High life

Hypocrisy

Taki

IThad planned to miss the celebrations of America's defeat in Vietnam that the US media so proudly put on last week, by flying to London for a friend's wedding. Alas, not only did I miss the religious ceremony, I was also AWOL for the naught- iest bachelor party since the one that put an end to Charles Benson's amateurish attempts at playing lover of the western world.

Instead, I flew to Washington DC and observed from up close how a great demo- cracy works, and — more important — how human greed diminishes the closer an election looms, and vice versa.

The Senate's week-long struggle with the budget ended with a proposal by Senator Jesse Helms to slash congressional salaries by ten per cent. Helms said that it would show that Congress was 'willing to share the burden' of reducing the federal deficit. He also said that the proposal needed no lengthy discussion. It turned out that he was right. As far as the discussion was concerned. No one got up to debate the issue, but the proposal was defeated, albeit in an extremely close vote.

Now there are those among the liberal camp who don't like Jesse Helms. He is too right-wing, they say, perhaps because he espouses things like doing away with child pornography, mandatory prayer in school, and spending money for defence rather than for tracing American's black heritage. But this vote had nothing to do with

• keeping America strong, it had to do with a symbolic gesture to the battered American tax payer. Needless to say, yet again the tax payer came in second. Apparently he doesn't even merit a symbolic gesture. What I found interesting, however, was who voted how.

Because the plan was politically touchY, 19 of the 31 senators up for re-election next year voted for the pay cut. On the other

hand, some of the Senate's richest mem- bers, including Lowell Weicker of Connec- ticut and Edward Kennedy of Chappaquid- dick , voted against the cut. (Both Weicker and Kennedy have in the past voted in favour of bussing; their own children, needless to say, all attended private schools.) The best excuse for voting against the cut was offered by . . . an Irishman, Patrick Moynihan, the senior senator from New York. 'I rarely vote with Senator Helms,' was she way he put it.

Well, what can one say, except that . hypocrisy lives and is doing well in the nation's capital. Speaking of hypocrisy, Tom Hayden, yet another Irishman, was on television throughout last . week. For any of you that don't know who Hayden is, he is a pock-marked phoney whose wife spent $2 million last year in order to get him elected as a California assembly man. His wife's name is Jane Fonda. Hayden made his name in the Sixties as a radical and last week he pranced in front of the television cameras in that unashamed man- ner people of his political persuasion are famous for. He reminded me of a man I once knew in the South of France whose one brief moment of glory had come when he seduced a beautiful young girl who went on to fame and glory. Every time he had a Chance he reminded us of his one brief moment of success. When the lady in question was tragically killed the man made sure to bring up the seduction even as she lay in state. Someone punched him al the mouth.

That is something I wished someone had done to Hayden last week. He went even further, proposing that a monument be erected by the government to honour those Who had . . gone to Canada during the Vietnam war in order to evade the draft. Which means we have come full circle. The traitor and coward as a hero. The media reported such garbage with a straight face. Which was par for the course. But I want to end on a happy note. Which my visit to Washington certainly `vas once I joined up with my friends such as Tom Wolfe, Vladimir Bukovski and Bob Tyrrell. The occasion was a confer- ence that discussed the moral equivalence

factor. Moral equivalence is the idea that there is no real moral difference between

the Soviets and America, i.e. they are both

Imperialist and out for all they can get. The term was coined by Jeane Kirkpatrick, who

was one of the speakers. She pointed out hosv some in the West like to believe such drivel, partly because of semantic mani-

pulation by the Russkies designed to de- legitimise western democracies. Norman fodhoretz talked of the treason of the intellectuals (being overwhelmingly hostile to the kind of society we live in and giving de facto support for totalitarianism) which 'as music to my ears despite me having u,ueeome an intellectual, and finally Tom 'Ife suggested that intellectuals are attracted to socialism because it seems in

good taste. In other words, just a bunch of social climbers. I knew it.