I woke up to the sounds of an oompah band marching through the main street in Gstaad. Is there a nicer sound to wake up to high in the Alps? I don’t think so. It was a lovely day, the Swiss burghers dressed up in their finest lederhosen, the mountains glistening in the sun, the air fresh and clean, a few American tourists asking what’s the occasion. Nothing special, just the day the cows are brought down from their pasture up high. The Swiss haven’t fought for 700 years–of armed neutrality, that is–and an oompah band, I guess, makes up for the lack of martial spirit.

For any of you who are not familiar, the closest thing in America to an oompah band is a fife and drums one, which also makes me feel awfully good. The best, of course, is a military band, a good old John Philip Sousa type, whose descendant, incidentally, I know very well (Mrs. Edward Ulmann, of New York, Southampton and more clubs than Clinton has told lies).

I grew up hearing nothing but military marches. Our boys were off to fight Mussolini’s legions when I was four. I actually said goodbye to my father and five uncles in Larissa station, women crying, children playing with officers’ ceremonial swords, people cheering as the trains left, the boys waving confidently, flags flying, the military bands playing those wonderful marches that egg on young men to fight for glory. We now know that "dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" may not be kosher after all, but once you’ve seen and heard it at age four, it’s very hard not to shit on people like Clinton who not only ran away, but now claim they would fight–for Israel.

We then heard the bands as the dispatches of victories came in–first the church bells, then the bands, Koritsa, Tepeleni, Pindos…names I will never forget. When the bands stopped playing, we knew it was bad news. Then we suddenly heard them again, but this time they were German ones, the wonderfully dressed Wehrmacht troopers marching in perfect step up to the Acropolis, where they raised the swastika and brought down the Greek white cross on a blue background. Four long years later, the Brits came in playing "It’s a Long Way to Tipperary," and I will leave it up to you for the rest. All I know is the moment I hear a band, any band, playing anything with a drum roll, I get goose pimples, think back to how valiantly we Greeks beat the Italians and resisted the Germans. Having signaled to the enemy that they were out of ammo after two weeks of very savage fighting, my uncle, the champion hurdler, was accorded the greatest battlefield honor by the German Major Trosbach, that of having an honor guard salute him and his men as they walked out of their dugouts with their weapons and standards and heads held high. Can I ever forget the courage of the Greeks, or the graciousness of the victorious Germans? Don’t you believe it.

But back to Gstaad. Goose pimples aside, that same afternoon, after tennis, I heard another sound, that of violins, in a concert by the Yehudi Menuhin school. I cannot describe the beauty of the setting on the veranda of the Palace Hotel, the mountains in the background, the pine trees and greenery, the Swiss dressed in black tie, the waiters lined up in their yellow jackets, and all the time Mozart, Beethoven and Vivaldi echoing in the valley below. Alas, next week it’s all over. I’m coming back to the Big Bagel, hot Bagel they tell me, for the first time in August since I was 14, when I had caught a terrible case of poison ivy and had to stay in the city covered with calamine lotion for two weeks. "That’s what you get for running around with a gardener’s daughter," was what the old man told me, but before my mother had a chance to scream at him, he smiled and said he was only kidding. Probably he was not, but those were different days.

And speaking of different times, do you remember a novel by Agatha Christie by the unfortunate title Ten Little Niggers? Well, it was published in 1939, and it referred to a traditional nursery rhyme in which 10 little boys die one by one. When the novel was published in America in 1940 the title was changed to Ten Little Indians. There was no racism involved. The story, a classic Christie murder mystery, is set in a hotel on an island off Devon. Ten guests are murdered one after the other in a macabre echo of the nursery rhyme. "Ten little nigger boys went out to dine; one choked his little self and then there were nine." It ends with the line, "And then there were none."

Now, the reason I bring this up is that a woman who has devoted her life to helping others–she is an English nurse who was honored by the Queen and after 40 years of service became chair of the Royal College of Nursing’s governing council–had to resign for innocently quoting the title of the Christie novel after waiting for members of her committee to return from a coffee break. She used the expression in relation to the failure of some members to return to the meeting. But some took umbrage. Inappropriate and offensive were the kindest critiques thrown at her. After Pat Botrill apologized to those present, and wrote to the RCN’s black general secretary reiterating that there was absolutely no malice behind her words, she was forced to resign anyway, the p.c. police giving no inch, however unintentional the remarks.

About the N word there can be no argument (and that coming from somebody as proud to be politically incorrect as myself is saying something), but when someone is simply alluding to the Agatha Christie mystery and it costs her her lifetime job, all it means is the end of free speech and of liberty. While scum like Dershowitz and the rest of the lefty losers are busy screaming about Bush curtailing our freedoms while he looks for terrorists, our greatest freedom, our free speech, has effectively been silenced by the p.c. gestapo. Where are liberty-loving people now that we need you? Some newspapers in England have written that it may have been clumsy of Pat Bottrill, but being forced to resign after 40 years of selfless and blameless service to her profession was an outrage. A novel is a novel, and a saying is a saying, and if one wants to go even further, why is a scumbag thug like Puff Shithole, or whatever name he goes under now, allowed to use the N word, but quoting it from a novel is not? Are we not supposed to read Gone with the Wind because of that word?

As I write, it emerges that the head of the RCN, the woman Pat Bottrill apologized to immediately, is an American, one Beverly Malone, an African-American. Better yet, she was president of the powerful American Nurses Association before she became an adviser–guess to whom, dear readers?–to none other than the draft-dodging liar Bill Clinton. Isn’t life grand. The biggest shit to ever soil the Oval Office was behind the bitch who has just forced a real hero to resign in shame for quoting Agatha Christie.

nnn

I hear that
my old friend (figure of speech, thank God) Sam Waksal has been indicted on
charges of insider trading, bank fraud, forging a signature and destroying records
to obstruct a federal investigation. Although I’ve been brought up to never
kick a man who’s down, I will make an exception in the case of this individual.
Waksal has been trying to plea-bargain his way out, but this was before the
new charges of bank fraud and signature-forging. Thirty years in the pokey and
millions of dollars in fines should do very nicely, thank you, at least for
this social-climber who didn’t mind giving false hopes to cancer sufferers
as long as his rotten company’s stock went up.

And all
this in order to hang out with… Mick Jagger and Martha Stewart. Never in the
history of the world has a man risked so much for so little. I can see someone
betting the farm in order to ensure not to have to hang out with people
like Jagger and Stewart, but then I’m not clued in with today’s celebrity
culture. Mind you, I’d commit fraud any day if in return I could bed down,
say, Renee Zellweger, or Juliette Binoche, but an ugly-as-sin rock star and
a middle-aged lifestyle guru? What is the world coming to?

Well, on
the old continent it’s even worse. Over here it’s the local authorities
who are doing a Waksal. Just imagine, pun intended, a John Lennon Airport. Last
month in Liverpool, the poor old Queen had to shake hands with the ghastly Yoko
Ono while unveiling a statue in honor of this newly renamed airport. Lennon
was the worst of the four Beatles, by his own admission as high as a kite for
much of the 60s and 70s, a shrewd publicity-seeker who railed against the establishment
throughout because it was the thing to do back then, not that he believed a
word he said against it. He is the fellow who sent his MBE medal back to Buckingham
Palace by chauffeur as a political protest, but who admitted it was because
his record Cold Turkey was badly slipping down the charts.

Lennon protested
the war in Vietnam purely because of the antiwar sentiment that prevailed, not
out of conviction or anything resembling an opinion. He hated capitalism–again,
because it was chic to hate it at the time–but took full advantage. He
was a violent heroin user, and a rude lowlifer all around. But because some
nut went and put a bullet in his back, we now have a statue and airport named
after him.

Erecting
statues and naming airports and buildings after rock stars has to be the ultimate
barbarism. I accept a Louis Armstrong Stadium, or a Fred Astaire St. (I don’t
know if one exists), but no John Lennon Aves., please. The idea of a bronze,
romanticized statue of Lennon similar to a Nelson, Wellington or Disraeli has
to turn the stomach. Only heroes should have buildings, streets and public spaces
named after them, not for Christ’s sake drug-taking pop stars. Armstrong
si, Lennon no.

But then,
what can one expect from Blair’s land? Britain’s population is by
far the worst-educated and most culturally debased of any industrialized country,
its youth no doubt consuming more drugs and alcohol and having more teenage
pregnancies than anywhere else on earth. There is more antisocial disorder in
British cities than anywhere in Europe, and crime is far above that in America.
Naming an airport after someone whose behavior typified what the Brits have
turned into is, I imagine, the logical conclusion to Britain’s barbarism.

Lies
of The Times

On the subject
of barbarism, this Paul Krugman fellow takes the cake. He is an ex-Enron consultant
who is bending over backwards to connect George W. with corporate sleaze. In
fact, he does more than bend. He outright lies and invents in his pathetic column
in The Big Bagel Times. Here’s a letter I read in the International
Herald Tribune last week that nails Krugman’s pathetic lies:

"Krugman
says George W. Bush’s investment in the Texas Rangers entitled him to $2.3
million from the baseball team’s sale. But, Krugman adds, ‘his partners
voluntarily gave up some of their share, and Bush received 12 percent of the
proceeds–$14.9 million. So a group of businessmen, presumably with some
interest in government decisions, gave a sitting governor a $12 million gift…’
We were among Bush’s partners. In 1989, when we bought the team, Bush became
the co-general partner with Edward Rose. At that time, the two general partners
were granted a 15 percent share in the investment, after each investor got back
his investment plus interest. This is a standard limited-partnership structure.

At the time,
Bush was a private citizen, not governor of Texas.

When we
sold the team in 1998, Bush received his 10 percent share. This was not ‘a
$12 million gift’ to ‘a sitting governor.’ Bush had a good idea
and the ability to make it happen. He was a dedicated manager and investor,
exactly what we hope for in our business leaders."

Signed Tom
Bernstein and Roland Betts. So, not only has Krugman the liar been caught out,
The New York Times has to be in cahoots. After all, Krugman surely
knew that Bush was not governor at the time, but he threw it in anyway to give
his lies a boost. Calling a standard business practice ‘a $12 million gift’
is further proof that Krugman is a person to be trusted, a la Marc Rich. Not
only does this liar have no shame about his Enron connection–I wonder whom
they learned all that constructive accounting from?–he tries to libel President
Bush as a tool of bribing businessmen. If the Times were not as desperate
to destroy George W.’s presidency, Krugman would have been long gone. But
it’s never too late. The paper of false record has been caught in flagrante.
Krugman should get a job in Hollywood, where bald-faced phonies and liars like
him are considered Tinseltown aristocracy.

Friends
Like These

Not everything
is as bleak as having to write about Krugman and his gang. The Defense Policy
Board, for example, did lift up my spirits. Exposing the Saudi "royal"
family, all 24,000 of them, is a good thing, even if my hero Henry Kissinger
does not agree.

Let’s
face it. Saudi Arabia does support our enemies, is the kernel
of evil as well as the prime mover behind the Islamofascists and gets away with
its balancing act through bribery and bullshit. With allies like the Saudis,
we truly do not need enemies; in fact, it would be far safer for Uncle Sam to
consider those towelheads enemies than to think they are our friends. With Sharon
playing the United States as a patsy on one side, and the Saudis doing exactly
the same on the other, no wonder we’ve decided to attack…Saddam Hussein.
When in doubt, take it out on the weakest.

The House
of Saud finances and preaches terrorism directly and indirectly, while Sharon’s
government is right on target to slowly ethnic-cleanse the West Bank and create
Eretz Yisroel. Both want Saddam out of the way. I do too, but only after the
Saudis have been made to pay for the terrorism they’ve financed for so
long, and Israel is forced to stay within its borders and to dismantle the illegal
settlements. Then let’s go and get the son of a bitch, but only then.

I missed
out last week as I was on a classic sailing boat battling 65 mph winds–called
the Mistral–somewhere off Corsica. The Mistral lasts from three to six,
possibly even nine days, and legend has it that if one murders his wife on the
ninth day, judges turn a blind eye to the vile deed. But before any of you travel
to the South of France hoping to get rid of the old lady, don’t. It’s
an old wive’s tale, and
political correctness being what it is nowadays, even in the land of cheese
they’ll throw the book at you. The only foolproof way to murder one’s
wife without punishment is to be black, an ex-sports star, and for the wife
to be white, preferably blonde.

But back
to Corsica. It is the last lovely and unspoiled place left on the overcrowded
and overbuilt Mediterranean coast. The birthplace of Napoleon is fragrant with
pine and thyme, its maquis-covered cliffs rising from azure and clear seas.
The Corsicans are tough and easily take umbrage. The reason I love them is because
of their propensity to blow things up. No sooner do the modern equivalent of
the Mongol hordes arrive on the island and propose to develop parts of it than
bang go their offices, their cars, at times even the hordes. Ever since
the 60s greedy developers have been trying to drag the Corsicans into the modern
world of tourism, starting of course with glass buildings and glitzy hotels.
Boom is the answer. If only the Hamptons had more Corsicans than Irish, Jews
and Poles, the now ghastly Hollywood East would be a dream.

During the
first millennium Corsica was under constant attack by those nice guys the Moors
and their cousins the Saracens. The papacy became the great protector against
infidel invasion, with Rome eventually conceding the island to Pisa, and then
to Genoa. The Genoese solidified their claim from 1284 until well into the 18th
century, when revolutionary aspirations gripped the people and a popular uprising
ensued. The excuse was somewhat the same as our American brothers used 40 years
later against the British: taxation.

Genoa did
not drench the island in blood, as was the custom of the day; instead it settled
for enticing the enlightened and mainland-educated elite to join in a sort of
collective assembly. This was in 1735. (Had the Brits followed the Genoese method,
one thing is for sure: Americans would today have a better sense of humor, along
with very bad teeth.) Collective assemblies sound good, but are as effective
as the Belgian army. An obscure baron of Westphalia, Theodore of Neuhoff, saw
the opportunity to become royal and landed on the island promising to help the
Corsicans throw out the Genoese. He was pronounced king on the spot, coined
money in his image and had new leaders elected. He also did the smart thing,
calling for Jews to come to Corsica to develop the island.

Now, as
some of you may have guessed, this did not go down well with the powers that
were. The Genoese, however flabbergasted, smelled real change and struck back
with a vengeance. For 10 years the Corsicans resisted against the coastal garrisons
of Genoa, until the sneaky French encouraged the revolutionaries to ally themselves
with their king. I don’t know what exactly happened to poor Theo, but I’m
guessing he assumed his original title of baron and remained happy to be less
than a footnote in the island’s history.

Enter Pasquale
Paoli, after the perfidious French hand back the island to Genoa. Paoli is Corsica’s
George Washington, except that he lost. Not only did he install universal suffrage,
he even gave the vote to…women. Needless to say, this innovative push for
human rights pissed off every one of the haves. The Genoese were so alarmed
at this radical democracy that they sold the place back to the Frogs in the
Treaty of Versailles in 1768. (The great Napo was born the very next year, ergo
his claim to be French.) The French came down like the proverbial ton of bricks,
and after some bloody battles Paoli took off for England and Corsica became
a French province.

On July
14, 1789, however, the ghastliest of catastrophes struck France: The starving
(they refused to eat cake) peasants stormed the Bastille and eventually overthrew
and murdered the royal family. The peasants then demanded that Paoli return
to Corsica, which he did, until the bloodthirsty Jacobin mob turned against
him. (He was a true democrat, they were smelly Stalinists.) Paoli then turns
to England, which was ever anxious to thwart the French rabble. Enter an obscure
Corsican-born French general by the name of Bonaparte, and Corsica eventually
becomes French forever after.

This, then,
is la petite histoire of the island, keeping in mind that Europe’s
history is one long account of hatreds and brutality, death and destruction.

And talking
about death, we almost lost Charlie Glass in the process. Glass, as some of
you may remember, was kidnapped in Lebanon by Islamofascists, who, typically,
picked up one of the few American tv reporters who was and is on the side of
the Palestinians. Although tied, he eventually escaped while his captors were
asleep. This time he was not so lucky. Speaking over a mobile telephone–yes,
I purchased one because the classic boat I was on had no modern conveniences,
in fact no conveniences whatsoever–I warned him to drive to Calvi and
wait for us there as we were about to hit a Mutiny on the Bounty storm.
"I’ve never been sick on a boat in my life," bragged Charlie.
What he failed to mention is he’d never been on a boat before. It took
him exactly 80 seconds to start puking his guts out; thankfully he had the presence
of mind to do it downwind.

And he was
not the only one. Five out of nine, including two female members of the crew,
were down in no time, including my daughter and her boyfriend. Glass was the
worst, remaining a horrible green for something like five hours, moaning softly
as he periodically hung his head over the side and blasted away. Although I
am one of his closest friends and constantly worry about him–he has the
horrible habit of being poor but never asking anyone for help–I found his
condition extremely funny and roared with laughter throughout. So much so, in
fact, my young son, crewing on board and enjoying the ride tremendously, asked
me to stop. But then he started to eat an ice cream cone in front of Charlie,
prompting the latter to beg for him to stop between heaves.

By the time
we reached St.-Tropez everything was hunky-dory, except for those foul-smelling
gin palaces of the nouveaux riche and extremely vulgar that line the harbor
and pollute the beaches. The most disgusting of all is Le Grand Bleu, owned
by a grotesque American dotcom billionaire called McCaw. Space prohibits me
from listing all the fat shits on super-yachts, as the stinkpots are known among
us purists, except to say that if the revolution ever comes, please check with
me first. I’ve got a list three miles long, starting with McCaw, Pigozzi,
Steiner… Robespierre, where are you now that we really need you?

Back in
October of 1968, Olympic Airways passengers flying from Kennedy to Athens were
surprised by an announcement that their flight had been canceled. No reason
was given. People were already on board when the announcement was made, and
if memory serves–I was not on that flight but a friend of mine was–there
was lotsa grumbling and not a small amount of cursing the owner of the airline.
The moment everyone was off, a lonely figure boarded, the doors were shut and
off went the plane to Greece carrying Jackie Kennedy, soon to be Jackie Kennedy
Onassis.

When the
story broke, Jackie and Ari took a hell of a lot of flak. "Who does this
Greek think he is, bumping people off the plane for his money-mad inamorata…"
was among the kindest things said. Actually, everyone was pissed off with Jackie
for forsaking Camelot for the land of feta. The plane incident was the icing
on the cake, so to speak. Later we found out that it was Jackie who demanded
Onassis empty the whole plane–poor Ari having suggested she only take up
the first-class part of the aircraft, while the plebs remained in the rear.

Well, it
all ended up in tears, as we all know. Ari lost his son in a plane accident,
was about to divorce Jackie, whom he accused of being cold-hearted and after
his money, and as he lay dying, the Greek government nationalized his beloved
Olympic airline, which he had started from scratch 20 years before. Now Olympic
is considered the worst airline in Europe, and is by far the greatest money-loser
among state-owned industries in the birthplace of selective democracy. Superstitious
Greeks always blamed Jackie for Onassis’ problems, but I’d like to
think it was simple hubris. Throwing some 200 people off an airplane for the
sake of a woman–and it wasn’t even Ava Gardner or Betty Grable–defies
the gods, and Ari paid the price.

Hubris,
alas, does not seem to work where Robert Mugabe is concerned. The Zimbabwe tyrant
is not only a bloodthirsty crook who has ruined his once-beautiful country in
20 short years, he is also a menace when in the air. Last week passengers on
Air Zimbabwe flight UM9726 from Harare to London discovered the Mugabe modus
operandi where air travel is concerned. Immediately after take-off Mugabe ordered
the Boeing 767 to divert to Madrid so he could catch a flight to Havana, where
that other democrat, Fidel Castro, was waiting for him. More than 200 passengers
were then kept in their seats for five hours, three in baking heat after landing
on Spanish soil. Once on the ground, Mugabe and his wife Grace got off, but
the rest were forced to stay inside the plane when it was discovered the Zimbabweans
did not have the right currency to pay for more fuel.

This is
not the first time the dictator has done this. He regularly diverts local and
international flights, often forcing first-class passengers from their seats.
Earlier this year, some lucky souls flying to London suddenly discovered they
had landed in Libya, because Mugabe had decided to drop in on Colonel Qaddafi,
yet one more democrat.

Now, there’s
nothing that murderous African dictators can do that will surprise me, but diverting
international flights with impunity should be a crime equivalent to hijacking.
Mugabe took one of the richest countries in Africa and managed to have its population
facing starvation with his Marxist policies. He and his band of thieves have
stolen all the wealth, murdered those who have opposed the kleptocracy, yet
when he lands in Madrid, that phony opportunist Judge Garcon, who got the great
Gen. Pinochet arrested, is nowhere to be heard or seen. Does that mean African
dictators can murder and steal with impunity, whereas a Pinochet, who saved
his country from Marxist ruin and gave up power voluntarily, is held to another
standard? You bet your sweet ass it does. Those grotesque politically correct
pundits who cheered when Pinochet was falsely and unfairly arrested by the hypocritical
Brits turn a blind eye over the gruesome crimes of black African tin-pot dictators.
Par for the course.

And speaking
of grotesque people, is there anyone worse than Belgium’s deputy prime
minister and foreign minister, Louis Michel? I doubt it. Michel is the pig who
tried to muscle in on the Austrian elections two years ago, and in the Italian
one last year. Belgium, needless to say, could not wage successful war against
Monte Carlo, but because of the unelected bureaucracy that rules Europe via
the European Union, crooked slobs like Michel wield a lot of power. I have always
suspected Michel and the Belgians of being totally corrupt–the greatest
pedophile-cum-murder scandal was hushed up because members of the government
were involved–but I’ve never been able to prove anything. Going to
Belgium to investigate is above and beyond the call of duty to journalism. The
food is good and the women all give it away like a frisbee, but if I had a choice
I’d take Grozny over Brussels.

Last week,
however, the London Spectator published a hard-hitting expose that blew
the lid off the Belgian swine. The piece begins with the following line: "Never
trust a person with a Belgian passport." A good start, I thought. Then
it goes on to say how the artificial state of Belgium, which consists of four
million Walloons (French) and six million Flemings (Dutch), is liked by no one
except the Belgian royal family whose livelihood depends on it. The Walloons
have dominated Belgian governments since the invention of the artificial state
in 1830.

Today, the
Frogs feel threatened by the growing demographic and economic power of the Flemings.
In their search for allies, the Walloon leadership, which Louis Michel personifies,
is bestowing Belgian citizenship on every immigrant entering and staying in
the country, and that includes criminals and Muslim terrorists. Five thousand
immigrants become Belgian citizens each month, and 52,000 illegals were made
Belgians overnight. Worse, the government and the security services have struck
a deal with Al Qaeda terrorists in Belgium that as long as Belgian targets are
not attacked, the terrorists can operate with impunity on Belgian soil.

It would
be a gross understatement to say that this makes Belgium a terrorist country,
and that the American government should include it in its axis of evil. Nothing,
of course, of the kind will take place. Bureaucrats are the same the world over,
and alas, Washington is no different.

Yet The
Spectator has discovered that the charismatic leader of the anti-Taliban
forces, Ahmad Shah Massoud, was assassinated by a Belgian citizen and his accomplice
posing as journalists. Some 20,000 Belgian passports were "stolen"
during the late 90s from Belgian legations, many of which turned up in the hands
of Muslim terrorists. The biggest mosque in Belgium, built with Saudi money
on land donated by the late Belgian king, operates its own Islamic police, supervising
certain Brussels neighborhoods with a large Muslim concentration. Ironically,
one of my best and oldest friends, the great sportsman and tennis champion Philippe
Washer, is a Belgian, as is another good buddy, Prince Albert Limbourg-Stirum,
but both men and their brood got wise to the crooks of their government and
moved to Switzerland immediately after the last world war.

Mugabe and
Michel, they make Al Capone and Lucky Luciano look like Shirley Temple.

Now, if
anyone was brought up to hate the Bard it would have to be me. After all, Hamlet,
the prince of ambivalence, is a very poor substitute for Beau, a romantic soldier
of fortune destined to die among the towelheads in a Viking’s funeral pyre.

And yet,
and yet. Sometime last year, those modernists who run Britain at present decided
to water down the teaching of Shakespeare to children under 16. The modernists–trendy
philistines who advise the government on education–have not as yet had
their way, but the fact that such reforms have even been suggested is widely
seen as the dumbing down of Britain once and for all.

Last week,
at the great historian Paul Johnson’s garden party, I asked a few of the
worthies present what they thought of the Bard. It was like polling members
of the Politburo about whether they liked Stalin circa 1949. To a man, and a
few women, the consensus was that Shakespeare not only invented the English
language as we know it, but that his humanity has much to teach us about ourselves.
That Shakespeare should be taught more, rather than less, and that teachers
should show films like Romeo + Juliet and Shakespeare in Love
to familiarize young people with just how great this guy really was.

Mind you,
as I said, these were educated people, leading figures from the worlds of theater,
literature and academia, even journalism (a profession that until recently was
seen by the above as being a step above safecracking and child molesting). They
would say that is a cynic’s retort, but the cynic would be wrong,
along with those who think that grownup books should be replaced by websites.
If one gives up on Shakespeare one might as well give up on understanding human
nature. As one professor told me, "He integrates the wisdom of the Renaissance
better than any other writer, and he is the antidote to the dumbing down going
on almost everywhere in society today." As my great-uncle said when I told
him I understood nothing, he helps intelligence to grow, without him you remain
flat, without a stimulus.

Doing away
with Shakespeare is, of course, a victory for the lowbrows. It is like doing
away with learning how to drive in a world where the automobile is king. Worse,
it is replacing literature with Neighbors or Oprah, as vile an
act as putting a Coca-Cola sign on top of the Parthenon, something I’m
sure has already been proposed by the hucksters of the industry. And it’s
deliberate. Not for profit, mind you, but for doing away with the past, the
road to the Alzheimer’s civilization the multiculturalists and politically
correct are aiming for.

I once asked
Yehudi Menuhin who the greatest composers were according to him. "There
were three geniuses, the three B’s, Bach, Beethoven and Brahms," he
said. "But only one miracle, Mozart!" Well, I’m Greek, and I
think Homer was the only miracle, but I will grant the Bard equal status, an
almost-miracle.

My friend
Joe Sobran will obviously disagree. Joe believes the Earl of Southampton was
the author of the plays and sonnets attributed to Will, but that doesn’t
change the fact that a human being wrote them. ("I’m here, I’m
queer, I’m Edward De Vere…" says Sobran in his Shakespeare lectures.)

The problem
is not unique to Britain. It was a series of great American critics who sounded
the alarm with books such as The Closing of the American Mind and The
Western Canon. But the Blooms and Bellows of this world are few, whereas
the philistines are sprouting like Muslims. Earlier this week, in Greece for
yet another party, I visited my old karate dojo for some training. Karatekas
are not usually among the haves. For some strange reason rich people do not
like getting hit. After a particularly good session, we sat around for a few
beers. Homer came up, and I was delighted to hear poor boys educated in public
schools all speak like professors on the glory that was Greece.

We Greeks
are not fools. We know that the only way our culture will survive is by teaching
it the old-fashioned way, not watering it down to please the Albanians and Muslims
who are overrunning our borders. No siree, if one wants to come to Greece and
send his son or daughter to school, he or she will have to learn it our way,
not theirs. In Britain and, alas, soon in America, the immigrant demands schools
teach his own culture, and to hell with 1000 years of European enlightenment.
The good news is that in France–a place soon to be as brown as California–Racine,
Voltaire, Baudelaire, Rabelais and Proust are still tops with teachers, as is
Goethe in Germany and Dante in the land of pasta.

With many
of our freedoms gone, with the p.c. Nazis watching us like hawks, are we also
to lose the right to speak correctly? Are our children to be deprived of Romeo
and Juliet, of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, of Hamlet and
Othello, of As You Like It, for such crap as media studies, feminist
history and video-based dramas? Let us nonphilistines, left, center or right,
unite in not allowing the Bard to be treated like Coriolanus. (As the great
Cole wrote, "And if she says your behavior’s heinous, kick her right
in the Coriolanus…")

•

And now
for some good news. I have just learned that a suit is being considered against
Saudi Arabian so-called royals, those rich ex-camel drivers who finance terror
to keep their solid-gold Cadillacs back home in Riyadh. Class actions are anathema
to me, pure and simple blackmail by those disgusting lawyers who financed Bill
Clinton and who got paid back in billions extorted from the tobacco companies
by the Draft Dodger’s corrupt Justice Dept. In this case, however, I am
with the lawyers. The ones suing are the Sept. 11 victims’ families, and
the corrupt Saudis have plenty of assets that can be seized right here in the
good old USA.

Sovereign
nations are supposedly immune from foreign lawsuits, but all that went out the
window when Uncle Sam stopped recognizing the seven state sponsors of terrorism
in 1996. Although the Saudis are not on the list, I cannot see anyone in the
Bush administration pulling strings to keep them off. The Saudis have had it
both ways for far too long. They have plenty of moolah, and they should part
with it. Every person who lost a loved one in the outrage of Sept. 11 should
sue, and everyone should be compensated in the millions. All the Saudis have
to do is lay off the hookers for a day or two and, presto, the money will be
available.

In Gstaad
recently, where King Fahd has taken over most of the town, the spectacle of
his lackeys walking around with bodyguards pushing people out of the way and
going shopping at 3 in the morning was as disgusting a sight as I’ve had
the bad luck to see in a lifetime. Come to think of it, I can’t remember
when I was angrier. I’ve always loved Switzerland and the Swiss, and I’ve
been defending them since I began writing. But this was not their finest hour
by far.

Bad English
weather is a cliche, especially during the summer months. Yet I can’t remember
a time when I enjoyed myself more. There were parties galore, starting with
Lord and Lady Black’s intimate dinner for 60 high-powered men and women–for
the life of me I don’t know what I was doing there among all the talent,
but nevertheless there I was. There was also a grand ball down in Somerset,
given by the von Preussens, the anglicized version of the Prussian royal family’s
name. Nicholas von Preussen is as English as his mother, born a Guinness, and
he and his wife are childhood friends of mine. The ball was for the birthdays
of their three teenage daughters. Like a true Prussian, Nicholas performed his
duty exactly the same day and time, so his three daughters were born approximately
the same day of the year. I had pursued his wife Victoria when I was young,
had failed miserably, but had landed one of her four sisters. The one I had
not pursued because she refused even to speak to me was Nicholas’ sister,
Antonia, who is married to a dour fellow by the name of Douro, who upon his
father’s death will become the Duke of Wellington.

Well, you
know how these things go. I was seated on the left of the hostess, and on my
left I found the lovely Antonia, now friendly and even slightly flirtatious.
"Who would want to look at an old lady of 45 with five children?"
she countered one of my compliments. "If you were married to me you’d
have had 24 children by now," said the Greek Lothario. Nothing much happened
after that, except that her son came up to me and told me to lay off his mama,
and I smilingly told him to fuck off, which he did. So good these English boys,
they understand all about passion where Southern Europeans are concerned.

But I’m
not here to tell you about such fluff as flirting with aristos, but about Independence
Day abroad. My my, what has Uncle Sam done to deserve some of the epithets hurled
at him by the lefties of this world? "A selfish bully" is one of the
mildest, this one by one Ziauddin Sardar, in his unreadable opus coauthored
with Merryl Wyn Davies and called Why Do People Hate America? Sardar
goes on to say that the U.S. has 3 percent of the world’s population yet
consumes more than 30 percent of global resources. The three richest Americans
have assets exceeding the combined GDP of the 48 least-developed countries.
And American women spend $8 billion a year on cosmetics, which is $2 billion
more than the total needed to provide basic education worldwide. I imagine all
this is true, although even if I had the time I wouldn’t bother to check
it. The one I liked the best was the statistic that tells us that what the U.S.
spends on pet food alone could meet the basic health and nutrition requirements
of all the world’s poor.

Now, I’m
the first to admit that our pets need to eat, but that doesn’t mean that
if we starved Fido the rest of the world would suddenly put on weight. Sardar
is obviously an intelligent man who is intellectually dishonest. Having seen
something of Africa’s woes, I am sympathetic with the intention of helping
the dark continent, the trouble being that even if American women gave up wearing
makeup and lipstick, it would be like putting money through a shredder. Africa
is one big kleptocracy, with hundreds of billions of dollars having been siphoned
off by corrupt leaders since independence during the 1960s. Angola alone earns
$5 billion a year from oil, and in every year of the past five a portion of
Angola’s state income goes missing.

Now who
in hell does Sardar think he’s kidding? Nigeria, Brazil, Russia, these
are countries that have the world’s most valuable resources, yet their
people are among the poorest anywhere on Earth. Has Sardar seen the favelas
around Rio in Brazil? In Mexico City? In Lagos? Of course America is a selfish
bully for not starving Fido and instead giving the moolah to corrupt so-called
Third World leaders. Three Mexican presidents, Aleman, Echeverria and Portillo,
took $500 million, $2 billion and $3 billion, respectively, as they left office.
By Sardar’s way of thinking, if, say, Ava Gardner had not used as much
powder as she did, there would have been Mexican children who would have grown
taller.

Well, the
world doesn’t work that way, alas, so all the arguments about America’s
depriving the rest of the world because of its lifestyle is a crock of you know
what. Another common charge against America by chattering lefties is that the
U.S. controls the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and the IMF, thus
denying democratic control over their own destinies to more than two-thirds
of the world’s population. This is as big a crock as the last one. Since
when did a Bengali peasant have any control over his destiny? Or an Albanian,
or an Afghan? At least with Uncle Sam providing the leadership the whole kit
and kaboodle will not end up in a Swiss bank, a la Mobutu. And speaking of crooks,
would any American-hater invest in, say, Zimbabwe, where the grotesque Mugabe
has driven one of the world’s richest farming nations to starvation?

As I said
previously, I’m off to the Riviera for a much needed rest from partying.
Some people resent the fact that I have a good time anywhere I go. Although
I give generously to charities and help a hell of a lot of folk, the haters
remain haters. Well, one thing is for sure. I’m not about to go and become
a monk because some envious souls don’t approve of my having a hell of
a good time. There is a disgusting midget by the name of Mathew Norman who works
for The Guardian. This very physically ugly man writes nonstop
lies about me. (I don’t read The Guardian but people tell
me that he does.) The poor guy is obviously so jealous he has lost his reason.
He froths at the mouth and makes stories up. So what? I shall go on chasing
girls and amusing myself, while he has to go back to his ugly wife and dreary
home every night.

America-haters
are like Mathew Norman: jealous, envious and frustrated. Sorry, but the poor
little Greek boy is like America, happy and free.

Bad
Choices in Israel & Palestine

Mind you,
markets are not helped when crooks get to the top of the corporate ladder and
start cooking the books. Although we are now in the third year of a bear market,
a performance unseen since the 40s, we are in reality facing not so much a crash
as a crisis of confidence. Those responsible must not only be punished, they
must be made to return their ill-gotten gains. Remember the words of a man who
knows nothing about business but has rarely got it wrong in business because
of my instinct: The system isn’t the problem, but individuals acting incompetently
and fraudulently are. The greedy chief executives who have lied and cheated,
misled investors and looted companies for their own benefit have to be jailed
with the proverbial key thrown away.

Oh yes, I almost forgot.
The present mess shows that Bill Clinton’s greatest achievement–one
that he goes around trumpeting ad nauseam, the bull market–was nothing
but a bubble in which huge amounts of capital were misallocated on wasteful
enterprises, notably the Internet. Some go as far as calling it the greatest
con of all time, rather than using Clintonian hyperbole and describing it as
the longest expansion in U.S. history. As in everything Clinton has ever been
involved in, even the Clinton boom turns out to be a fraud. It now looks like
even the government’s figures during the Clinton years are suspect. If
this is so, there was no American boom and no productivity miracle.

As always,
Clinton comes out smelling like a rose. A protracted bear market for which George
W. Bush had no responsibility whatsoever could still make him a one-term president.
Oy vey! Far from having had our economic slowdown and being ready to pull out
of it, thanks to the greedy types the worst could still be to come.

And now
for the bad news. I happen to agree with Bush that Arafat has to go, but not
the way he went about it. Even Palestinians have a right to choose their leader;
instead, they are in a bitterly resentful mood after hearing an American president
lay down the law. Moderate Palestinians–and they are in the majority, unless
of course one reads John Podhoretz and his ilk–are now even more careful
to keep their heads down, for fear of appearing American and Israeli stooges.
Arafat’s time has gone, but it’s the Palestinians who must vote him
out. The trouble is that inside the PLO no one has emerged to challenge Old
Fish Eyes. Such respected figures in the West as Mahmoud Abbas, one of the architects
of the Oslo agreement, have no following among ordinary Palestinians. A possible
younger successor, one who emerged from the student movement and won great popularity,
Marwan Barghouti, would be perfect, except that he’s in an Israeli jail.

Still, many
Palestinians accept the fact that Arafat is a liability, but no Palestinian,
in or out of Israeli jail, pro- or anti-Arafat, extremist or moderate, will
accept Bush dictating to him who his leader should be. To Palestinian minds,
America and Israel are one and the same, with Uncle Sam an avuncular figure
who nevertheless always sides with his Israeli nephew. Palestinians regard Sharon
in the same light as Israelis regard Arafat. Here we have two old men who are
the problem and not the solution, but try to convince either of the truth. With
Bibi waiting in the wings, Sharon is obviously the second worst choice, just
as with Hamas sitting on the bench Arafat is the default.

As everyone
in the Muslim world knows, Arafat’s huge baggage of diplomatic incompetence
is hard to overlook. Yet this obvious fact cannot be spelled out from the lawn
of the White House. It is–and you’ve got to take my word on this because
I do speak with moderate Palestinians–as if Sharon stood on that lawn and
demanded Arafat’s resignation. Arafat’s months of siege by Israeli
tanks have done more to restore his stature in Arab eyes than anything he has
achieved throughout his bumbling career. The only victory Palestinians now are
sure of is in their defiance of the American President’s demand.

Mind you,
it is not the leaders who are important and standing in the way of peace. The
hard truth is that it’s the people on both sides who no longer believe
it’s possible to live with each other. Israelis are in a bunker mood and
think there will never be peace until the last Palestinian is ejected from the
occupied territories. The Palestinians simply cannot see what peace has to offer.
Never in the 35 years that I’ve been visiting the area have I seen the
people farther apart. There is real hatred everywhere, and a change at the top
will do very little. Just as Sharon’s successor may well prove to be even
more of a criminal, so may Arafat’s inheritor prove to be a bigger bungler
and more corrupt. Heaven help us.

Abraham
Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, writing in The Washington
Post, claims anti-Semitism is rearing its ugly head all over Europe, particularly
in Britain, France, Germany, Belgium and Denmark. He claims to be shocked and
very disturbed. Foxman has cried wolf once too often. He bases his findings
on polls his group conducted throughout those five countries. More than a million
Jews live in these five nations, and he claims their communities are under siege.
There have been attacks against synagogues and Jewish students, but the attacks
have not come from just Brits, Germans, the French, Belgians or Danes. They
to a great extent have come from Muslim immigrants. Foxman is making a big,
big mistake if he thinks he can get away with this one. The governments of these
five nations have not only made sure these incidents no longer take place by
protecting Jewish schools, homes and properties, but have also instructed judges
to throw the book at anyone caught attacking Jewish people or their property.

Foxman claims
that European leaders have explained away anti-Semitic incidents as a fleeting
response to events in the Middle East. He makes it sound as if Hitler’s
legions were on the march while Europe slept. Forty-five percent of the 2500
people polled in late May and early June said that they believed Jews were more
loyal to Israel than to their own country. So what? European Jews took the brunt
of the Holocaust, so it’s only natural that they trust Israel more than
their own nation. That does not make the rest of us anti-Semitic. I have French
friends who are Jews and who trust and love Israel far more than they do France.
Does that make me a Jew-hater? Sixty-two percent, according to Foxman’s
polls, think that anti-Israel sentiments led to anti-Jewish attacks in Europe.
Again, what’s so strange about that? Muslims reacted in Europe the way
Palestinians reacted in the occupied territories. Does that make Europeans anti-Semitic?

I know Foxman’s
game and I don’t like it. Anyone who does not agree with Israeli policies
means he’s deep down inside an anti-Semite. Fuck you, Foxman. Good try,
but no cigar.

I want to
tell you about two men, both English, although both foreign-born. One is known
as England’s greatest living playwright, even if in my opinion he is the
world’s greatest living playwright, Sir Tom Stoppard. The other
is always referred to as Britain’s greatest living painter, Lucien Freud.
One is a wonderful man, full of humanity and humor, and his plays reflect his
intelligence, his wit and
his grace. The other is a particularly vile-looking creature, a rude, bad, mad
and dangerous-to-know almost-an-octogenarian whose art echoes his soul in its
violence and aggression. Both men are Jewish.

Let’s
start with Sir Tom. Born Tomas Straussler, a Czech Jew, he was displaced by
the Germans by the time he was two, and then in Singapore by the Japanese when
he was about five. Fleeing the Japanese with young Tom and his brother, his
mother was forced by circumstance to leave her husband behind. Dr. Eugene Straussler
later boarded a boat packed with refugees that went down with all hands when
an enemy bomber caught up with it.

For young
Tom, just surviving that kind of beginning is a victory of sorts, but to become
and remain a civilized human being has to be a triumph of the will (no pun intended).
Eventually Tom ended up in England, when his mother married an English major
who brought up her kids to be English to the core–you know the kind of
thing, cricket, tea and the standard English emotional detachment. Young Tom
turned himself into a dandy and a cricket fanatic, wearing frilly shirts and
velvet suits, English accoutrements of both the Victorian period and the Swinging
60s. More important, his inner Czech popped out with that elegant melancholy
of Mittel Europa, turning out plays that reeked of intelligence and wit, poetry,
scholarship and love. From Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead through
Jumpers, Travesties, The Real Thing, Indian Ink
and the magnificent Arcadia and The Invention of Love to his superb
screenplays and now to his vast Russian trilogy, Stoppard never fails to dazzle
with his intelligence and learned elegance.

Stoppard
writes with a devoted attention to actors. No prima donna, he must be the only
person in the cutthroat theatrical world that no one has a bitchy thing to say
against. A word to the wise: Tom was bullied at school, not by other schoolboys,
but by some frightening teachers. His strange accent obviously did not endear
him to lower-middle-class (in the English sense) men who still believed that
wogs begin at Calais. He left school without a degree and never went to university.
Some amateur psychiatrists insist that Stoppard’s fascination with academics
in his plays comes from the fact he never attended college. I say rubbish. Had
he attended university, it would have most likely put him off. Brilliant epigrammatists
like Stoppard and Oscar Wilde before him are born, not taught, but also work
very, very hard at it. Making one’s audience feel clever, as Stoppard does,
requires burning the midnight oil.

Now here’s
where I come in. This year marks the 25th anniversary of the column I write
for the London Spectator, known as the oldest and by far the most elegant
publication in the English-speaking world. At one time during the first years
a letter arrived written by Tom pointing out the fact that I had misquoted Papa
Hemingway. The letter ended with, "Can’t this man bother to look things
up?" The magazine led off with it, making me feel rather small. English
newspapers and magazines do not have factcheckers–thank God–so people
like me who cannot be bothered with research are not continually embarrassed
(I am also computer illiterate, so I can’t use the Internet).

Ten to 15
years later I was walking with a lovely young girl next to a London park following
a party. It was a brilliant June evening and it was starting to get dark. We
were looking for a taxi, but there were none to be had. Then a car stopped,
a man stuck his head out the window and asked if we needed a ride. I recognized
Sir Tom Stoppard (as he had by then become) immediately, but because of the
letter I hesitated. "Are you Taki?" asked the great man. "Come
on, hop in, I’ll take you wherever you want to go. You’ll never find
a taxi in these parts."

My friend
Kate looked a tiny bit suspicious–the Stoppard car was nothing to write
home about–until I told her not to worry: "We are not about to be
mugged by Sir Tom Stoppard." She turned a bright red, which made him start
laughing. He then proceeded to apologize to me for the letter he had written.
"God knows how many mistakes I make all the time…" When he deposited
us at Harry’s Bar I asked him to join us for dinner but he declined. "I
have to go home and baby-sit for a friend." He is probably the only multimillionaire
playwright who baby-sits for friends who can’t afford it. He also discovered
that he was fully Jewish fairly recently, his mother having kept it from him
because of his stepfather’s ferocious xenophobia and probable anti-Semitism.

I’ve
seen Tom quite a few times since then, and one day he dropped in on me in my
Manhattan house to meet the wife. The Schoenburg-Hartensteins used to own most
of Bohemia, where Tom originates from. Some time ago I wrote to him asking him
if he could help my daughter, who was trying to get a job in the London theater
world. "She is stage-struck, not fame-struck," I assured him. In no
time he had her working at the National Theatre, where they worked her quite
hard and she was very happy for three years.

Now for
the bad news. Lucian Freud I have met twice in my life. Once when I threw him
out of a men’s room where he was peeking at people taking drugs–it
was at a private ball in London–and once at the old Mortimer’s, when
John Richardson introduced us and Freud was rude. (I should have hit him, but
one doesn’t hit old men.) Although Freud’s private life is his business,
suffice it to say he has ruined a life or two or three along the way. His current
girlfriend is 27, and he pinched her from a friend of mine who had a minor stroke
as a result. It didn’t help that Freud had taken my friend’s wife
from him some 20 years before, although he sent her back once he had used her
as a model too.

For his
upcoming 80th birthday the Tate has given him a retrospective that is packing
them in like no other. That is because the modern hucksters who run the art
world have declared Freud a genius. He is nothing of the kind. He’s a very
minor painter who has never evolved from all the flaws of drawing and construction,
using tricks, quirks and mannerisms to hide his lack of talent. Critics describe
him as relentless; I see him as relentless in the drabness, the ugliness and
the sameness of his paintings. If he’s unique it’s in the horrid images
of the human body that he has created the last 60 years.

Freud was
born in Berlin in 1922, the grandson of that other fraud, Sigmund, and came
to England in 1933. He has to be among the worst draftsmen who have managed
to sell their art in the millions, disguising his artistic flaws by pouring
the paint on ugly and contorted female nudes and even uglier male pachyderms.

Two men,
both Jewish-born in Central Europe and brought up in England. One a force of
joy and good, the other almost a Lucifer figure, as grotesque in his private
life as in his paintings. Go figure.

And speaking
of Mick Jagger, the British press, the yellowest in Europe, has gone ape over
a report that the aging rocker will become Sir Mick. For any of you who may
be unfamiliar with the British honours system (I spell it the English way),
they are referred to as gongs, and are awarded to all and sundry, from the powerful
such as newspaper proprietors and editors, to the rich, who receive their titles
in exchange for contributing to party funds, down to civil servants who somehow
advance up the slippery pole regardless of who is in power. There are also honours
given to the teaching and medical professions, and to those who work for charities.

Since Tony
Blair became prime minister in 1997, he has shamelessly ennobled some pretty
shady people who have stuffed Labour’s coffers, but he is not the first
to do it. Lloyd George, the Welsh windbag, was as bad as the lying Tony Blair.
Although the Queen hands out the gongs, it is on the recommendation of the prime
minister, and giving a knighthood to such a controversial figure as Jagger will
make the honours system seem more "cool" in the eyes of a younger
generation. The award is further proof, if any were needed, of the Blair government’s
pathetic attempts to win votes by schmoozing pop idols and soap opera stars
while Britain’s education system, healthcare and transport slide even further
into Third World decay.

Now for
the controversy. The chief objection to Jagger’s becoming Sir Mick is his
checkered past, which includes an arrest for drugs, a brief imprisonment, a
noted lack of eagerness to pay too much tax to Her majesty’s Treasury and
a failure to devote himself to good works. In fact, a hagiographer of the Rolling
Stones, Philip Norman, went so far as to call the knighting of Jagger a disgrace
and a travesty. "Indeed, in the whole field of pop stardom, I can think
of no one who less deserves such an honor." The reason for this is Jagger’s
lack of social conscience and patriotism. Whereas Elton John and Cliff Richard,
both knights, continued to live in Britain and pay punitive taxes, Jagger had
become a tax exile by the early 70s. A notorious tightwad, Mick has never parted
with a substantial amount of money despite the fact he has fathered many children
with various women. No one gets rich from getting laid by Jagger, goes the saying
among those in the know, not even if they produce a meal ticket.

Sometime
during the 90s, while writing a column for the Sunday Times in London,
I began a campaign for Jackie Stewart to receive a knighthood. Jackie had not
only won three Formula I world championships in a British car, he had spent
the last quarter century working for charitable causes. When I spoke to a Tory
government minister who was a friend of mine and inquired why Jackie had been
left off the list, he told me it was because of his having moved to Geneva.
When Jackie chose Geneva, the taxes in Britain were confiscatory, and although
he risked his life daily–many grand prix drivers back then died horrible
and fiery deaths–his profits were minimal compared to today. Finally, a
couple of years ago, after Jackie moved back to England, he got his gong, 25
years too late as far as I’m concerned.

Jagger,
however, continues to be a tax exile, and has never done a single thing for
charity. This is the media’s opinion, not mine, because although I think
all pop stars are clowns, and the honours system completely debased by the politicians,
whether Jagger is Sir Mick or just plain Mick could not interest me less. Inherited
titles, which represent tradition and continuity, not to mention responsibility,
are a different matter altogether, but I’ll talk about that some other
time. What amazes me is the time and newspaper space wasted on whether or not
Jagger will get his gong. As one headline put it, "He’s a self-centered,
philandering, drugtaking, ex-jailbird tax exile whose whole life has been devoted
to the pursuit of pleasure…all in all, the perfect credentials for a Blair
honor." Close, but no cigar. Thank God I’m not self-centered, or a
tax exile, otherwise it could have been little old me they were referring to.

Did I say
I was not self-centered? As Keith Kelly has blown my cover–how does he
find out these things?–and published it in the New York Post last
week, yes, Pat Buchanan, Scott McConnell and I are starting a national fortnightly
in the autumn called The American Conservative. Our motto is that we
are traditional conservatives mugged by the neocons. For Christ’s sake,
Pat, Scott and I were conservatives when the Podhoretzes of this world were
schmoozing Uncle Joe Stalin. Who the hell is William Kristol anyway, to tell
people like Pat and me how we should think? Kristol is an ambitious careerist
who would be on the left of Alex Cockburn if the wind were blowing thataway.

The real
conservatives are people like Bill Buckley, Pat, Scott, Joe Sobran, Peter Brimelow,
George Szamuely and countless others whom the neocons have shut out because
we refuse to take orders from opportunists and turncoats. I hope all of you
out there follow our progress–it’s going to be a tough fight.

And while
I’m at it, I read in "MUGGER" that Matt Drudge has dropped his
column and mine. What the hell was that all about? I named him columnist of
the year, and he drops my column because this Signorile fellow fights with fellow
gays? What do I have to do with gay cat fights?

Come on,
Matt, put us back tout de suite, both MUGGER and the poor little Greek boy,
who will be much poorer as soon as TAC starts to publish.