have the largest trade deficits in world history? Why is the U.S. dollar losing value over time to other tradable currencies?

Greed, and elected representatives who are toadies to special interests, are decimating the American economy.

Consider President Obama’s budgets for 2010 and 2011. The combined red ink is $2.9 trillion. No one anywhere in the world has this kind of money to lend to Washington. How will these massive deficits, never before experienced on earth, be financed? They can only be financed by the Federal Reserve destroying its own balance sheet by its purchase of toxic financial instruments from the banks thereby providing the banks with cash with which to buy the Treasury’s bonds, or by the Federal Reserve itself purchasing the Treasury’s bonds by creating new money, or by another collapse in equity values that sends investors fleeing into “safe” Treasury bonds.

American power is on the precipice, about to fall. Perhaps it is a good thing. The world will be rid of bullying, of invasions of innocent countries based on blatant lies, of torture and murder of woman and children, of redistribution of income from the poor to the rich.

The criminal record accumulated by the United States makes it the least indispensable country on earth.

As you’ve no doubt heard by now, leading Oscar nominees Avatar and The Hurt Locker are directed by ex-spouses: James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow, who were married from 1989-1991. What you might not know is that traces of each can be seen in the other’s movie.

But first, the question of the female director. Although women have directed such solid films as Big, Clueless, and Sleepless in Seattle, Bigelow is only the fourth woman out of the last 170 Best Director nominees. Oscar nods are decided by members of each craft, and the old boys club of directors doesn’t see much need for diversity.

Bigelow, however, has long been an honorary old boy, at least since Cameron executive-produced her boggling 1991 action flick about surfing bankrobbers, Point Break, which starred Keanu Reeves, Patrick Swayze, and Gary Busey. As that cast suggests, Bigelow, who was trained in modern art theory, is intellectually rigorous about keeping her films non-intellectual.

And that, ironically, makes her films simple enough to intellectualize over. The Hurt Locker begins with a title card: “The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug.” The rest of the movie illustrates that single statement.

Hit movies are generally about characters Learning Important Lessons that Will Change Their Lives Forever. The Hurt Locker, on the other hand, is about a man, a reckless but brilliant Explosive Ordnance Disposal technician, finding out what he already knows: that he doesn’t want to change his life, even if it will kill him.

Indeed, that largely sums up Bigelow’s long career (she’s now 58): over-the-top explorations of male obsessiveness. And who provides a more memorable example of masculine single-mindedness than her prodigious and difficult ex-husband?

Is it a coincidence that the name bestowed upon the hero of The Hurt Locker, who loves his job more than his wife, is “Sergeant First Class Will James?” Typically a Christian name, “James” makes an awkward surname in a movie in which the surest clue to how the three EOD soldiers feel at any moment is whether they are calling each other by their first names (comradely), last names (business-like), or ranks (homicidal). Perhaps Bigelow finds the name “James” personally compelling enough to hazard the confusion its use induces in its audience. (It’s hard to imagine the clarity-loving James Cameron taking a similar risk.)

Or is it a coincidence that Bigelow rather resembles a real-life version of Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley, that classic nerd’s heroine in Cameron’s 1986 sci-fi film Aliens? Like Weaver (whom Cameron also cast in Avatar), Bigelow is almost six feet tall. And unsurprisingly, Cameron, to whom too much is never enough, made Avatar’s blue leading lady ten feet tall.

Both Weaver and Bigelow are well bred, lady-like, and attractive, but Bigelow is also an expert at blowing stuff up. Bigelow is a real Ripley. For example, like the EOD specialists whom The Hurt Locker portrays, Bigelow disdains typical Hollywood gas fireball explosions. She strove to make her blasts “a very dense, black, thick, almost completely opaque explosion filled with lots of particulate matter and shrapnel.”

Bigelow can talk explosions and lenses all day long. And that’s what The Hurt Locker is: soldiers filmed in Baghdad-like Amman, Jordan through telephoto lenses that deliver the exact opposite of Avatar’s famously immersive 3D.

The telephoto effect compresses the apparent distance between the near and the far. For instance, in this typical street scene, if an Improvised Explosive Device were concealed within that hulk of the car behind the American G.I., would he be within the blast zone? The viewer can’t even guess.

This art house action flick transpires in a disorientating, flat, and cluttered pictorial space. Bigelow’s telephoto shots keep the viewer from being able to discern what’s safely far away from the three heroes and what’s close enough to kill them, much like the potentially lethal uncertainty confronting the soldiers as they try to disarm IEDs of unknown magnitudes.

Yet it concludes with a quiet bang. Back in America, still somehow in one piece, Sgt.  James is dispatched by his wife to pick out a box of breakfast cereal. After all those telephoto depictions of war, Bigelow unleashes one memorable fisheye lens shot of the valiant warrior in a supermarket cereal aisle seemingly a mile long, befuddled by peace.

“It was a dark and stormy night, but we were young and thought we could do anything. There was no looking back. None of that David Copperfield kind of nonsense. We were already men. We had our finger on what was going on between self and culture. We did away with the traditional architecture of the short story. It was bull—-t, so we dumped it. There was no beginning and no middle, just a lot of emotion, irony and mood. MMMooodd. It was Zen, man, and it never snapped shut. We said less, and it counted for more, and the suckers went wild. Holden grabbed them by the coogies and never let them go. Shawnie loved that stuff, but Susan Hayward really blew it in Uncle Wiggy. She of the Foolish Heart.

They said I liked young women and manipulated them. Of course I did. Wouldn’t you? That bitch Joyce Maynard took me for some ride. I love you more for yourself than Catcher, she used to say, while I stuffed her. And like a fool I believed her. We used to lie down after chow and she’d tell me about the millions—millions—of boys who went to bed at night thinking they were Holden. And when I’d tell her those millions went to bed jerking off thinking of Marilyn Monroe, she’d squeal like a stuffed pig, and make me come.

They say I am a recluse. Of course I am. Look what they did to Papa. Philip Roth, John Updike, Harold Brodkey, they say I shaped them all, and perhaps I did. Pitch perfect dialogue and sharp social observation is what it’s all about. Sure, Holden was my Gatsby, I got his fierce alienation just right. Adolescence and alienation, morality and distrust, you don’t need to be a genius. When The Catcher first caught fire, I thought only of getting laid. Holden’s inner voice was talking about a need which comes before love—honesty—or so they told me. I was dying to tell them the only need which comes before love is getting laid. Thank God, I didn’t.

When I was writing The Catcher I was horny as hell. Marilyn, Jayne, Ava, Lana, they all drove me nuts. So I punished the bitches by showing them that love does not mean sex. I gave Holden an instinct of celibacy. And although my old man was a Jew, I never cared for all that bullshit. I made the only two good people Holden meets to be Catholic nuns.

After that it was all down hill. I wanted to save the world but the world did not want to be saved. So I said fuck it. I invented the Glass family, a group ritually washing away the world’s guilt. This is a world of hypocrisy and false values, a world that needs love but does not know how to find it. The people who use the word love are all phonies, starting with that jerk Bono. The only man I trust and whom I’ve never met is Taki, the Greek Spectator correspondent.”

Is this a joke? Believe it or not, it’s not. Apparently it will all soon come out, with the great man’s papers. How do I know it’s not a hoax? Ah, here we’re getting into deep waters. I am not at liberty to reveal certain facts, suffice it to say that—unlike Clifford Irving and Howard Hughes—I have been in touch with Mr. S in the past. Better yet, he chose to contact me. The only clue I will give is that Mr. S was a Spectator reader, and received the best weekly in the English-speaking world under a pseudonym, but in his New Hampshire address. Toward the end, he hinted to me that he read Takimag, but I’m not sure he could handle the internet or a word processor. Apparently I stand to inherit something from him, but that’s the least of my concerns. What I’m worried about is publicity, or the movie that’s sure to follow. I can see it now. “JD & Taki, a love story between two real men who never met.” Or “JD & Taki, a movie that will melt your heart the way Melvin & Howard did.”

Joking aside, as soon as my pen pal died I contacted both the sainted editor of the Speccie as well as our executive editor. Both doubted my story but immediately changed their minds when I produced the proof. They both advised me to go with it but not to mention what I have in my possession until the will is probated. I have obviously also taken legal advice which, incidentally, was the same as the sainted one’s.

I cannot go into details for legal reasons, but JD Salinger and I never spoke on the telephone, we only corresponded. He loathed modern Britain almost as much as I do, and particularly hated what he called phonies like Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis and, surprisingly, VS Naipaul. In fact he once hinted I should beat Naipaul up, but dropped it after I told him I was a friend of Shiva Naipaul’s, as well as of his wife Jenny. Nearly all adults were suspect to JD Salinger, as well they should have been—that’s why he has a man who Holden respects make a homosexual pass at the youngster. A boy alone in a world of hypocrisy and false values. That was the real JD Salinger, at least the one I got to know through hundreds of letters. Stay tuned.

Readers ask if the financial crisis is over, if the recovery is for real and, if not, what are Americans’ prospects. The short answer is that the financial crisis is not over, the recovery is not real, and the U.S. faces a far worse crisis than the financial one. Here is the situation as I understand it:
The global crisis is understood as a banking crisis brought on by the mindless deregulation of the U.S. financial arena. Investment banks leveraged assets to highly irresponsible levels, issued questionable financial instruments with fraudulent investment grade ratings, and issued the instruments through direct sales to customers rather than through markets.

The crisis was initiated when the U.S. allowed Lehman Brothers to fail, thus threatening money market funds everywhere.The crisis was used by the investment banks, which controlled U.S. economic policy, to secure massive subsidies to their profits from a taxpayer bailout and from the Federal Reserve. How much of the crisis was real and how much was hype is not known at this time.

As most of the derivative instruments had never been priced in the market, and as their exact composition between good and bad loans was unknown (the instruments are based on packages of securitized loans), the mark-to-market rule drove the values very low, thus threatening the solvency of many financial institutions. Also, the rule prohibiting continuous shorting had been removed, making it possible for hedge funds and speculators to destroy the market capitalization of targeted firms by driving down their share prices. 

The obvious solution was to suspend the mark-to-market rule until some better idea of the values of the derivative instruments could be established and to prevent the abuse of shorting that was destroying market capitalization. Instead, the Goldman Sachs people in charge of the U.S. Treasury and, perhaps, the Federal Reserve as well, used the crisis to secure subsidies for the banks from U.S. taxpayers and from the Federal Reserve. It looks like a manipulated crisis as well as a real one due to greed unleashed by financial deregulation.

The crisis will not be over until financial regulation is restored, but Wall Street has been able to block re-regulation. Moreover, the response to the crisis has planted seeds for new crises. Government budget deficits have exploded. In the U.S. the fiscal year 2009 federal budget deficit was $1.4 trillion, three times higher than the 2008 deficit.  President Obama’s budget deficits for 2010 and 2011, according to the latest report, will total $2.9 trillion, and this estimate is based on the assumption that the Great Recession is over. Where is the U.S. Treasury to borrow $4.3 trillion in three years?

This sum greatly exceeds the combined trade surpluses of America’s trading partners, the recycling of which has financed past U.S. budget deficits, and perhaps exceeds total world savings.
It is unclear how the 2009 budget deficit was financed.  A likely source was the bank reserves created for financial institutions by the Federal Reserve when it purchased their toxic financial instruments. These reserves were then used to purchase the new Treasury debt. In other words, the budget deficit was financed by deterioration in the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve. How long can such an exchange of assets continue before the Federal Reserve has to finance the government’s deficit by creating new money?

Similar deficits and financing problems have affected the EU, particularly its financially weaker members. To conclude: the initial crisis has planted seeds for two new crises: rising government debt and inflation.

A third crisis is also in place. This crisis will occur when confidence is lost in the U.S. dollar as world reserve currency. This crisis will disrupt the international payments mechanism. It will be especially difficult for the U.S. as the country will lose the ability to pay for its imports with its own currency. U.S. living standards will decline as the ability to import declines.

The financial crisis is essentially a U.S. crisis, spread abroad by the sale of toxic financial instruments. The rest of the world got into trouble by trusting Wall Street. The real American crisis is much worse than the financial crisis. The real American crisis is the offshoring of U.S. manufacturing, industrial, and professional service jobs such as software engineering and information technology.

Jobs offshoring was initiated by Wall Street pressures on corporations for higher earnings and by performance-related bonuses becoming the main form of managerial compensation. Corporate executives increased profits and obtained bonuses by substituting cheaper foreign labor for U.S. labor in the production of goods and services marketed in the U.S.

Jobs offshoring is destroying the ladders of upward mobility that made the U.S. an opportunity society and eroding the value of a university education. For the first decade of the 21st century, the U.S. economy has been able to create net new jobs only in domestic nontradable services, such as waitresses, bartenders, sales, health and social assistance and, prior to the real estate collapse, construction. These jobs are lower paid than the jobs were that have been offshored, and these jobs do not produce goods and services for export.
Jobs offshoring has increased the U.S. trade deficit, putting more pressure on the dollar’s role as reserve currency. When offshored goods and services return to the U.S., they add to imports, thus worsening the trade imbalance.

The policy of jobs offshoring is insane. It is shifting U.S. GDP growth to the offshored locations, such as China, thus halting growth in U.S. consumer incomes. For the past decade, U.S. households substituted an increase in indebtedness for the lack of growth in income in order to continue increasing their consumption. With their home equity refinanced and spent, real estate values down, and credit card debt at unsustainable levels, it is no longer possible for the U.S. economy to base its growth on a rise in consumer debt. This fact is a brake on U.S. economic recovery.

Stimulus packages cannot substitute for the growth in real income. As so many high value-added, high productivity U.S. jobs have been offshored, there is no way to achieve real growth in U.S. personal incomes. Stimulus spending simply adds to government debt and pressure on the dollar, and sows seeds for high inflation.

The U.S. dollar survives as reserve currency because there is no apparent substitute. The euro has its own problems. Moreover, the euro is the currency of a non-existent political entity. National sovereignty continues despite the existence of a common currency on the continent (but not in Great Britain). If the dollar is abandoned, then the result is likely to be bilateral settlements in countries’ own currencies, as Brazil and China now are doing. Alternatively, John Maynard Keynes’ bancor scheme could be implemented, as it does not require a reserve currency country. Keynes’ plan is designed to maintain a country’s trade balance. Only a reserve currency country can get its trade and budget deficits so out of balance as the U.S. has done. The prospect of U.S. default and/or inflation and decline in the dollar’s exchange value is a threat to the reserve system.

The threats to the U.S. economy are extreme. Yet, neither the Obama administration, the Republican opposition, economists, Wall Street, nor the media show any awareness. Instead, the public is provided with spin about recovery and with higher spending on pointless wars that are hastening America’s economic and financial ruin.

New York City is for the rich and the young. If you’re not either of those things, get out. Those who stay are doomed to sitting in a tiny apartment all alone and bitching about rich kids in love. This is what the majority of my friends do. They gripe about mythical trust fund hipsters who are into fashion and partying and other shallow pursuits. It reminds me of tough guys from the 50s using “pretty boy” as a derogatory term. You realize you just called that guy young and attractive, right?

No group of flippant and successful kids sums up this vacuum of hate more than Vampire Weekend. They are a New York band from the right side of the tracks that sing about pretty girls and having fun and sometimes they even do it using African music! Can you even wrap your head around the blasphemy? “I miss old New York” the forgotten geriatrics moan before mumbling, “These guys are ripping off black music so they can do coke with socialites.” (Are there any American bands that aren’t ripping off black music?)

I personally never understood someone complaining about someone else having money. Music snobs vilified The Strokes because they came from money. The singer’s father owned a modeling agency and therefore their songs suck. The people who did this complaining were middle class kids from small town America who moved to New York for exactly the kind of scene The Strokes created. The real beef with these bands is “They made something and I didn’t so they must have cheated.”

In the case of Vampire Weekend however, there is a much bigger picture their critics don’t get. The band’s singer comes from Bronxville High School, which is in the affluent suburb of Westchester. Thousands of children lost their parents on 9-11 but this school was hit particularly hard due to the disproportional number of parents who worked in finance. On the actual day, the school became a temporary bunker where hundreds of kids waited for parents who never came. At that year’s graduation ceremony, almost half the kids were staring out at a proud mother who was also a grieving widow. This led to a whole new generation of hedonism and apathy. They didn’t kill themselves but they turned to a smorgasbord of prescription pills my generation never had access to. Cocaine regained a popularity it hadn’t seen since the 80s and friends disappeared into the city where they could really focus on addiction. Money often does a lot more damage to young kids than drugs and these kids were left with inheritances that meant they’d never have to work again. Why get sober?

In the midst of this limitless self-abuse, there was a group of kids who veered in the opposite direction and embraced an almost sappy optimism. They swore off drugs, went back to school and some even embraced religion. This scene is the opposite of punk rock and instead of screaming about “No future,” they sang, “You can turn your back on the bitter world.” I saw Vampire Weekend play at East River Park when they first started and although the turnout was paltry, every single person there was dancing. This is what people don’t get. This band is about young people enjoying life—no matter what. They aren’t simply saying, “Put down the champagne, let’s go play tennis.” They’re saying, “Put down the razor blade, let’s go play tennis.”

It’s almost impossible for bitter, old New Yorkers to feel sympathy for rich white kids, especially when said kids are successful and having fun. I find Vampire Weekend inspiring and thoroughly enjoy their carefree music and I’m not alone. The first single from their new album (the one about the bitter world) debuted at number one and the band is headlining the music festival Coachella with platinum-selling rapper Jay- Z. This success will only make the bitter backlash more furious but like all adults complaining, the kids won’t hear it. They’re too busy having fun.

A month after Germany surrendered in May 1945, America’s eyes turned to the Far East, where the bloodiest battle of the Pacific war was joined on the island of Okinawa.

Twelve thousand U.S. soldiers and Marines would die—twice as many dead in 82 days of fighting as have died in all the years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Within weeks of the battle’s end came Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Three weeks later, Gen. MacArthur took the Japanese surrender on the battleship Missouri.

That was 65 years ago, as far away in time from today as the Marines’ arrival at Da Nang was from Teddy Roosevelt’s charge up San Juan Hill.

Yet the Marines are still on Okinawa. But, in 2006, the United States negotiated a $26 billion deal to move 8,000 to Guam and the other Marines from the Futenma air base in the south to the more isolated town of Nago on the northern tip. Okinawans have long protested the crime, noise and pollution at Futenma.

The problem arose last year when the Liberal Democratic Party that negotiated the deal was ousted and the Democratic Party of Japan elected on a promise to pursue a policy more balanced between Beijing and Washington.

The new prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, indicated his unease with the Futenma deal, and promised to review it and decide by May. Voters in Nago just elected a mayor committed to keeping the new base out.

This weekend, thousands demonstrated in Tokyo against moving the Marine air station to Nago. Some demanded removal of all U.S. forces from Japan. After 65 years, they want us out. And Prime Minister Hatoyama has been feeding the sentiment. In January, he terminated Japan’s eight-year mission refueling U.S. ships aiding in the Afghan war effort.

All of which raises a question. If Tokyo does not want Marines on Okinawa, why stay? And if Japanese regard Marines as a public nuisance, rather than a protective force, why not remove the irritant and bring them home?

Indeed, why are we still defending Japan? She is no longer the ruined nation of 1945, but the second-largest economy on earth and among the most technologically advanced.

The Sino-Soviet bloc against which we defended her in the Cold War dissolved decades ago. The Soviet Union no longer exists. China is today a major trading partner of Japan. Russia and India have long borders with China, but neither needs U.S. troops to defend them.

Should a clash come between China and Japan over the disputed Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, why should that involve us?

Comes the retort: American troops are in Japan to defend South Korea and Taiwan. But South Korea has a population twice that of the North, an economy 40 times as large, access to the most advanced weapons in the U.S. arsenal and a U.S. commitment to come to her defense by air and sea in any second Korean War.

And if there is a second Korean War, why should the 28,000 U.S. troops still in Korea, many on the DMZ, or Marines from Futenma have to fight and die? Is South Korea lacking for soldiers? Seoul, too, has been the site of anti-American demonstrations demanding we get out.

Why do we Americans seem more desperate to defend these countries than their people are to have us defend them? Is letting go of the world we grew up in so difficult?

Consider Taiwan. On his historic trip to Beijing in 1972, Richard Nixon agreed Taiwan was part of China. Jimmy Carter recognized Beijing as the sole legitimate government. Ronald Reagan committed us to cut back arms sales to Taiwan.

Yet, last week, we announced a $6.4 billion weapons sale to an island we agree is a province of China. Beijing, whose power is a product of the trade deficits we have run, is enraged that we are arming the lost province she is trying to bring back to the motherland.

Is it worth a clash with China to prevent Taiwan from assuming the same relationship to Beijing the British acceded to with Hong Kong? In tourism, trade, travel and investment, Taiwan is herself deepening her relationship with the mainland. Is it not time for us to cut the cord?

With the exception of the Soviet Union, few nations in history have suffered such a relative decline in power and influence as the United States in the last decade. We are tied down in two wars, are universally disliked and are running back-to-back deficits of 10 percent of gross domestic product, as our debt is surging to 100 percent of GDP.

A strategic retreat from Eurasia to our own continent and country is inevitable. Let it begin by graciously acceding to Japan’s request we remove our Marines from Okinawa and politely inquiring if they wish us to withdraw U.S. forces from the Home Islands, as well.

Most African governments are at best lacklustre in their response to environmental problems; at worst, in a host of countries they are fully complicit in a wide range of unlawful activities ranging from poaching, to uncontrolled fishing and logging. Worsening the problem are the ubiquitous ‘do-gooders’ from abroad who seem to spring up in all the wrong places with all the wrong ideas and invariably do more harm than good. 

One need look no further than Gorongoza National Park in central Mozambique for an example. Prior to the end of Portuguese colonial rule it was one of the great African game reserves, with a range of flora that stretched from enchanting Fever Tree forests to sprawling plains and sandstone cliffs. It accommodated an abundant variety of wildlife that made it a unique natural marvel. Of course, this was before it was turned intoa butchery by the newly installed Frelimo regime following the end of Portuguese colonial rule. In the ghastly process the buffalo of the neighbouring Zambezi delta, numbering over 100,000 animals, were virtually wiped out; much of the meat processed into ‘bully-beef’ and shipped to Afghanistan to fill the bellies of Soviet soldiers. But despite the mayhem some game survived. This attracted the benevolent, but blundering attentions of an American IT multi-millionaire by the name of Greg Carr who admirably sought to save the park from further destruction.

Sadly he has failed. Ignoring the advice of many regional experts familiar with the wiles of the crooked governing kleptocrats, he leapt joyfully into the latter’s welcoming embrace. Sickeningly, Carr appears to have lauded their labours in relieving him of over $20 million with little to show for it short of a mountain of wrecked vehicles and hundreds of bloated employees. Worse, word has spread, and he has managed to create a socio-economic magnet for people who now see Carr as a soft touch; instead of protecting the wildlife (it is a Game Reserve), he has triggered an influx of predatory villagers. The plight of the remaining game is now probably more precarious than before Carr’s intervention.

But Carr keeps illustrious company in compounding Africa’s conservation woes. Western governments have long been generous benefactors for the various government agencies tasked with protecting wildlife, but sadly, much of the money is spent on the salaries of incorrigibly corrupt officials, providing them with transport to expand their nefarious activities. Thanks to the arrogance and ignorance of folks like Bill Gates, Bono, and Jeffrey Sachs, the continent has been showered in millions of chemically-treated mosquito nets, most of which have by-passed the bodies they were supposed to protect and ended up lining fishing nets. Perfect if one wants to poison fish and sterilise watercourses.  “Without Western aid the law-enforcement agencies would not have been able to move and sell all the illegal meat, ivory, and fish,” says a safari-operator who wishes to remain anonymous.

Still, there might be hope: Mushingashi Game Ranch, in Western Zambia, is run by Darrell Watt—a former soldier and wildlife enthusiast. “Ten years ago there was little game there,” says friend and former game-ranger Terry Roach. “now it’s a little out of hand. The antelope don’t even move out the road anymore. The place is full of game; plenty of lion, the elephant are settling and the buffalo are back.” Of course, saving game was not an easy task for Watt. “Darrell has been harassed endlessly by government because he’s standing on their toes,” says a well-known Zambian hunter who also wishes to remain anonymous. “Most of the game that survived years of rampant poaching has found sanctuary with Darrell…I know some people in high places would like him dead. It’s a great pity, but none of the NGOs will help a guy like Darrell because they are afraid of standing on political toes.”

In Mozambique, Derek Littleton, a former Zimbabwean Ranger, manages his concessions in Niassa Province, in the extreme north of the country, providing rare relief for the formally game-rich country’s dwindling wildlife population. “Derek is doing a good job but he’s got his work cut out for him. He holds a candle for wildlife in this country. For the rest of the country it’s really game-over. There is no real plan, people have a license to kill, and the government pays lip service to conservation. If you want ivory the Pemba Police Station is probably the best place to buy it.”

Better known is Charles Davy from the Zimbabwe ‘Lowveld’ who, far from being applauded for his conservation efforts in saving a vast tract of wildlife wilderness, seems to be attracting all the wrong sort of attention. Unfortunately for him he is a serial offender; he is a white-hunter with a pretty daughter who dates Prince Harry—and he’s rich. In a cheap shot on a ‘usual suspect’, the London Daily Mail recently took a leap of faith in accusing Davy of involvement in rhino-horn trafficking on the strength of what one of their reporters gleaned from a taxi-driver.

Paradoxically, to the chagrin of the hand-wringing do-gooders, what these three locales have in common is they are all hunting areas. But with strict take-off quotas in place and effective anti-poaching operations, only a small fraction of the game is ever killed. The formula works; these areas produce rare examples of relatively safe wildlife havens on a largely lawless continent. Again, much to the irritation of foreign know-alls, the people at the helm are hard-bitten professional hunters who have weathered war and hostile political turbulence with a fortitude of few whites who have lived a lifetime in the African wilderness.

It’s a wrench upon the conventional wisdom, but the facts show the hunters have got it right and the rest have got it woefully wrong. Those who have come to help have only helped destroy. Humanitarian ‘feel-good’ philosophies aimed at stimulating population growth and Western guilt, which leads to ‘politically correct’ interventions that do not ruffle official feathers, seem set to stay. The only hope for African wildlife lies with those who make a living out of killing it.

As a boy I once climbed the Great Pyramid of Cheops at Giza in Egypt, sitting on its summit to watch the dawn break across the desert. That experience—and the visceral draw of climbing or walking into the past—has remained with me ever since. It has given me a respect for what has come before, a career in writing fictional accounts of it, a profound belief in its importance to our lives. For history is more than just a pile of mouldering books or some corduroy-clad and dandruff-dusted bore in full pontificating flow. It is our inheritance and hinterland, our collective consciousness and DNA, our identity and social glue. Ignore it, and a nation becomes as soulless and meaningless as an empty paper bag. Abandon it, and a nation is poorly placed for whatever lies ahead.

The modern Left hates history and its concomitant, tradition (unless, of course, they abase themselves before the twin totems of slavery and worker rights). To the Left, history is distasteful, reactionary, elitist and by its very nature conservative. Cut the ties, the liberal-left believes, and you can stamp your brand (while stamping out stubborn resistance) and remould a nation as your own utopian idyll. The here, the now, the year zero, are what counts to them. It is why Blair conjured the grotesque and forgettable notion of ‘Cool Britannia’, why New Labour squandered a billion pounds on the vacuous and unloved Millennium Dome, why the dreadful Lord Mandelson dismissed those serving in the Guards Divison of the armed forces as being nothing more than ‘chinless wonders’. Those same chinless wonders have shed their blood in Afghanistan and Iraq papering over the inadequacies of their political masters. But then, Mandelson is possibly less judgemental of types who lie on their mortgage application forms.

Had the Millennium Dome celebrated a thousand years of British history and tradition, had it embraced and embodied our contribution to arts, culture, exploration, and science (not to mention some pretty dramatic military campaigning) people would have flocked. The past gave us kings and queens, great cathedrals and beautiful gardens; the past gave us Shakespeare, Newton, Cook, Nelson, Wellington, Austen, Darwin, and Elgar. New Labour offered up a spirit zone, an oh-so-right-on hermaphrodite statue, and the grisly spectacle of Her Majesty transported by barge to spend a toe-curling 1999 New Year’s Eve holding hands with the Blairs and lip-synching Auld Lang Syne. History was thrown out and dignity and worth went with it.

It was Churchill who remarked that we need to look a long way back in order to see forward. How right he was and how lightly we discard his advice. We forgot that financial bubbles burst and greed catches up. We forgot that men fight and peace dividends are illusory. We forgot that peace is harder to prepare for and sustain than war. We forgot that Afghanistan will ever rise up to bite our Great Game backsides. We forgot that air power alone is no substitute for local knowledge and boots on the ground, and that technological supremacy is no guarantee of victory. We forgot there is no such thing as a risk-free conflict. We forgot too in Britain that Labour government profligacy and ineptitude will ever bring us to the point of ruin. And we forgot that in betraying our western heritage, we would end as little more than a sump tank for Third World grievances and atavistic practices (including hostile preaching, forced marriage, honor killing, vicious witch-doctoring and violent exorcism). Yes, we forgot. Historical illiteracy has done all this, and more.

Because we do not know our past, we are ill-at-ease with the present and ill-prepared for the future. The shopping mall is now the opiate of the masses. And meantime, book-lending from UK libraries has fallen by forty percent over the past decade alone. Small wonder that basic understanding has become the more limited, shallow and bite-sized; academic rigour is spent; reality has been moulded by Wikipedia, touch-screen and computer-generated imagery. Then we are surprised when our children identify Churchill as an animated dog on an insurance commercial rather than the wartime British leader. We lose the references and in doing so have lost ourselves.

My father was a true polymath, a brilliant linguist, classicist, scientist, and industrialist, a man who was present in New York for the ’29 Wall Street Crash, a hunter who shot big game with Hemingway in Africa and chamois with Hermann Goering in Europe (while apparently stealing Nazi secrets), a bon viveur who lived in Claridges between the wars and who later survived a Luftwaffe bomb on his Mayfair home (and a stabbing by a diamond thief). Now, that is history. For sure, his generation made mistakes—monumental ones. And there was never a golden era. Yet however described, it was populated by those who could talk in sentences, who were educated and informed, who were real people.

History is rich in character, incident, and salutary lesson. Take, for example, the life and times of the legendary Elizabethan spymaster of England, Sir Francis Walsingham. As secret policeman and chief of both domestic and foreign espionage, he knew the value of human-intelligence. Not for him the sclerotic and bureaucratic behemoths that protect our national security today. Not for him a Department of Homeland Security that can employ over seventeen thousand souls and yet cannot stop a man with fireworks in his underwear. Plain old-fashioned groundwork, tradecraft, diligence and a sound reading of the enemy were his forte. He understood religious fanaticism, conspiracy and assassination plots, had witnessed the slaughter of thousands of Protestant innocents in Paris during St. Barholomew’s Day 1572. His wake-up call; his 9/11. It informed him of the coming threat.

In blackmailing a groom to the chamber of the pope, Walsingham gained access to a letter from King Philip II of Spain detailing the entire battle-plan of the gathering Spanish Armada. In placing an agent at the heart of the private household of the Marquis of Santa Cruz, he was probably instrumental in the mysterious death of the Grand Admiral three months before he was to lead that Armada out. In planting false prophecies and astrological predictions among the Armada crews, he spread dissent and mutiny and encouraged many to jump ship. In relentlessly pursuing the Spanish fleet, he deployed one of his ‘intelligencers’ aboard the enemy galleon Floriana and, through expeditious use of gunpowder, sent her to the bottom. Some neat tricks. Walsingham was the spy-chief who introduced the concept of Extraordinary Rendition (he persuaded pirates in La Rochelle to attempt the kidnap of the papal legate to Paris). As for his sworn enemies, the Spanish Inquisition were experts in the notorious interrogation technique of waterboarding (referred to as toca). Perhaps the past is not so much a foreign country, after all.

In losing our history, we lose part of ourselves and impoverish what is left. So forget textspeak and philistinism. My advice to the young is simple—climb to the highest vantage. And then look back.