Taki Magazine

‘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.

“I’m known as a strange, aloof kind of man,” Salinger told the New York Times, in 1974. “But all I’m trying to do is trying to protect myself and my work.” He passed away yesterday, at the age of 91.

This extraordinary film from The Mises Institute—which features Ron Paul, Joseph Salerno, Hans Hoppe, and Lew Rockwell—is a clear and compelling analysis of the Fed, and why curbing it is a must.

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.

The opposition in Iran, as elsewhere, uses the language of human rights to assert its moral superiority over its enemies in their seats of power. Opposition spokesmen point to government kangaroo courts, rapes, beatings, electric shocks and imposition of the death penalty to convince the world outside that the regime is illegitimate. Vicious attacks on students by the modern brown-shirts of the Basij militia further undermine the right of the clergy to govern.

Yet, amid the justifiable outrage at the punishments the Iranian regime metes out to those it suspects are trying to overthrow them, there are memories of a previous opposition movement that made the human rights case against the Shah in 1979. Then, Iran’s opposition groups, who were both democratic and theocratic, contended that torture and murder by the Shah’s secret police, the notorious SAVAK, proved that the Shah was not fit to govern.  As soon as the clergy seized power, however, prisons and torture chambers in which the new rulers themselves had once suffered were overflowing.

Ayatollah Khalkhali sat in judgement day and night to send not only members of the ancien regime, but former revolutionaries, to the gallows. Born in idealism and supported by a broad base of democrats, secularists, leftists and prelates, the Iranian revolutionaries exceeded SAVAK in the use of intimidation, torture and killing. Evin Prison, symbol of the Shah’s hated police state, saw more torture and murder than the SAVAK had practiced. Moreover, the clergy did not take long to exceed the Shah’s cronies at siphoning off as much of the country’s wealth as they could stuff into the folds of their jellabas.

Iranian men and women, however, enjoy more rights than their fellow Muslims across the Persian Gulf in Saudi Arabia. Countries that support and trade with the Saudi monarchy lack credibility when condemning the Iranian mullahs for human rights abuses that are routine in Saudi Arabia. In both countries, women are made to cover themselves lest they invite the lust of men. Iranian women, however, enjoy legal protections that Saudi women have never known. They work in the professions, and they drive cars. They vote and stand for parliament, while their Saudi sisters have no parliament and must be driven by a male relation or retainer.

Iran holds elections that in the past have expressed the popular will, but the rulers clearly tampered with the results of last June’s presidential poll to avoid relinquishing power—not to the opposition—but to a man from within the ranks of the theocracy who had twice been a much-feared prime minister. Mir Hosein Musavi’s election would not have portended a counter-revolution so much as a partial reform, but even that was too much for the Supreme Leader and the system over which he presides. Denying Musavi the presidency—more importantly, denying the electors their choice or president—may have initiated the counter-revolution that the ayatollahs of Qum fear most.

As the regime fights for its life, Iranians suffer more abuse. Stories of those who have been released from prisons since the demonstrations against the fraudulent elections have been harrowing and well documented. Women and men have been raped in their cells. Beatings are routine. Policemen torture youngsters into informing on their friends. And there is nothing we in the Western world can do about it.

Even before the elections, Iran executed children: twenty-six under the age of eighteen with another 130 awaiting the death penalty. (Saudi and Sudanese courts also execute children for criminal offenses.) Iranian courts put to death more than three hundred adults, after trials that barely deserve the name, in 2007. Human Rights Watch reported that another 29 men were hanged in one day in 2008 without so much as disclosing most of their names. Detentions without trial are commonplace, and political activists often disappear into a security system that has no habeas corpus. This was routine before the regime felt threatened, and it can only increase as its opponents mobilize for their overthrow. A year ago, a few activists asked for reforms. Now, they are openly shouting, “Death to the Dictator.”

As the people lose their fear, that of the rulers increases. A frightened regime, like a wounded lion, is not interested in anyone’s rights.

Condemnations of Iran’s human rights abuses are justified. Coming from the United States, however, they are little more than hypocrisy. The US government’s use of torture and maintenance of torturers in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Colombia deny it credibility. American manipulation of separatists in the Kurdish, Arab, and Azeri regions of Iran further diminishes any role the US can play among the vast majority of the Iranian population who believe in national unity and fear civil war. Pleas by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other advocates of adherence to international law are welcomed by Iranian citizens who need to feel, as anti-apartheid militants in South Africa once did, that they are not alone in the world. However, the regime in Tehran is just as likely to ignore Amnesty as it does the US government.

Noam Chomsky said recently, “Putting aside the details of the election, about which we don’t know much, the whole structure of the regime is oppressive and authoritarian, and undermines basic civil and other human rights. Protest against it is not only honorable but courageous, because it faces extreme violence.” The question is less how to persuade the regime to lessen the violence against its citizens than how to encourage those who are standing up to its violence that they can prevail. The duty for its friends abroad is then to hold them to the ideals for which they are risking their lives now. Civil society in the rest of the world can demonstrate its support of Iranian democrats. It can also restrain the Israeli and American governments from launching an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities that will give the regime a new breath of life, a blunder that would equal Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran in 1980 that saved the Iranian revolution by forcing all Iranians to unite around Ayatollah Khomeini.

Dr. Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, wrote in The Daily Beast in December, “No one can predict a revolution nor say with certainty when an authoritarian state loses its footing if not its grip.” The signs are, though, that resistance to authority is having an impact. Parsi added, “The State’s ability to use the language of religion to repress these developments is failing. Again and again religion has proven itself to be much better suited as a language of resistance than governance.” If the Resistance succeeds, it may embrace, as the mullahs have since 1979, religion as part of the state’s structure. It may also, like the mullahs, ignore our calls for it to respect the human rights of its own opponents.

“You know, despite it all, it’s still really a miracle America elected a black man as president,” my 60-something neighbor said to me over beers recently. You get this a lot from people born before 1965. Apparently, America is a racist hellhole and the fact that they overcame this deep-seated hatred for blacks to allow one into the White House is physics defied. Um, as far as I can tell, a seemingly smart and in-control Democrat proceeded the most hated Republican president of all time. That’s not a “miracle.” It’s a “normal.”

I get insulted when Boomers tell me how racist my country is. I understand where they’re coming from, I guess. They grew up with survivors of the Great Depression: Grumpy old traditionalists that worked their fingers to the bone in isolation and never tried anything weird. That was then however, so please shut up about it. There is not a gigantic ogre of racism controlling our brains that took time off during the election but rears its ugly head every time we have a problem with, say, unprecedented taxation.

Now, I’m sure you can dig up some redneck who still says nigger or half a dozen skinheads in the middle of nowhere but hate crimes are a miniscule percentage of total crimes in America and if you get into per capita, all races get it about equally. I heard some horrible stories about drinking fountains from forever ago and I saw a video where dogs were attacking some dude but that was a different universe than my generation’s America. We don’t care if people aren’t like us anymore. We don’t even get what you’re talking about.

When someone under 40 hears boomer anthems like, “There’s a land where the children are free,” we go, “What the hell is this song about? Where are the children NOT free?” Old people grew up in a climate where nuns gave the strap if you wrote with your left hand and young boys were verboten from going near dolls. Our generation yawns at such superstitious claptrap. If my son turns out to be gay, I will go into a deep depression for about seven minutes and then I’ll get over it. The boomers grew up in a world where their parents dry-heaved at the thought of a black man breathing the same air as them. Even the boomers, I’m told, were occasionally mocked for not being exactly like the majority. My American Indian mother-in-law was nicknamed jungle bunny in college. Not only do we find that hard to comprehend. We think it’s funny. As Harmony Korine said, “I crack up at the race riots.”

We never would have made fun of this guy.

It seems like every children’s book I’m forced to read to my kid is about some freak that everyone learned isn’t a freak after all. We never thought he was a freak in the first place you ancient babies. If Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer were born today, the other reindeers would high-five him and ask him what reindeer games they think he should play. In my school, the kid with Down Syndrome was the school hero and the football team adopted him as their favorite fan without a trace of irony. The pre-1970 people are unable to grasp this. They created movies like Mask where a boy with craniodiaphyseal dysplasia, is mocked for his circus-like disfigurements. Or the show Square Pegs where the quirky, unusual kids were relegated to the bottom rung of the high school hierarchy. In my Secondary Education, all these people would have been rock stars.

The same goes with sexism. Why Men Earn More pointed out the obvious error with assuming women get paid less for the same work. Namely: Why wouldn’t corporations hire them in droves? They’re cheap labor, right? Turns out they earn less because they tend to be more committed to family events than staying up all night preparing proposals. In other words, they choose to earn less. After waves of famine, a great depression, and a free-for-all orgy of whining, we’ve figured a lot of it out and the old wive’s tales no longer make any sense to us.

We are the information generation. We know you’re born gay and there’s nothing you can do about it. We googled it. We know women can be just as capable at any job and we hire accordingly. We know freaks are not cursed by the almighty but just statistical inevitablilites. We are way too well-adjusted to push someone out of our life just because they don’t meet some strange parameters someone else invented so please stop doing a spit take when we don’t behave exactly like our grandfathers.

Enter a London coffee house or restaurant, check into a hotel, or wander by a building-site, and you will find the workforce almost exclusively foreign. Yet British unemployment continues to surge towards 2.5 million. Something is rotten in the heart of modern Britain, for that heart is the underclass and its malady is caused by welfare.

A process of reverse evolution is in train. It is no longer the fittest or the brightest, the fastest or the best, who survive and thrive in our contemporary jungle. It is the moronic and the bovine, the fattest and the least productive, who are cosseted and subsidized and excused their behavior. Because of it, they breed. After all, sex is free and the State will ever pick up the pieces. Collect £200 and Get out of Jail for free. While the benighted and exploited middle-classes pay their tax, marry late, and have fewer children, the underclass procreates with abandon. They have every reason, and no reason not to.

As Africa has systematically swallowed a trillion dollars in aid with precious little to show for it, so welfare at home has rendered a burgeoning social subgroup unable or unwilling to pull its (now grotesquely bloated) weight. The middle class pays dearly—housing these people, schooling them, nursing them for their myriad addictions and self-induced complaints, and then being mugged by them as they trudge home from their highly-taxed jobs.

Rather than imbue an ethic of hard work, discipline, and responsibility, through a process of handouts and hand-wringing we have promoted instead a culture in which it pays to be a dropout and where a man need not lift a finger (let alone a pick, shovel, mallet, chisel, or spanner) in order to earn a wage. Crack, smack, and street-robbery are so much more rewarding.  Whoever imagined nothing is for free was profoundly wrong. The underclass not only rejects the notion there is nobility in work, it cannot actually see the point.

Every decade that passes, the habits become engrained (some would say, enshrined) and the mindset reinforced. The underclass grows, and not merely because teenage girls fail to discover contraception and believe the swiftest route to a council house is via their own birth-canals. Enabling and sustaining it, feeding it with ceaseless waves of new recruits, is a liberal-left education establishment that has conspired to beach successive generations on the shoals of illiteracy and phonetic spelling and the sandbars of underachievement. Init, well wicked, knowhaddamean? Of course you do. Education used to point the way out of the ghetto. Today it simply consigns our young to a lifetime of delivering pizza.

Without the resources to renationalize industry, left-leaning governments have directed their energies towards taking the public back into state ownership. Create an underclass, make it dependent on your largesse, and you will garner its vote. That is the premise. Or maybe there is no logic; perhaps it is just the old knee-jerk and patronizing instincts of the left. They know best. And it has done irreparable harm. In place of parenting, there are social workers; instead of common sense, there is health and safety and the criminal records bureau; substituting for normal community interaction is diversity training; standing in for work there is always welfare. At every level the state intrudes and society suffers.

I am not advocating we eat the poor—far be it for me to promote a fatty diet—and nor do I suggest we abandon all financial safety-nets. I simply propose we ditch the tired vocabulary of victim-hood that categorizes the handout-consuming and habitually unemployed as the ‘most vulnerable in society’. It is the wealth-creators who are the most vulnerable.

Look closer and you will find that poverty is more often than not a matter of prioritization for those apparently caught in its maw. I long to hear a politician ask the question: If you have so little money, what on earth persuaded you to have five children? Why at Christmas do you purchase the latest consumer durables, computer-games and plasma-screen televisions and yet baulk at spending on private health insurance? How come you are so fat when fruit and vegetables are cheaply available? It will not happen. For we have infantilized the populace, stripping the underclass of pride, motivation, and personal responsibility and instead awarding it rights and benefits.

In the liberal-left world of the welfare state, everything is a condition, an illness, a fault of someone else. Even obesity is to be blamed on rogue genes, thyroid-malfunction or the antics of food manufacturers rather than on the sloth and greed of individuals. People forget the mouth is generally larger than the anus and thus cram it with more food. They have been allowed to forget.
The origin of yet another subspecies is revealed. But that’s okay. For the state will provide gastric bands and liposuction and will end up owning a few more souls.

With James Cameron’s Avatar shouldering aside George Lucas’s original Star Wars and Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight for second place on the all time movie box office rankings (behind only Cameron’s own Titanic), it’s a good time to note one of the odder twists in the evolution of popular film culture: the rise of the self-proclaimed do-it-all writer-director-producer.

Of the last thirty Best Picture nominees (2003-2008), ten had directors who also took screenwriting credits (including George Clooney for Good Night and Good Luck). And of the top 30 box office hits of all time—a list dominated by recent films due to inflation—the director has also served double-duty as a screenwriter on 16.

The growing allure of the writer-director extends even to Lucas and Cameron, both of whom seem more intrigued by technological innovation than by fine-tuning dialogue. Lucas is notoriously tin-eared, while Cameron abstains from originality in plot and dialogue to—as he explains it—avoid confusing the audience.

After triumphing as the sole writer-director on the original Star Wars in 1977, Lucas took a public role for his 1980 sequel The Empire Strikes Back more like hypomanic producer David O. Selznick’s on 1939’s Gone with the Wind. Lucas handed the screenwriting credits to old-timer Leigh Brackett and young gun Lawrence Kasdan, and the directing credit to Irvin Kershner. Is it surprising that The Empire Strikes Back is widely considered the best of the five follow-ups?
Indeed, when Lucas returned in 1999 with The Phantom Menace, he took sole credits for both writing and directing. And it showed.

Still, The Phantom Menace made plenty of money. People like the idea of the embattled genius coming back after 16 years away (or 12 years in Cameron’s case) with his deeply personal revelation. Ironically, a variant of the auteur theory—that dauntingly intellectual Parisian rewrite of Hollywood history intended to establish the primacy of the director as the “author” of the film at the expense of the actors, screenwriter, producer, and the rest of the crew—is becoming the standard way to make crowd-pleasing popcorn movies. The public adores identifying with megalomaniac filmmakers.

This is not to say that old time directors such as Howard Hawks never rewrote scripts. They were, though, more reluctant to insist upon a writer’s credit. Back then, directing was seen as a fun, fulfilling, well-paid job that introduced you to lots of beautiful women. Securing your place in artistic history by insisting upon your authorship was less of a priority.

The young French critics, such as Francois Truffaut, who in the 1950s put forward the auteur theory extolling pre-WWII Hollywood directors had pressing career concerns. They wanted to direct, but the French film industry was then dominated by screenwriters. Moreover, the older generation of French intellectuals, such as Sartre, were pro-Soviet, so the (short-lived) pro-American bias of the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd brought them welcome notoriety. (Eventually, General De Gaulle returned to power and gave them the money to make their New Wave movies.)

This Parisian innovation of organizing Hollywood history around directors caught on in film schools and in Hollywood, where the auteur theory was less adopted than adapted. Insiders know perfectly well that no matter how talented the director, a film can’t get started until somebody does the typing, and that a film can’t get made until somebody arranges the financing. Hence, the trend has been less for the director to gain at the expense of writers and producers than for individual men (and they are almost always men) to try to take on at least part of all the major behind-the-scenes roles so as to fully stamp their authorship on films.

I noticed its advantages in 1984, when I tried to explain to friends that I was looking forward to the upcoming baseball movie The Natural because its cinematographer Caleb Deschanel had done outstanding work on Black Stallion and The Right Stuff. I soon learned, though, that virtually nobody could keep track of anybody besides stars and directors. Describing The Natural to casual movie fans as “a Robert Redford movie” or to intense fans as “a Barry Levinson movie (you know, the guy who did Diner?)” worked, while references to cinematographers just led to blank expressions all around. Tracking anybody beyond stars and directors was just too much to keep in mind.

Besides, saying “I like John Ford Westerns” sounds more sophisticated than saying “I like John Wayne Westerns,” even though they are more or less the same movies.
The auteur theory is popular because it is less scholarly than it is Romantic, an aid to hero-worship. It personalizes the vastly complicated business of making movies into one man’s struggle for self-expression. In this way, it’s similar to the 1960s and 1970s Cult of Authenticity that worshipped Baby Boom singer-songwriters, such as Bob Dylan, for writing their own material.

Sure, the 1956 version of I’ve Got You Under My Skin is a finer piece of popular art than any Neil Young recording, but exactly which middle-aged pro’s work of art is it? Singer Frank Sinatra’s? Songwriter Cole Porter’s? Arranger Nelson Riddle’s? In contrast, Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush (“Flying Mother Nature’s silver seed to a new home in the sun”) is lousier on every objective dimension, but Baby Boomers loved it because you can be sure that, whatever it means, Neil really meant it.

And, sure, nobody much cared about Lucas’s leaden line in The Phantom Menace, “The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute.” But at least you knew George cared about it.

Reading good books is like making love. Reading bad ones is like masturbating. I’ve just read three good ones, one of which got on my nerves because it was about a homosexualist, as opposed to a homosexual. Which in fact the other two were about.

Now if someone had suggested to me long ago that I would be reading three books about three men who preferred their own sex, I’d have said they’ve been puffing on the magic dragon, but that’s neither here nor there. I was curious to read about James Lees-Milne, by Michael Bloch, because although I never met him, I knew and know some of his so-called straight friends. The other two are the biography of Somerset Maugham, by Selina Hastings, and of John Cheever, by Blake Bailey. But let’s start with Lees-Milne. The homosexualist.

Lees-Milne was—like the other two subjects—bisexual, but unlike the other two had no children. His was a benign idiopathic homosexuality, but he viewed things only through the prism of homosexual eroticism. Hence my calling him a homosexualist. Here was a man who fell in love with women, although the affairs were almost never consummated, a serious lover of beautiful old buildings, and a writer of note, whose whole life was shaped and influenced by his homosexual mentors and gay friends. Yet he had a horror of those who flaunted their proclivities and he often called such people buggers and homos. Mind you, this was the buttoned up England of the thirties and forties, with no Elton Johns around to wave the gay flag.

Still, Lees-Milne emerges as a hell of a gay cat, cattiness being the operative word. He thought of many of his fellow gays as shallow, slick, sophisticated and absurd, adjectives I used to use about old queens who hung out around Monte Carlo in the fifties. He adored the Nicolsons, Harold Nicolson having been his lover earlier on, only to see Alvide, his wife, fall madly in love with Harold’s wife, the ghastly Vita, thirty years later. Nice upper class stuff, but not my cup of tea. James adored Vita almost as much as his wife did, but without the cigar.

Lees-Milne is best known for his diaries, which I admit I never read. In his biography, however, I came across his mean-spirited and back-biting, waspish comments about some friends of mine—all heterosexual, I may add—which I obviously didn’t like. In contrast, he refers to Rory Cameron and to his mother’s house on Cap Ferrat, La Fiorentina, as something exceptional. Actually I went there about five times and thought it was the pits. Cameron was a grab-arse pansy, now long dead of Aids, who used the house to lure young tourists on board, his mother a terrible snob who pretended to come from something she didn’t come from. I smelled things early on and stayed away.

I have to admit, however, I couldn’t put the book down, and Michael Bloch—a fellow gay—has done tremendous research and writes with love for his subject. There was one passage that made me laugh and wonder how the white, upper middle class of England ever survived, by which I mean the species. There is a wedding lunch in Thurloe Square after James’s and Alvide’s wedding. Of the five men present all five were homosexual although three were married. Three of the five were Jim’s ex-lovers. “It was rather strained and uneasy,” wrote Harold Nicolson of the lunch party. I bet it was.

When I read Selina Hastings’ biography of Waugh ten years or so ago, I was stunned by the extent of Waugh’s rampant homosexuality during his youth. I suppose it is an English thing, but the guy did have seven children, and with a woman to boot. I was also pleasantly surprised by the beauty of the author, whom I tried to put the moves on during a Spectator summer party, but she would have none of it. Her book on Maugham is as wonderful as she is. I was once asked when still in my teens by a renowned Riviera “bugger” to lunch at La Mauresque, Maugham’s grand villa. Like a fool, I declined because I was intimidated.  By the time I discovered that writing was what life’s all about it was too late. The great man was dying, but I did visit the house with my friend Leonidas Goulandris when it was put up for sale in 1965. Ronald Searle showed us around. The place reeked of old fashioned sin and old fashioned writing. If I had had the moolah back then, I would have bought it on the spot.

Maugham is the most underrated writer in the world, and I read all of his works when I was young. In fact for awhile I wanted to be Larry Darrell, but then chose to be Dick Diver instead. I read Ted Morgan’s biography of the master twenty-five years ago, and this one is just as good. How anyone can call his work sentimental slush is beyond me. In fact how anyone can read a word by Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie is even more beyond me. But I’ve run out of space. I will get back to John Cheever in future, but for the moment, while still recovering from partying, I plan to read Marcus Scriven’s splendid book on yet another terrific bugger, John Bristol, a man who makes everyone I’ve mentioned above sound like choir boys.

Few cartoon characters have been loved—or argued over—more than Tintin, the Belgian reporter-cum-detective whose adventures have been translated into over 50 languages and sold over 200 million books. To be precise, it is not Tintin as such who is controversial but the “contradictory and inscrutable” man (as Pierre Assouline describes him) who dreamed him up and guarded him jealously until his death in 1983. Assouline is the highly-regarded biographer of Georges Simenon and Henri Cartier-Bresson, and his penetrating study, Hergé: The Man Who Created Tintin, will add to a growing international reputation.

Georges Remi—“Hergé” was derived from the pronunciation of his reversed initials—was born in Brussels in 1907, the first of two sons of a Walloon factory worker and a Flemish mother. His parentage symbolizes his persisting political importance to his deeply divided country. “Hergé was the personification of Belgium. He remains one of the last great myths of a Belgian Federation,” notes Assouline.

Hergé enjoyed adventure stories, drawing, American cartoons, Charlie Chaplin, and Buster Keaton; these influences gave his stories clarity of line, camera-like angles, and inventive typography, including the use of text bubbles to indicate who was speaking (of which technique he may have been the first European practitioner). He began drawing for Scout journals, then got a job contributing cartoon strips to the children’s section of the respected Le Vingtième Siècle newspaper, Le Petit Vingtième. He invented a Scout called Totor, who eventually became the 15-year-old Tintin—a round-faced, snub-nosed, fair-haired, plus-four wearing Bruxellois, invariably accompanied by a white fox-terrier called Milou (Snowy in English).

Tintin is brave, chivalrous, pure, intelligent—but without a past, a family, even a Christian name. It is curious how little personality Tintin has; the humour is almost all provided by his much more interesting friends—the hot-tempered alcoholic Captain Haddock, the incompetent detectives Thomson and Thompson, the deaf Cuthbert Calculus, the odious insurance salesman Jolyon Wagg, and the opera-singer Bianca Castafiore. Tintin is always a combination of Parsifal and straight man.

But despite Tintin’s many appealing characteristics, Hergé’s reputation is today often occluded by generic allegations of racism, anti-Semitism and wartime collaboration—with frequent attempts in some European countries to have some of his books edited or even removed from circulation.

Much of this controversy centers on Tintin in the Congo, published over 1930-1. Tintin goes to the Belgian Congo (now Zaire) as a reporter, and in his spare time goes big-game hunting. Hergé portrays the Congolese as being lazy and foolish—and it is assumed that they are better off being run by Europeans. (Such social solecisms impelled Britain’s Commission for Racial Equality to urge a ban on the book in 2007.) Yet the Congolese are also kindly and well-meaning while all the baddies are white, and the book is extremely popular amongst modern Zaireans.

Hergé disliked big business as much as he disliked communism, and an unfortunate characteristic of anti-plutocracy is that it often merges into anti-Semitism, and Hergé was unquestionably guilty of producing caricatures such as the unscrupulous financier Blumenstein in The Shooting Star (later bowdlerised to “Bohlwinkel”) and, some feel, both Laszlo Carreidas in Flight 714 and Tintin’s persistent enemy Rastapopoulos.

Other evils were battled by the plus-foured preux chevalier. Tintin in America bemoans the dispossession of the Indians. The Land of Black Gold assails the oil industry. The Red Sea Sharks attacks slavery. The Castafiore Emerald features gypsies being unjustly accused of theft. The Calculus Affair warns against the misuse of science for militaristic ends. Such concerns would hardly preoccupy a real fascist. Nor would a fascist have produced The Blue Lotus, Hergé’s first masterpiece, a denunciation of racial stereotypes and the cruel Japanese occupation of Manchuria in the 1930s, written in conjunction with a life-long Chinese friend.

Congo aside, Hergé’s reputation as Hitlerian fellow-traveller rests on his continuing to work for the Belgian press during the German occupation. His wartime strips (The Shooting Star, The Secret of the Unicorn, Red Rackham’s Treasure and The Seven Crystal Balls) were apolitical, but they appeared sometimes alongside pro-Nazi editorials, and were thought by some to be legitimizing those opinions. Assouline writes in respect of Congo, “[Hergé’s] talent was an anæsthetic. It disarmed all challenges to the established order”—inferring that his wartime work may have had the same effect.

But Assouline also observes that Tintin was read “avidly” in prisons and camps; would the inmates really have been better off without the cub reporter’s expeditions to find meteorites, latter-day Incas or pirate treasure? Hergé said afterwards that he saw his work as being no more politically significant than that of a plumber or carpenter. For Hergé, the cartoon was always more important than the context—to the extent that when in 1943 he received friendly advice to scale back his output in order to minimize likely Allied repercussions, he replied defiantly: “Now is the time to appear in the greatest number of newspapers possible…In any case I will have reached the largest public”.

To add to his charge-sheet, Hergé also retained ties after the war with some ex-collaborationists—although seemingly not former Vingtième Siècle colleague turned SS officer Léon Degrelle, who claimed later that he had been the model for Tintin, which, says Assouline, “hardly seems likely”. Hergé believed always in loyalty to friends, a Scoutlike virtue for which he would now be honoured had his friends been on history’s winning side.

Hergé was arrested on the day the Allies liberated Brussels, by resistants clutching a bulletin showing him as part of a “Gallery of Traitors”, with the threat that “The punishment that we will exact from them is merciless”. He was saved because of the popularity (and profitability) of his creation, but also because he had never been involved in politics and his brother had been a prisoner of war. But the legal process lasted almost two years, while professional disadvantage persisted long afterwards.

Although he threw himself back into making Tintin perfect (including canny redrawing to chime with new sensitivities), he was riven by doubt. He took unscheduled absences, and moved in with a mistress without divorcing his wife. He developed interests in Jungian psychology, jazz, Taoism, “cryptozoology”, and abstract art. His inner conflicts emerged into his output; the frigid tableaux of Tintin in Tibet were drawn from recurring nightmares of the time. “Elegant to the last”, notes Assouline, “he adhered to the dictum that humour is the courteous expression of despair”.

But Hergé’s genius has never been in doubt—giving rise to the term “hergémony” to describe his importance. His inventiveness, sly wit, slapstick humour, and the ever-growing period charm of his universe (not to mention that the first of a series of Tintin films should be released next year) means that Tintin will continue to be read for many decades to come.

I do not much care for the obese. Worse, they make me feel nauseous. I dislike their shuffling and snuffling ways and believe them to be slothful, gluttonous, self-indulgent, undisciplined, manifestly unattractive and malodorous. You like them, you keep them, cherish them, embrace them as they invade your space with their open pores and stretch-elastic pants and eat noisily in the seat beside you on the airline.

There, I’ve said it. For I am prejudiced—unashamedly so—and I defy any to find a fellow-human who is not. Prejudice is simply gut reaction and preconception, is to have a point of view, is the bias within us all. It is as natural to Mankind as walking, talking, and making love. To attempt its control or suppression is as predestined to fail as commanding back the waves; to decry it is sheer cant and hypocrisy and ignorance of the human condition.

Which brings me to the smug liberal-left. As self-appointed guardians of modern orthodoxy and rigorous policers of our thoughts, these touchy-feely fascists go after dissenters with preachy and puritanical zeal. After all, to be left-of-centre is enlightened, while to be on the right is regarded as beyond the pail. Yet in my experience, the most blinkered, judgemental and lacking in common warmth are these brothers and sisters of the Left (ask the chauffeurs who have ferried Labour ministers around Britain for the past thirteen years).

Prejudice on their terms is somehow acceptable, for double-standards ever were the norm. They may attack me on grounds of class, but woe betide should I accuse one of their own of being unutterably common; a black MP may whine over a surfeit of blonde and blue-eyed nurses in the Health Service, but I cannot carp at African-sourced cleaners tramping the same wards; the Left will talk of ‘inclusivity’, but falls remarkably silent when asked to represent the interests of those—among them huntsmen and armed forces personnel—outside their immediate voter base. How unpleasant. Scratch a ‘liberal-thinker’ and you will invariably encounter a proto-Robespierre or St. Juste itching to consign you to the nearest re-education camp or guillotine.

When recently in Scotland, I listened to the mewling complaints of those discussing racism and homophobia. Call me brave or foolish, but I felt compelled to point out that latent racism is merely tribalism by another name (of which we all are guilty); mild homophobia is often little more than residual dislike of difference, irritation at evangelistic ‘pride’ and foot-stamping special pleading, and the by-product of concern felt by a species for its long-term genetic survival (something buggery and fellatio are unlikely to achieve). For good measure, I illustrated their own pet hates and prejudices: against the privately-educated, against town-dwellers, against any English incomer to Scotland. The revelation appeared to shock them. Later, during an interview with Radio Inverness, and bored with repeated questioning as to why I had never visited the Highlands, I replied that my forbears had doubtless been there to help with the Clearances. More controversy and consternation. For chippiness is as endemic to the Scots as alcoholism, meanness and acid-ginger hair.

Oops. I commit the cardinal sin of stereotyping. But stereotyping exists because it captures the whisper of a truth, because it provides a convenient shorthand and is fun. Thus, Frenchmen have halitosis and Englishmen are repressed; Scandinavian males are dull and Welshmen lachrymose and depressive; German men are hidebound and Italian men are spoilt hysterics with peckers scaled to their classical statues. As for the Greeks…Another time, maybe.

It is—or should be—a free market. That is how ideas are traded and tested and society thrives, with humor, insult, and ribald remark. To micromanage and legislate for every nuance and slight is to drain away our lifeblood. In some quarters, there is such innate fear at the risk of causing offence that many in conversation will hesitate to complete a sentences. As one British actor remarked, throughout Hollywood they simply use Oh, my God as a non-specific and uncommitted catchall. It has come to this. There is a need for manners, fairness and compassion; there is also a desperate requirement for space in which opinion and offense can be given. That balance is our birthright and the key to a robust democracy. You cannot iron out every kink.
I am no fan of the tyrant, the thug, or the bully. Nor would I condone the persecution or prosecution of an individual on grounds of race, color, creed, career, class, earnings potential, gender, age, size or shape, dress, political persuasion, sexual orientation, or lifestyle. But I recognize and accept that people will choose their group and comfort zone, will judge others by such criteria. I myself might even stoop to the occasional low jibe. The world is imperfect and so too its inhabitants. So, be like me. Throw off the shackles of political correctness and the dead hand of the Orwellian apparatchiks. Kick back and be kind to your inner intolerant self. Dream of hanging cyclists like voles from lampposts as a warning to others or dropping your least favorite thespian down a well. Articulate your views. And embrace prejudice.

“Elections don’t matter!” conservatives have long groused. “No matter who you vote for, things never change.”

Well, we may have an exception here.

Scott Brown told Massachusetts’ voters if they elected him to what David Gergen calls “the Kennedy seat” in the Senate, he would go to Washington and run a sword through Obamacare.

Thirty-six hours after Brown’s triumph, a disconsolate Nancy Pelosi emerged from the House Democratic caucus to announce that the votes were not there to pass a bill that had, on Christmas Eve, gotten 60 votes in the Senate.

A 78-seat Democratic margin is apparently insufficient to save a health care reform bill that is the highest priority of a Democratic president elected just a year go.

What argument is then left for Democratic control of Congress?

The shock wave from Brown’s victory also appears to have killed cap-and-trade and immigration reform. Democrats are in open flight.

For what Massachusetts revealed is that this Congress, where Democrats still hold 59 percent of the Senate and 59 percent of all House seats, is no longer representative of America, if ever it was.

We have a center-left Congress imposing a minority ideology on a center-right country.

Obama has gotten the message. Thursday, doing a passable imitation of William Jennings Bryan, he ripped the Wall Street banks and endorsed “the Volcker Rule” to force Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase to divest themselves of their hedge funds and stock-trading operations, or lose their protections as banks.

Panic is also evident in Harry Reid’s caucus, where the Brown victory put in sudden doubt Obama’s nomination of Ben Bernanke to a second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve. Sens. Russ Feingold and Barbara Boxer immediately bailed on Bernanke, as has Sen. McCain.

Liberals are asking why they should go to the wall to confer a second terms on a Fed chairman appointed by George W. Bush.

Reacting to the president’s attack on the Street and the sudden peril to Bernanke’s reappointment, the Dow went into a three-day dive that wiped out 5 percent of its value. Should Bernanke be rejected, it is said, the effect on Europe’s markets will be like that on Europe’s monarchs when news arrived that Louis XVI had gone to the guillotine.

“Chairman Bernanke helped the president ... steer through some very turbulent times and rough waters,” said the White House Monday.

Fine. But was not Ben in the wheelhouse when we hit the iceberg? And never saw it. In his first two years, did he not preside over an easy money policy that fueled the housing boom that created the housing bubble, the popping of which brought on the crisis from which the good professor has helped to save the republic?

If a snoozing camper’s unattended fire sets Yellowstone ablaze, do we single him out for honor for alerting the Park rangers and leading a bucket brigade?

Paul Volcker, the Fed chairman who wrung inflation out of the economy to prepare the ground for the Reagan tax cuts, said of his harried successor, “Bernanke has been through a fire, and given the experience he has had, he’s a lot more ... qualified than he was four years ago.” Were Bernanke to be rejected, Volcker added, “I don’t think that would be received well here or abroad.”

But if rejection of Bernanke would cause turmoil in U.S. and world markets, what does that say about the real stability of the system? And is it not time we stopped treating the Fed as a holy of holies?

In 1913, when the Fed was created with the duty of preserving the dollar, one 20-dollar bill could buy one 20-dollar gold piece. Fifty 20-dollar bills are needed today to buy one 20-dollar gold piece. Under the Fed’s custody, the U.S. dollar has lost 98 percent of its value.

Against the euro, in the George W. Bush decade, the dollar lost close to half its value.

The dollar is the storehouse of our wealth. Has the Fed faithfully safeguarded that storehouse? Was it not Thomas Jefferson who taught us, “In questions of power let us hear no more of trust in men, but bind them down from mischief with the chains of the Constitution”?

Every monetary crisis is a result of Fed action or inaction, for the Fed controls the money supply. As Milton Friedman wrote in the book that won him a Nobel, the Fed’s easy money fueled the market bubble that burst in 1929. In our time, the Fed fueled the dot-com bubble, the stock market bubble and the housing bubble. Bubbles appear when money is created faster than the supply of goods that money buys.

This populist uprising is a product of rage and revulsion at the Washington and Wall Street elites, the unindicted co-conspirators who created this crisis, neither of which has paid a price commensurate with what they did to the country.

Let this rebellion not end until all receive their just desserts, and we get real “change we can believe in.”

“Tiger Woods in sex rehab clinic” seemed to be all that the newspapers of my native land could talk about one day last week. If you managed to miss the more staid US dailies’ coverage of the momentous event it is simply that Tiger is hanging out at a “clinic” somewhere in Hicksville, The South, getting “treatment” for his sex addiction. I say “clinic” and “treatment” as activities seem to include “art classes, exercise and fitness regimes, shame reduction work, a spirituality group, a grief group, and yoga”. Plus sharing a room and having, horror of horrors, to have to clean it himself. This sounds a great deal more like a New Age retreat center than it does treatment for ambitious and wandering gonads—but we’ll come to that in a moment.

The next day the same papers were full of pieces about whether sex addiction is in fact an addiction. Details of the treatment do amuse: first, a ban on Tiger pleasuring himself for 90 days. The New Puritanism has gone too far if a sporting god and near billionaire isn’t allowed even to play with himself. Indeed, a complete and total ban on sex of any kind might also not be the way to convince a healthy young man to resist any cocktail waitresses who might throw themselves at him. Finally, the revelation that, unlike the others, Tiger gets maid service also raises a snigger: maid service of what?

The greatest surprise to me was that this clinic seems to be unisex: men and women with any (but obviously voracious) sexual habits are treated together—which, again, doesn’t seem likely to lead to a reduction in sexual activity. Perhaps appropriate is a story from a friend who did medical training: one young man was seen trolling for dates amongst those attending the sexual diseases clinic. When asked why, given the obvious probability that they were infectious, the response was that, well, at least the young man did know that they were up for it in theory, even if not right now.

But I think there’s a more serious observation that can be made about this whole hoopla. Sex addiction, whether it’s a disease or not (I think not), clearly and obviously transgresses the boundaries of what the society thinks is acceptable. Even in this very much less religious age, it is a sin against public expectations. And sins, even if they are simply against public expectations, need to be expiated.

Which is where other details of the treatment come in. Apparently Tiger must recount all his transgressions to his wife Elin, in sordid and excruciating detail. He must, as above, serve a period of abstinence, during which he must exercise and meditate (“mens sana in corpore sano”, no?). Then, if all of this is done successfully, he can be forgiven and welcomed back into the arms of his family and the hearts of the public. All of which sounds terribly Catholic to me really. Confession, contrition, and penance being the center of that sacrament normally called confession and all those being present in this treatment for “sex addiction”.

You might, if a cynic like me, simply assume that both the Church and the clinic have hit on the same psychological dramas that need to be played out before wives or the public will forgive. You might be more cynical and think that the clinic has simply copied a system that has worked well for a millenia or more. Or you might simply look at this and think that while organized religion is direct, the belief in a vengeful and omniscient God has declined the form of religion necessary to carry on.

And as to whether sex addiction actually exists or not we might go along with Chesterton. When people stop believing in God they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything. The idea that 90 days of enforced celibacy is the way to induce a man to be faithful on day 91 certainly counts as “anything”.

In 1935, British journalist James Agate admitted to obsession with a juicy but fundamentally parochial murder case, while from Quetta—now in Pakistan, then in the Raj—came news of a quake which had left 20,000 dead. He told readers of his diary, Ego:

“This trial has moved me immensely, while the dreadful affair at Quetta makes no impression. The thousands who perished in that earthquake might be flies. I see no remedy for this, since one can’t order one’s feelings, and to pretend something different is merely hypocrisy.”

(Alistair Cooke and Jacques Barzun have been but two of the nine-volume Ego’s admirers.)

A decade after Agate’s musing, George Orwell either offered in person, or saw somebody else offer, to a woman (whom he only identifies as “intelligent”) a book that dealt with Nazi atrocities. The woman responded to this offer by begging: “Don’t show it to me, please don’t show it to me. It’ll only make me hate the Jews more than ever.”

To watch the coverage of Port-au-Prince’s latest and most spectacular descent into Hobbesianism is to wonder how widespread, in the West, similar sentiments now are apropos Haiti. Of course no-one—at least, no-one who wishes to hold down a responsible job—will now actually admit to being as indifferent to suffering Haitians as Agate was to suffering Quettans, or as shockingly malevolent as was the female whom Orwell mentioned toward exterminated Jews.  We are all weepers now; have been ever since Dianamania first compelled the entire West’s population to check into Heartbreak Hotel. (“Now hear this. You will sob your heads off when contemplating the death of the People’s Princess in a car crash. And you will like it.”) Of global citizenship’s public demands on the tear-ducts, there is today simply no opting out. In private ... it might, just might, be another tale.

It would be even more obviously another tale if more Westerners were to acquaint themselves, or reacquaint themselves, with the outcome of a disaster almost as great as Haiti’s in terms of lives lost (approximately 100,000), but on the other side of the world. The earthquake in question, starting two minutes before noon and finishing at approximately seven minutes after noon on September 1, 1923, precipitated the wiping-out of Tokyo and nearby Yokohama. There is no improving, for sheer evocativeness, upon the words used by Richard Storry (1913-1982), Professor of Japanese Studies at Oxford, in his History of Modern Japan:

“Nearly everything ... redolent of Yedo [the medieval Japanese capital] was a heap of ashes. In its place there rose a city of a striking beauty, with wide streets and high modern buildings at its core, surrounded by a vast jumble of new wooden houses clustered along undistinguished thoroughfares; some of these resembled country lanes and so acquired a certain pensive charm. Within three or four years there was little sign that Tokyo had ever known calamity.” [Emphasis added]

Does anyone not a moron seriously suppose that within three or four years, or within 30 or 40 years, Haiti will be similarly furbished? Does anyone with the smallest knowledge of the devastation which the December 2004 tsunami inflicted on Indonesia and Sri Lanka, in particular, imagine that Tokyo-style infrastructural improvement will take place in those miserable lands? Confronted with the ample evidence that successive Indonesian regimes since the 1940s have diverted all foreign aid either to Zurich bank accounts, or to improved military methods of turning subject races into glue (or, of course, to both), it would necessitate a Bono—worse, a Bob Geldof—to conclude that the average post-tsunami welfare donation was ever put to anything even vaguely resembling post-tsunami welfare.

But we can’t continue thinking on these lines now, can we? The horrible suggestion that Japanese can run a country, and that Haitians can’t, might lead to the equally horrible suggestion that Japanese have a recognizable civilization and that Haitians don’t. Or the comparably unmentionable conjecture that the Marshall Plan did good to Italy and the Netherlands but would probably have been wasted on, say, Liberia. Which in turn—gasp!—foreshadows the appalling premise that some groups of people might conceivably be worthier of our practical help than are other groups of people. And once we’ve taken that diabolical idea on board, well, it’s Auschwitz all over again by Tuesday next.

With Haiti, then, as with most of life in 2010, it is quite simply better (as well as easier) not to think. Deciding which charities we can legitimately support, and which charities are merely shills for Idi Amin’s heirs, is a procedure too risky to be tried. Let us suppress all tendencies to the evils of Thought by recalling Steve Sailer’s words from 2005: “the economics of mass media are: ‘Clever things make people feel stupid and unexpected things make them feel scared’.”

So when the next natural catastrophe occurs—in Togo or Nicaragua or Laos or wherever—let us operate feel-good campaigns on the same non-principle we now employ, the one spelt out by Woodrow Wilson in 1915. “I am going to teach the South American republics,” he harrumphed, “to elect good men.”  He was really talking about Mexico—not about the South American republics at all—but then, geography and foreign history were never his strong points. Heaven forbid that they should ever be ours.

The dead and displaced now run into the millions, lawless ruination continues unabated in Zimbabwe. But, Morgan Tsvangirai, the president, and man Zimbabweans looked to for salvation, looks surprisingly pleased with himself.

He is not easily embarrassed. Caught on film recently, looking rather smug beneath a portrait of his bête noire, Robert Mugabe, Mugabe’s face seems to say it all: real power remains with me, and the one in the chair is a political dummy deployed to deflect world anger. Tsvangirai’s recent behavior might be without precedent: where in history do we find a politician who clearly won a murderously skewed election, who then tosses a political lifeline to the killers, reinstates them, and effectively surrenders all real power to the losers?

Maybe we should not be surprised. For years, Tsvangirai groveled at South African President Thabo Mbeki’s feet, rising only to sing his tormentor’s praises while Mbeki connived with Mugabe to destroy him and his party. Still, it was an understandably furious and combative Morgan Tsvangirai we bore sympathetic witness to following the stolen election of 2008. He assured us repeatedly there would be no compromise with the electoral villainy of Robert Mugabe and his gang. Those of us who sought vindication of the democratic will, cheered.

But then, the rhetoric suddenly softened. Interestingly, this followed the precipitous transfer of R300,000,000 (US$40,000,000) from the South African Government to Zimbabwe, ostensibly for agriculture. Just where this money went remains as clear as mud. But soon thereafter convoys of new Mercedes Benzes rolled in to town, and Morgan and his merry men changed their tune entirely. No sooner had their bottoms hit the soft German leather than they bolted to the signing table to sell the peoples’ mandate for real change and started clucking loudly in praise of their assailants.  (A chuckling ZANU PF Minister Francis Nhema is reported to have said that his associates had no idea it was going to be so easy to ‘buy off’ their MDC opponents.)

Clearly, treachery was afoot when Roy Bennett, a dispossessed white farmer and senior opposition figure who some say is the most popular politician in the land was thrown into jail and charged with treason—despite assurances from the new prime minister, and the South African president, that he would be safe from arrest. As the prosecution process unfolded, Tsvangirai maintained a thunderous silence. Obviously, a political stitch-up, Bennett still sits in the dock with a rope around his neck while the MDC mutters its disapproval.

Despite a commitment in the newly signed, so called (Global Political Agreement) GPA to “… a nation where all citizens respect and therefore enjoy equal protection of the law and have equal opportunity to compete and prosper in all spheres of life,”  his party’s supporters have been jailed, tortured, and murdered, and the few white farmers left on the land are being mercilessly evicted. Tsvangirai has trivialized these outrages as “isolated incidents” while talking up his relationship with Mugabe and calling for world support for him and his quislings.

Conveniently forgotten by Tsvangirai and his cohorts is the fact that it was the commercial farmers and their labor who provided the vital impetus that made him and the MDC a serious political force. Some paid for their commitment to him and his party with their lives—the rest with their homes, land, and livelihoods. All this while the nation starves, food aid pours in, and the populace flees the country in waves overwhelming the country’s neighbors.

Tragically, it appears Tsvangirai, along with his MDC colleagues, has betrayed the people who died for the cause of freedom. And yet the opposition hierarchy have their heads firmly stuck in the national feeding trough. The miserable farce seems set to play on! All politics in Africa is business, as the cynics say, and the MDC proves that right.

Against this back-drop came recent news that Giles Mutsekwa from the MDC has joined Kemba Mohadi, his partner in crime at Home Affairs, and overseen the arrest, torture, and death of political activists. But this should come as no surprise. Just in case investors thought it was safe to go back in the water, he also co-signed a Stalinist ‘specification’ order aimed at plundering the Meikles Group, one of the country’s largest business conglomerates. Critics are now calling for Mutsekwa and other MDC ministers (recently accused of corruption) to be put on the sanctions list with their ZANU PF cronies.

Frustrated though he may be, a beleaguered Roy Bennett may one day be appreciative of Mugabe’s obstinacy. Mugabe has denied him his place at the cabinet table because he is a ‘white settler’.  History will be harsh on the gluttons who now gorge on the carcass of the country they were elected to preserve while their people starve. 

At my annual check-up, my doctor handed me a sheet explaining the reasons for office fee increases for Medicare Patients. It is worth reporting at length.

Medicare fixes the prices for Medicare patients’ health care. All office charges for Medicare, including office visit charges, have been set by the Federal government since 1984. In real terms (adjusted for inflation), these fixed prices are less today than they were three decades ago.

During the last four years, there have been large decreases in Medicare reimbursements for laboratory services provided in-house by private physicians. Payments for in-office blood work, for example, have been cut 35 to 47 percent. Yet, a physician’s overhead continues to increase as a result of uncontrollable costs, such as property taxes, building insurance, electricity, maintenance, malpractice and workers compensation insurance.

As one result, my doctor had to close both the x-ray unit and the state and federally licensed medical laboratory on his premises. Now patients are inconvenienced by having to go to other locations for services that formerly were provided by the doctor at lower cost. A one day medical check-up is now a multiple day event and more expensive.

While Medicare payments to doctors have been cut, regulations have been increasing: “Almost every outside diagnostic procedure (CT, MRI scan, sonogram) ordered by this office now has to be pre-approved by some outside agency. Many medications are now requiring pre-approval or step therapy. Each requires filling out 1-2 pages of forms and/or two or more phone calls. This requires personnel time and therefore more cost. Consultant referrals are requiring more paperwork and time to schedule.”

My doctor has more people employed doing paperwork than he does delivering health care.

While Medicare payments for in-office services to private doctors, including those for blood work and x-ray units, were drastically cut, payments to outside corporate facilities for the same services were increased. It is obvious what is afoot. Corporate lobbies are using their whores in Congress to shift income from physician offices to corporate labs, corporate medical service providers, and hospitals that are owned by national corporations.

Legislation that cuts payments to private physicians and increases the payments to large corporate entities is intended to destroy private practice and to create in its place corporate bureaucracies in which doctors are wage slaves. The physician’s income is diverted to shareholders, CEO bonuses, and Wall Street. Health care is being replaced with health business.

As a result of the way American medicine is being reconstructed, patients will cease to have a doctor whom they know and who knows them. Important information is lost in a system of bureaucratized “health care” in which a patient sees whatever face happens to be on duty at the corporate provider. Impersonal health care thus brings a cost of its own, and its quality can be low compared to private practice. Indeed, the U.S. is creating a “health care” system that is more costly and less efficient than single-payer national health systems. But it will enrich corporations and provide play for Wall Street.

It turns one’s stomach to watch libertarians and “free market economists” defend bureaucratized impersonal health care as “free market medicine.” There is no free market present. Corporate lobbies and campaign contributions use government power to create bureaucratized monopolies that destroy medicine for the practitioner and the patient. Wall Street pushes for greater shareholder earnings, which are achieved by denying care.

Just as independent businesses have been destroyed by corporate chains, from Wal-Mart to auto parts to fast food, medicine is being destroyed by monopoly capital. The risks of starting a private business today are many times higher than they were a half-century ago. Chains have turned Americans who once were independent businessmen and women into employees.

The fate of the health care bill demonstrates the power of private lobbies. What was to be health care for Americans was instantly transformed into 30 million new patients for the private health insurance industry. The “solution” to tens of millions of Americans being unable to afford health care is a law that requires them to purchase a private health care policy or be annually fined. As most of these uninsured Americans cannot afford to purchase a private policy, the plan is for the federal government to use taxpayers’ money to subsidize their purchase of a policy from private companies.

In other words, tax money is being diverted to the pockets of private businesses. This is par for the course in “capitalist” America.

In today’s America, Karl Marx’s criticisms of capitalism are understated. Wherever one looks, the scene is one of the government using taxpayers’ money to enrich private interests. Taxes are collected from people who can barely make it, and the revenues are transferred to multi-millionaires and billionaires. The federal government piles debt on the backs of heavily burdened and dispossessed Americans in order that investment banksters can pay annual bonuses that exceed the lifetime earnings of most Americans.

Every aspect of the U.S. military has been mined for private profit. Supply and other functions for the military, such as those provided by Halliburton and Blackwater, services once provided by the military itself at low cost, have been privatized. These services now cost many multiples of the cost to taxpayers of in-house military provision.

The “war on terror” enriches the armaments/security industry and enables Israeli territorial expansion. The Israel Lobby and the munitions industry are major sources of funding for U.S. political campaigns.

Prisons have been privatized in order to create profits for private corporations. The prisons require high incarceration rates in order to be profitable. Consequently, “freedom and democracy” America not only has the highest incarceration rate and the highest absolute number of prisoners in the world, but also a prison population comparable in size to the prison population of Stalin’s Gulag Archipelago.

Congress allows private companies run by hardline Republicans to count electronically without paper trails the votes in elections. It has been proved over and over that the electronic voting machines, with proprietary undisclosed codes, can rig any election, especially if there are no exit polls or the captured media can find a way to discredit the exit polls.

And now we have private health care destroyed by the greed for profit. There are many reports of health care corporations, but not private doctors, rationing and even denying health care to policyholders in order to maximize profits. There are reports of people with treatable forms of cancer who were not told by their corporate health care providers in order to avoid the cost of their treatment. These reports are in compliance with capitalist America’s emphasis on profits (SET ITAL)uber alles(END ITAL), to hell with people, the environment, honor and integrity.

Wall Street is romanticized by libertarians and “free market economists.” They believe, entirely on the basis of their ideology, that Wall Street finances venture capitalists who bring economic progress and higher living standards. Wall Street does no such thing, especially since financial deregulation turned Wall Street into a speculative hedge fund.

Wall Street is concerned with annual bonuses. It will do anything to get them.

Today the interests of American capitalists are as far removed from the interests of the population as the bureaucrats of state-owned firms under socialism. Neither can fail, no matter how incompetent or inefficient, as they have the public purse as their backup.

The Wall Street investment banks, which created with the compliance of the regulatory authorities and the credit rating agencies, “toxic” instruments that were sold worldwide, thus destroying the prospects of people in many countries, are devoid of integrity and honor. Their only god is greed. And they control the U.S. government, which is too dependent on campaign contributions to restore regulation.

The lobbies of greed rule America. The White House, Congress, even the federal judiciary are impotent in the face of capitalist greed.

There is no government of the people, for the people, by the people, only the rule of private interests.

Dr. Roberts was assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury in the Reagan administration, associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, Senior Research Fellow in the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and held the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University.

To find out more about Paul Craig Roberts, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at http://www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS.COM

Most people told me I wouldn’t be the same after my first trip to the Subcontinent. India changes you, they all said. Well, I’ve been now, and India was not quite the revelation I was expecting. The culture has been over-exposed. The literature, the images, and the crafts are near and far, one need not travel further than a local hippie market to get a flavor of the place. Having already visited cities like Mexico, Beijing, Athens, and Phnom Penh, India was a version of the same theme: noise, pollution, poverty, and organized chaos.

The history is unique, as are the people, but not so much so that I felt the need to jump on the “Incredible India” bandwagon. On the contrary, being there made me long for clean water, clear skies, tidy streets, and meat. After ten days, I was ready to go home. The beggars are bullies.  The deafening sound of horn-blowing is relentless, unbearable even. The endless parade of men pissing on roadsides worthy of a good eye roll, and the decay. Oh, the decay. Hardly a building in site, save a few hotels, not crumbling or corroded.

I can imagine how lovers of India are reacting now. But I love India. India is so wonderful. How could you be so blind to the magic. Well, I love India too. India is wonderful, and I saw the magic. It just didn’t have a life-altering effect on me. I have always loved living in Europe or America. I will always prefer the pristine to the polluted, and I don’t believe you have to discover the lord Ganesha to remove the obstacles in your mind.

The India of today is as it has seemingly always been, poor. Furthermore, it is rife with charlatans selling spirituality to wide-eyed tourists. This is the way of the world though, isn’t it. Take care of yourself, and your own, and to hell with the rest. Not a very Christian concept mind you, but perhaps the wisest choice when confronted with so much chicanery. Generally speaking, Indians are storytellers, and swindlers. The very thought of performing an act of altruism left my body instantly upon arrival. My friend, and travel companion, on the other hand, was seduced by charitable giving, and the spiritual racket. Not surprisingly, she had a life-changing experience.

Did I miss out on something? Am I jaded, and heartless for not being moved to action? I suppose the idea that one person cannot save a billion would lead someone to suggest simply helping one person makes a difference. But who does one choose? Given the choice, I choose myself. If that makes me grotesque, the karma is my own burden to bear. Though I doubt if a nickel in a cup is going to help anyone break the chains of samsara.

As I traveled around the country, visiting sites, shopping for treasures, and getting to know the locals, I imagined myself living in India, and what I would do to make myself happy if I had to exist there.  Only then was I as excited about India as I had been in anticipation of my trip. India is cheap, labor plentiful, and those in need abundant. I imagined restoring a 19th century or Art Deco building in which I would then reside. I envisioned giving life to an old factory where I would employ craftsmen to create spectacular furnishings, and other adornments. Additionally, the operation would support environmental, and community needs for education, hygiene, growth, and sustainability. The possibilities seemed magnificent, though the likelihood of my fantasies becoming a reality are slim. My life’s work is not, sadly, in India. I am not Indian. My community is Western, and my point of view is too well-defined by these traditions.

Nevertheless, I suppose India did change my perspective. The fear and anxiety that usually comes over me when I am around so many people went away. For all India’s flaws,  and contradictions, Indians are warm, and unassuming, and not nearly as scary to me as Westerners. Ironically, I felt more trusting of Indians knowing they might be trying to cheat me, than of gringos dressed up as do-gooders. What I liked most about my trip was being surrounded by so many of them. Indians are elegant, and well-dressed. They have a superior sense of style, color, and perfume. Those who have spoken to me of their travels in India always remember the smells. I will too. The good ones, that is, there is so much excreta.

If Republicans will study the returns from Massachusetts, then review the returns from Virginia and New Jersey, light will fall upon the path to victory over Barack Obama in 2012.

Obama defeated John McCain by winning the black vote 24 to one, the Hispanic vote two to one and taking a larger share of the white vote, 44 percent, than did John Kerry or Al Gore. As the white vote was three-fourths of the national turnout, Obama coasted to victory.

Now consider Massachusetts. In the 2008 election, no less than 79 percent of the voters were white, and Obama carried them by 20 points, winning the state 62 to 36.

How did Scott Brown turn that 26-point deficit into a six-point victory? By winning the white vote as massively as did Obama. While there are no exit polls to prove it, we do have exit polls from Virginia and New Jersey, which tend to corroborate it.

Bob McDonnell won the Virginia governor’s race by 17, while McCain lost Virginia by six. As McDonnell did equally poorly with African-Americans, losing the black vote 90 to nine, while McCain’s lost it 92 to eight, what explains his Virginia landslide?

The white vote. McDonnell won Virginia’s white vote 68 to 32, though his opponent was a downstate Democrat more conservative than the Northern Virginia candidates he beat in the primary.

In New Jersey, same story. McCain won 8 percent of the black vote. Gov. Chris Christie won 8 percent of the black vote. How did Christie turn a McCain loss of New Jersey by 16 points into a five-point victory?

The white vote. McCain won the white vote in New Jersey 50 to 49, but Christie won the white vote 59 to 34, almost two to one.

Republicans have won three major races—two of them upsets and one a Massachusetts miracle—because the white share of the vote in all three rose as a share of the total vote, and Republicans swept the white vote in Reagan-like landslides.

What explains the white surge to the GOP?

First, sinking white support for Obama, seen as ineffectual in ending the recession and stopping the loss of jobs.

Second, a growing perception that Obama is biased. When the president blurted that the Cambridge cops and Sgt. James Crowley “acted stupidly” in arresting black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates—a rush to judgment that proved wrong—his support sank in white America and especially in Massachusetts, where black Gov. Deval Patrick joined in piling on Crowley. Deval is now in trouble, too.

Then there was Obama’s appointment of Puerto Rican American Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. Her militant support for race and ethnic preferences and her decision to deny Frank Ricci and the white firefighters of New Haven a hearing on their case that they were denied promotions they won in competitive exams because they were white caused 31 GOP senators to vote against her.

While Massachusetts is Democrat over Republican three to one, Reagan carried the state in 1984 and Hillary Clinton clobbered Obama in the 2008 primary, though the Kennedys were in Obama’s corner. The Scott Brown Democrats were the Hillary Democrats were the Reagan Democrats.

But if McDonnell, Christie and Brown could roll up large enough shares of the white vote to win in three major states McCain lost, why did McCain lose all three?

Answer: In 2008, the working and middle class had had a bellyful of the Bush-McCain Republicans. They were seen as pro-amnesty for illegal aliens and pro-NAFTA, when U.S. workers had watched 5 million manufacturing jobs disappear in a decade—and reappear in China. They were willing to give Obama a chance because Obama had persuaded them by November he was not just another big-spending utopian liberal.

So what have Obama and Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi been doing for a year? Crafting a federal takeover of health care with a vast plan that provides coverage for the uninsured—most of whom are minorities—while sticking it to Medicare recipients, 80 percent to 90 percent of whom are white.

Immigrants are 21 percent of the uninsured, but only 7 percent of the population. This means white folks on Medicare or headed there will see benefits curtailed, while new arrivals from the Third World, whence almost all immigrants come, get taxpayer-subsidized health insurance. Any wonder why all those Tea Party and town-hall protests seem to be made up of angry white folks?

What the McDonnell, Christie, and Brown victories teach is that the GOP should stop listening to the Wall Street Journal and start listening to these forgotten Americans.

An end to affirmative action and ethnic preferences, an end to bailouts of Wall Street bankers, a moratorium on immigration until unemployment falls to 6 percent, an industrial policy that creates jobs here and stops shipping them to China appear a winning hand in 2012.

Flanked by the presidential guards known as the Evzones, one would imagine that the soldier entombed in front of the Greek parliament witnessed the last of violence when he fell fighting in the battlefield.

Alas, not so.

On January 9, at 7:59 pm, a bomb exploded in a trash bin next to The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. In a proclamation titled ‘Democracy Will Not Win’ and posted on a website hosted by state university servers, The Conspiracy of the Cells of Fire and the Terrorist Guerrilla Group claimed responsibility and promised to continue with its violent campaign. In response to this act of terror, Citizens’ Protection Minister Michalis Chrysochoidis made the following declaration:

“Some people want panic and fear but we are not afraid nor will we panic…This is an unguarded area and it will remain this way. We will not transform Athens into a militarized city. Athens is a safe and free city.”

Six days later, on January 15, a little after noon, a gang of masked attackers broke into the central office of the Deputy Justice Minister Apostolos Katsifaras. Finding Katsifaras missing, the thugs used their batons and hammers to brutally vent their anger on two of the minister’s employees, sending them both to the hospital. True to style, they trashed his office and scattered leaflets of anarchist propaganda before they left. 

The minister was right about one thing though:  Greeks are not scared and they are certainly not panicking. On the contrary, Greeks are tired, peeved, and angry at the increasingly emboldened terrorist groups and the swamp of anarchist subculture in which they swim.

If anything, these recent acts of desecration and violence reminded the nation of the time when mobs held Athens under siege in December 2008. Over a period of two weeks, anarcho-student mobs burned, looted, and gutted the Greek capital and cities across Greece.  Schools and university departments became launching pads for roaming gangs of street thugs who eventually caused an estimated 1.5 billion euros in damages.

A far cry from being ‘militarized,’ Greeks stood aghast as a paralyzed government, instead of containing the rioters, ordered anti-riot squads to refrain from arresting the students or using any appreciable force. This short-sighted move not only prolonged the rioting and plundering, but almost succeeded in toppling the paralyzed government itself. Moreover, it brought to the forefront the consequences of government policies on higher education that over decades, enabled the radicalization and anomie of its youths. (Incidentally, no criminal investigation into the 2008 riots has been launched.) 

The restoration of democracy in 1974 heralded a new and different era of violence in Greece that emanated from within rather than from without: regular terror and violence from leftist groups and mobs of anarchists who have entrenched themselves in the social and educational fabric of Greek society. According to the recent whining of one 44-year old anarchist, rioting is the only rational response to an administration that just ‘doesn’t understand their frustration at class division, the poor economy, a broken education system, and a corrupt government.’

Petulant self-pity aside, the anarchists and members of terror groups, who like to imagine themselves ‘re-enacting some sort of 19th century social revolution against the bourgeois,’ are neither poverty-stricken nor alienated. A good number of them enjoy access to higher education for which they pay no tuition and no fees. Many so-called students are fanatically committed to pathological demonstrations and compulsive vandalism as ‘a fun social activity’ and an emotional catharsis that combines wanton destruction with the extension of ’legitimate demands’ for all to hear. 

Gallingly enough, students majoring in anarchy have made great use of a neoclassical enclave where they can congregate, commiserate, conspire, stash weapons, and hang out: the Athens National Technical University, better known as the Polytechnic. Like all universities across Greece, the Polytechnic is out of bounds for the police. An ’academic asylum law,’ passed shortly after the fall of the junta prohibits law enforcement from entering university grounds to pursue trouble makers and bring them to justice.  In fact, when the government tried to pass educational reforms in the summer of 2006 that included limiting the infamous ‘asylum’ law, no less than ten thousand students rioted, occupied universities across the country, firebombed the police, and generally did what they do best in the sabotage of higher education: Molotov cocktails and organized tantrums.

At the end of the day, The Greek dream has always been to graduate from a university you can’t get expelled from to getting a job in the civil service that you can’t get fired from. Nonetheless, most would agree that state malfunction is no excuse for state destruction. And under no circumstances is anarchy and terror the solution or catalyst for the change Greece so urgently demands. With the country at the brink of financial ruin and mired in other serious socio-economic problems, this generation of anarchy are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

However, amidst the violence and vicious cycles, there is an enduring and rare inspiration in those charged with protecting The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Dressed in the traditional kilt worn by the men who fought the rugged and relentless resistance against Ottoman rule, the Evzones stand completely still at their posts, impervious to all threats and provocations—including cowardly terrorist attacks. Remarkably, even when they were warned of an imminent explosion, three Evzones guards refused to abandon their posts, an action for which they were given presidential recognition. 

It would be fitting if both members of parliament and the media begin showing the same sincerity in protecting public interest as the Evzones show in protecting the unknown soldier who died not to destroy his country, but to honor it. As for the terrorists and anarchists, its high time they got a haircut, went back to school, and gave up the Marilyn Manson lyrics for Pericles’s ’Funeral Oration.’ 

Enter a London coffee house or restaurant, check into a hotel, or wander by a building-site, and you will find the workforce almost exclusively foreign. Yet British unemployment continues to surge towards 2.5 million. Something is rotten in the heart of modern Britain, for that heart is the underclass and its malady is caused by welfare.

A process of reverse evolution is in train. It is no longer the fittest or the brightest, the fastest or the best, who survive and thrive in our contemporary jungle. It is the moronic and the bovine, the fattest and the least productive, who are cosseted and subsidized and excused their behavior. Because of it, they breed. After all, sex is free and the State will ever pick up the pieces. Collect £200 and Get out of Jail for free. While the benighted and exploited middle-classes pay their tax, marry late, and have fewer children, the underclass procreates with abandon. They have every reason, and no reason not to.

As Africa has systematically swallowed a trillion dollars in aid with precious little to show for it, so welfare at home has rendered a burgeoning social subgroup unable or unwilling to pull its (now grotesquely bloated) weight. The middle class pays dearly—housing these people, schooling them, nursing them for their myriad addictions and self-induced complaints, and then being mugged by them as they trudge home from their highly-taxed jobs.

Rather than imbue an ethic of hard work, discipline, and responsibility, through a process of handouts and hand-wringing we have promoted instead a culture in which it pays to be a dropout and where a man need not lift a finger (let alone a pick, shovel, mallet, chisel, or spanner) in order to earn a wage. Crack, smack, and street-robbery are so much more rewarding.  Whoever imagined nothing is for free was profoundly wrong. The underclass not only rejects the notion there is nobility in work, it cannot actually see the point.

Every decade that passes, the habits become engrained (some would say, enshrined) and the mindset reinforced. The underclass grows, and not merely because teenage girls fail to discover contraception and believe the swiftest route to a council house is via their own birth-canals. Enabling and sustaining it, feeding it with ceaseless waves of new recruits, is a liberal-left education establishment that has conspired to beach successive generations on the shoals of illiteracy and phonetic spelling and the sandbars of underachievement. Init, well wicked, knowhaddamean? Of course you do. Education used to point the way out of the ghetto. Today it simply consigns our young to a lifetime of delivering pizza.

Without the resources to renationalize industry, left-leaning governments have directed their energies towards taking the public back into state ownership. Create an underclass, make it dependent on your largesse, and you will garner its vote. That is the premise. Or maybe there is no logic; perhaps it is just the old knee-jerk and patronizing instincts of the left. They know best. And it has done irreparable harm. In place of parenting, there are social workers; instead of common sense, there is health and safety and the criminal records bureau; substituting for normal community interaction is diversity training; standing in for work there is always welfare. At every level the state intrudes and society suffers.

I am not advocating we eat the poor—far be it for me to promote a fatty diet—and nor do I suggest we abandon all financial safety-nets. I simply propose we ditch the tired vocabulary of victim-hood that categorizes the handout-consuming and habitually unemployed as the ‘most vulnerable in society’. It is the wealth-creators who are the most vulnerable.

Look closer and you will find that poverty is more often than not a matter of prioritization for those apparently caught in its maw. I long to hear a politician ask the question: If you have so little money, what on earth persuaded you to have five children? Why at Christmas do you purchase the latest consumer durables, computer-games and plasma-screen televisions and yet baulk at spending on private health insurance? How come you are so fat when fruit and vegetables are cheaply available? It will not happen. For we have infantilized the populace, stripping the underclass of pride, motivation, and personal responsibility and instead awarding it rights and benefits.

In the liberal-left world of the welfare state, everything is a condition, an illness, a fault of someone else. Even obesity is to be blamed on rogue genes, thyroid-malfunction or the antics of food manufacturers rather than on the sloth and greed of individuals. People forget the mouth is generally larger than the anus and thus cram it with more food. They have been allowed to forget.
The origin of yet another subspecies is revealed. But that’s okay. For the state will provide gastric bands and liposuction and will end up owning a few more souls.

“You know, despite it all, it’s still really a miracle America elected a black man as president,” my 60-something neighbor said to me over beers recently. You get this a lot from people born before 1965. Apparently, America is a racist hellhole and the fact that they overcame this deep-seated hatred for blacks to allow one into the White House is physics defied. Um, as far as I can tell, a seemingly smart and in-control Democrat proceeded the most hated Republican president of all time. That’s not a “miracle.” It’s a “normal.”

I get insulted when Boomers tell me how racist my country is. I understand where they’re coming from, I guess. They grew up with survivors of the Great Depression: Grumpy old traditionalists that worked their fingers to the bone in isolation and never tried anything weird. That was then however, so please shut up about it. There is not a gigantic ogre of racism controlling our brains that took time off during the election but rears its ugly head every time we have a problem with, say, unprecedented taxation.

Now, I’m sure you can dig up some redneck who still says nigger or half a dozen skinheads in the middle of nowhere but hate crimes are a miniscule percentage of total crimes in America and if you get into per capita, all races get it about equally. I heard some horrible stories about drinking fountains from forever ago and I saw a video where dogs were attacking some dude but that was a different universe than my generation’s America. We don’t care if people aren’t like us anymore. We don’t even get what you’re talking about.

When someone under 40 hears boomer anthems like, “There’s a land where the children are free,” we go, “What the hell is this song about? Where are the children NOT free?” Old people grew up in a climate where nuns gave the strap if you wrote with your left hand and young boys were verboten from going near dolls. Our generation yawns at such superstitious claptrap. If my son turns out to be gay, I will go into a deep depression for about seven minutes and then I’ll get over it. The boomers grew up in a world where their parents dry-heaved at the thought of a black man breathing the same air as them. Even the boomers, I’m told, were occasionally mocked for not being exactly like the majority. My American Indian mother-in-law was nicknamed jungle bunny in college. Not only do we find that hard to comprehend. We think it’s funny. As Harmony Korine said, “I crack up at the race riots.”

We never would have made fun of this guy.

It seems like every children’s book I’m forced to read to my kid is about some freak that everyone learned isn’t a freak after all. We never thought he was a freak in the first place you ancient babies. If Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer were born today, the other reindeers would high-five him and ask him what reindeer games they think he should play. In my school, the kid with Down Syndrome was the school hero and the football team adopted him as their favorite fan without a trace of irony. The pre-1970 people are unable to grasp this. They created movies like Mask where a boy with craniodiaphyseal dysplasia, is mocked for his circus-like disfigurements. Or the show Square Pegs where the quirky, unusual kids were relegated to the bottom rung of the high school hierarchy. In my Secondary Education, all these people would have been rock stars.

The same goes with sexism. Why Men Earn More pointed out the obvious error with assuming women get paid less for the same work. Namely: Why wouldn’t corporations hire them in droves? They’re cheap labor, right? Turns out they earn less because they tend to be more committed to family events than staying up all night preparing proposals. In other words, they choose to earn less. After waves of famine, a great depression, and a free-for-all orgy of whining, we’ve figured a lot of it out and the old wive’s tales no longer make any sense to us.

We are the information generation. We know you’re born gay and there’s nothing you can do about it. We googled it. We know women can be just as capable at any job and we hire accordingly. We know freaks are not cursed by the almighty but just statistical inevitablilites. We are way too well-adjusted to push someone out of our life just because they don’t meet some strange parameters someone else invented so please stop doing a spit take when we don’t behave exactly like our grandfathers.

Gstaad. I went to a wonderful party, three days of a non-stop feast, although not at the Palace, the mere hoi polloi were excluded, in theory at least.

There wasn’t a sign of Kate or a Mick, they must have forgotten the date, actually they were not invited, but Topper (whom no one could say is a pleb—well bred is his motto, or is it well fed?) was there, as was Freddy, and Minnie, and Lolly and Bunny and George, I couldn’t have liked it more.

Sorry, Sir Noel, but I write this rather hung over, the Muse having silently slipped away in the snow around six-thirty this morning on my way home.  430 swells flew over the Atlantic for Philip Radziwill’s marriage to Devon Schuster, his childhood sweetheart, for a romantic but spectacular wedding in the snow-covered village of Gstaad, where the groom’s parents have a chalet. The timing was perfect. Gstaad resembles Yemen during the holidays, but then things quiet down until the February rush that turns this beautiful alpine town into Beirut with a bit of downtown Moscow thrown in for good measure.  So, in the middle of January, while hoi polloi were back chasing the not so mighty buck, the swells arrived for some serious partying among the sheltering mountains of the Bernese Oberland, the German part of good old Helvetia which I love. (French speaking Switzerland I find bogus-chic, and the Italian part slightly Sloany—phony).

What a pleasure it was not to run into anime creatures with exaggerated cheeks, lips and breasts. No pouting Jade Jaggers stinking up the place with their self-importance, certainly no desperate publicity-seeking Paris Hilton types,  just a lot of young good looking people having fun. The parents of the groom are very old and good friends of mine. The mother, Eugenie Radziwill, is actually a childhood friend. As is her husband John. I first met John’s father, Stas, when he was JFK’s brother-in-law. He was married to Jackie’s much prettier sister Lee, but the marriage I always thought to be a rocky one, and it ended in divorce sometime during the Seventies. Stas liked to have a good time and we used to hit the clubs together when he’d come to Paris. He would have enjoyed last weekend as he had an eye for the ladies, to say the least. Just before I sat down to write this column I glanced at the papers and saw pictures of a hoodie delivering a small package to 18-year old Georgia Jagger, and with the de riguer punch-up which followed and ended Georgia’s birthday celebration in London. Oh to be in England, with its hoodies and its punch-ups,  but for the moment I think I’ll stick to Switzerland.

And the hell of a party that was. Miles of silk covered the permanent tent that houses four tennis courts, and miles of marble that based the Radziwill portraits that plastered the tent. The Radziwills were electors of Poland, which means they were elected to be kings, not a bad idea even back then. Another good idea was to start the fun with a mountain fondue party on Friday, with cabins well-stacked with warm gluewein taking the merry makers to the top. Coming down for some strange reason seemed to go much quicker and then it was on to the Palace GreenGo club until the dawn.

Next day came the wedding in the beautiful Saanen church followed by the ball. In between, however, I had been asked to give a lunch for some who flew over for the bash, which did not turn out to be a great success even if I say so myself. I felt too ill and had to leave in the middle for some cross country skiing to be ready for the evening. A rather rude thing to do but necessary. My great buddy John Sutin played host, although he wasn’t feeling his best either, especially as he was wearing an alpine coat of lemon green that did not help.
And a funny thing happened that evening. I danced with a married lady while very much in my cups and kissed her. Right in the kisser. After awhile I wanted some more, asked her to dance once again and applied the Taki method. Not best pleased she pushed me away. Never one to insist, I sat down and complained to a friend of mine about the volatility of females. “But that was her twin,” my friend George told me, “and they’re wearing identical dresses.” Figuring that I might pick on the wrong twin again, I gave up and concentrated on some of my daughter’s friends. For dancing only, that is. 

Now I’m left with some wonderful memories and an enlarged liver for my troubles. My son John Taki set a new record in the Taki Cup as he raced up to the Eagle Club in 36 minutes. Ten years ago, when the competition began, 59 minutes was the record that was supposed to be unbreakable. And JT did it without sleep and having skied all day. He does even better with the fairer sex—he’s separated from his Italian wife and has two young children—but the reason I consider him an ungrateful son who hates his father is because he absolutely refuses to put in a good word for his old man to past or present girlfriends. In fact he tells them I’m happily married, a vulgar abuse of the truth.
     

I welcome James Jackson’s courage in pointing out the fact that Africa’s chronic dysfunction is the result of, not white European rule in the past, but black Africans rule in the present—that, rather than its being the result of European colonialism and post-imperial indifference, as is the Left’s contention, chronic dysfunction in the region is the result of European post-colonialism and post-imperial aid programs.

I will not accuse him of Leftism, but Mr. Jackson still commits the fallacy— characteristic of the Left—of judging sub-Saharan Africa by European standards, and still seems to assume that Africa would develop into a European-style civilization if only Africans stopped playing victim and got their act together, for once and for all. This latter assumption stems from the belief, held by the Left, that black Africans are Europeans with black skin. Said belief is linked to another belief, one that values progress and measures it in terms of convergence with Europe’s present techno-industrial society—a type of society characterized by complex social organization, high technology, industrial production, scientific discovery, capitalism, rule of law, private property, citizen’s rights, modernity, and secular rationalism. The abnormality of these beliefs in relation to some non-European societies is not obvious to us, because we take them for granted. But taking cognizance of it is important, for the consequences are catastrophic: they underpin the entire aid and white guilt enterprise, which have fuelled a population explosion in the Dark Continent and the consequent tide of hungry and resentful immigrants into Europe and North America.

I have argued for some time that if stability is ever to visit the Dark Continent, we must allow black Africans to diverge from Europe and to reorganize in a manner harmonious with their temperament, proclivities, and endowments. I have also argued that we must not intervene, even if the end result is disturbing to us. What Africa needs is not more money and development, but none. Black Africans are different from Europeans. We may not wish to speak of African cultures, because in relation to ours they seem primitive, but we must accept that culture means something different for them than it does to us, and, while me may well have an opinion, our opinion is irrelevant if what they understand as culture is what works for them. Progress, as important as it may be for us presently, is out of place there. Africa has gone to hell because it must.

Read Why Africa is Hell by James Jackson on Takimag.com.

This is not to say that the present situation in sub-Saharan Africa (and I stress sub-Saharan, because we must not tarnish Morocco and Egypt with the same brush) is normal by African standards. It is not normal. It is the result of a period of transition – from white society to black society—that Western Leftists have been obstructing ever since the end of empire with their well-meaning (but all the same doomed) aid and development programs.

Traditional sub-Saharan societies are tribal; their spiritualities animistic; their medicine witchcraft; their sanitation poor; their farming subsistence or non-existent. J.R. Baker (Race, 1974) paints a picture of uncivilization: the aborigines were naked or semi-naked; they practiced self-mutilation; they resided in small settlements, in simple, single-story dwellings; they sailed on crude canoes carved out of tree trunks; they had not invented the wheel; they rarely domesticated animals or used them for labor or transportation; they had no written script or recorded history; they had no use of money, no numbering system, no calendar; they had no roads; and they had no administration or code of law. Chiefs were despotic, capricious, and cruel; slaughter was frequent; cannibalism was sometimes practiced. Dialects were simple, with limited vocabularies to express abstract thought. The average tribesman lived for the moment and lacked foresight. Any bright ideas usually perished with its inventor. Such a picture efficiently explains Africa in the 21st century. 

It also explains why aid and development funds have achieved nothing except amplify the horrors in the continent: after all, once you introduce money in the above context, the spear gives way to the AK-47. Bono and Geldof and their fellow Live8 participants, the ageing, self-righteous, self-indulgent, cosmetically-enhanced rock stars that we know and loathe, have blood on their hands. So do the Western charities and media for supporting such efforts.

This why I think Mr. Jackson is right to want “the demolition of every road, college, and hospital we ever built” in black Africa. This ought to have been concomitant with de-colonization. If the European powers no longer saw it feasible to maintain an empire, they ought to have dismantled the colonial infrastructure and left the region as it was first found by the early explorers. Outsiders ought to have been forbidden, by an international covenant modeled after the Antarctic Treaty of 1959, from upsetting the sub-Saharan habitat by declaring the region a nature preserve. Of course, this was politically impossible at the time, and the European conscience, already afflicted by post-imperial guilt, would have been doubly troubled by the ensuing famines (without industrialized farms, you cannot feed millions of people). But the famines have, nevertheless, still visited the region, and not only have they not been averted, but they have been multiplied and magnified by the Western efforts to avert them.

The initial post-imperial famines might have been inevitable, but the end result would have been a smaller, re-tribalized, pre-historical population, able to feed itself through the traditional methods of subsistence farming, hunting, and gathering. After a few generations, sub-Saharan Africa would have no longer looked at the West with a mixture of envy, frustration, and hatred, because it would have forgotten about its existence, except through orally transmitted fables and legends. The white man would have been remembered as a god (or a demon)—as an alien being from another world, who built cities of gold and had magical powers beyond imagination. After a few generations, sub-Sahara African would have reverted to its pre-colonial ways, and completed its transition from a collection of failed states to a living record of humanity’s past.

What is the greatest human achievement? Many would answer in terms of some architectural or engineering feat: The Great Pyramids, skyscrapers, a bridge span, or sending men to the moon. Others might say the subduing of some deadly disease or Einstein’s theory of relativity.

The greatest human achievement is the subordination of government to law. This was an English achievement that required eight centuries of struggle, beginning in the ninth century when King Alfred the Great codified the common law, moving forward with the Magna Carta in the thirteenth century and culminating with the Glorious Revolution in the late seventeenth century.

The success of this long struggle made law a shield of the people. As an English colony, America inherited this unique achievement that made English-speaking peoples the most free in the world.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, this achievement was lost in the United States and, perhaps, in England as well.

As Lawrence Stratton and I show in our book, “The Tyranny of Good Intentions” (2000), the protective features of law in the U.S. were eroded in the twentieth century by prosecutorial abuse and by setting aside law in order to better pursue criminals. By the time of our second edition (2008), law as a shield of the people no longer existed. Respect for the Constitution and rule of law had given way to executive branch claims that during time of war government is not constrained by law or Constitution.

Government lawyers told President Bush that he did not have to obey the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which prohibits the government from spying on citizens without a warrant, thus destroying the right to privacy. The U.S. Department of Justice ruled that the President did not have to obey U.S. law prohibiting torture or the Geneva Conventions. Habeas corpus protection, a Constitutional right, was stripped from U.S. citizens. Medieval dungeons, torture, and the windowless cells of Stalin’s Lubyanka Prison reappeared under American government auspices.

The American people’s elected representatives in Congress endorsed the executive branch’s overthrow of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Law schools and bar associations were essentially silent in the face of this overthrow of mankind’s greatest achievement. Some parts of the federal judiciary voted with the executive branch; other parts made a feeble resistance. Today in the name of “the war on terror,” the executive branch does whatever it wants. There is no accountability.

The First Amendment has been abridged and may soon be criminalized. Protests against, and criticisms of, the U.S. government’s illegal invasions of Muslim countries and war crimes against civilian populations have been construed by executive branch officials as “giving aid and comfort to the enemy.” As American citizens have been imprisoned for giving aid to Muslim charities that the executive branch has decreed, without proof in a court of law, to be under the control of “terrorists,” any form of opposition to the government’s wars and criminal actions can also be construed as aiding terrorists and be cause for arrest and indefinite detention.

One Obama appointee, Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein, advocates that the U.S. government create a cadre of covert agents to infiltrate anti-war groups and groups opposed to U.S. government policies in order to provoke them into actions or statements for which they can be discredited and even arrested.

Sunstein defines those who criticize the government’s increasingly lawless behavior as “extremists,” which, to the general public, sounds much like “terrorists.” In essence, Sunstein wants to generalize the F.B.I.’s practice of infiltrating dissidents and organizing them around a “terrorist plot” in order to arrest them. That this proposal comes from a Harvard Law School professor demonstrates the collapse of respect for law among American law professors themselves, ranging from John Yoo at Berkeley, the advocate of torture, to Sunstein at Harvard, a totalitarian who advocates war on the First Amendment.

The U.S. Department of State has taken up Sunstein’s idea. Last month Eva Golinger reported in the Swiss newspaper, Zeit-Fragen, that the State Department plans to organize youth in “Twitter Revolutions” to destabilize countries and bring about regime change in order to achieve more American puppet states, such as the ones in Egypt, Jordan, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Canada, Mexico, Columbia, Ukraine, Georgia, the Baltic states, Britain and Western and Eastern Europe.

The First Amendment is being closed down. Its place is being taken by propaganda in behalf of whatever government does. As Stratton and I wrote in the second edition of our book documenting the destruction of law in the United States:

“Never in its history have the American people faced such danger to their constitutional protections as they face today from those in the government who hold the reins of power and from elements of the legal profession and the federal judiciary that support ‘energy in the executive.’ An assertive executive backed by an aggressive U.S. Department of Justice (sic) and unobstructed by a supine Congress and an intimidated corporate media has demonstrated an ability to ignore statutory law and public opinion. The precedents that have been set during the opening years of the twenty-first century bode ill for the future of American liberty.”

Similar assaults on the rule of law can be observed in England. However, the British have not completely given up on government accountability. The Chilcot Inquiry is looking into how Britain was deceived into participating in the illegal U.S. invasion of Iraq. President Obama, of course, has blocked any inquiry into how the U.S. was deceived into attacking Iraq in violation of law.

Much damning information has come out about Blair’s deception of the British government and people. Sir David Manning, foreign policy advisor to Blair, told the Chilcot Inquiry that Blair had promised Bush support for the invasion almost a year in advance. Blair had told his country that it was a last minute call based on proof of Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction.

Sir William Patey told the inquiry that President Bush began talking about invading Iraq six or seven months prior to September 11, 2001. A devastating official memo has come to light from Lord Goldsmith, Prime Minister Blair’s top law official, advising Blair that an invasion of Iraq would be in breach of international law.

Now a secret and personal letter to Prime Minister Blair from his Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, has surfaced. In the letter, the Foreign Secretary warned the Prime Minister that his case for military invasion of Iraq was of dubious legality and was likely as false as the argument that removing Saddam Hussein would bring Iraqis a better life.

Blair himself must now testify. He has the reputation, whether deserved or not, as one of the slickest liars in the world. But some accountability seems to be heading his way. The Sunday Times (London) reported on Jan. 17 that the latest poll indicates that 52 percent of the British people believe that Blair deliberately misled his country in order to take Britain to war for the Americans. About one quarter of the British people think Blair should be put on trial as a war criminal.

Unlike the U.S., where government takes care to keep itself unaccountable to law, Britain is a member of the International Criminal Court, so Blair does stand some risk of being held accountable for the war crimes of President George W. Bush’s regime and the U.S. Congress.

In contrast, insouciant Americans are content for their government to behave illegally. A majority supports torture despite its illegality, and a McClatchy-Ipsos poll found that 51 percent of Americans agree that “it is necessary to give up some civil liberties in order to make the country safe from terrorism.”

As our Founding Fathers warned, fools who give up liberty for security will have neither.

MISSING: global recession, 6 billion careless owners.

No, really, why do I see thousands of people milling around in the shops as though the credit crunch was nothing more than an abdominal exercise machine with a built-in payment plan?

Alastair Darling, in his budget, forecasts a “return to growth in the fourth quarter” of this year, and here in London, the hellishly crowded Christmas shops suggest the punters think that’s a good thing. Bollocks. Am I the only person who is utterly furious? When everything went completely tits up we were promised an apocalyptic collapse of Western civilization. Finally all the tips we had gleaned from watching disaster movies were going to pay off.

You know the form: stock up on leathers, 4x4s (no need to worry about global warming in an apocalypse) and weaponry, set up gladiatorial arenas, cook your fatter neighbors, before retiring to some retreat with your leading lady. At the very least, you should be able to get a table in a restaurant good enough to impress that lady, and buy Eaton Square with the change.

Has that happened? My ass. Any girl daft enough to accept dinner with me is going to a place with an all-you-can-eat salad bar because every table at Sheekeys and the Wolseley is still crammed with bankers.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not Gordon “back-to-the-Manse” Brown ranting about bankers like John Knox railing against Papal mistresses. I like bankers—and Papal mistresses, too—they invite me to parties and sometimes have even made me a penny. But I wouldn’t be human if my spirits weren’t raised by a few friends being found huddled around braziers under a bridge like Randolph and Mortimer. Trouble is, politicians are treating the economy with the foresight of a deep-fried Mars bar.

John Springs

The recession was caused by free money being handed out willy-nilly. Don’t listen to anyone else: a Bank of England report recently blamed “excessive risk-taking in the upswing of the credit cycle and insufficient resilience in the subsequent downturn.” That’s like the parents of obese children criticising their bloated offspring for being greedy. Children eat, it’s what they do. If you want a slimmer child, here’s a tip—stop feeding it burgers; if you want to stop unsustainable debt levels fuelling property bubbles, raise interest rates.

To be fair, we just copied the U.S. It was Greenspan who invented the soft economic landing, oblivious to the fact that every now and again some salad and a little roughage was important for the diet, not just slower protein. But, he was only the nurse; the parents were the politicians, and they liked an economic style that stuffed ice cream into the brat’s mouth every time it started to cry.

Hardly surprising that every other country took their lead, and nobody from nurse, parents or child complained until the 10 year-old boom became the youngest patient on the cardiac ward.

The fact is, if someone gives me £100 for doing sod all, I’ll spend it. So did you and now we’re all in debt. You might as well take a crate of vodka into an AA meeting as expect anybody to act responsibly in a credit boom. The real danger is what they’re doing now. 

The vodka has been drunk, and Majestic have delivered a few cases of Bulgarian Cabernet Sauvignon, oh and then there was the Special Brew, and did someone really polish off the Goldwasser and the Angostura bitters in what seemed a very promising new cocktail (for which we came up with a hilarious name) at 3 am?

Normally fatigue kicks in there, you sleep and wake with an unpleasant hangover that nonetheless reassures you for having suffered for your excesses. But if instead someone discovers the tequila? You drink shots until dawn, hit the all-night bars, collapse in an alleyway and wake up in jail in a position of unexpected intimacy with a tattooed cellmate called Cletus.

Lehmans et al. were someone saying ‘What, absolutely no more Angostura at all?’ Time for bed and that painful but morally cleansing recession. Instead the politicians, central bankers and economic doves rang the doorbell, handed over the mescal and shouted ‘Arriba’, cutting interest rates to zero, printing money and telling everyone to go out lending and borrowing again.

The result: full tables in restaurants, recovering house prices and Christmas presents all round. Enjoy it if you want, but I’ll bet you that in a couple of years when everyone sobers up, we’re going to hear two very different things: I’m going to hear the maitre d’ at the Wolseley saying, “Of course we have a table, sir, that’s no problem,” whereas all you’re going to hear is the sound of Cletus opening the lubricant.

Caramba!

You might think that James Cameron, the man who wrote and directed the two biggest global box office blockbusters in history, Titanic and technologically groundbreaking Avatar, hardly needs defending. Yet, amidst all the denunciations of Avatar by neoconservative such as John Podhoretz and David Brooks, who are annoyed that the evil Earthling mercenaries use terms like “shock and awe,” and the more persuasive criticism from science fiction aficionados that the auteur dumbs down his movies for the mass market, it’s worth pointing out that the Cameron glass is half full, too.

Like many guys of a certain age, I’ve nurtured a love-hate attitude toward James Cameron that goes back a quarter of a century to a point about five minutes into Terminator. That’s when it started to dawn upon me that the man behind this cheesy, low-budget time travel flick starring that muscle man who talks funny was the most ambitious and accomplished hard science-fiction filmmaker ever.

Yet, if Cameron had so much talent that he could make the movie of my dreams, then it is easy for me to assume that he should make it. And when he doesn’t, I tend to take it personally.

Nevertheless, Cameron deserves some vindication. For example, rather than being the America-hating leftist of neocon fulminations, Cameron is a worthy successor to the greatest American science fiction writer, Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988).

A highly imaginative writer, Heinlein’s politics were far from consistent. (His three cult novels have three wildly different cults: Starship Troopers was the second book on the official U.S. Marine Corps reading list, while Stranger in a Strange Land was beloved by hippies, and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by U. of Chicago libertarians.) Still, it’s fair to say that Heinlein was not a conventional Hollywood liberal.

Having been raised on Heinlein novels, I could always see where Cameron was coming from. His second film, 1986’s Aliens, struck me as Heinlein’s Starship Troopers done better than Heinlein himself could manage. Cameron left out the political chatter and added extra helpings of suspense and combat between giant space bugs and humans in powered armor suits.

Indeed, in a recent interview with blogger Jordan Hoffman, Cameron credits Heinlein’s 1959 novel as the inspiration for Aliens. He goes on to denounce Paul Verhoeven’s smirky 1997 adaptation of Starship Troopers. When asked to recommend sci-fi novels, Cameron responded:

JC: I’d say anything by Heinlein … Starship Troopers, if you want to see where Aliens was inspired.  Which, of course, was made into a not great film…
JH: Not great?! I’m throwing the gauntlet down. It’s great in a tongue and cheek sort of way.
JC: Yeah, I think that’s what I didn’t care for, because the original story by Heinlein is pretty serious. The last line of the book, and he means it absolutely seriously, is: “to the everlasting glory of the infantry.” He was celebrating the ground-pounder, the dogface, but in a futuristic context.

Cameron is pro-soldier and anti-war, a combination the neocons find shocking but I find appealing.

Heinlein’s thumbprints can be found all over Avatar’s pastiche of a plot. For instance, the device that launches Cameron’s scenario—one identical twin must substitute at the last minute for his brother on an interstellar voyage—is also in Heinlein’s 1956 novel Time for the Stars. Moreover, Avatar appears to borrow one of its central ideas—Pandora, a planet where the entire ecosystem is a single living network exchanging information—from the climax of Heinlein’s 1953 book for boys, Starman Jones.

Indeed, Avatar’s main plot—a human soldier teams up with a seemingly primitive but actually wise alien tribe to prevent an evil Earthling mining company from despoiling their sacred tropical homeland—an be found in Heinlein’s 1948 “young adult” story Space Cadet.

This is not to say Cameron is plagiarizing Heinlein. Rather, Heinlein’s ideas are part of the creative DNA of every artist working in hard sci-fi.

Further, Cameron is confronted with the same storytelling problem as Heinlein: they both love giant machines, but audiences don’t want to see the overdog win. Heinlein used a more convoluted variant of the Avatar plot in both Red Planet (1949) and Between Planets (1951). In these, the heroes are human settlers on Mars or Venus who enlist the admirable indigenous aliens in their fight for planetary independence from the oligarchic rulers of Earth.

In Heinlein’s books, it’s as if the American Revolution saw the American settlers allying with the American Indians to defeat King George. (The reality, of course, was closer to the opposite. As the Declaration of Independence’s reference to “merciless Indian Savages” suggests, “democracy” and “indigenous rights” are more antonyms than synonyms.) Not surprisingly, Cameron, who was born and raised through age 16 in Canada, can’t be bothered with Heinlein’s contortions, so Avatar is politically simpler than its sources in the Heinlein canon.

The better criticism of Avatar is that its colossal budget (some of it going to develop new technology, such as his multi-camera motion capture rig that finally allows digital aliens to reflect fully the facial expressions of human actors) means that Cameron felt compelled to simplify his more sophisticated original screenplay. He wanted to make it comprehensible to the largest possible audience, especially the less astute overseas market (where it’s just about to break the billion-dollar barrier).

As his twelve-year absence between Titanic and Avatar attests, his obsession with dreaming up new ways to make movies sometimes gets in the way of his actually making movies.

Noah Millman complains, reasonably enough, at The American Scene:

The reason people assume the Na’vi are supposed to be stand-ins for Native Americans or whatnot is that Cameron didn’t make them alien enough. … Avatar is a science-fiction failure because Cameron didn’t grapple seriously with making a race of aliens, or an alien world. … But if your eye is on the bottom line, it probably makes sense to stay well inside your audience’s comfort zone.

No other filmmaker leaves me pondering so often the financial tradeoffs he’s dealing with while I’m watching his movies. I’m always wondering: How much more could Cameron have afforded to do if he’d spent $100 million less?

Ultimately, I suspect that Cameron, despite his remarkable fluency as a visual storyteller, is less interested in making movies about science fiction heroes than in being a science fiction hero himself, an inventive engineer straight out of a Heinlein novel such as The Door into Summer/.

As Cameron’s aspirations have swelled, he’s made himself into an offscreen, yet central, figure in his own movies, perhaps more than any filmmaker since Cecil B. DeMille. Will Cameron go broke shooting Titanic? Will he revolutionize filmmaking and movie-going in Avatar? The looming presence of James Cameron in James Cameron films has become both intrusive and inspiring.

This makes Cameron, in a strange way, more interesting than his own movies.

The opposition in Iran, as elsewhere, uses the language of human rights to assert its moral superiority over its enemies in their seats of power. Opposition spokesmen point to government kangaroo courts, rapes, beatings, electric shocks and imposition of the death penalty to convince the world outside that the regime is illegitimate. Vicious attacks on students by the modern brown-shirts of the Basij militia further undermine the right of the clergy to govern.

Yet, amid the justifiable outrage at the punishments the Iranian regime metes out to those it suspects are trying to overthrow them, there are memories of a previous opposition movement that made the human rights case against the Shah in 1979. Then, Iran’s opposition groups, who were both democratic and theocratic, contended that torture and murder by the Shah’s secret police, the notorious SAVAK, proved that the Shah was not fit to govern.  As soon as the clergy seized power, however, prisons and torture chambers in which the new rulers themselves had once suffered were overflowing.

Ayatollah Khalkhali sat in judgement day and night to send not only members of the ancien regime, but former revolutionaries, to the gallows. Born in idealism and supported by a broad base of democrats, secularists, leftists and prelates, the Iranian revolutionaries exceeded SAVAK in the use of intimidation, torture and killing. Evin Prison, symbol of the Shah’s hated police state, saw more torture and murder than the SAVAK had practiced. Moreover, the clergy did not take long to exceed the Shah’s cronies at siphoning off as much of the country’s wealth as they could stuff into the folds of their jellabas.

Iranian men and women, however, enjoy more rights than their fellow Muslims across the Persian Gulf in Saudi Arabia. Countries that support and trade with the Saudi monarchy lack credibility when condemning the Iranian mullahs for human rights abuses that are routine in Saudi Arabia. In both countries, women are made to cover themselves lest they invite the lust of men. Iranian women, however, enjoy legal protections that Saudi women have never known. They work in the professions, and they drive cars. They vote and stand for parliament, while their Saudi sisters have no parliament and must be driven by a male relation or retainer.

Iran holds elections that in the past have expressed the popular will, but the rulers clearly tampered with the results of last June’s presidential poll to avoid relinquishing power—not to the opposition—but to a man from within the ranks of the theocracy who had twice been a much-feared prime minister. Mir Hosein Musavi’s election would not have portended a counter-revolution so much as a partial reform, but even that was too much for the Supreme Leader and the system over which he presides. Denying Musavi the presidency—more importantly, denying the electors their choice or president—may have initiated the counter-revolution that the ayatollahs of Qum fear most.

As the regime fights for its life, Iranians suffer more abuse. Stories of those who have been released from prisons since the demonstrations against the fraudulent elections have been harrowing and well documented. Women and men have been raped in their cells. Beatings are routine. Policemen torture youngsters into informing on their friends. And there is nothing we in the Western world can do about it.

Even before the elections, Iran executed children: twenty-six under the age of eighteen with another 130 awaiting the death penalty. (Saudi and Sudanese courts also execute children for criminal offenses.) Iranian courts put to death more than three hundred adults, after trials that barely deserve the name, in 2007. Human Rights Watch reported that another 29 men were hanged in one day in 2008 without so much as disclosing most of their names. Detentions without trial are commonplace, and political activists often disappear into a security system that has no habeas corpus. This was routine before the regime felt threatened, and it can only increase as its opponents mobilize for their overthrow. A year ago, a few activists asked for reforms. Now, they are openly shouting, “Death to the Dictator.”

As the people lose their fear, that of the rulers increases. A frightened regime, like a wounded lion, is not interested in anyone’s rights.

Condemnations of Iran’s human rights abuses are justified. Coming from the United States, however, they are little more than hypocrisy. The US government’s use of torture and maintenance of torturers in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Colombia deny it credibility. American manipulation of separatists in the Kurdish, Arab, and Azeri regions of Iran further diminishes any role the US can play among the vast majority of the Iranian population who believe in national unity and fear civil war. Pleas by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other advocates of adherence to international law are welcomed by Iranian citizens who need to feel, as anti-apartheid militants in South Africa once did, that they are not alone in the world. However, the regime in Tehran is just as likely to ignore Amnesty as it does the US government.

Noam Chomsky said recently, “Putting aside the details of the election, about which we don’t know much, the whole structure of the regime is oppressive and authoritarian, and undermines basic civil and other human rights. Protest against it is not only honorable but courageous, because it faces extreme violence.” The question is less how to persuade the regime to lessen the violence against its citizens than how to encourage those who are standing up to its violence that they can prevail. The duty for its friends abroad is then to hold them to the ideals for which they are risking their lives now. Civil society in the rest of the world can demonstrate its support of Iranian democrats. It can also restrain the Israeli and American governments from launching an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities that will give the regime a new breath of life, a blunder that would equal Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran in 1980 that saved the Iranian revolution by forcing all Iranians to unite around Ayatollah Khomeini.

Dr. Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, wrote in The Daily Beast in December, “No one can predict a revolution nor say with certainty when an authoritarian state loses its footing if not its grip.” The signs are, though, that resistance to authority is having an impact. Parsi added, “The State’s ability to use the language of religion to repress these developments is failing. Again and again religion has proven itself to be much better suited as a language of resistance than governance.” If the Resistance succeeds, it may embrace, as the mullahs have since 1979, religion as part of the state’s structure. It may also, like the mullahs, ignore our calls for it to respect the human rights of its own opponents.

I have trouble even talking with people about “healthcare reform.” The problem is, whenever someone says something like “46 million Americans are uninsured!” (usually followed by a drawn-out sigh of moral outrage), I answer back, “Good to hear. If only we could get more people off insurance, then prices would fall and efficiency would increase.”

Needless to say, this usually doesn’t go over too well, and I often get subjected to comparisons to the History Channel’s list of Most Evil Dictators. “Actually, my dear, Hitler was in favor of socialized medicine...” 

I’ve really never understood the “universal coverage” concept. I lack insurance for routine maintenance of my car, apartment, and computer and yet am able afford upkeep on my meager salary. Why should my body be different? Moreover, it’s only those medical procedures that people must pay for out of pocket (like Lasik eye surgery, breast implants, and the rest) that have had stable—or even falling—prices over the past decade.

More insurance just makes everything more expensive; “universal” coverage would be catastrophic. 

Yet, the “universal healthcare” meme has been the Left’s Holy Grail for years—the big redemptive social program, whose absence bespeaks a backward and cruel America. Rock The Vote has gone as far as to warn young men everywhere that if they even think about not supporting Obamacare, they’ll never to get laid again—ever! 

Any young person nodding along to this video might want to remember that the plan that just passed the Senate won’t actually give most of them any “free healthcare”; instead, it’ll force them to buy insurance, costing them thousands each year.  It’s obviously a horrible deal. But no matter. Twenty-something beta-males and Stuff-White-People-Like people will support socialized medicine of any kind if they know what’s cool for them.         

I’ve found it quite strange that just as the Democrats have begun negotiations over exactly kind of bill they’ve been fantasizing about for a long time, the liberal hardcore decided it didn’t support it anymore. The Nation, Howard Dean and the bloggers all came out against. And even after the bill passed in a last-minute vote on Christmas Eve, the liberals stuck to their guns.

(You see, the Senate bill lacks a “public option”—that is, health insurance, or even actual healthcare, that the government provides directly—and for the liberals, this means that the wicked insurance companies will still be getting rich covering Americans.)

Keith Olbermann has likened such a state of affairs to appeasing the Abominable Snowman:

[O]ur underprivileged, our sick, our elderly, our middle class, can be fed into [the insurance industry], as human sacrifices to the great maw of corporate voraciousness…The American Insurance Cartel is the Death Panel, and this Senate bill does nothing to destroy it. Nor even to satiate it.

Demanding that everyone take insurance, and then hating anyone who profits in the insurance industry, is at the root of this weird liberal angst. But this is leading them to intellectual blackout. One senses that the liberals are disappointed that Obama’s not trust-busting enough, and humiliating enough insurance CEOs, and that this has blinded them to the fact that they’re actually getting most everything they’ve always wanted. 

First off, there’s really no need for Olbermann & Co. to be concerned. Not only does the Senate bill approximate what Barack Obama promised on the campaign trail, but it would, without question, eventuate in a massive socialization of medical care.

No reform plan was ever going to create a big public facility where we’d all go when sick, and where the doctors and nurses would be state employees. (This is what Britain has, and no one wants to reproduce the NHS.)

Besides the contemporary welfare state isn’t just brick-and-mortar bureaucracies. The brunt of its work is done by funneling money to “non-governmental organizations” (think ACORN, “faith-based initiatives,” Freddie and Fannie, and other disasters) as well as well-connected private companies (including the evil insurance cartel, which, by the way, could never have cartelized itself if the government hadn’t been subsidizing its products.)

So yes, if the bill’s enacted, the insurance execs will still get rich: forcing the companies to cover everyone will be more than made up for by mandating that everyone who can buy insurance. But what’s significant is that the industry execs will profit as government rent-seekers, not as barons of free-enterprise, just as the cartel itself will morph into a deathly private-enterprise/public-utility cyborg.

Insurance is about someone else taking on the liability of your getting sick or injured; to make a profit, the insurer wagers that more insurés won’t get hurt or injured each month than do. Obliging everyone to buy insurance and insurers to insure everyone might be accurately called a tax or a pre-payment for medical care. But insurance it ain’t. 

I suppose it’s a kind of solace during these snowy times that Norway, the country with the world’s highest per capita income, has not missed a single working day through inclement weather, and as I write there are thirty feet of snow covering the country. In some areas there is much more than thirty feet of the white stuff, yet the bars are packed at night with people who have put in a hard day’s work and wish to relax. Oh yes, I almost forgot, the last time the schools closed in Norway was when the Wehrmacht occupied her, and only for half a day at that. (German lessons in the afternoon).

Ditto in Switzerland. I’ve never heard of a bus or train running late or being cancelled due to bad weather, except when an avalanche hit the valley and cut off Lauenen (a tiny hamlet six klicks east) from Gstaad, on January Ist 2000. The wife of a visiting Englishman had gone there for an assignation and her lover got stuck with her for three whole days and nights. That cooled off the red-hot romance, and since then everything has been honky dory with the Englishman and the wife.

And speaking of sex, romance and assignations, call me a prude or an old fart, but reading a septuagenarian grandmother’s diaries about how she got stuffed by Harold Pinter while married to the sainted Hugh Fraser didn’t exactly race my motor. And in the family home, to boot. Then in the Telegraph I read that old Harold was two-timing his mistress Joan Bakewell with Barbara Stanton some forty years ago. I knew Babs in New York, when she was Barbara Condos, a divorcee who was very sexy but quite down market. I think we hit the clubs a couple of times but then—if memory serves—she possibly went out with my father. In death, Harold Pinter is presented as some kind of Don Giovanni, by the women he left behind, that is, as I don’t believe he ever bragged about the fairer sex. Getting it on with Antonia, Barbara, Joan and Vivien might seem impressive to some, but it’s really fourth division stuff. We should leave Pinter where he belongs, among Britain’s best playwrights, and not write about him as some third rate Don Juan, which he most likely was.

Although I’ve been pursuing the fairer sex since I realized boys and girls were built differently, I thank God I have never had the urge to spill the beans about the times I got lucky, and with whom. First of all it’s the quickest way of stopping getting lucky—men who talk are worse than those with crabs, according to Madame Claude, the famous madam of Paris during the Sixties.  Plus it sounds awful. I was once in a sauna with three very famous playboys during Edmond de Rothschild’s party in Megeve in 1963, a blast that was designed to last three days and nights. We were recovering and trying to sweat it out when a certain lady’s name came up. She was a famous film star. We all looked at each other because all four of us had stepped out with her. No one said a word except for Jean Poniatowski, descendant of Napoleon’s marshal who died during the retreat from Russia. “I’ve never met her,” he said, “what’s she like?” “Leave the sauna at once,” said Gianni Agnelli, and we all burst out laughing. Jean remained nonplussed. He was the only one who hadn’t gotten lucky and it was Agnelli’s way of pointing this out. But it was as far as it went. None of this detailed crap of today, from both men and women. I suppose publicity is what it’s all about, except that the women I grew up with didn’t do that sort of thing. There.

Mind you, there are worse things than bad taste and indiscretions, like shooting and killing football players in Africa, where else. The Confederation of African Football called the murders in Angola a one-off, but that’s like saying South Africa is safe. 50 murders per day in that once wonderful country, and the greedy charlatans who run football are trying to convince us that the World Cup is not a magnet for terrorist acts.  The Dark Continent is an extremely violent place, and a life is worth very, very little down there. PC pimps pretend otherwise, but take it from Taki. The place will remain unlivable until we stop shoveling money to the thugs who pose as heads of state and demand the minimum of safety standards. A bit north—east of that unpleasant place, in Yemen to be exact,  a killer lives in great luxury and is being protected by a corrupt government which has as yet to extradite him because of his father’s billions. In the meantime, a Norwegian family mourns the loss of their daughter, Martine Vik Magnussen, a student at London’s Regent’s Business School. She was raped and murdered in London on March 16 2008, and the last person with her was the Yemeni Farouk Abdulhak, who flew out on his old man’s private jet hours after the murder. Remember the names. Shaher Trading, where his billions come from, and Farouk Abdulhak, the alleged murderer. You might run into them in South Africa this summer.

“We are at war. We are at war against al-Qaida, a far-reaching network of violence and hatred that attacked us on 9/11, that killed nearly 3,000 innocent people and that is plotting to strike us again.”

Thus did Barack Obama clear the air as to whether we are at war, and with whom and why.

Following his remarks, during a White House briefing by National Security Council aide John Brennan, Helen Thomas asked a follow-up question to which we almost never hear an answer: Why is al-Qaida at war with us? What is its motivation?

It was Osama bin Laden himself, in his declaration of war in 1998, published in London, who gave al-Qaida’s reasons for war:

First, the U.S. military presence on the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia. Second, U.S. sanctions causing terrible suffering among the Iraqi people. Third, U.S. support for Israel’s dispossession of the Palestinians. “All these crimes and sins committed by the Americans are a clear declaration of war on God, his Messenger and Muslims,” said Osama.

He began his fatwa quoting the Koran: “But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them, seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem of war.”

To Osama, we started the war. Muslims, the ulema, must fight because America, with her “brutal crusade occupation of the (Arabian) Peninsula” and support for “the Jews’ petty state” and “occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there” was waging war upon the Islamic world.

Terrorism, the direct killing of civilians for political ends, is al-Qaida’s unconventional tactic, but its war aims are quite conventional.

Al-Qaida is fighting a religious war against apostates and pagans in their midst, a civil war against collaborators of the Crusaders and an anti-colonial war to drive us out of the Dar al-Islam. On Sept. 11, they were over here—because we are over there.

Nothing justifies the massacre of Sept. 11. But these are the political goals behind the 9/11 attack, and this is why Islamists fare well in elections in the Middle East. Tens of millions of Muslims, who may despise terrorism, identify with the causes for which Osama declared war—liberation of Muslim peoples from pro-American autocrats and Israeli occupiers.

Americans are being killed for the reasons Osama said we should be killed—not because of who we are, but because of where we are and what we do.

Consider. America lost 4,000 soldiers in six years in Iraq, with 30,000 wounded. Yet not one American of the 125,000 soldiers in Iraq was killed in December. Why not? Because we no longer conduct raids, patrol streets, kick down doors and pat down suspects. We have ended our combat operations, withdrawn to desert bases and seem anxious to go home. When we stopped fighting and killing them, they stopped fighting and killing us.

Most Americans today appear content to let Shia and Sunni, Arab and Kurd decide the future of Iraq. And if they cannot settle their quarrels without a civil-sectarian war, why should their war be our war?

According to Gen. Barry McCaffrey, we must now prepare for 300 to 500 dead and wounded every month in Afghanistan by summer.

Why are the Taliban killing our soldiers? Because we threw them out of power, took over their country and imposed the Hamid Karzai regime, and our troops, some 100,000 by fall, are the force preventing them from recapturing their country. We will bleed in Afghanistan as long as we are in Afghanistan.

But if, as Obama said, “we are at war with al-Qaida,” why are we fighting Taliban when al-Qaida is in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and North Africa?

Hamas has used terrorism, but not against us. Hezbollah has used terrorism, but not against us since the bombing of the Marine barracks, a quarter-century ago. And our Marines were attacked in Lebanon because we were in Lebanon, intervening in their civil-sectarian war. Had the Marines not been sent into the midst of that war, they would not have been targeted.

When Ronald Reagan withdrew them, the attacks stopped.

Like Europe’s Thirty Years’ War—among Germans, French, Czechs, Dutch, Danes, Swedes, Scots and English, Catholics and Protestants, kings, princes and emperors—the Muslim world is roiled by conflicts between pro-Western autocrats and Islamic militants, Sunni and Shia, modernists and obscurantists, nationalities, tribes and clans. The outcome of these wars, the future of their lands—is that not their business, and not ours?

The Muslims stayed out of our Thirty Years’ War. Perhaps we would do well to get out of theirs. But as long as we take sides in their wars, those we fight and kill over there will come to kill us over here.

This is payback for our intervention. This is the price of empire. This is the cost of the long war.

Few cartoon characters have been loved—or argued over—more than Tintin, the Belgian reporter-cum-detective whose adventures have been translated into over 50 languages and sold over 200 million books. To be precise, it is not Tintin as such who is controversial but the “contradictory and inscrutable” man (as Pierre Assouline describes him) who dreamed him up and guarded him jealously until his death in 1983. Assouline is the highly-regarded biographer of Georges Simenon and Henri Cartier-Bresson, and his penetrating study, Hergé: The Man Who Created Tintin, will add to a growing international reputation.

Georges Remi—“Hergé” was derived from the pronunciation of his reversed initials—was born in Brussels in 1907, the first of two sons of a Walloon factory worker and a Flemish mother. His parentage symbolizes his persisting political importance to his deeply divided country. “Hergé was the personification of Belgium. He remains one of the last great myths of a Belgian Federation,” notes Assouline.

Hergé enjoyed adventure stories, drawing, American cartoons, Charlie Chaplin, and Buster Keaton; these influences gave his stories clarity of line, camera-like angles, and inventive typography, including the use of text bubbles to indicate who was speaking (of which technique he may have been the first European practitioner). He began drawing for Scout journals, then got a job contributing cartoon strips to the children’s section of the respected Le Vingtième Siècle newspaper, Le Petit Vingtième. He invented a Scout called Totor, who eventually became the 15-year-old Tintin—a round-faced, snub-nosed, fair-haired, plus-four wearing Bruxellois, invariably accompanied by a white fox-terrier called Milou (Snowy in English).

Tintin is brave, chivalrous, pure, intelligent—but without a past, a family, even a Christian name. It is curious how little personality Tintin has; the humour is almost all provided by his much more interesting friends—the hot-tempered alcoholic Captain Haddock, the incompetent detectives Thomson and Thompson, the deaf Cuthbert Calculus, the odious insurance salesman Jolyon Wagg, and the opera-singer Bianca Castafiore. Tintin is always a combination of Parsifal and straight man.

But despite Tintin’s many appealing characteristics, Hergé’s reputation is today often occluded by generic allegations of racism, anti-Semitism and wartime collaboration—with frequent attempts in some European countries to have some of his books edited or even removed from circulation.

Much of this controversy centers on Tintin in the Congo, published over 1930-1. Tintin goes to the Belgian Congo (now Zaire) as a reporter, and in his spare time goes big-game hunting. Hergé portrays the Congolese as being lazy and foolish—and it is assumed that they are better off being run by Europeans. (Such social solecisms impelled Britain’s Commission for Racial Equality to urge a ban on the book in 2007.) Yet the Congolese are also kindly and well-meaning while all the baddies are white, and the book is extremely popular amongst modern Zaireans.

Hergé disliked big business as much as he disliked communism, and an unfortunate characteristic of anti-plutocracy is that it often merges into anti-Semitism, and Hergé was unquestionably guilty of producing caricatures such as the unscrupulous financier Blumenstein in The Shooting Star (later bowdlerised to “Bohlwinkel”) and, some feel, both Laszlo Carreidas in Flight 714 and Tintin’s persistent enemy Rastapopoulos.

Other evils were battled by the plus-foured preux chevalier. Tintin in America bemoans the dispossession of the Indians. The Land of Black Gold assails the oil industry. The Red Sea Sharks attacks slavery. The Castafiore Emerald features gypsies being unjustly accused of theft. The Calculus Affair warns against the misuse of science for militaristic ends. Such concerns would hardly preoccupy a real fascist. Nor would a fascist have produced The Blue Lotus, Hergé’s first masterpiece, a denunciation of racial stereotypes and the cruel Japanese occupation of Manchuria in the 1930s, written in conjunction with a life-long Chinese friend.

Congo aside, Hergé’s reputation as Hitlerian fellow-traveller rests on his continuing to work for the Belgian press during the German occupation. His wartime strips (The Shooting Star, The Secret of the Unicorn, Red Rackham’s Treasure and The Seven Crystal Balls) were apolitical, but they appeared sometimes alongside pro-Nazi editorials, and were thought by some to be legitimizing those opinions. Assouline writes in respect of Congo, “[Hergé’s] talent was an anæsthetic. It disarmed all challenges to the established order”—inferring that his wartime work may have had the same effect.

But Assouline also observes that Tintin was read “avidly” in prisons and camps; would the inmates really have been better off without the cub reporter’s expeditions to find meteorites, latter-day Incas or pirate treasure? Hergé said afterwards that he saw his work as being no more politically significant than that of a plumber or carpenter. For Hergé, the cartoon was always more important than the context—to the extent that when in 1943 he received friendly advice to scale back his output in order to minimize likely Allied repercussions, he replied defiantly: “Now is the time to appear in the greatest number of newspapers possible…In any case I will have reached the largest public”.

To add to his charge-sheet, Hergé also retained ties after the war with some ex-collaborationists—although seemingly not former Vingtième Siècle colleague turned SS officer Léon Degrelle, who claimed later that he had been the model for Tintin, which, says Assouline, “hardly seems likely”. Hergé believed always in loyalty to friends, a Scoutlike virtue for which he would now be honoured had his friends been on history’s winning side.

Hergé was arrested on the day the Allies liberated Brussels, by resistants clutching a bulletin showing him as part of a “Gallery of Traitors”, with the threat that “The punishment that we will exact from them is merciless”. He was saved because of the popularity (and profitability) of his creation, but also because he had never been involved in politics and his brother had been a prisoner of war. But the legal process lasted almost two years, while professional disadvantage persisted long afterwards.

Although he threw himself back into making Tintin perfect (including canny redrawing to chime with new sensitivities), he was riven by doubt. He took unscheduled absences, and moved in with a mistress without divorcing his wife. He developed interests in Jungian psychology, jazz, Taoism, “cryptozoology”, and abstract art. His inner conflicts emerged into his output; the frigid tableaux of Tintin in Tibet were drawn from recurring nightmares of the time. “Elegant to the last”, notes Assouline, “he adhered to the dictum that humour is the courteous expression of despair”.

But Hergé’s genius has never been in doubt—giving rise to the term “hergémony” to describe his importance. His inventiveness, sly wit, slapstick humour, and the ever-growing period charm of his universe (not to mention that the first of a series of Tintin films should be released next year) means that Tintin will continue to be read for many decades to come.

The Underwear Bomber case indicates that whoever is behind these bomb scares is laughing at our gullibility.

How realistic is it that al-Qaida, an organization that allegedly pulled off the most fantastic terror attack in world history, would in these days of heightened security choose for an attack on an airliner a person who is the most conspicuous of all? Umar Farouk Mutallab had a one-way ticket, no luggage, no passport, and his father, reportedly a CIA and Mossad asset, had reported him to the CIA and Mossad. Does anyone really believe that al-Qaida would choose as an airliner bomber a person waving every red flag imaginable?

This obvious question has escaped the U.S. media, a collection of salespersons marketing full body scanning machines for airports.

Would al-Qaida, with its extensive knowledge of explosives, have armed Umar with a “bomb” that experts say couldn’t have blown up his own seat?

It is difficult to imagine a more gullible population than America’s, but do even Americans believe this story?

Since 9/11 the F.B.I. has been busy enticing people, who lack organizational skills, into “terrorist plots” that consist of F.B.I. initiated hot air talk. These ridiculous stings are then taken to trial, and the media fans the flames of fear of “home-grown terrorist plots against Americans.”

There is little doubt that those interested in leading the U.S. deeper into a police state and deeper into a “war on terror” are active in adding orchestrated events to whatever real ones real terrorists manage to accomplish. The paucity of real terrorists has caused the U.S. government and its Ministry of Truth to promote the Taliban to terrorist rank. The problem is that these “terrorist acts” are taking place thousands of miles away in lands that the average American cannot find on a map and, thus, lack scare value. To keep the peril alive for Americans, we have the Underwear Bomb Plot.

What will be next? An elaborate head of hair laced with nano-thermite?

The “war on terror” is a far greater threat to Americans than all the terrorists in the world combined. This is so because the “war on terror” has destroyed the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. American citizens are now helpless in the event someone in government decides that some constitutionally protected behavior, such as free speech, or a contribution to a children’s hospital in Gaza, where Hamas, a U.S.-declared “terrorist organization,” happens to be the elected government, constitutes aiding and abetting terrorism.

On Jan. 5 a ruling by the Federal Appeals Court in the District of Columbia gave away the most essential protection of liberty by declaring that the U.S. government is not bound by law during war. The ruling absolves Washington from complying with America’s own laws and from complying with international laws, such as the Geneva Conventions. It makes a mockery of all war crime trials everywhere. By elevating the executive branch above the law, the court gave the government carte blanche.

The rationale offered by the court for refusing to uphold the law came from Judge Janice Rogers Brown, who said that America had been pushed by war past “the leading edge of a new and frightening paradigm, one that demands new rules be written. War is a challenge to law, and the law must adjust.” By “adjust” she means “be set aside” or “be thrown out.”

The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to defend both the Constitution and the principle that government is not above the law. Last Dec.14 the Supreme Court refused to review a ruling by the Federal Appeals Court in the District of Columbia, which dismissed a torture case with the argument that “torture is a foreseeable consequence of the military’s detention of suspected enemy combatants.” In other words, neither U.S. nor international laws against torture can be enforced in U.S. courts. The opinion was written by Judge Karen Lecraft Henderson.

The “war on terror,” which is enriching Halliburton, Blackwater (now operating under an alias), and the military/security complex, while denying Americans health care, is running up debt that is a threat to Americans’ purchasing power and living standards. The contrast between America’s sanctimonious rhetoric and the murder of civilians and torture of prisoners has destroyed America’s reputation and caused Europeans as well as Muslims to despise the United States.

The sacrifice of the Constitution and rule of law to a hyped “theorist threat” has destroyed the heart and soul of America herself.

As a poet wrote, “our world in stupor lies.”

“America is Losing the Free World,” was the arresting headline over the Financial Times column by Gideon Rachman.

His thesis: The largest democracies of South America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia—Brazil, South Africa, Turkey, India—are all moving out of America’s orbit. “(T)he assumption that the democracies would stick together is proving unfounded.”

President Lula of Brazil has cut a “lucrative oil deal with China, spoken warmly of Hugo Chavez,” hailed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on his election “victory”, and honored the Iranian president with a state visit.

In the Security Council, South Africa sided with Russia and China in killing human rights resolutions and protecting Zimbabwe and Iran. Turkey has moved to engage Hezbollah, Hamas, and Tehran, and spurn Israel. Polls show anti-Americanism surging in Turkey. From trade to sanction on Iran and Burma,  India sides with China against America.

The ruling parties in all four were democratically elected. Yet, in all four, democratic solidarity is being trumped by an older solidarity—of Third World people of color against a “white, rich Western world.”

Writing in World Affairs, Geoffrey Wheatcroft quotes author Aaron David Miller (The Much Too Promised Land) that across the Middle East America is “not liked, not respected and not feared.”

What makes this “frightening,” says Wheatcroft, “is that many American politicians and commentators ... have yet to grasp this reality. Such ignorance is evident in the bizarre notion—current even before George W. Bush took the oath of office—that America not only can and should spread democracy, but that this would be in the American national interest. Why did anyone think this?”

Asks Wheatcroft, “If the United States is not liked or respected throughout the Arab countries, why on earth would Americans want to democratize them?”

Excellent question. Some of us have been asking it of the democracy-uber-alles neoconservatives for decades. Yet, these democracy worshipers not only converted Bush, they demanded and got free elections in Lebanon, the West Bank, Gaza and Egypt. Big winners—Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Wheatcroft quotes Eugene Rogan, who has written a history of the Arab peoples, that “in any free and fair election in the Arab world today, the Islamists would win hands down. ... (T)he inconvenient truth about the Arab world today is that in any free election, those parties hostile to the United States are likely to win.”

Given free, inclusive elections in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt, there is a likelihood our allies would be dumped and leaders chosen who were committed to kicking us out of the Middle East and throwing the Israelis into the Mediterranean.

What, then, is the rationale for the National Endowment for Democracy to continue tax dollars to promote such elections?

In World on Fire, Amy Chua writes that in Third World countries there is almost always a “market-dominant minority”—Indians in East Africa, whites in South Africa, overseas Chinese—which, in a free-market, attains higher levels of income and controls a disproportionate share of the wealth.

When democracy arrives, however, the racial, tribal or ethnic majority votes to dispossess these market-dominant minorities.

When colonialism ended in East Africa, Indians were massacred. The Chinese suffered a horrible pogrom in Indonesia in 1965, when the dictator Sukarno fell— and another when Suharto fell. Picked clean, two-thirds of the 250,000 whites in Rhodesia when Robert Mugabe took power are gone. Half the Boers and Brits have fled Jacob Zuma’s South Africa. In Bolivia, Evo Morales is dispossessing Europeans to reward the “indigenous people” who voted him into power. Chavez is doing the same in Venezuela.

Query: If democracy, from Latin America to Africa to the Middle East, brings to power parties and politicians who, for reasons religious, racial or historic, detest the “white, rich Western world,” why are we pushing democracy in these regions?

Our forefathers were not afflicted with this infantile disorder. John Winthrop, whose “city on a hill” inspired Ronald Reagan, declared that, among civil nations, “a democracy is ... accounted the meanest and worst of all forms of government.”

“Remember, democracy never lasts long,” said Adams. “It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”

Added Jefferson, “A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where 51 percent of the people may take away the rights of the other 49.” Madison agreed: “Democracy is the most vile form of government.”

The questions raised here are crucial.

If racial and religious bonds and ancient animosities against the West trump any democratic solidarity with the West, of what benefit to America is democracy in the Third World? And if one-person, one-vote democracy in multiethnic countries leads to dispossession and persecution of the market-dominant minority, why would we promote democracy there?

Why would we promote a system in an increasingly anti-American world that empowers enemies and imperils friends?

Is democratism our salvation—or an ideology of Western suicide?

As everyone and his cousin know, the neocons are my least favorite “Washington insiders” and they divide generally into two categories, the ill-mannered, touchy Jews and their groveling or adulatory Christian assistants. David Frum, the Kagan boys, Norman and John Podhoretz, and Michael Ledeen are the house-owners; while Bill Bennett, Fred Barnes, Michael Novak, Cal Thomas, Linda Chavez, and Rich Lowry all live in the servants’ quarters.

Although I’ve suffered more at the hands of the Podhoretz-types than from the machinations of their servants, I’ve always felt a grudging admiration for my most vicious enemies. The Jewish neocons leave their finger-marks on whatever they do to bring down their critics on the right; and they don’t seem to care that others notice. Most of their hits on members of the Old Right, such as getting Sam Francis removed from an editorial post at the Washington Times and Joe Sobran from one at National Review, have been done in a strikingly open fashion.

It’s as if the neocons wish to be caught in flagrante delicto, perhaps to demonstrate what they can get away with. At Catholic University in 1987, the neocon capifamiglia first got their underlings to call the appropriate deans in order to keep me out of a graduate professorship. But then Norman made a direct call to the university administration, so that he could personally warn the administrators against my allegedly anti-Zionist views. (As far as I can recall, I never held such views.) Neocons enjoy inflicting PAIN on those “anti-Semites” who dare to defy them. And they show a kind of Stalinist exuberance when they pounce on those they want to crush. Even when they’ve unloaded on me and my friends, I can appreciate their hate-filled energies and the thoroughness with which they destroy reputations. At least the Jewish neocons are nasty but not sneaky; and they feel entitled to crush those whom they don’t fancy.

Here I have to differ from my friend Taki, who seems excessively hard on the Jewish neocons. He accuses them of being hypocrites who avoid fighting in the wars they foment. He also charges them with smearing their opponents (almost always on the right) by denouncing them as Jew-haters and Nazi-sympathizers. But Taki may be overlooking the more endearing or at least more interesting side of his adversaries. They act with an emotional intensity that we should be able to admire on the aesthetic level. This of course would not keep me from doing to these sleazebags what they’ve done to me over the last twenty-five years. But I can appreciate their straightforward approach to ruining others. In a nutshell they are truly worthy absolute foes. Here I’m inclined to cite the German legal theorist Carl Schmitt who observed that one should respect people who deal with powerful, determined enemies.

It is the neocons’ servants who turn my stomach. These include not only those who bow and scrape before their masters but also those who help eliminate neocon targets.  At the lower level these helpers engage in character assassination from behind the scenes, and some of them have done so at the expense of such badly battered victims as Sam Francis, M.E. Bradford, and Joe Sobran. For me those who take the orders are more contemptible than those who give them. They combine servility with dishonesty—and a willingness to defame in order to curry favor. The worst such case of kissing-up by a neocon houseboy involved the head of a “conservative think-tank,” who went to President Reagan in order to trash the Southern scholar Mel Bradford. This enabler undertook his task as a favor to “Irving and Bea,” who were then greasing the skids for their protégé, that dumpy mediocrity and gambler extraordinaire Bill Bennett. Bradford, who had the inside track, had to be eliminated for the dark horse candidate Bennett, so that the neocons could get their fill of NEH grants. 

And I’ve also no use for those fetch-and-takers who spend all their time trying to anticipate and express the latest neocon concern. When these types are not cheering on the Red team against the Blue, calling for wars to spread democracy, rediscovering the “Christian conservative” Martin Luther King, and howling against Islamo-fascism, they turn to even viler things. For example, they work around the clock to keep the agitprop publications and organizations they “manage” free of politically undesirable influence. On those very few occasions when I got to place my comments in neocon-run publications, I did so after I had spoken to the Jewish master class, and bypassed their Christian subordinates. Having dealt with this nomenklatura for years, I’ve become convinced that the servant class submits the name of every would-be contributor to some censoring office, located in Midtown Manhattan. Without the necessary stamp of approval the gentile editor is not allowed to accept any article or commentary.

The slave class has also featured certain charges that have been given heavy-duty use against those who are marked out for marginalization. One member of this class has besmirched me as an “intellectual who wants to return to the eighteenth century” and as someone who has “no understanding of today’s politics.” Equally familiar is the charge raised by some of the house servants that we have not moved with the times. But since the neocons and neoliberals help shape these times and determine what we’re allowed to say, it all comes down to the same: We’re bad for not saying what they want us to say. One aging neocon client, who has grown rich in the service of his masters, turned his back on me at an Aspen Institute Conference where both of us were invited to speak five years ago. More recently, the same person has wondered aloud “why paleos are so bitter.” The answer is simple: His friends have smashed our heads into the wall often enough to remove the grins from our faces.

Unlike the master class, which glories in destructive acts, the slave class pretends that such acts have never taken place. The opponents of the neocons are simply “bitter” and this may be ascribed to our sour dispositions. Otherwise we would sit down with the rest of the “movement’ and iron out our differences. But no invitation to parley has been extended to our side or to anyone whom the neocons have decided they don’t want around.

That is the way the neocons have organized the soft or kept opposition to the center-left. One can take one’s pick in this case about which are worse, the deciders of agendas or their servants. I’ve already chosen. 

I have come to see why the value of a woman is her femininity.  The ability to serve, please, and preside, without castrating the gents, is close to divine.

For instance: ‘Tis the week before Christmas, and a light snow is falling in London. This is my favorite season. I am about to head home to Switzerland, like I do every year.  A magical spell with family, friends, and festivities awaits.

My mother and I love to dress our Christmas tree, give presents, and eat delicious food. My father and brother don’t care much for Christmas, which is always a disappointment for my mother and me. They drink too much and scowl a lot. Furthermore, they are hopeless where gift-giving is concerned. (Though they can be generous when cajoled.) We do our best not to let them crush our Christmas cheer.

I am well acquainted with patriarchal conventions like grumpiness. Where I come from, there are many subtle practices that separate the boys from the girls. Roles are well defined. Equality is not much in our vocabulary.

Subtle things clue me into the fact that men and women are different. In my family, for example, men have endearing nicknames like Goofy or Rascal. Women are usually addressed as bitch, rather than by a first name, or some other more traditional designation.  Last week on a note left to me by my father, he wrote: Thanks for nothing—bitch. We ain’t no cooks—bitch. We had to eat out!

As one might assume, bitches are required to cook, clean, drive, and exhibit all the most favorable feminine qualities. Additionally, we are expected to be skilled in typically masculine tasks, like drinking, shooting, thinking, and fucking. Though we are supposed to conceal these talents, unless by request, or if it serves to highlight the men favorably.

This is all good. First-rate even. These are not complaints. Having, yet concealing certain skills, is an asset, not a detriment. Only novices make a show of their knowledge and know-how. I suffer from terrible guilt on New Year’s Eve every year when I see my kid brother standing meekly to the side while I put on a spectacular fireworks display in our garden. 

Doing women’s work doesn’t need to be demeaning. I learned as much this past week when I found myself for the first time, a woman alone in a house with nothing but men.  Big, tough, men.

I was visiting my father in New York. My brother, my male best friend, and my father’s sensei were also at the house. I wondered if they would have survived at all without me and our dutiful daily housekeeper.  I imagine they would have eaten out every night, the house would have been in shambles, and a roach or ant colony would have moved in, as none of them can manage a simple dishwasher or washing machine.

The first morning during my trip, I found myself in the kitchen. I was happy to have the place to myself. I don’t care much for conversation before noon. The men trickled in slowly. I could not finish my breakfast. Each one berated me with requests.

My father does not do anything practical, not even boil water.

The sensei, while extremely polite and unassuming, can only cook using his microwave, not ours. 

My brother needs three female assistants to do anything menial.  He often makes such a fuss about his obligations, a stable of women manage his burdens simply to quell his anxiety.

My best friend cannot charge his telephone without someones help.

By 9:15, I was ready for some retail therapy. 

Later that day, I poked around department stores looking for pretty clothes and Christmas presents. I felt extremely fortunate, and proud, to be a fairly obsequious bitch. I don’t have to fight to survive in quite the same way as a man.

Merry Christmas!

Until the Underpants Bomber tried to blow up Flight 253 over Detroit, the frontrunner for the Best Picture Oscar was widely assumed to be Up in the Air. Indeed, before the Christmas Day incident reminded everybody of how much they hate business travel, the dramedy—in which George Clooney plays a travel-addicted corporate consultant who gleefully flies first-class around the country to fire people—let Hollywood feel, for once, relevant: The Motion Picture Industry Responds to the Unemployment Crisis!

Why would Academy Awards exist if not for self-congratulation?

Up in the Air has been widely celebrated for being the first movie to refer, tangentially, to the economic downturn in the mere 29 months since subprimes crashed in August 2007. The film doesn’t actually have much of interest to say about losing your job (other than it helps to have family), but at least the movie mentions it.

Modern Hollywood requires so many lunch meetings before a deal can be put together that it can only attain economic topicality by procrastinating through an entire business cycle. This adaptation of Walter Kirn’s 2001 novel (which is set in the booming 1990s) wound up being worked over, on and off, by writer-director Jason Reitman (2006’s Thank You for Smoking) throughout the last decade. (Hollywood’s inability to be as up-to-date as the opening skit on Saturday Night Live is, on the whole, a good thing. Not surprisingly, the first excellent Iraq movie, 2009’s The Hurt Locker, is an apolitical, timeless portrayal of men at war.)

Kirn’s Up in the Air, which I read after seeing (and almost forgetting) the movie, is much better than I had expected. It’s a gentle satire about the alienation modern travel inflicts. Ryan Bingham is a kind, reflective, wounded man who has stumbled into a career so mortifyingly unmanly he won’t mention it to his seatmates: “career transition counseling.” In other words, he flies around the country to give pep talks to the newly laid-off. He intends to quit as soon as he reaches one million frequent flier miles, and then find a life where he can have a home and perhaps a family.

The most distinctive aspect of Kirn’s book is Bingham’s wry but sincere appreciation for the small solaces—such as rapid check-ins for regular customers and executive clubs at airports—that capitalism has devised to make life in “Airworld” slightly less soul-crushing. (Consider that Robert Crandall of American Airlines devised frequent fliers miles as a blatant kickback to bribe corporate travelers into getting their employers to pay for higher fares on AA. That miles instantly became sanctioned by custom as the private property of employees is testimony that even your boss recognizes the afflictions of flying.)

Jason Reitman (son of Ivan Reitman, director of Ghostbusters) has turned Kirn’s wispy book into a lengthy, pseudo-satire denouncing the nonexistent trend toward Expense Account Homelessness.

Up in the Air is by no means a bad movie. Yet, if it’s a Best Picture contender, more attention should be given to Reitman’s contrivances, which tend toward the absurd, sentimental, and on-the-nose. For example, rather than counsel workers after they’ve been let go, Bingham’s job is now to fire people he’s never met before. That’s not at all what real outplacement firms do—although this gimmick of Reitman’s can be excused because it adds interest to a movie rather lacking in incident.

Moreover, Clooney is miscast as a Career Transition Counselor, which is a pink collar “people person” job. A 48-year-old heterosexual man with Clooney’s charisma would be Executive Vice President of Sales, dealing only with high-level customers, not with the poor bastards they want fired.

Clooney is less an actor than an old-fashioned movie star. That’s wonderful in a movie star role. Yet, nobody would have cast a 48-year-old Clark Gable in such a sad little job, and Clooney gives us no reason to find him credible, either. A better actor who is less of a celebrity, such as Peter Sarsgaard, could have made me believe in Ryan Bingham, but Clooney can’t.

Worse, in contrast to Kirn’s Bingham, the Reitman-Clooney version is not just adept at living out of his suitcase, he loves it. He tells everybody they should do it. He’s like John Candy’s pathetic homeless salesman in 1987’s Trains, Planes, and Automobiles, only he thinks he’s cool. In the wake of the idiotic new humiliations dreamed up by the government to abuse passengers further after the Underpants Bomber, Clooney’s zest for hanging around airports seems especially nonsensical.

Is there anybody alive over the age of 25 who likes to fly from Omaha to Detroit as much as Clooney’s roguish antihero does? I’m sure there must be, somewhere, but in 18 years in the corporate world, I never heard anybody admit it. The norm is to kvetch about travel.

And is it really so much better up in first class? Does your flight get delayed less when you use your miles to upgrade?

No, the corporate bigshots I’ve known all lusted after private jets. Now, that’s luxury. (Of course, in its own way, it’s equally nerve-wracking to have a pilot and copilot sitting around drinking coffee while you figure out where they should fly you next so you can earn enough money to keep paying their salaries.)

Most preposterously, Reitman gives Clooney a side business delivering a “motivational” speech at conventions advising paying customers to abandon their loved ones to live a carry-on life devoted solely to … accumulating frequent flier miles:

”Make no mistake, your relationships are the heaviest components in your life … The slower we move, the faster we die. Make no mistake, moving is living. Some animals were meant to carry each other to live symbiotically over a lifetime: star-crossed lovers, monogamous swans. We are not swans. We’re sharks.”

No doubt, some corporate travelers think like this, but they don’t talk like this. They always make a big to-do over the personal sacrifices they’re making by being out on the road.
Reitman’s plot devices then laboriously teach Clooney’s Bingham the Important Life Lesson that it’s better to have a home and a family than to spend your life in food courts.

Thanks, Jason, I didn’t know that.

Of course, what male fans of Up in the Air want is not Ryan Bingham’s life, but George Clooney’s: a private jet to your villa in Lake Como or Puerto Vallarta with this month’s Vegas cocktail waitress. (Female fans, in turn, get to fantasize that Clooney is thinking about settling down.) Since they know they won’t get Clooney’s life, Up in the Air lets them take comfort in assuming George will, for his sins, die alone.

When punk hit London in the late 1970s, it was impossible to buy bondage pants or hair dye or even a leather motorcycle jacket. Punk back then was about using whatever was available to be ridiculous, even if that meant walking down the street in your pajamas. It made their parents furious and that’s all that mattered.

As a parent who grew up punk, I had mixed emotions when I first saw a Puerto Rican high school student walk into a bodega with her pajamas on. It made me mad, but not because she was fighting the system. It made me mad because she was being so fucking lazy.

Since then, seeing urban youth go to school in their pajamas has become all too common. The teachers see no need to tell children school is different than their living room and the single parents back at home don’t seem to give a shit either. “Oh well,” I think to myself. “They’re not my kids. They’re not even my culture.”

So I head off to the airport. I’ve got some meetings in LA with my people and I’m wearing our requisite blazer and dress shirt. That’s how we do when we fly. We employ a modicum of decorum. Right? No. Not right. That hasn’t been the case for a long time. Outdoor pajamas aren’t reserved for lazy rap fans in New York’s Lower East Side. They are the one great unifier that brings all lazy, self-indulgent Americans together, regardless of race or background. In fact, one could argue they’re about to replace denim as the nation’s go-to comfort pant (what the hell is so uncomfortable about denim by the way? It’s a cotton twill, not a horse hair shirt.) We’re at the point now where you ARE special if you put your pants on, one leg at a time.

Anyway, on my way to the plane I see this guy. He’s a grown man in his pee pee jam jams replete with an Ultimate Fighting Championship motif (I mean, it’s not going to be race cars or something, come on, he’s a grown man). The irony of the UFC logo is it brings me to the central reason these ubiquitous peejays are so irritating. As men, we’re supposed to be at least kind of prepared to throw down at all times. I’m not saying you need to hospitalize everyone who accidentally spills your pint but what if someone slaps your girl? What if someone slaps his girl? You’re going to run over in your soft flannels, penis swinging like a pendulum, and kick his ass? It’s the same reason I have been actively trying to ban flip-flops on men since they became popular. We’re not meant to be that cozy. We’re men for fuckssakes. You can’t defend anyone from anything when your shoe is hanging by a thread and your clothes are made of a blankie.

After returning from LA, I headed upstate with some friends to get drunk, watch fights on Pay-Per-View, and basically give my eyeballs a timeout from all the abuse I had inadvertently put them through. I very recently built a house there and had no idea I was actually driving into the eye of the storm. Almost every Catskills resident dresses like a Puerto Rican high school student. In the ER (long story) I sat next to a morbidly obese woman whose pajamas were hiding the expanding bedsores she got from playing video games all day. At every fast food joint, hardware store, shopping mall, and pharmacy, couples merrily pushed their carts in sleepover pants. You couldn’t get away from them.

See this guy? Shortly before taking this picture I was next to him at the Doctor’s office (longer story) and when asked to provide the nurse with his driver’s license number, he said, “342 309 4… 5… um, 5? Something like that.” Yeah, that’ll do Bozo. We just need to know roughly what your license number is. That’s how filing works. You classify your patients in big loose groups that are impossible to accurately locate. What really drove me nuts was why he couldn’t tell the nurse the number. He doesn’t have ID because he doesn’t have his wallet. He doesn’t have his wallet because he doesn’t have fucking pockets! So, we’ve gone from an inability to identify with manhood to an inability to even identify yourself at all. Nice one America!

I spent the 80s wearing bondage pants, a studded leather jacket and singing for bands like Anal Chinook and Leatherassbuttfuk. I appreciated the older punks who wore whatever they could find, but this isn’t that. This is a new low. The pedantic punk precept of “Fuck the system” may roll your eyes but at least they were willing to step into the fray and engage. Today’s pajama people could give a shit what happens with any system, anywhere. All they care about is going back to bed. Let’s pray they die before they wake.

White Zimbabweans used to tell a joke—what is the difference between a tourist and a racist? The answer—about a week.

Few seem to joke any more. Indeed, the last time anyone laughed out there was over the memorable headline “BANANA CHARGED WITH SODOMY” (relating to the Reverend Canaan Banana and his alleged proclivities). Zimbabwe was just the latest African state to squander its potential, to swap civil society for civil strife and pile high its corpses. Then the wrecking virus moves on and a fresh spasm of violence erupts elsewhere. Congo, Ivory Coast, Sudan, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, even Kenya. Take your pick, for it is the essence of Africa, the recurring A-Z of horror. And as surely as Nelson Mandela took those steps from captivity to freedom, his own country will doubtless shuffle into chaos and ruin.

Mark my words. One day it will be the turn of South Africa to revert to type, its farms that lie wasted and its towns that are battle zones, its dreams and expectations that lie rotting on the veldt. That is the way of things. Africa rarely surprises, it simply continues to appal.

When interviewed on BBC Radio, the legendary South African jazz musician Hugh Masekela spoke of the 350-year struggle for freedom by blacks in South Africa. The man might play his trumpet like a dream, but he talks arrant nonsense. What he has bought into is a false narrative that rewrites history and plays upon post-colonial liberal angst. The construct is as follows: white, inglorious and bad; black, noble and good; empire, bad; independence, good; the west, bad; the African, good. Forgotten in all this is that while Europeans were settling and spreading from the Cape, the psychopathic Shaka Zulu was employing his impi to crush everyone—including the Xhosa—in his path, and the Xhosa were themselves busy slaughtering Bushmen and Hottentots. Yet it is the whites who take the rap, for it was they who won the skirmishes along the Fish and Blood Rivers and who eventually gained the prize.

What suffers is the truth, and—of course—Africa. We are so cowed by the moist-eyed mantras of the left and the oath-laden platitudes of Bono and Geldof, we are forced to accept collective responsibility for the bloody mess that is now Africa. It paralyses us while excusing the black continent and its rulers.

Whenever I hear people agitate for the freezing of Third World debt, I want to shout aloud for the freezing of those myriad overseas bank accounts held by black African leaders (President Mobutu of Zaire alone is believed to have squirreled away well over $10 billion). Whenever apartheid is held up as a blueprint for evil, I want to mention Bokassa snacking on human remains, Amin clogging a hydro-electric dam with floating corpses, the President of Equatorial Guinea crucifying victims along the roadway from his airport. Whenever slavery is dredged up, I want to remind everyone the Arabs were there before us, the native Ashanti and others were no slouches at the game, and it remains extant in places like the Ivory Coast. Whenever I hear the Aids pandemic somehow blamed on western indifference, I want to point to the African native practice of dry sex, the hobby-like prevalence of rape and the clumps of despotic black leaders who deny a link between the disease and HIV and who block the provision of antiretrovirals. And whenever Africans bleat of imperialism and colonialism, I want to campaign for the demolition of every road, college, and hospital we ever built to let them start again. It is time they governed themselves. Yet few play the victim card quite so expertly as black Africans; few are quite so gullible as the white liberal-left.

So Britain had an empire and Britain did slavery. Boo hoo. Deal with it. Move on. Slavery ended here over two hundred years ago. More recently, there were tens of millions of innocents enslaved or killed in Europe by the twin industrialised evils of Nazism and Stalinism. My own first cousins—twin brothers aged sixteen—died down a Soviet salt mine. I need no lecture on eggplants and neck-irons. Most of us are descendents of both oppressors and oppressed; most of us get over it. Mind you, I am tempted by thoughts of compensation from Scandinavia for the wickedness of its Viking raids and its slaving-hub on the Liffe. As for the 1066 invasion of England by William the Bastard…

The white man’s burden is guilt over Africa (the black man’s is sentimentality), and we are blind for it. We have tipped hundreds of billions of aid-dollars into Africa without first ensuring proper governance. We encourage NGOs and food-parcels and have built a culture of dependency. We shy away from making criticism, tiptoe around the crassness of the African Union and flinch at every anti-western jibe. The result is a free-for-all for every syphilitic black despot and his coterie of family functionaries.

Africa casts a long and toxic shadow across our consciousness. It is patronised and allowed to underperform, so too its distant black diaspora. A black London pupil is excluded from his school, not because he is lazy, stupid or disruptive, but because that school is apparently racist; a black youth is pulled over by the police, not because black males commit over eighty percent of street crime, but because the authorities are somehow corrupted by prejudice. Thus the tale continues. Excuse is everywhere and a sense of responsibility nowhere. You will rarely find either a black national leader in Africa or a black community leader in the west prepared to put up his hands and say It is our problem, our fault. Those who look to Africa for their roots, role-models and inspiration are worshipping false gods. And like all false gods, the feet are of clay, the snouts long and designed for the trough, and the torture-cells generally well-equipped.

I once met the son of a Liberian government minister and asked if he had seen video-footage of his former president Samuel Doe being tortured to death. ‘Of course’, he replied with a smile. ‘Everyone has’. They cut off the ears of Doe and force-fed them to him. His successor, the warlord Charles Taylor, was elected in a landslide result using the campaign slogan He killed my ma, he killed my pa, but I will vote for him. Nice people. Liberia was founded and colonised by black Americans to demonstrate what slave stock could achieve. They certainly showed us. Forgive my heretical belief that had a black instead of a white tribe earlier come to dominate South Africa, its opponents would not have been banished to Robben island. They would have been butchered and buried there.

When asked about the problem of Africa, Harold Macmillan suggested building a high wall around the continent and every century or so removing a brick to check on progress. I suspect that over entire millennia, the view would prove bleak and unvarying.

On the eve of this millennium, Nelson Mandela and friends lit candles mapping the shape of their continent and declared the Twenty-first Century would belong to Africa. Whatever. Meantime, the vast natural resources have been frittered and agricultural production since independence has halved. A pity that for every one Mandela there are over a hundred Robert Mugabes.

Visiting a state in west Africa a few years ago, I wandered onto a beach and marvelled at the golden sands and at the sunlight catching on the Atlantic surf. It allowed me to forget for a moment the local news that day of soldiers seizing a schoolboy and pitching him head-first into an operating cement-machine. Almost forget. Then I spotted a group of villagers beating a stray dog to death for their sport. A metaphor of sorts for all that is wrong, another link in a word-association chain that goes something like Famine… Drought… Overpopulation… Deforestation… Conflict… Barbarism… Cruelty… Machetes… Child Soldiers… Massacres… Diamonds… Warlords…Tyranny… Corruption… Despair… Disease… Aids… Africa.

Africa remains the heart of darkness. Africa is hell.

Arnold Toynbee read Spengler’s The Decline of the West as a young historian at the University of London and had the same reaction I did when I first read Hemingway. It blew his mind. He found it both exhilarating and dismaying. Exhilarating because of its historical insights, dismaying for it disposed of the questions he was formulating in his mind about the West and its culture. He nevertheless went on to write A Study of History, all twelve volumes of it, eclipsing Spengler as the numero uno assessor of Western civilisation’s place in history.

I looked up old Arnold and his cosmic despair while recovering from probably the worst hangover ever, but that’s another story altogether. (Schopenhauer and Toynbee go well together the day after the night before). However depressed and self-absorbed, Toynbee got religion right, lecturing at Oxford that “If our secular Western civilisation perishes, Christianity may be expected not only to endure but to grow in wisdom…” He uttered these words in 1940, during the Battle of Britain, and also suggested (privately) that surrender might be preferable to more hatred and violence.

Toynbee was no anti-Semite, but blamed Judaism for the West’s crass materialism, “a consummate virtuosity in commerce and finance,” and that the Jewish claim to be the chosen people had encouraged a Judo-Christian Western attitude of arrogance toward other cultures. Where he mostly got it right was the United States. He saw her as the new Rome—brutal and expansive—and put his trust in the U.N. That was as dumb and wrongheaded as trusting Anwar al Awlaki to address young Muslims in Britain at venues funded by taxpayers.  After the war Toynbee let it rip. During the Korean War he described the West as “radioactive,” whose culture when in contact with non-Western societies “threatens to poison the life of the society whose body social is being penetrated.” Looking at Africa today, Arnold sure hit the spot. Big oil has corrupted everyone, and while billions in Western aid go straight into dictator and kleptocrat pockets, Africans are dying from hunger, malnutrition and disease. Not to mention tribal slaughters of the Rwanda kind.

Many agreed, and Toynbee’s ideas inspired a plethora of works centered on the West’s diminishing role in the world.  The great Greek philosopher-historian Taki has always been of two minds where Toynbee is concerned.  On the one hand I’ve always believed that the West, actually America, would always find a way to turn the rise of the Third World to our own advantage; on the other, the lack of spiritual and ethical matters would eventually prove our downfall. “Our own descendants,” wrote Arnold, “will cease to be Westerners in the traditional sense and will gradually be relegated to the modest place history had originally assigned it.”

Recently Toynbee’s predictions have rung awfully close to the truth. We first had a Nigerian who any moron would have arrested on sight in view of his lack of luggage, one-way ticket paid for in cash, and all-round appearance. Then we have a thoroughly dishonest prime minister expressing outrage at a heroin dealer being put to death in a country on which Britain foisted drugs in the past and went to war with in order to continue foisting. Finally, and this is the best, a low life, odious so called playboy by the name of Gaddafi, beats up his wife at Claridge’s , breaks her nose and cuts up her face,  has his bodyguards resist police attempting to investigate, then has the Libyan ambassador call off the fuzz by claiming diplomatic immunity for the scumbag. And what does the brave British prime minister do? He remains outraged over the execution of a major heroin dealer and cannot get involved.

This diseased poor excuse of a man, Moutassim Gaddafi, likes to be called Hannibal, as outrageous a slur on the name of a brave man as is possible, has a long record of violence against those who cannot defend themselves. Last year he held hostage and beat up two Filipino servants. The Swiss arrested him but folded almost immediately. The Swiss president flew to Libya and begged forgiveness. The thug has been involved in similar-like fracases in Paris, in Rome, and I’d hate to think what he’s been up to down south, where he makes the unlamented Udai Hussein resemble Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind.

But just think what the family of Yvonne Fletcher and relatives of those who were cowardly brought down over Lockerbie by a Libyan bomb must feel. When the scumbag was about to be arrested in Claridge’s he called his ambassador and got away with diplomatic immunity. But since when is diplomatic immunity used to cover crimes?  Since Gaddafi’s thugs shot down a female policewoman in London and walked away smirking. We all know that it was Libyans who fought to the last in Thermopylae, and it was Libyans who coolly rode against the Russian guns in Balaklava, and that it was Libyans who charged the Union canons in Gettysburg, and it was a Libyan general who took France in six weeks back in 1940. Despite such accomplishments, it doesn’t excuse our lameness once the brave Hannibal broke his wife’s nose. 

Toynbee was right. We have been relegated to our rightful place. We are a fourth rate power in a fourth rate continent eager to please any criminal who spends money.

      I had just finished reading the uncensored edition of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s book, In the First Circle (Harper Perennial, 2009), when I came across Chris Hedges article, ‘‘One Day We’ll All Be Terrorists’’ (Truthdig, Dec. 28, 2009). In Hedges’ description of the U.S. government’s treatment of American citizen Syed Fahad Hashmi, I recognized the Stalinist legal system as portrayed by Solzhenitsyn.

Hashmi has been held in solitary confinement going on three years. Guantanamo’s practices have migrated to the Metropolitan Correction Center in Manhattan where Hashmi is held in the Special Housing Unit. His access to attorneys, family, and other prisoners is prevented or severely curtailed. He must clean himself and use toilet facilities on camera. He is let out of solitary for one hour every 24 hours to exercise in a cage.

Hashmi is a U.S. citizen but his government has violated every right guaranteed to him by the Constitution. The U.S. government, in violation of U.S. law, is also subjecting Hashmi to psychological torture known as extreme sensory deprivation. The bogus ‘‘evidence’’ against him is classified and denied to him.  Like Joseph K. in Kafka’s The Trial, Hashmi is under arrest on secret evidence. As the case against him is unknown or non-existent, defense is impossible.

Hashmi’s rights have been abrogated by his government with the allegation that he is a potential terrorist or perhaps just a terrorist sympathizer. Another American citizen, Junaid Babar stayed with Hashmi for two weeks and allegedly delivered ponchos and socks to al-Qaida in Pakistan. Allegedly Babar used Hashmi’s cell phone to reach others aiding terrorists. The U.S. government says that this suffices to implicate Hashmi in Babar’s activities.

Babar made a plea bargain to five counts of ‘‘material support’’ for terrorism, but is working off his prison sentence by testifying as a government witness in other terror trials, including in Canada and the U.K., and as the U.S. government’s only evidence against Hashmi.

Hashmi’s real offense is that he is a Muslim activist defending Muslim civil liberties and making provocative statements about the U.S. As Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, has pointed out, federal courts have given the U.S. government wide latitude to use Hashmi’s exercise of his constitutionally protected rights to free speech and association as evidence of a terrorist frame of mind and, thereby, of intent to commit terrorism.

Brooklyn College professor Jeanne Theoharis warns us that an American citizen can now be tried on secret evidence. ‘‘You can spend years in solitary confinement before you are convicted of anything. There has been attention paid to extraordinary rendition, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib with this false idea that if people are tried in the United States things will be fair. But what allowed Guantanamo to happen was the devolution of the rule of law here at home, and this is not only happening to Hashmi.’‘

Indeed, Hedges reports that ‘‘radical activists in the environmental, (anti)-globalization, anti-nuclear, sustainable agriculture and anarchist movements are already being placed by the state in special detention facilities with Muslims charged with terrorism.’’ Hedges warns: ‘‘This corruption of our legal system will not be reserved by the state for suspected terrorists or even Muslim Americans. In the coming turmoil and economic collapse, it will be used to silence all who are branded as disruptive or subversive. Hashmi endures what many others, who are not Muslim, will endure later.’‘

The silence of bar associations and law schools indicates an astounding insouciance to Thomas Paine’s warning: ‘‘He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.’’ Some of my Republican and conservative acquaintances are even gleeful that, finally, we are going to get tough and deal forcibly with ‘‘these people.’’ They naively believe that they themselves will remain safe when law ceases to be a shield of the people and becomes a weapon in the hands of government.

In A Man for All Seasons, Sir Thomas More cautions against cutting the law down in order to chase after devils, for with the law cut down, where do we stand when the devil turns on us?

Clearly, these fundamental questions are of no concern to the U.S. Department of Justice (sic), to Congress or the White House, to the ‘‘mainstream media,’’ to the American people, or even to very much of the federal judiciary.

Glenn Greenwald pointed out in Salon (Dec. 4, 2009) that the Convention Against Torture, championed and signed by President Ronald Reagan and ratified by the U.S. Senate, states: ‘‘Each State Party is required either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution. No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency may be invoked as a justification of torture. Each State Party shall ensure that all acts of torture are offenses under its criminal law.’‘

Two decades later the U.S. government tortures at will. Justice (sic) Department officials write memos authorizing torture despite the ratified Convention Against Torture, U.S. law, and the Geneva Conventions. The Pew Poll reports that 67 percent of Republicans and 47 percent of Democrats support the use of torture.

And Americans think they have freedom and democracy and live under the protection of the rule of law.

The law is lost, and with it American liberty.

Had he not proven incompetent to detonate his lap bomb, Umar Farouk Abdulmullatab would have carried off an air massacre to rival Lockerbie. We would all have ended Christmas day watching TV footage of 300 mangled bodies being picked up around Detroit.

The system breakdown was total. His father had reported to the U.S. embassy that Umar had gone extremist, disowned his family and vanished in Yemen. Though the 23-year-old Nigerian had been put on a U.S. terrorist watch list and denied a visa to enter Britain, his U.S. visa was not revoked.

Though he had been in Yemen for months, bought his plane ticket in cash and boarded without luggage, he was neither red-flagged nor screened or body-searched.

We were spared the horrible consequences of our incompetence, only because of his incompetence. The episode raises questions not only about airline security, but about how we are fighting the real war we are in.

Defeating al-Qaida calls for ways and means different from dealing with domestic crime families like the Gottis or Gambinos.

Organized crime is the province of police and prosecutors.

Crime bosses are read their rights and granted access to a lawyer. They come into court in suits to undergo a fair and equal contest to ascertain guilt or innocence. If acquitted, they walk free.

This 23-year-old Nigerian is an enemy combatant whose way of war is mass murder. Under the rules of war, he may be shot. The immediate imperative was not to read him his Miranda rights or to phone Ron Kuby. It was to subject Abdulmullatab to intense and hostile interrogation so that U.S. forces can quickly find, fix, attack and kill his comrades and camp followers.

Unlike the war on crime, or the war on drugs, this is not a metaphorical war. There is no presumption of innocence, rather a presumption that Umar is a terrorist and did not act alone.

The questions he should have been asked as soon as he was pulled off the plane and hauled to a prison hospital are these:

Who taught you to detonate a bomb? Who sewed the underwear in which you concealed the components? Who was with you in Yemen? What are the names of those you trained with? Who helped you get on that plane? Who did you stay with on your visits to the U.S.? Who gave you cash? Who paid your bills? Where is your computer? And if you want pain medicine for those burns, you will tell us.

A question arises after the lackadaisical way the administration first dealt with this potential horror. Are we governed by serious people? A second question is raised by the ideological journey of this 23-year-old from devout Muslim to extremist to terrorist, and by his sojourn from Nigeria to London to Yemen to America.

In Omar Bradley’s comment on Korea, are we fighting the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong enemy.

Obama just ordered 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan. Yet, even if Gens. David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal pull it off and pacify Kandahar, how does that protect the American homeland from suicide bombers hell-bent on blowing up airliners?

How does turning the tide in Afghanistan stop radical Muslim youth in Africa or Arabia from being trained to board planes with bombs and blow them up over the Atlantic? How do 130,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq make us more safe from an al-Qaida that has moved into Waziristan, Baluchistan, Yemen, Somalia and North Africa?

The Sept. 11 massacre may have been decided upon in Afghanistan. But the perpetrators were Saudis and Egyptians who plotted, planned and trained in Germany, Boston, Delray Beach and Northern Virginia.

How has occupying two nations at a cost of 5,000 dead, 35,000 wounded and a trillion dollars made us safer from an enemy that more resembles the Apache of Geronimo than the panzers of Rommel?

If protection of the homeland against another Sept. 11 is the goal of this war, how relevant to that goal is the building of clinics and schools in Kabul and keeping the Taliban at bay in Helmand?

Are we fighting other people’s wars, rather than our own war?

We Americans are today widely hated in the Arab and Islamic world by scores of millions, out of whom al-Qaida need but recruit a few hundred suicide bombers to wreak havoc on our country.

Does having 200,000 U.S. troops in their part of the world, fighting and killing Muslims, make our country more secure than defending our borders, keeping radicals out, running al-Qaida down, and tracking and killing them where they are?

To win the war we are in, we have to fight the war we are in, not the war we prefer to fight because no one else is so good at it.

Isn’t charity the best? The Season of Giving just finished giving itself to us and every year the message becomes clearer and clearer: Charity is the best feeling in the world.

What charity you ask? Who cares? It’s all about giving. All people need to say is, “He gave it to charity” and our heart swells with smiles. Where the money goes is irrelevant, apparently. If you’re walking around New York and you see those guys with the giant water cooler containers that say UHO on the side, throw a coin in. Sure it recently came out that the owner was just letting the guy keep all the money after taking a $25 fee, but that’s neither here nor there. Charity is about giving. Who receives it is none of our business.

A few years ago, I decided to start a Christmas family tradition of going to the Bowery Mission and serving food to the homeless. My wife and our infant daughter arrived early Christmas afternoon to see about a dozen homeless people voluntarily smoking like chimneys outside in the cold. I had my family wait in the lobby and went towards the kitchen to ask where our help would be most effective. Maybe we could schlop out some mashed potatoes as our daughter watched from a booster seat and learned the true meaning of Christmas. In the dining area, I walked past about five non-smokers watching the original Black Christmas (the scariest movie I have ever seen in my life). When I got to the kitchen, I met at least 20 volunteers manning three industrial ovens that contained tray upon tray of roasted potatoes, three turkeys, plenty of vegetables, and more brussels sprouts than there are homeless people in Manhattan. The man in the apron regretted to inform me there is actually a waiting list for volunteers and the only way I was going to get to help out was to sign up for next Christmas, like, today.

Far from the Bowery, carving the Christmas goose.

Then it hit me. What am I doing? We’d like to think of the homeless as average Joes down on their luck but the vast majority of them are average Joes completely out of their fucking minds. Just up the road from the Mission you had the seminal punk club CBGBs where bouncers always carried tazers when asking the homeless to move because you never know how a bum is going to react. A few blocks from there you had George Drescher who was stabbed in the brain (through his eye) and killed after questioning a bum who was rooting through the garbage. I put my family in jeopardy in order to fulfill some ABC prime time notion of the spirit of Christmas because I wanted to feel good about myself. How idiotic.

Since then I’ve spent every Christmas serving food to my own family, at home, and trying to make each holiday as memorable as possible for the kids (another one came out since the daughter was on the Bowery). I still reach out occasionally. Some friends of mine recently asked to help them with Movember, a prostate cancer charity wherein participants get their facial hair sponsored to help the cause. These charities usually manage to raise about $10,000 per group and this year I was about $50 of that. Unfortunately, cancer research is the last of the big spenders and $10,000 is 0.0002% of the five billion dollars cancer research needs to get through the year. “Raising Awareness” is the go-to reason for ignoring the numbers but let’s face it, you’d have to be dead not to know about cancer at this point. Marathons and marches are a great way to raise morale and form a sense of community but they don’t help fight cancer.

My lawyer asked me to sponsor him for the 100 Mile Man Foundation. I put in $200 but only because my lawyer’s been very good to me in the past and I wanted to say thanks. The charity helps underprivileged kids go to community colleges and get a degree. Sounds good but do hardworking poor kids really need help getting into community college? If a kid wins a private scholarship at Manhattan’s Baruch College for example, he’s looking at about $4,000 for tuition and then $4,000 in Financial Aid. That’s $4k profit. Kids are now being paid to go to school. What is this, England? Even if he doesn’t get a private scholarship, the Financial Aid for a poor kid with pretty good marks is almost impossible not to get. In short, if you’re poor in New York and you work hard, school is free.

I’m sure there are some great New York charities. I always hear about them. While interviewing Susan Sarandon, I learned she is a huge proponent of City Harvest, a group that takes excess food from restaurants and donates it to New York City’s homeless. That sounds like a great idea. There’s also New York Cares, which donates coats to the homeless. We performed at a benefit for them that raised over $10,000. I never looked into where the money went. Neither would you. We don’t care THAT much. So, if you’re not doing the math or looking into where you’re money’s going, let’s just call a spade a spade and admit you’re going to the Bowery Mission to feel good about yourself. Actually, try to be a little more cautious about what colloquialisms you use. You don’t want to get stabbed.

All good things must come to end, and so will my tenure as editor of Taki’s Magazine.

From the beginning, I thought of my role at Takimag as that of an impresario, my task being to surround myself with as many people who are smarter than I am as possible. (Whenever I’d mention this to my buddies, one would usually chime in with, “Well, Richard, that’s not too hard!” Hardy har har…)

Takimag was churning out great stuff before I arrived (with Paul Gottfried, Justin Raimondo, and John Zmirak leading the way), but I’m particularly grateful to those new contributors who helped me appear like an intelligent and well connected editor. These include, among others:   

Doug Bandow, Thomas Bertonneau, Austin Bramwell, Gary Brecher, Peter Brimelow, Patrick J. Buchanan, Lee Congdon, Karen De Coster, Martin van Creveld, John Derbyshire, Marcus Epstein, Daniel Flynn, David Gordon, Nikolas Gvosdev, Kevin R. C. Gutzman, Leon Hadar, Jeffrey Hart, Grant Havers, James Kalb, S.T. Karnic, Bill Kauffman, Razib Khan, E. Christian Kopff, Mark Krikorian, Alex Kurtagic, Robert Stacy McCain, Gavin McInnes, Ilana Mercer, Charles Murray, Brendan O’Neill, Michael Scheuer, Peter Schiff, “Spengler” (David P. Goldman), Caleb Stegel, Jared Taylor, Derek Turner, Laurence Vance, Thomas E. Woods Jr., Tim Worstall, and Elizabeth Wright.

I’m even prouder of the younger writers I brought on board over the past two years, most of whom got their start blogging at Takimag: 

Kevin DeAnna, Patrick Ford, Mark Hackard, Dylan Hales, Richard Hoste, Jack Hunter, Nina Kouprianova, Scott Locklin, Evan McLaren, Mike Payne, Keith Preston, Helen Rittelmeyer, and Devin Saucier. 

And then there’s Steve Sailer, who began writing a weekly “Zeitgeist” column in the spring of 2009 and who’s done some of his most memorable, and hilarious, work at Takimag. Paul Gottfried deserves special recognition, too, not simply as a frequent contributor but as an advisor and éminence grise. Thanks go out as well to Angelo Matera, who ran Takimag’s finances during 2008, and Lew Rockwell and Peter Brimelow, who have been highly supportive of me and who have introduced tens of thousands to the website through generous linking. 

And most of all, I’d like to thank Taki. My boss allowed me not to worry about finances for two years—quite a luxury among the blogging set!—and from the beginning, he gave me more editorial freedom than any 29-year could dream of. Taki has been an indispensable patron of and contributor to right-wing causes in America, Britain, and Europe, and I’m proud to call him a friend.

But never fear, loyal readers, Takimag won’t be going away—nor will I be severing my ties with the webzine.

Taki’s talented daughter, Mandolyna, who became a regular contributor, will be stepping in to fill my shoes and, no doubt, she’ll bring her own perspective to the webzine. Over the past month, Mandolyna has already taken on many of the tasks of editor, finding new voices and commissioning new pieces. And I’ll be sticking around, too, offering economic and political commentary on a regular basis. 

And what else will I be up to? Well, I’m currently hard at work creating a new web project. Many of the themes that predominated at Takimag over the past two years will be taken up again at the new site, but I also hope to cut some new paths, particularly in the discussion of Human Biological Diversity and also in terms of the format and look of a right-wing webzine. 

In order to fuel more speculation around the blogosphere, I won’t say anymore… But expect a launch by early February. And if you’re interested in supporting this project, then I encourage you to (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), as I’d love to discuss the details with you.

Crises are opportunities, and I hope that 2010 will be the year when the Alternative Right comes into its own. 

In closing, I’ve had a great time at Takimag over the past two years, and its been an honor to work with such intelligent contributors and readers.

Best wishes,
Richard

Let’s start 2010 right and mention a few honest people in the news…

I wrote this sentence a couple of hours ago, not realizing how difficult it was going to be to find even one honest boldfaced name. Like old Diogenes, I am still looking as my deadline nears. Which reminds me: The white-bearded old Greek at least had a trademark lamp to help him in his search, something I refuse to carry as it gets in the way, especially when trying to ski. Diogenes credited his teacher Antisthenes with introducing him to a life of poverty and happiness—the two went in hand—but the Greek should thank God he lived 2,300 years ago. In today’s Olive Republic, poverty and unhappiness are one, and when I say poverty, I mean when people cannot pay for a third home, a yacht, and a fourth family car. So forget what I just wrote about starting the New Year right. There are honest people strewed all around the world, but I’ll be damned if we ever hear or read about them.

When Greek premier George Papandreou recently said that Greece is corrupt, it was the first truth uttered by a Greek politician since the spring of 1946, when my uncle took the oath of office. By acknowledging to his European Union peers that the Greek public sector was corrupt, Papandreou was using a redundancy of expression—a pleonasm—as everyone knows that a Greek public servant and corruption are one. The trouble is that there is nothing he can do about it. His old man, now gone below, and his rival, the fat and incompetent Costa Karamanlis, procured more civil service jobs in return for votes than there are wild-eyed Islamic terrorists in Pakistan, so a civil service strike means the Olive Republic comes to a halt quicker than I can say ouzo. 

More important, no one in the birthplace of electrolysis expects anything from the state, and as a result, no one pays taxes if they can help it. One in three Greek workers is employed by the state, a result of decades of public hiring, which means one in three Greeks stays busy trying to hinder the other two from doing business. No civil service is worse, although I am told that in parts of Equatorial Guinea the public sector—especially where passports are concerned—is just as lousy.

But let’s go on. Greece is a lost cause, and I for one have given up on it. Last month, we had a lot of eco-vultures with a bone to pick in Copenhagen. It was, and always is, about money. That’s why George Soros was there. This bum has never created anything except a method to enrich himself, so I fail to understand what he was doing there in the first place. That other fraud, Michael Bloomberg was also there, showboating and leaving a large carbon footprint with his private jet. I lack the technical knowledge to judge if climate change is real or not, but one thing’s for sure: If there’s money to be gouged from the haves, the have less will do so. But suddenly, Eureka! I have thought of an honest man, three in fact.

About fifteen years ago I went to dinner at Norman Mailer’s house in Brooklyn. There I met a very nice man, good-looking and gentlemanly. He was well spoken and measured in his words. He told me that he had three subscriptions to the Spectator, for three different locations, as he travelled a lot and needed to keep up with English life. His name was Larry McMurtry, a Pulitzer Prize winner for his novel Lonesome Dove, as well as an Academy Award winner for his screenplay of Brokeback Mountain. He has just published his autobiography, Literary Life, and your high life correspondent is in it. His first novel, Horseman, Pass By, was made into that wonderful film Hud. Larry also wrote The Last Picture Show, and Terms of Endearment. His books are autumnal in nature and simply beautiful. His only weakness seems to be an affinity with the poor little Greek boy. Now that’s what I call an honest man.

As is Professor Paul Gottfried, whose memoir Encounters also includes the greatest Greek writer since Homer. The professor connects his numerous encounters with prominent thinkers and scholars, many of them outsiders, and he includes President Richard Nixon, the greatest outsider of them all because he refused to play ball with the inside-the-beltway phonies of Washington. Encounters is fascinating to read, even after I had read the two passages about myself, a rarity in books nowadays.

Lastly I read Kevin Mac Donald’s Cultural Insurrections, his essays on western civilization, Jewish influence, and anti-Semitism. Jewish influence is a much-discussed subject—in private, that is. It is seldom the subject of dispassionate scientific analysis. MacDonald does not pull his punches. I read all three books in one week while partying non-stop as the year came to a close. And celebrated the new one with a party I threw with a friend in Gstaad, a party full of honest men and women, and some awfully pretty girls to boot. What was all that guff about not finding honest people? There are beautiful girls everywhere, and there’s nothing that rings more honest than a beautiful young girl. Happy New Year. 

MISSING: global recession, 6 billion careless owners.

No, really, why do I see thousands of people milling around in the shops as though the credit crunch was nothing more than an abdominal exercise machine with a built-in payment plan?

Alastair Darling, in his budget, forecasts a “return to growth in the fourth quarter” of this year, and here in London, the hellishly crowded Christmas shops suggest the punters think that’s a good thing. Bollocks. Am I the only person who is utterly furious? When everything went completely tits up we were promised an apocalyptic collapse of Western civilization. Finally all the tips we had gleaned from watching disaster movies were going to pay off.

You know the form: stock up on leathers, 4x4s (no need to worry about global warming in an apocalypse) and weaponry, set up gladiatorial arenas, cook your fatter neighbors, before retiring to some retreat with your leading lady. At the very least, you should be able to get a table in a restaurant good enough to impress that lady, and buy Eaton Square with the change.

Has that happened? My ass. Any girl daft enough to accept dinner with me is going to a place with an all-you-can-eat salad bar because every table at Sheekeys and the Wolseley is still crammed with bankers.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not Gordon “back-to-the-Manse” Brown ranting about bankers like John Knox railing against Papal mistresses. I like bankers—and Papal mistresses, too—they invite me to parties and sometimes have even made me a penny. But I wouldn’t be human if my spirits weren’t raised by a few friends being found huddled around braziers under a bridge like Randolph and Mortimer. Trouble is, politicians are treating the economy with the foresight of a deep-fried Mars bar.

John Springs

The recession was caused by free money being handed out willy-nilly. Don’t listen to anyone else: a Bank of England report recently blamed “excessive risk-taking in the upswing of the credit cycle and insufficient resilience in the subsequent downturn.” That’s like the parents of obese children criticising their bloated offspring for being greedy. Children eat, it’s what they do. If you want a slimmer child, here’s a tip—stop feeding it burgers; if you want to stop unsustainable debt levels fuelling property bubbles, raise interest rates.

To be fair, we just copied the U.S. It was Greenspan who invented the soft economic landing, oblivious to the fact that every now and again some salad and a little roughage was important for the diet, not just slower protein. But, he was only the nurse; the parents were the politicians, and they liked an economic style that stuffed ice cream into the brat’s mouth every time it started to cry.

Hardly surprising that every other country took their lead, and nobody from nurse, parents or child complained until the 10 year-old boom became the youngest patient on the cardiac ward.

The fact is, if someone gives me £100 for doing sod all, I’ll spend it. So did you and now we’re all in debt. You might as well take a crate of vodka into an AA meeting as expect anybody to act responsibly in a credit boom. The real danger is what they’re doing now. 

The vodka has been drunk, and Majestic have delivered a few cases of Bulgarian Cabernet Sauvignon, oh and then there was the Special Brew, and did someone really polish off the Goldwasser and the Angostura bitters in what seemed a very promising new cocktail (for which we came up with a hilarious name) at 3 am?

Normally fatigue kicks in there, you sleep and wake with an unpleasant hangover that nonetheless reassures you for having suffered for your excesses. But if instead someone discovers the tequila? You drink shots until dawn, hit the all-night bars, collapse in an alleyway and wake up in jail in a position of unexpected intimacy with a tattooed cellmate called Cletus.

Lehmans et al. were someone saying ‘What, absolutely no more Angostura at all?’ Time for bed and that painful but morally cleansing recession. Instead the politicians, central bankers and economic doves rang the doorbell, handed over the mescal and shouted ‘Arriba’, cutting interest rates to zero, printing money and telling everyone to go out lending and borrowing again.

The result: full tables in restaurants, recovering house prices and Christmas presents all round. Enjoy it if you want, but I’ll bet you that in a couple of years when everyone sobers up, we’re going to hear two very different things: I’m going to hear the maitre d’ at the Wolseley saying, “Of course we have a table, sir, that’s no problem,” whereas all you’re going to hear is the sound of Cletus opening the lubricant.

Caramba!

“And this shall be a sign unto you: You shall find the infant wrapped in swaddling clothes, and laid in a manger.

“And suddenly there was with the Angel a multitude of the heavenly army, praising God, and saying: Glory to God in the highest and on earth, peace to men of good will.”

Here the argument begins. Is it biblical to say, “Peace on earth and good will to men,” which is inclusive but inexact? Or does that dilute and distort the meaning of “Peace on earth to men of good will,” which is restrictive?

The former, while ecumenical, seems pacifist. Do we wish good will today to al-Qaida? And is not the chorus singing out peace on earth “to men of good will” at the first Christmas a “heavenly army”?

And is not the purpose of an army to destroy enemies—in the case of the heavenly army, the army of the Devil?

“Peace on earth to men of good will” seems more consistent with the Sermon on the Mount, where the Lord says, “Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.”

Surely, Christ was not here calling down blessings on the legions that had brought a Roman peace to the known world by conquering all tribes and nations through the power of the sword.

Yet, Christ did not exclude Romans soldiers from the company of men of good will. Of the centurion who implored him to heal his servant from afar, as “I am not worthy that thou shouldst come under my roof,” Christ said: “Amen, I say to you. I have not found such great faith in Israel.”

The centurion’s words have become immortal, as for centuries they have been repeated three times by the faithful before receiving communion at every Latin mass said on earth.

What the Bible seems to teach is that there are just causes worth fighting for and just men who fight in them, and “peace on earth” is not merely the absence of war, as “in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar,” but the presence of peace with justice.

To his credit, President Obama reintroduced, in his address at Oslo on accepting the Nobel Prize for Peace, the Christian concept of a just war.

”(O)ver time, as codes of law sought to control violence within groups, so did philosophers and clerics and statesmen seek to regulate the destructive power of war. The concept of a ‘just war’ emerged, suggesting that war is justified only when certain conditions were met: if it is waged as a last resort or in self-defense; if the force used is proportional; and if, whenever possible, civilians are spared from violence.”

Obama is saying that not only must the cause be just, but the means employed. He went on to ask if, even in the “Good War” against Nazism, we always observed the Christian laws of war.

”(F)or most of history, this concept of ‘just war’ was rarely observed. The capacity of human beings to think up new ways to kill one another proved inexhaustible, as did our capacity to exempt from mercy those who look different or pray to a different God. Wars between armies gave way to wars between nations—total wars in which the distinction between combatant and civilian became blurred.

“In the span of 30 years, such carnage would twice engulf this continent. And while it’s hard to conceive of a cause more just than the defeat of the Third Reich and the Axis powers, World War II was a conflict in which the total number of civilians who died exceeded the number of soldiers who perished.”

Though World War II was a just war, Obama was implying, it was not always conducted justly. Indiscriminate bombing of defenseless cities of defeated nations—Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki—is difficult to reconcile with a Christian concept of (SET ITAL) jus in bello. (END ITAL)

And today’s wars? Certainly, after Sep. 11, Afghanistan was a just war, justly fought. But as it has become Obama’s war, with his having doubled U.S. forces in combat, what is it we are fighting for?

Comes the answer: to prevent a return of the Taliban, which could lead to a return of al-Qaida and a new base camp for terrorists preparing another Sept. 11. And if the Taliban return, Afghanistan will become a sanctuary for war on Pakistan, and the capture of its nuclear weapons by Islamic fanatics who would use them.

We are hence no longer fighting a war of necessity to root out terrorists so they cannot replicate an act of mass murder. We are fighting a preventive war—to prevent their return, from Pakistan, to Afghanistan.

Is this a just, necessary and wise war? From his own hesitancy in sending more troops and his ruminations at Oslo, Obama himself seems conflicted. And understandably so.

Merry Christmas, and peace on earth to men of good will.

For Democrats like Harry Reid, who called them “evil-mongers,” and Nancy Pelosi, who called them “un-American,” the NBC News poll must have hit like a sucker punch at a Georgetown wine-and-cheese.

The Tea Party movement, those folks rallying against spending last spring and Obamacare in the summer town halls, are viewed more favorably than the Democratic Party.

Forty-one percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of the Tea Party movement, to 35 percent for Obama’s party. Only 24 percent view Tea Party activists unfavorably, while 45 percent hold a negative view of the Democrats.

While Tea Party types played a role in the GOP’s comeback—helping take down Gov. Jon Corzine in New Jersey and turning a John McCain deficit of 6 points in the Old Dominion into a 17-point victory for Bob McDonnell—the movement is no subsidiary of the GOP. For it played a major role in routing liberal Republican “Dede” Scozzafava in New York’s 23rd and came within a point of electing a third-party conservative.

As Congressional elections are 10 months off, though primaries begin in the spring, where do Tea Party types find the battles to keep them in fighting trim? Copenhagen may have provided an answer.

While Obama came home with a nothing-burger, Hillary stole the show. Without authorization of Congress, she committed the United States to lead a campaign to transfer, beginning in 2020, $100 billion a year “to address climate change needs in developing countries.” The fund would start at $10 billion and grow by 1,000 percent in a decade.

The $100-billion-a-year global fund sprang from the fertile mind of Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

By 2020, U.S. citizens, whose nation is careening toward default, will be borrowing tens of billions more every year from China, if Beijing is still willing to lend to us, so we can ship those tens of billions off to the sump holes of the Third World.

The arrogance of power here astonishes.

Not only does Hillary’s commitment represent a doubling of U.S. foreign aid, she declared at Copenhagen that climate change—known as global warming before a blizzard brought Obama winging home early—is “undeniable.”

Now, undeniably, there is climate change. But we call it spring, summer, fall and winter. As for global warming and cooling, that has been going on for millennia. Not so long ago, we exited what is known as the “little ice age.” Over the 20th century, the official rise in global temperature was seven-tenths of one degree Celsius.

People are wailing about the “hottest decade” in history. But who would have noticed if the Chicken Littles had not told us we are all burning up and we must act now to save the planet?

How do we save the planet? By giving them power and money.

Hillary’s hundred billion a year is just the tip of the iceberg, and this iceberg is not melting. We are at the beginning of the biggest con in history.

Earlier this month, the Environmental Protection Agency made an “endangerment finding” that carbon dioxide, the food of plants and trees, is a dangerous pollutant. Under the Clean Air Act of 1970, this gives EPA power to shut down the U.S. economy, though EPA head Lisa Jackson says the ruling will apply only to 10,000 utilities, refineries and large manufacturers that emit more than 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide every year.

Congress has done nothing to reverse this usurpation of power.

Strict enforcement of this finding would make America a pasture and guarantee China’s future as the first industrial power, the factory for mankind. What is the purpose of this preposterous EPA finding?

It is the EPA nightstick to club into line U.S. companies that are fighting the Gore-Kerry-Obama cap-and-trade bill stalled in the Senate, which represents another huge transfer of wealth and power from the private sector to Beltway bureaucrats.

What the Obamaites are saying to industrial America is: Back off your opposition to cap-and-trade, or the EPA shuts you down.

The Tea Party irregulars have it in their power to stop the New World Order crowd cold. All they need do is stop cap-and-trade in the Senate for 10 months, until November, and block Hillary’s $100 billion fund from ever seeing the light of day.

If the Tea Party activists can hold the line, they can, next fall, send Congress a message it will not soon forget about getting off this Acela to globalism and getting back to putting America first.

In Europe, democracy is dead. French and Dutch voted to kill the EU constitution. The EU rechristened it the Lisbon Treaty. The Irish voted no. They were forced to vote again. The British detest it, but Gordon Brown has denied them a vote.

The West is disappearing into a New World Order, and against globalism, the Tea Party folks may represent our last best hope.

Historically, at least in America, people who seek to thrive in the theatre, publishing, finance, media, or even the gossip columns, make their way to Manhattan. Once here, the climb begins, and it’s tougher than any mountain in Nepal. As E.B. White, the great Big Bagel chronicler wrote, “all it takes is a willingness to be lucky.” But first one must get through the velvet rope.

I was kept out until 1978, when Clay Felker, the man who discovered Tom Wolfe, and countless others, decided it was time for the poor little Greek boy to stand up and be counted. I flew from London to New York and went to work almost immediately. He spiked the first piece but then I struck it rich with a story about William Paley, the rich all-powerful head of CBS, and the prominent women trying to land him after his wife, the legendary Babe Cushing Mortimer Paley, had died. I described him as a man so old he was considered middle-aged even in Palm Beach, and gave the women names of various fish, blow fish, the barracuda, shark, etc. Clay was over the moon and called me at five in the morning offering me a job.

“I’m going to make you famous,” was Clay’s way of luring writers he liked. Fame, however, never meant a thing to me—chasing girls and excelling on the tennis courts or on the mat counted for much more. Esquire magazine back then was a must-read, and being a regular columnist on it meant doors flew open. Americans take hacks seriously, something I’ve never understood, but I took full advantage by spending my nights at Studio 54, Elaine’s, Le Cirque and various other Manhattan hot spots. The fun and games lasted almost ten years, until low-life Brit lad magazines took over the field. Then my father died, and I went back to the Olive Republic in order to attend to business, keeping only my house and a very low profile in the Bagel. Oh yes, I did start a couple of publications of my own in New York and Washington, one now only a fond memory, the other still going with my name on the masthead.

But Manhattan during the Fifties and Eighties is always on my mind. New York when I was very young was literally the shining city on the hill. Only recently I noticed that those wonderful Edward Hopper, red-brick houses with fire escapes and stoops on the outside are still there, but not really. They’re disappearing faster than Christians in Baluchistan. Roll down gates of storefronts are the next thing to go. The city has declared them to be on a par with fatty foods and smoking. So the sound of hearing them clang shut late at night will soon be a memory, like so many other pleasant noises offered by the city that supposedly never sleeps.

And yet, there’s always the Empire State Building, its many shades reflecting the mood of the city, a true Everest for city slickers, and Rockefeller Center, its gray-slate exterior varying during rain or shine, time of day and light. Its magnificence and richness, however, is omnipresent, witness to a once upon a time unconquerable America. Further uptown, the white-gray marble and huge windows of Bergdorf – Goodman with its mansard roof looms as an anchor as well as a border, delineating the shopping from the residential areas further north. Now, at Christmas time, the festive lights affirm that come hell or high water people will shop and spend and be merry.

Further north come the great beaux-arts and art deco apartment towers, the backdrop to our visions of urban glamour, witty badinage and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing in white tie and tiara to a Cole Porter tune. There is a real dinner-jacket, very dry Martini atmosphere, with Central Park acting as the background to the rich enjoying themselves in their penthouses. (So what’s a mugger or two, or three, or four?) It is elegant and ethereal, and, most importantly, it reminds me of my happy youth and first loves.

The great Central Park West buildings and those of Fifth Avenue fronting the park created New York’s most memorable and humane skyline. The museum mile, as its known, is like a city within a city, an area vile developers have yet to desecrate. The last one who tried, one Aby Rosen, a German, got shot down, but he’s still lurking. Beaux-Arts and modernist principles make the museum mile the humanist urban place it is today. If the developers ever get their hands on it, goodbye humanity, hello greed and misery.

Wallace Stevens wrote that “sentimentality is a failure of feeling,” a witty remark but only that. What’s wrong with feeling sentimental over limestone buildings and mansard roofs, young blondes with bobby socks, fictive existences of silver screen idols long dead, plays, essays and poems about a mythic city on the Hudson? Not to mention F.Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald jumping into the fountain in front of the Plaza, or Langston Hughes’s Harlem? Or snowy Christmases gone by, with neighborhood kids singing carols and even using the word Christmas as in have a Happy Christmas.  Which reminds me. The Pug’s Club Christmas card is probably the funniest and nicest holiday card ever sent out, and the one responsible for it is our president, Nick Scott. Pug’s have two of our 16 members who have been nominated for the Nobel Peace prize. Instead it went to a man who is doing to America what Blair-Brown did for Britain. With that unhappy thought, a very happy Christmas to all Takimag readers.

I have come to see why the value of a woman is her femininity.  The ability to serve, please, and preside, without castrating the gents, is close to divine.

For instance: ‘Tis the week before Christmas, and a light snow is falling in London. This is my favorite season. I am about to head home to Switzerland, like I do every year.  A magical spell with family, friends, and festivities awaits. 

My mother and I love to dress our Christmas tree, give presents, and eat delicious food. My father and brother don’t care much for Christmas, which is always a disappointment for my mother and me. They drink too much and scowl a lot. Furthermore, they are hopeless where gift-giving is concerned. (Though they can be generous when cajoled.) We do our best not to let them crush our Christmas cheer.

I am well acquainted with patriarchal conventions like grumpiness. Where I come from, there are many subtle practices that separate the boys from the girls. Roles are well defined. Equality is not much in our vocabulary. 

Subtle things clue me into the fact that men and women are different. In my family, for example, men have endearing nicknames like Goofy or Rascal. Women are usually addressed as bitch, rather than by a first name, or some other more traditional designation.  Last week on a note left to me by my father, he wrote: Thanks for nothing—bitch. We ain’t no cooks—bitch. We had to eat out!

As one might assume, bitches are required to cook, clean, drive, and exhibit all the most favorable feminine qualities. Additionally, we are expected to be skilled in typically masculine tasks, like drinking, shooting, thinking, and fucking. Though we are supposed  to conceal these talents, unless by request, or if it serves to highlight the men favorably.

This is all good. First-rate even. These are not complaints. Having, yet concealing certain skills, is an asset, not a detriment. Only novices make a show of their knowledge and know-how. I suffer from terrible guilt on New Year’s Eve every year when I see my kid brother standing meekly to the side while I put on a spectacular fireworks display in our garden. 

Doing women’s work doesn’t need to be demeaning. I learned as much this past week when I found myself for the first time, a woman alone in a house with nothing but men.  Big, tough, men.

I was visiting my father in New York. My brother, my male best friend, and my father’s sensei were also at the house. I wondered if they would have survived at all without me and our dutiful daily housekeeper.  I imagine they would have eaten out every night, the house would have been in shambles, and a roach or ant colony would have moved in, as none of them can manage a simple dishwasher or washing machine.

The first morning during my trip, I found myself in the kitchen. I was happy to have the place to myself. I don’t care much for conversation before noon. The men trickled in slowly. I could not finish my breakfast. Each one berated me with requests. 

My father does not do anything practical, not even boil water.

The sensei, while extremely polite and unassuming, can only cook using his microwave, not ours.   

My brother needs three female assistants to do anything menial.  He often makes such a fuss about his obligations, a stable of women manage his burdens simply to quell his anxiety.

My best friend cannot charge his telephone without someones help. 

By 9:15, I was ready for some retail therapy. 

Later that day, I poked around department stores looking for pretty clothes and Christmas presents. I felt extremely fortunate, and proud, to be a fairly obsequious bitch. I don’t have to fight to survive in quite the same way as a man.

Merry Christmas!

A distraught would be hack celebrity journalist today decried the way in which the media was draining the limited resources of Tiger Woods mistress stories.

Tim Worstall, speaking exclusively to Takimag, spoke out about the way in which the irreplacable stocks of tales of sexual misconduct by Tiger Woods were being wasted.

“We used to think that there was no shortage, that we could carry on mining and pumping out reports of yet another Tiger Woods mistress for ever. There were no limits to our environment and every day brought another cocktail waitress or hooker with which we could run a front page story.” he said. Worstall continued “How wrong we were: now the count has reached 18 we’re struggling to find more. The well has run dry and we’re reduced, like some desperate motorist screaming for just another gallon or two of gas, to running stories about how Tiger’s mother thinks he’s been a very naughty boy.

“We should have been more careful with this natural resource and not wasted it in a orgy of conspicuous consumption. After all, it’s taken Tiger nearly five years of marriage to produce and yet we’ve consumed it all in just three weeks.” Worstall concluded.

M. King Hubbert would be 106 years old.

If you would know what Copenhagen is all about, hearken to this nugget in The Washington Post’s report from the Danish capital.

“Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenari—who is representing all of Africa here—unveiled his proposal Wednesday for a system in which rich countries would provide money to poor ones to help deal with the effects of climate change. ...

“Zenawi said he would accept $30 billion in the short term, rising to $100 billion by 2020. ... This was seen as a key concession by developing countries, which had previously spurned that figure ... as too low.”

There was a time when a U.S. diplomat would have burst out laughing after listening to a Third World con artist like this.

But not the Obamaites. They are already ponying up.

Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack just pledged $1 billion at Copenhagen to developing countries who preserve their forests. Thus, America, $12 trillion in debt and facing a second straight $1.4 trillion deficit, will borrow another $1 billion from China to send to Brazil to bribe them to stop cutting down their trees.

When you slice through the blather about marooned bears and melting ice caps, oceans rising and cities sinking, global warming is a racket and a crock. It is all about money and power.

Copenhagen has always been about an endless transfer of wealth from America, Europe and Japan and creation of a global bureaucracy to control the pace of world economic and industrial development.

End game: enrichment and empowerment of global elites at the expense of Western peoples whose leaders have been bamboozled by con artists.

When Katrina hit New Orleans and the Gulf Coast and Rita came ashore in Texas in 2005, we were told this was due to global warming, and hurricane seasons would now get worse and worse until the world radically reduced the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

President Bush ignored the hysteria. What happened?

As Michael Fumento reports, the 2009 hurricane season ended quietly, with the fewest hurricanes since 1997, and not one hurricane made landfall in the United States.

When the feds sought to list the polar bear as an endangered species, Gov. Sarah Palin protested this “politicized science” and sued, claiming the polar bear was a healthy species whose numbers had doubled in recent years.

Was she wrong?

Is the Arctic ice cap melting? So we are told. But what harm has befallen mankind other than to have a Northwest Passage opened up to maritime traffic in the summer?

The Antarctic ice sheet is nine times as large as the Arctic, and here is what the British Antarctic Survey wrote last April:

”(D)uring the winter freeze in Antarctica this ice cover expands to an area roughly twice the size of Europe. Ranging in thickness from less than a metre to several metres, the ice insulates the warm ocean from the frigid atmosphere above. Satellite images show that since the 1970s the extent of Antarctic sea ice has increased at a rate of 100,000 square kilometres a decade.”

One hundred thousand square kilometers a decade?

This would mean Antarctic sea ice expanded by 300,000 square kilometers since the 1970s, or 116,000 square miles, which is an area larger than all of New England.

How can the Antarctic ice cap grow for three decades as the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has steadily increased, unless carbon dioxide has little or nothing to do with global warming?

Unlike the Arctic, Antarctica is a continent, and while chunks of ice are cracking off in Western Antarctica, in Eastern Antarctica, four times larger, the ice sheet is thickening and expanding. The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research reported last April that the South Pole had shown “significant cooling in recent decades.”

In April 1992, as the alarm over the Earth’s end times began, scientists worldwide issued what was called the Heidelberg Appeal, aimed at just the kind of hysteria we are witnessing now in Copenhagen.

“We are ... worried ... at the emergence of an irrational ideology which is opposed to scientific and industrial progress and impedes economic and social development,” said the scientists.

“We contend that a Natural State, sometimes idealized by movements with a tendency to look towards the past, does not exist and has probably never existed since man’s first appearance in the biosphere. ... (H)umanity has always progressed by increasingly harnessing Nature to its needs and not the reverse.

“We do, however, forewarn the authorities in charge of our planet’s destiny against decisions which are supported by pseudo-scientific arguments or false and non-relevant data.”

Since then, 4,000 scientists and 72 Nobel Prize winners have signed on. Again, it needs be said: Global warming is cyclical, and has been stagnant for a decade. There is no conclusive proof it is manmade, no conclusive proof it is harmful to the planet.

I have long eschewed the materialist, and joshed at the slaves of greed.  But I have a watch fetish.

I, the otherwise non-materialistic- tomboy is felled by a fob. I, who would rather walk bare foot than bother with shoes at all, will salivate at the sight of the right timepiece. It is unseemly.

I couldn’t explain it if I tried.

One time, strolling London’s Portobello Road, my eye settled on a marvel. It caught my fancy, and then as surely, my heart.

A face was all it was. There was not even a band. So unwanted was this paraplegic that the vendor started the price too low to bother arguing. He was so chuffed to be rid of this orphan he was only a few pennies off actually paying me to take it.
I took the crippled mechanism to a watch doctor. After some radical surgeries the beast became a beauty. We lived some splendid years together.

I know the day it vanished.

In a messy move from London to Marrakech, my darling of a watch became lost in space.

Life went right on along. But in a in a low-grade, invisible way, I became unwell.  An unquenchable nausea invaded at the slightest memory of my lost love. I quietly lived with this heartache that could make me lose my balance, tip me into an armchair, dribble tears down my face. My true love, it turned out, was a thing. I mourned it. 

Months later, in the souk of Marrakech, buying almonds, I noticed the milky arm of a foreign lady. At the end of her slender limb, encircled at the wrist was a black soft cloth watchband. No question it was my watch.

My heart raced, sweat bunched between my breasts. The almond vendor jabbered on. Then, mid-negotiations, I bolted from the sacks of nuts and slammed into the crowd, toppling bodies out of my way. As I neared the lady, I slowed my gait to an unnatural over-excited hopping, tried to catch my breath, and prepared for the improbable show-down. Would she resist? Would she flat-out lie?

Fixated by certainty, I knew that whatever the means, the outcome could only be the watch and I being reunited. Romeo returns!

I pounced. ‘Where did you get that watch?’

Needless to say, it was not my watch. Just a grotesquely embarrassing moment for me, and no doubt a frightening one for this lady as she tore away from me.

Over the years I’ve had relationships with many other watches, all types. Though each had its sex appeal, not one of them ever lived up to that first heady liaison.

Nevertheless, I learned that to deny oneself is a shallow victory, so just the other day I indulged in a yummy new watch. It’s ‘Return on

Investment’ is exponential pleasure. Can’t really do much better than that.

In this season of gift giving I say feed the beast of your wants. Go buy yourself a thing you desire.

According to the AP, Tiger Woods was the outstanding athlete of the decade.  Also making the top six were Lance Armstrong, Roger Federer, Michael Phelps, Tom Brady, and Usain Bolt.

Lists like this list highlight the peculiarities of sports journalism.  Sportswriters commonly fixate on particular sports—men’s cycling, say—to the exclusion of others.  When a particular figure dominates the events they cover, their concentration on those events leaves them with the impression that he is the finest competitor in the world today, if not ever.

They are mistaken.  As anyone who has lived, let alone played organized sports, in the South knows, the best athletes are not playing golf.  Or swimming.  Or riding bicycles.

So, for example, although a golfer in my rural Texas high school won a state championship while I was there, no one thought he was the best athlete in school.  That title went to the fellow who later scored two touchdowns for the Redskins in the Super Bowl, Ricky Sanders.

Sanders simply excelled at football.  Perhaps the high point of his high school career came against our school’s arch-rival.  Sanders intercepted a pass on defense, scored a touchdown on offense, and kicked the extra point in undefeated Belton’s 7-0 victory over previously unbeaten Georgetown.  Both teams were in the state’s top ten.  Ricky was a sophomore.

He also made all-region at basketball and placed in three events—virtually without practicing the entire season—in the state track meet.

Football, basketball, and—why not?—track.  Oh, and I recall watching him loft pitch after softball pitch over the fence at the local baseball field one day.

He didn’t play tennis.  Or swim.  (Swim?  There wasn’t a single school in our district with a pool!)  Or race a bike.  (As I understand it, Texas-born Armstrong took up cycling only after failing at football.)

Why not?  As our head football coach put it one day at practice, gesturing toward the nearby tennis courts, where our school’s team was practicing, “If those guys were men, they’d be out here.”

A few of my teammates and I mocked the coach for this for the rest of my senior season.  “That Jimmy Connors is such a wimp,” I’d laugh as we ran past the tennis players.  “Yeah,” Paul Thorpe chimed in, “and so is Bjorn Borg.”  Yet, the coach’s comment captured an attitude that is very widespread in most of the country.

The finest American athletes play football, basketball, and—to a lesser extent—baseball.  That’s where the money is.  That’s where the fame is.  That’s the macho thing to do.  (Yes, some of them moonlight at track.  Bolt clearly deserves attention, but only because of the extent to which he has improved the world-record times in the sport’s glamor events—the ones every kid has tried.)

As to Woods:  his game is closer to athletic competition than darts, chess, or bowling, I suppose, but to call him a superior athlete to Tim Duncan or Kobe Bryant, Tom Brady or Ray Lewis is absurd.  To throw in Lance Armstrong and Roger Federer among the list of athletes finer than Albert Pujols or Alex Rodriguez is simply to ignore the fact that the best athletes play the glamor games.  I’m betting that not one of those guys took up football, basketball, or baseball because he first failed at cycling.

I’ve had a lot of experience buying jewels for beautiful girls. Believe me. And I didn’t put “Be Generous” at #6 on my 10 Rules for keeping a mistress for nothing—it’s important and rumors of a stingy lover get around quicker than bad news. So when Taki tells you that he know a craftsman who can mend a girl’s heart, express your inner gentleman, and generally make her forget about your past misbehavior, you can take it to the bank.

And you don’t just have to take my word for it. The work of Alex Sepkus, an intellectual eccentric and colorful fellow who lives down on 48th St., is known the world over. And not only does he create things of beauty, but he’s a honest, Christian man. Just last year, after the markets crashed and luxury goods were about popular as a Woody Allen film in Islamabad, times were tough for Alex, to be sure. But he refused to reduce his staff. According to Alex, at Christmas time, laying off employees just isn’t done. While other immigrants from the old Soviet Union have become shysters, oligarchs, and layabouts, Alex remained, somehow, a man of the old world—and his jewelry reflects this sensibility. So, take this piece of advice as a little Christmas present from Taki. Get her something from Mr. Sepkus.     

Alex can be reached at 212.391.8466 and at 42 West 48th St. suite 501. 

It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry at a new pedagogy that has been sweeping Canada’s French-speaking province.  The Ministry of Education (and Truth?) in Quebec is finally incurring much deserved flak for imposing a curriculum that aims for an “intercultural Quebec” where everyone lives together in peace and mutual tolerance.  Since September 2008, the Ministry has required that a new curriculum, known as the Éthique et Culture Religieuse (ÉCR), be taught to all students in grades one through twelve, whether they attend private or public schools (or are homeschooled).  Presumably this experiment in “relativism” will foster a more “open” and “democratic” Quebec. 

According to a recent critical assessment of the ÉCR, students are required to learn about and tolerate every single “religious position” imaginable, from pagan animism to witchcraft all the way to the Raëlian cult!  And this “tolerance” is no personal choice. Parents are not allowed to exempt their children from these classes.  Despite the relativistic rhetoric about “open dialogue,” it is highly doubtful that politically incorrect views on identity and sexual freedom are enjoying a hearing. Although teachers are required to encourage dialogue about all cultures and customs, they are also empowered to intervene in class discussions that violate the “dignity” of any oppressed group, and quickly denounce the parties who are guilty of insufficient tolerance. 

Fortunately, les habitants are fighting back.  A coalition of conservative Catholics, nationalists, and concerned parents is demanding the end of the ÉCR’s foray into social engineering.  One can only hope that they succeed, since Quebec’s politics sets the tone for what French separatists there often unkindly call the ROC (the Rest of Canada), a vast region that has been far more accepting of political correctness than la belle province. 

Yes, he will return to golf.

No, the PGA will not die without him, though it will obviously suffer and each major tournament in which he fails to appear will foster endless with Tiger-without Tiger ratings analysis.

No, this is NOT the end of sports endorsements.

The next time there is a big human interest story in any tournament, there will be days of gaseous banter about whether it will “save golf.” These emissions will feature lots of dull quips about how said human interest story shows golf is about “more than just Tiger’s infidelities.” God help us if it involves a female golfer.

Pundits are already bemoaning the PGA’s heavy focus on Tiger as a lesson in the perils of failing to diversify your product (“DON’T BE A ONE-MAN BRAND!”). Watch for at least one adroit chap to twist this into a bad Steve Jobs analogy (Has it not occurred to anyone that some sports only have one athlete fans care about?).

A recent article in a glossy magazine about the rich and famous mentioned a $35 million house in Malibu, California, whose neighbors include the actor Mel Gibson and the singer Britney Spears. The owner of this mega-monument to good taste and inconspicuous consumption turns out to be one Teodor Nguema Obiang, son of a man who goes by the same name with the tongue-twisting Mbasogo thrown in to tell them apart.

Obiang junior is 38 years old, and is paid $4000 per month back in the old country. He is obviously a man who counts his pennies because he paid for the house in cash, as he did when purchasing a Gulfstream V jet for $38 million, four Ferraris for $ 1 million, two Rolls-Royce Phantoms at $350,000 each, two Maybach Mercedeses at $350,000 each, couple of speedboats and a large yacht for prices unknown.

Not bad for a 38-year-old with a (very) limited education making 48,000 greenbacks per year. The man sure knows how to save. And spend. Mind you, we are living in a capitalist society, so why not. Teodor’s excesses might not be tolerated in today’s economic climate, but he’s no Wall Street executive. No Lloyd Blankfein he. He’s not even a Bernie Maddof. What he is, yes, you guessed it dear readers, is black, and better yet, a real, honest-to-goodness African.  His father is Teodor Nguema Obiang Mbasogo, president for life of Equatorial Guinea, and junior is his agricultural and forestry minister. Equatorial Guinea is a small coastal African country with a population of 500,000, most of whom live way below the poverty line but whose infant death rate is 93 percent, among the highest in the world. There is no clean water and no health services. Simon Mann, an English mercenary recently pardoned by Teodor senior (for a large yacht, I presume) reported his fellow jailbirds eating insects and rats, although he, being a European, got favorite treatment and was given grass and bread crumbs.

How does old man Obiang manage to live in a grand palace, have billions in American banks and be so generous with his penny-pinching son? That’s as hard to answer as trying to guess the motive that made Goldman Sachs give $500 million to help small businesses over five years last month. Equatorial Guinea has undergone an oil boom in recent years, which—on paper—has produced the highest per capita income in Africa. But for some strange reason its people continue to drink foul water, eat insects and rats, and watch while 93 percent of their children die of malnutrition and lack of health services.

Although African apologists like the vile self-publicist Bono might accuse the people of being masochists, the facts are very simple. Obiang has stolen the whole kit and caboodle while the oil companies, those nice guys who charged us more for their gas while oil prices were plunging, are happy to deposit the moolah in banks such as the Riggs Bank in Washington (it was fined 25 million dollars back in 2004 for accepting Obiang funds) Wachovia and Bank of America.

Here’s what Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, an otherwise pompous buffoon, had to say: “The fact that someone like Mr Obiang continues to travel freely here suggests strongly that the State Department is not applying the law…” And travel freely the Obiangs do. While their people starve, African crooks—Obiang is hardly alone—extort, steal and use corrupt methods to export millions in the hundreds and thousands to greedy bankers in Europe and America. They use shell corporations and off shore accounts to launder the money, and although Uncle Sam is aware of what is going on, the oil lobbies are busy protecting the thieves. Many payments of Equatorial Guinea oil and timber are made by western corporations directly to Obiang. He also receives bribes and extortion payments from the oil companies.

When I asked a past commissioner of customs why the U.S. government is turning a blind eye and only concentrates on drugs, I was told that “people can go without cocaine, but not without oil.” Worse is the fact that junior routinely travels to the United States with over a million in cash on his person which he fails to declare. A crime punishable up to five years in the pokey, but junior travels on a diplomatic passport, which I guess makes it okay.

Billions of western aid goes to poor African countries, but it never reaches the poor. Instead, it goes straight back to western banks and straight into the greedy pockets of people like the Obiangs. President Bongo of Gabon, now resting in that sauna-like place below, owned 15 enormous properties in France, had ten luxury cars and 70 bank accounts. Young Teodor obviously suffers from an inferiority complex to need such large cars and airplanes. My advice to him is to copy, say, Bill Kristol and John Podhoretz, and have a penile extension operation. Then purchase a mini. It might do wonders for his image.

But seriously. Equatorial Guinea has become the third largest oil producer in sub-Sahara Africa, with revenues of about 4.8 billion per year. Surely the Obama administration can do something about this bum, as well as the rest of the crooks in Africa. No more African aid until they cough up the stolen loot. Including the Malibu mansion, the jet, the yacht and the eight cars. And a little time in some federal prison to teach junior a lesson. But I won’t be holding my breath.   

Despite longheld doubts and suspicions about the president’s resolve in fighting the “War on Terror,” a few prominent neoconservatives have celebrated Obama’s recent Oslo speech as a triumphant testament to the “Christian realism” characteristic of Cold War liberalism.  In The New York Times, David Brooks recently praised The One for soberly recognizing that evil exists in the world.  Obama deserves a place in the pantheon of cold warriors like Harry S. Truman and JFK for (finally) understanding that pretty words and flowery sentiments are no substitute for the use of overwhelming firepower against the enemies of freedom.  Of course, one should not embrace the dark side while one combats one’s foes, as Brooks warns:  “So as you act to combat evil, you wouldn’t want to get carried away by your own righteousness or be seduced by the belief that you are innocent. Even fighting evil can be corrupting.” 

Now this fight against evil, Brooks assures his readers, requires the spread of American democratic values hither and yon.  Yet there is nothing “corrupting” about this.  Perhaps as a way of assuaging potential worries that the project of democracy-building can be as corrupting as any stab at empire-building in the past, Brooks brings in some heavy guns here.  Brooks takes pains to show his awareness of the old biblical truth that every human being is a sinner, even with the best of intentions.  For this reason, he quotes with approval the great Cold War strategist George Kennan:  “The fact of the matter is that there is a little bit of the totalitarian buried somewhere, way down deep, in each and every one of us.”

Brooks also quotes Reinhold Niebuhr’s famous statement on democracy as perhaps the best answer to the objection that a democratic imperialism is still an imperialism.  As Niebuhr once put it, “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”  In short, the spread of democracy is the best political antidote to the sinfulness that lurks in every human heart.

Now there is nothing new about finding a prominent neoconservative who praises democracy-building as “realistic,” or makes use of a Cold War liberal theologian like Niebuhr.  Other neoconservatives, particularly Michael Novak, have praised Niebuhr for his realistic defense of the moral superiority of democratic capitalism.  Having written elsewhere on Kennan’s and Niebuhr’s opposing views on Lincoln’s legacy in the Cold War era, I was, however, irritated that Brooks shows no awareness of the stark differences between these two stalwart defenders of America’s interests.  For all of Niebuhr’s much vaunted “realism,” this liberal Protestant never doubted that true Christian charity required the assumption that all human beings desire democracy, American-style.  By contrast,  the conservative Protestant Kennan warned America’s leaders in the Cold War era not to assume that all peoples desire American liberty and equality.  Because this seasoned diplomat doubted that there was an inner Jeffersonian democrat lurking in every human heart, Niebuhr accused Kennan of an amoral “egotism.”  Apparently, what was realistic to Kennan was heartless to Niebuhr. 

Brooks is right about one thing:  Obama is indeed marching in the footsteps of Niebuhr.  But it is not a march that Kennan would have followed, for that path leads to the howling wilderness of Iraq and Afghanistan. 

“It’s time to stop worrying about the deficit—and start panicking about the debt,” the Washington Post editorial began. “The fiscal situation was serious before the recession. It is now dire.”

The editorial continued:

“In the space of a single fiscal year, 2009, the debt soared from 41 percent of the gross domestic product to 53 percent. This sum, which does not include what the government has borrowed from its own trust funds, is on track to rise to a crushing 85 percent of the economy by 2018.”

What are the risks of an exploding U.S. public debt?

The Chinese, Japanese and Arabs still buying that debt will begin to suspect they are holding onto paper on which the United States will default, or will cheapen by inflating its currency—as the Germans did in 1923 to avoid paying war reparations.

When they do, they will stop buying U.S. debt and start dumping. The Fed will then have to raise interest rates to attract borrowers, throwing the economy into a tailspin.

Is Congress even aware of what is happening?

Harry Reid is talking about doubling Medicare rolls to include folks 55 to 64. Facing a second straight $1.4 trillion deficit, Congress is moving to raise the debt ceiling by another $1.8 trillion.

And the lead story in the Post Monday began:

“The Senate cleared for President Obama’s signature on Sunday a $447 billion omnibus spending bill that contains thousands of earmarks and double-digit increases for several Cabinet agencies.”

Total cost of the Senate bill passed Sunday was “$1.1 trillion, including average spending increases of 10 percent for dozens of federal agencies.”

Ten percent hikes for federal agencies? What is going on?

Democrats say the money is needed to make up for the neglect of the George W. Bush years. But the Bush years were the fattest years for federal social spending since the Great Society.

Sen. Dick Durbin says the spending is necessary “to keep cops on the street ... so that families feel secure. ... Money spent to help our first responders, firefighters and policemen is a critical investment.”

But aren’t cops and firemen a state and local responsibility?

“It is business as usual, spending money like a drunken sailor, ” said Sen. John McCain. “And the bar is still open.”

But when sailors get drunk and spend crazily, they are on shore leave and spending their own money. When they get back aboard ship, they sober up and shape up, and do the vital work they enlisted to do.

These congressmen never stop bingeing. They are addicts. They are alcoholics. And they are spending our money. According to Taxpayers for Common Sense, there are 5,200 earmarks in that one Senate bill, which averages out to 12 pork projects for every House member—and 52 for every senator.

What is going on in Washington?

Democrats are following the Rahm Rule of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel. “Don’t allow a crisis to go to waste. ... There are opportunities to do big things.”

The Party of Government is exploiting the economic crisis to grow the government. And from the standpoint of self interest, this makes sense. Most government employees are Democratic voters, as are most beneficiaries of government programs.

Moreover, Democrats have to get the money out the door before the midterms, where the party is going to take a bath and lose power.

How else to explain this lead story last week in USA Today:

“The number of federal workers earning six-figure salaries has exploded during the recession. ...

“Federal employees making salaries of $100,000 or more jumped from 14 percent to 19 percent of civil servants during the recession’s first 18 months—and that is before overtime pay and bonuses are counted.

“Federal workers are enjoying an extraordinary boom time—in pay and hiring—during a recession that has cost 7.3 million jobs in the private sector.”

When the recession started, the Defense Department had 1,868 civilian employees earning $150,000. Defense now has 10,100. The Transportation Department had one person earning $170,000 when the recession began. Transportation now has 1,690 employees earning above $170,000. Recession in America means boom times in D.C.

The financial crisis that almost sank the capitalist system was the work of Washington and Wall Street. The Fed created the bubble. The White House and Congress goaded banks into making all those subprime mortgages. Fannie and Freddie bought up the lousy paper and turned it into securities. Wall Street banks bought them up and put them on their books as Triple A assets. Federal regulators looked the other way.

Yet happy days are here again on Wall Street. And Washington never saw better times, with federal workers now earning, on average, $31,000 a year more than workers in the gutted private sector.

Is this the government the Founding Fathers dreamed of—or is this the kind of arrogant government they took up arms against?

I don’t know about you, but I need a cup of coffee first thing in the morning.

When I awoke my fuzzy morning eyes scanned the room and got nothing. I was in an unfamiliar bedroom, not for the first time I might add, but that would be another story. And not that I’m complaining, in this particular instance the bedroom I’m in is comfortable as a cloud.

I have no idea where I am. But I know that I need a cup of coffee so I best get on with figuring out my Global Position.

No sound disturbed me, yet I awoke. It was all amorphous, woke up for the sake of needing no more sleep, thank you very much.  A window was wide open, and all I could see was that it was dark outside. Warm and lovely inside. Even if I still had no idea where I was.

The red lights of an electric clock read 6:04.

6:04 what, though? I thought. Could as easily be dusk as dawn. No discernible clues to work with. I lay still. If it turned out to be early evening I’d make a mission of making a big night out of it. As a way to wisely use this seemingly ‘extra-found time’. If it was morning, which would mean I had been a-slumbering twelve hours straight, then I had probably best get my ass out of bed and fix on getting something productive done. Either way, by the looks of things, I would be getting out of these lovers arms of a tender bed. But what to do about the needed coffee? How do I get me some? When I still don’t know where I am.

I lie unmoving in the snug bed, my eyes are closed. Letting the magic happen. And then I hear the sounds of a New York City garbage truck. The hydraulics, the dragon snort of exhaust, the men barking and slapping the side of the rig. Oddly sexy, those garbage collectors, but, as I’m want to say, that would be another story. 

I open my eyes, I see day light glowing its first shiny swipe, and indisputably it is day. I’ve had the almighty mother of all twelve hour naps and yes, I do feel a million bucks for it. More important, I know where I am. I am in NYC. And coffee will be a short walk away.

I bound.

I’m out the front door and the daylight has shot up another shade, to a milky grey with overtones so awesome they could only be captured by the brilliant Brit painter (whose name eludes me – lots of initials?). Never mind, his name is not important, only his oeuvre is important. Yet still his talent doesn’t begin to compete with that of Mother Nature. In the warming glow of a glorious day I have walked to the corner where the street meets the avenue. No cars interrupt the rain-wet streets. I cross and watch a man, young, cherubic, somehow his aura reads ‘determined’, and he has just finished running up the metal garage door front on the west side of his establishment. He is now charging around the corner to the adjoining south wall where he releases the metal door and runs it noisily upward, crashing it to its moorings. And I’ve only just arrived at the other side, stepped up onto the curb.

The establishment is a coffee shop.

Are you open?

Yup! Right this second.

God I love New York.

“Tell me,” I recently asked a leading British politician.  “Had the movie Life of Brian been a parody of Islam rather than of Judao-Christian belief, would a single member of the Monty Python team currently be alive?”  He could provide no real answer. So I shall endeavour to do it for him.

You see, the right to give offence is the very bedrock of pluralism and western liberal democracy. Deny that right, and freedom narrows, and the walls of debate close in. Refuse to defend that right, and it is the extremists who prevail.  Humour, argument and the rough and tumble of basic rudery are the stuff of liberty and our way of life. Outrage never killed anybody—until Islam became involved.
 
Suddenly, everyone is scared; everyone tiptoes about; everyone is oversensitized to the smallest of slights or off-message remarks. Hell, you could even lose your head if you’re not careful. No one wants to be the next Daniel Pearl. So we cower and we grind our teeth and we think dark things. What a shame.
 
Every nation deserves a spiritual centre, and organised religion provides it. Religion can reinforce identity, create a unity of purpose, give a people strength and focus at times of trial or celebration, and add dimension and soul to the corporate whole. Without a core common value system—often bolstered by belief - a country takes a first step towards committing suicide. And without acknowledgement of its Christian foundation, and in its chaotic adoption of multiculturalism, Britain has set out along that path.

At its best, religion has given us great buildings and fine music, has encouraged philanthropy, has inspired writers and artists, and brought hope and light to millions in their darkest hour. We would be impoverished for its absence.  Just look at the Czech Republic. It is common to hear the atheists of today–themselves adherents to an aggressive cult–mount a sustained attack on the notion of faith.  They dismiss too lightly the fact rite and ritual and spiritual quest have always been part of Man.  They forget too easily the worst atrocities of the Twentieth Century were perpetrated by Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, the most committed and tyrannical of irreligionists.

Of course, religion—like humankind itself—has its imperfections. Without some element of doubt, it becomes intolerant and loses humanity. Listen to a bible literalist and you will see what I mean. Islam does not involve or invite doubt; it is about obedience and its holy book is considered the actual word of God. Not much wriggle-room for jokes or compromise. Islam is never going to embrace the “coffee and biscuits in the crypt” approach and gentle idiosyncracies that are so much part of the Anglican (and British) tradition. Add to this the foreign imams who populate British mosques, who have no stake or belief in our way of life, who show no loyalty to our country and who do not even speak our tongue, and the seeds of tension and misunderstanding are sown. Yet the political class continues to express surprise at the apparent rise of the nationalistic far Right.

In promoting, and then imposing the liberal-left conceit of multiculturalism, that political class created a value-free and grievance-ridden swamp in which all views were equal, any creed had merit, and where radical Islamisation could take root without any fear of challenge. Tread lightly, the police were told. Ignore the problem, the Security Services were commanded. Woe betide those who cautioned against the Balkanisation of Britain and the steady erosion of her values in favour of some hybrid mess. For they were deemed racist.

So the terrorist attacks came, innocents and innocence died, and the Labour administration of Blair and Brown tried to hang tough by proposing ID cards for the populace and ninety-days detention without charge.  Beyond this, and in the name of integration, the concept of faith school—of whatever flavour—was also assailed. None wished to single out Islam for criticism and few had appetite to argue that traditional Christian belief has served both country and society well. Freedom died just a little bit more. All because of our tolerance for intolerant Islam and its madrasas; all because of our tolerance for a political elite that has sold democracy short.

When the suicide-vest detonates—or a police raid goes in—it is customary for Moslem community leaders (and, indeed, their communities) to argue the terrorist suspects were “not Moslem.” The bleak truth is - they are.  The bombers have been nurtured within Islamic schools, brainwashed by Islamic imams, recruited by Islamic spotters, and trained in Islamic camps. The evidence is more than circumstantial, the common denominator more than incidental. Islam must take its share of responsibility, for without recognition of the problem there can be no lasting cure.

That same politician to whom I spoke, talked movingly of Moslems lying dead in graves beside their Christian comrades across the battlefields of World War II. A comforting thought, until one remembers there are fewer than five hundred Asian Moslems in the entire British armed forces. It is a sad truth—and a real one—that to earn a place in the heart and consciousness of a nation, you must first be prepared to shed your own blood for it.  Few British Moslems appear willing to volunteer. They cannot then complain of being shunned. Too often it is they who keep aloof; too often it is they who seem contemptuous of the land in which they choose to settle and whose benefits they enjoy.

Sharia has no place in western civilisation. Wahabi-based extremism is incompatible with our cherished and hard-fought-for freedoms. And in a nominally secular and open-faced democracy, the donning of a full veil should be considered as inappropriate and threatening as the wearing of a balaclava. The veil conceals. The veil divides. The veil subjugates. The veil sets a Moslem firmly apart from the wider social milieu. To those who have joined the mass migration to our shores, the message should be clear—buy into our system or bug out. That is the compact.

Islam needs a New Testament or an Enlightenment. Islam needs a liberal interpretation of the Koran. Islam needs to remove an ossifying theology from the state. Islam needs to lighten up. Islam needs to laugh at itself and permit us to laugh at it. Unless and until this occurs, Moslems will forever be viewed with suspicion and latent hostility by large swathes of the British public.

As for the members of Monty Python—Islam would have ensured a most uncomfortable ride.

Last week I learned about Mike Huckabee’s pandering to the underclass, thanks to a Democratic Party editorial in our local newspaper. Apparently Governor Mike was addicted to commuting the sentences of (predominantly black) felons during his eight-years of service as Arkansas governor. Indeed before he left the statehouse, he had commuted the sentences of 1,033 such offenders. Some of Huck’s beneficiaries were not especially violent, but many were, and one of them, Maurice Clemmons, who had been sentenced to 108 years in the slammer for a wide assortment of unsocial acts, had to be shackled when he appeared in court, lest he started pummeling everyone around him. Against the advice of state prison officials, Mike pardoned Clemmons, who last week, nine years later, murdered four policemen in Lakeland, Washington. Another Huckabee parolee, Wayne DuMond, suffocated a mother of three in 2004; he was thereafter returned to prison, where he died a year later.
Not to worry! In an interview with Bill O’Reilly on FOX, which is the employer of many “conservative” thinkers, Mike learned that there was no reason to fret over spilled milk. There was supposedly no way Mike could have known much about the more than 1,000 criminals he had paroled. Should we mention the obvious? How the hell could a responsible governor do what Huckabee did without knowing the backgrounds of the potentially murderous criminals he was letting out of prison? And why should he have ignored wiser counsels to release murderous human beasts who had previous histories of violence?  The answer is self-evident. Like Karl Rove, when he leaned on banks to provide Hispanics, as potential GOP voters, with sub-prime rate loans, and like McCain, when he railed against Confederate flags and repeatedly supported affirmative action in public education, Mike was reaching out. He was simply acting like a Republican, which is exactly why he’s on FOX.
The Democratic editorial provided other useful information about our “conservative” party, news channel, and presidential candidate:” Not to be ignored is that it was O’Reilly’s boss at FOX, Roger Ailes, who was behind the Willie Horton ads in 1988 that helped destroy Massachusetts Democrat Michael Dukakis’ presidential campaign. Horton was a convicted murderer who raped a woman after wrongly being released on furlough.” Reading the above passage made me proud that I’m not a Republican or (even worse) a FOX junkie. And if Mike or O’Reilly manages to become the next GOP presidential candidate, I’ll vote early and often for the black messiah. At least he’s not a Republican suck-up panting after minority votes. In any case no one, outside of the American academy, would mistake Obama for a “conservative.”  The same cannot be said about Huckabee, O’Reilly or the loathsome channel that pays for these windbags. 

Last weekend, in an attempt to uncover the mysteries of the contemporary art market, I put on my great uncle’s Lederhosen and posed as an eccentric Austrian collector at Art Basel Miami. The gallerists had largely ignored me the day before. This sartorial jeu d’esprit was an attempt to spark them into action. And it worked. The assistants—meticulously coiffed men and languidly bored girls—appeared to perk up. They showed me around and made introductions. I asked a few questions. They replied guardedly. I got the distinct impression that they were withholding information, or perhaps waiting to see whether I would reveal my hand. And maybe that is what the art world is–a big game in which no one is quite sure of the rules, but no one wants to be the first to admit it.

Let me give a sample conversation:

Austrian “collector”: (Examining beautiful, painstaking woodcut by Franz Gertsch) This is interesting.

Gallerist: Yes, Gertsch is a very important artist.

Austrian “collector”: How long would it take him to produce a print like this?

Gallerist: Gertsch works at his own speed.

Austrian “collector”: No doubt. And what speed is that?

Gallerist: Gertsch cannot be rushed.

Austrian “collector”: So how long would it take him, if he wasn’t being rushed?

Gallerist: (Reluctantly) I would say, anywhere up to 6 months. Maybe more.

Austrian “collector”: (Impressed) Wow, that is a long time. (Examining the tiny pointillist marks) Is he autistic?

Gallerist: (Pokerfaced) Gertsch is a very important artist.

Art Basel Miami Beach has been running since 2002 and is the sister event to the more established Art Basel in Switzerland. The fair runs for the first week of December. The official show takes place in the vast convention center. There are 250 galleries exhibiting contemporary artists; some, like Franz Gertsch, are very important. Miami’s other galleries and exhibition centers take advantage of the event to open their doors to this international assembly of art world movers and shakers. Galleries in parts of town such as Wynwood and the Design District showcase the new crop of artists waiting to be discovered.

I never knew exactly what was going on at the fair. There were a lot of people milling around but how many of them were in a position to pay the huge sums for which most of these works were being offered? Despite the ubiquitous gallerists and their languid/coiffed assistants, I never saw any evidence of business being transacted. And, in that sense, the art fair parallels the city of Miami itself. After New York and Chicago, Miami’s skyline is the third most impressive in America, according to the Almanac of Architecture and Design. And yet many of these huge buildings stand empty. Miami, like the art world, has been hit hard by the recession. Furthermore, and again like the art world, it is hard to know what makes Miami tick. San Francisco prides itself on its technology and bohemianism, New York is driven by finance and Los Angeles by the entertainment industry. And Miami?

The city is one of extraordinary diversity, even by American standards. Over one third of the population of the metropolitan area are Cuban. Large numbers of Haitians, Colombians and Brazilians live in the city itself. They rub shoulders with a generous sprinkling of European emigrés and well-heeled New Yorkers. People watching is a very entertaining local pastime. I enjoyed the sight of a statuesque platinum blond lady strutting down Lincoln Road, dragging two befuddled poodles behind her. She was no stranger to cosmetic surgery – she looked as if she had recently been punched in the mouth and was now caught in a wind tunnel.

What brings the inhabitants of Miami together? In one sense, it is a shared love of pleasure. The sports cars are flash, the yachts are big and the dresses skimpy. There is a flirtatiousness in the air which cannot be explained by the sultry climate alone. However, is there still enough money flying around in a recession to sustain these sybaritic lifestyles? That is also a question which the art world is currently grappling with. Given the cost of shipping artworks around the world – the actual cost as well as the insurance costs – it is baffling how the contemporary art scene functions at all.

Back at the art fair, there were a number of works which I found baffling in another way. I am thinking of the $5000 door mat lying in the middle of the gallery, with a plaster cast of a doorbell on top of it. The poor girl working there told me that she had already had to chase a dozen people off the mat when they accidentally stepped on it. I was so perplexed myself that I forgot to play the game for a moment; I asked her outright what the point of this ‘work’ was. She stammered a little and called her employer who proceeded to crush me beneath the weight of his art world babble.

Austrian “collector”: This is interesting.

Gallerist: Yes, Gabrielli is a very important artist. His experiments in form are designed to encapsulate the physical manifestation of a single thought, with all its lyricism and paradox. His pieces represent both interior visions and the very real destruction of the well-defined and corporeal. They stand on the anxious fulcrum of categorization where distinctions between forms and material disappear, or are made to disappear. Gabrielli is a very important artist.

None of this made any sense to me but it was so fluently and so earnestly delivered that any disagreement on my part would have felt like a personal insult.

I left that gallery full of admiration for the owner. Did he believe what he was saying? Was he making it all up? In any case, he had silenced me through his use of language. Like a master spin doctor, he had used language to befuddle rather than to clarify, and he had left me feeling like the idiot. That’s when I realized that language is also a big part of the art world game.

There are times when a dealer or a gallerist will push you for a reaction. At these times, there is one phrase which I find particularly useful. After a considered appraisal, I like to say, “Hmmm, yes, it’s very derivative.” Out of context, this is of course utterly meaningless. Its beauty lies in the fact that it could be an endorsement or a criticism—you never have to show your hand, and you come away sounding like a great expert.

Are the Russian security services behind the climate change scandal? Britain’s Independent seems to think so. The allegation was made, not surprisingly, with prompting from sources high within the UK government. The paper implicates Moscow in revealing the Norwich-based Climatic Research Unit’s emails. Conversations in the messages point to a concerted effort to omit and selectively employ data for the promotion of the anthropogenic global warming agenda.

Both Russia’s GRU (military intelligence) and the FSB (Federal Security Service) certainly maintain a formidable cyber-warfare capability. The Independent claims the massive load of information was first posted on a server in Tomsk, with the hack facilitated by the local FSB directorate. Cert