High life
Call in the clowns
Taki
New York This is my last week in the Bagel, but for the first time in donkey's years, I am sad to be going to good old Helvetia. There's something exciting as well as rest- ful about a city that is supposed never to sleep, the round-the-clock action making it easy for restless souls like yours truly to stay home with a good book once in a while. Easy access to a good time is what keeps one healthy. Or like Babe Ruth once said, 'It's the chasing that wears one down.'
Needless to say, the civil trial of O.J. Simpson is once again hogging the news, with grotesque ambulance-chasers using super-heated, sulphurous, wild and inflam- matory rhetoric in order to remain popular on the college lecture circuit. This is what lawyering is all about nowadays, at least in DC, El Lay and the Bagel. Say something outrageous on the idiot box, defend Stalin's murders of tens of millions, call Newt Gin- grich a worse person than Hitler, denounce the El Lay police department as Ku-Klux Klanners — and, presto, the fee to lecture the suckers of tomorrow triples overnight. Alan Dershowitz and various other hustlers of his ilk have turned the outrageous com- parison into the proverbial art form. Once. upon a time, the most easily noted difference between the animal world and Homo sapiens was the use by the latter of articulated words as opposed to producing sounds. No longer. I have heard 'activists' say on the Discovery channel that 'jelly-fish are every bit as successful as humans'.
No, I said your tie looked cheap and loud, I never said it didn't suit you.' Worse, I watched the quintessential show- biz moralist, the bewigged Sam Donaldson of ABC infamy, unfavourably compare Newt Gingrich to Lenin, saying that 'Lenin shot everybody, Newt shoots only Democrats and their relatives'. This from a supposedly serious hack on national televi- sion.
Mind you, why not? Oliver Stone, that sweaty vulgarian whose outright lies and distortion of history have turned him into a Hollywood icon, has compared himself to William Shakespeare, without ever being in danger of being laughed out of town. Peo- ple who can't even spell the word use 'fas- cist' indiscriminately, oblivious to the fact that fascist derives from 'fasces' (a bundle of rods) an ancient Roman symbol used by Mussolini as an emblem of unity and authority.
Television and its egregious use of hyper- bole has also changed politics. There isn't any truth anywhere, it's he who uses the better soundbite who wins. The spin-doc- tors have taken over the political process, doing away with truth in stating facts and applying due diligence before expressing opinions.
The Left, of course, was and remains the nonpareil of spin. Alger Hiss dies and the media give credence to the notion that Hiss was framed by the FBI. Here is an honest- to-goodness red-blooded Yankee traitor who was caught red-handed, yet his Grou- cho Marx defence until the end (do you believe me or his lying eyes?) makes him a victim of sorts in most peoples' eyes. What bothers me is that this trend is now very much part of British life. Fraudster Darius Guppy insists he committed his crimes in order to avenge his father against Lloyd's and — like Stone — is not laughed back to Oxford, a place known to house clowns among the Fellows as well as the student body. (I am thinking of those envious creeps who turned against Wafic Said's and Muck Flick's generosity.) Guppy was caught red-handed like a certain poor little Greek boy I know, and, instead of admit- ting his guilt like a man, he is now trying to tell us he did it for his father's honour.
When words no longer have any mean- ing, it's time to call in the storm troopers. Or the clowns. Both are already running Whitehall. Poor General de la Bilhere, he should have known in this age of the com- mon man a hero like him would emerge as a villain, and a villain like Guppy a hero.
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