Taki’s List

Owning a boat, especially a sailing yacht, is like having a beautiful mistress with your wife’s approval. This is the good news. The bad is that a boat is even more expensive than a high class courtesan.

The Boston Globe praises Saudi Arabia and its rulers for its diplomatic finesse in brokering a cease-fire between Hamas and Fatah. This is the way it should be. When someone finally does something good, they should be praised. Up to a point, that is. For far too long the Saudi ruling kleptocracy—because that’s all it really is—has bought safety for itself by paying off regional thugs and relying on the American safety umbrella. Personally I cannot ever forget that the first thing the Bush administration did following 9/11 was to fly Saudi ruling family relations to safety. In other words, away from Texas or other parts north in continental United States, and back to the sandy haven which is Saudi Arabia.

Oh, to be in England! The once upon a time green and pleasant land is now Europe’s burglary capital, the most violent country in the old continent, Albania included. It’s gotten so bad that the paralyzed Blair government has reverted to television slogans such as: “Don’t moan, take action: it’s your street too.” Sure, and pigs may fly. In Britain’s mean streets taking action is taking your life in your hands. One wrong look and some ethnic minority—a protected species—will knife you quicker than you can say John Bull…

A London friend has sent me a book whose subject caused a few faint complaints in the beginning but has now escalated to a full-scale furore, Jimmy Carter’s Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Racist and anti-Semitic have been the operative words used by outraged pundits to describe it, while people such as the Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz and the director of the Anti-Defamation League Abe Foxman have gone overboard in calling the 39th President of the good old USA not only an anti-Semite but a Christian madman and a pawn of the Arabs…

Style is the most abused word in the English language. It is usually attributed to fashionable people by those not in the know. Style, however, is an elusive quality, and few fashionable people and almost no celebrities possess it outright. No one is capable of buying it, although thousands try. The dictionary defines ‘style’ as a noticeably superior quality. It is of an abstract nature and one either has it or one does not. As a child, I used to admire dictators, their brilliant uniforms, their swagger and their conviction. Although I hate to admit it, I still like dictators and for a very good reason: their lack of hypocrisy. They do not resort to taking the advice of pollsters and image-makers in order to find out who they ought to be…

I want to shake up the stodgy world of so-called ‘conservative’ opinion. For the past ten years at least, the conservative movement has been dominated by a bunch of pudgy, pasty-faced kids in bow-ties and blue blazers who spent their youths playing Risk in gothic dormitories, while sipping port and smoking their father’s stolen cigars. Thanks to the tragedy of September 11—and a compliant and dim-witted president—these kids got the chance to play Risk with real soldiers, with American soldiers. Patriotic men and women are dying over in Iraq for a war that was never in America’s interests. And now these spitball gunners, these chicken hawks, want to attack Iran—which is no threat to the U.S. at all.

The only good thing to emerge from that tragic war – one that I covered and one that I backed to the hilt until the very last day – was that it ruined LBJ’s prospects of running for a second term. It cost 58,000 American lives, and close to two million Vietnamese ones – north and south – and made celebrities out of opportunists like Jane Fonda’s husband, Tom Hayden, clowns like Abbie Hoffman, and professional busybodies like Daniel Ellsberg. It took Uncle Sam a generation to recover from the trauma of the Vietnamese debacle.

So here at last is Taki’s way to save the planet without pain. But before we begin, a warning: don’t try doing it all at once. Melting glaciers, violent hurricanes, flash floods, terrible droughts, the threat to polar bears in the shrinking Arctic Sea ice, and the real possibility of fires in the Amazon rainforest cannot be reversed overnight. The unmentionables want us to believe that climate change is liberal propaganda, but unlike WMD in Iraq, climate change is real and very scary. Although Miami and Palm Beach are places I wouldn’t visit even if I were sober, none of us would like to see them capsize under rising water. So here we go.

All governments are monopolies of organized force, inherently unjustifiable. And once accepted, they are bound to get out of control sooner or later. No, there is no longer a Right or a Left. Bush’s mammoth expansion of government power and spending makes LBJ look like Robert Taft, the last true conservative—and peace lover, I might add. Labels are for fools.

OK, 2007 is upon us, and the end of history, as in Francis Fukuyama’s fearless forecast of 1990, has turned out to be full of you-know-what. In fact, never in seven centuries, give or take a few, has this planet of ours been in more turmoil. Fukuyama is a great scholar, and he meant well, but what he got wrong was religious fervour and human nature. Basically, the urge to control one another’s behaviour. Better yet, the incompatibility of Islamic beliefs and liberal democracy. Let’s begin with Iraq…

To West Point, where sitting in the midst of the corps of cadets on a soft autumn evening watching a football game evokes memories of the America I used to know as a schoolboy. The soldier ethic — i.e., the virtues of the past — is everywhere. Courtesy, formality, self-restraint, good manners and not a small amount of very attractive female soldiers, to boot. The virtues of the military are those of a past aristocratic society, where courage, honesty and authority were greatly valued. Once upon a time, Western societies took their cue from the past. No longer. The military is the last bastion of the last virtues of the past.