Strip-search the Brits

The first time I met Pat Buckley was in 1964 and the circumstances were rather strange. It was at the Palace hotel in Gstaad, and a few friends and I
were drinking around the large piano in the grill while the pianist was playing a spirited version of Mussolini’s favorite tune, “Giovinezza.” Our singing
the ode to youth and fascism apparently did not best please a tall, bald man standing at the bar who suddenly threw his whiskey glass at us. It smashed
against the wall showering us with glass, although no one was cut or seriously hurt.

Larry Ellison, the chief executive of the software giant Oracle and the world’s 11th richest man, according to Forbes magazine, is not imbued by an ounce of grace or elementary good manners. He has constructed a basketball court on board his megayacht, the latter a monstrosity which pollutes more than a battleship and serves no other purpose than as a penile extension to its owner. He’s also so cheap…

I remember when I was living in Flambertin des Creppieres, a small hamlet west of Paris with an admittedly extremely pretentious name, and listening to two butchers arguing about Camus. They both had obviously read him, but it was their evocation of other writers whom they compared him to which left me breathless. After they finished their wine they shook hands and went back to slicing up chickens and lambs. Just like back in old Miami, n’est pas?

Imus is an unpleasant fellow—one could never take him to a gentleman’s club, for example—but he didn’t say anything black radio jockeys don’t say every day about us whites. And it was meant, after all, to be a joke. Ethnic jokes have all but disappeared from the mass media due to censorship. The prevalence in a given society of jokes about a particular ethnic group is not a good indicator of feeling toward that group. In fact, sometimes it’s the contrary.

Fictitious enterprises are the heart and soul of low journalism, and no one is lower in my opinion than Lloyd Grove. Just that week I had launched The American Conservative magazine, so Grove needed to put a kibosh to it with an anti-Semitic slur against me. I vowed to kick him in the ass the next time I ran into him, although I had no recollection what he looked like.

The seizure of the British Royal Marines and sailors by Iran was always a no brainer. To Iran, Tony Blair is a lame duck, and the British people believe in their government as much as the Americans believed that Bill Clinton did not have sex with that woman. Few Brits accepted their Government’s story that their boats were in Iraqi waters.

In this week’s New Yorker Philip Gourevitch takes a shot at Robert Mugabe, one of the leading psychopathic monsters among the rest of the crooks and murderers who lead the Dark Continent. He writes that the South African honcho, Thabo Mbeki and his gang have dishonored themselves by failing to stand up to an oppressor (Mugabe) who is as contemptuous of his people as Ian Smith was. What utter crap. Ian Smith, a wonderful man…

Last week I spent some days in Washington, D.C. for a conference organized by Fran Griffin at the National Press Club. The subject was Sam Francis, and his terrific book, Shots Fired, about America’s culture wars. Alas, Sam Francis passed away two years ago.

Back in the old country we’ve been making jokes about the Persians since 480 B.C. But we also like them because they made heroes out of us Greeks. We only lost once to them, in Thermopylae in 480 B.C., but they were 400,000 of them and 300 of us.