High life
Socialists or socialites?
Taki
retirement home of Andreas Papandreou. Not that it hasn't been great fun. Watch- ing the Kravises, Gutfreunds, Steinbergs and Trumps go through their paces is not unlike when I used to pass my time in La Coupole on the Boulevard Montparnasse, observing the hookers getting rich on the sidewalk. In fact, as an old Tibetan monk recently told me, if a traveller was in- formed that such people were considered important, he might begin to comprehend why the Chinese worship the pig.
And speaking of pigs, my spies tell me that Teddy Kennedy will make one more run for the brass ring sometime in the Nineties, a fact that will surely make me move to Albania. Teddy and his elegant brood are referred to as American royalty, surely the ghastliest libel against royals since an unscrupulous Greek mistook an ape for Lord Weidenfeld. Throughout the Eighties Kennedy and his fellow liberals continued to spread the big lie against America, but it was the people of the socialist paradises who revolted.
Which brings me to the greatest events since the last world war. I simply cannot understand what the fuss is all about. I mean the one about corruption and how it doomed the Marxist elite. My daddy, God rest his soul, who almost never got it wrong, always told me that if I wanted to live the very good life without working for it, I either had to do what he told me and wait for his death, or be adopted by a communist official in a country behind the Iron Curtain. C'est tout. (Thank God I chose the former.) So why is everyone screaming? You mean they didn't know? What horsefeathers. Of course everyone knew, but it is in the nature of the Kennedys, the Dodds and the Kerrys to lie where com- munism is concerned because they gain Brownie points by doing so with those who wear suede shoes and corduroy trousers and . . . well, you know the types.
For years now, in the name of Marxist- Leninist purity, the gangs that have ruled behind the Iron Curtain have cultivated their aristocratic tastes for, among other things, shooting on lavish estates main- tained at the public's expense. This is chicken-feed compared to what the bearded butcher of Havana spends, or those clowns of Sandinistas. Not to men- tion Ali Babandreou and his band of crooks right here in the Big Olive. (The Greek socialists left a bill of over $500,000 for us taxpayers to take care of in one chic holiday resort alone. That is for 1988.) Now that's what I call real socialists, or were they perhaps just socialites?
But I digress. Be it socialism or society, they both took a drubbing during the Eighties, something The Spectator has not. If the sainted editor agrees, and the old ticker holds out, I hope to continue writing for you into the Nineties. In the meantime, I wish every loyal Spectator reader a very happy Christmas.
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