High life
Election eve
Taki
T write this as I am about to attend an 'American election victory party at . . . Aspinall's. A London gambling club may be a strange place to celebrate a Reagan victory to some of you, but it is very appropriate to yours truly: After all, this election is no foregone conclusion, and where else is one more likely to place a friendly wager over the individual Senate races than among people who gamble over which slot a small white ball might fall into. Needless to say, I am not nervous — despite being a pessimist at heart — over my Reagan victory prediction because unlike some of those American soi disant pundits (those who have declared a variety of threats to the American political system in case of a Reagan win) I take neither this column, nor myself seriously. In fact, the only thing I do take seriously where politics is concerned, is the ability of those pompous asses who write the editorials for the New York Times and the Washington Post to convince the fools who read their stuff that Reagan's image makers may be the undoing of representative government in the United States.
Just think of it. Here is a President who has been attacked as non-caring, lazy, evasive, ignorant, a war-monger, and a downright Hollywood phony, but who nevertheless, despite the media onslaught, has managed to convince the American people that he — and not the press's darling — should lead them for the next four years, and what has the Fourth Estate's reaction been? To scream bloody murder that somehow, some way, through a process that is both mysterious and sinister, Ronald Reagan and his gang are manipulating their (the media's) coverage. Never mind that Mondale presided over the most disastrous presidency in Amer- ican history, or that Gary Hartpence was a synthetic man, ashamed of his roots, his name, his accent, his handwriting; and never mind that Jesse Jackson's racist policies are equal to a reverse Ku Klux Klaner, and that he has been caught lying more often than Teddy Kennedy has switched blondes, it is Reagan who is the phony and manipulator. According, that is, to clowns with names like Reston, Lewis, Wicker, Cohen and others too ludicrous to mention in such an elegant publication as this one.
What is disturbing to someone like myself who chooses to live and work in Britain, is not what the Post and Times write (after all, I only glance at them while reading the sports results in the Herald Tribune) but the fact that British television have picked up their cry and are echoing the big lie. On the last night before the election the BBC's coverage of President Reagan could have been taken from the pages of the paper that gave us Janet Cooke's fabricated story about an 8-year- old heroin addict, the same one that tried to discredit the Bulgarian connection to kill the Pope, or those of the one that preached the innate goodness (via Herbert Mathews) of Uncle Joe Stalin and Fidel Castro (not to mention the prediction that there would be no camps or bloodbaths in southeast Asia after a communist victory).
Well, if the BBC wants to lose any more credibility than it already has, who am Ito try and tell them what they're doing wrong? I can only point out what James Reston wrote last week when he realised that nothing he and his friends could write would stop Reagan from winning. The majority is sovereign but not always right, could be the excuse the BBC's Panorama people could use when faced with an
embarrassing Reagan landslide that con- tradicts their charges of press and media manipulation.
But I have gone on too long about such unpleasant things as American pundits and blow-dried TV personalities. Like Wrig- ley's gum, I plan to double my pleasure and double my fun tonight as Reagan wins his last term of office. The thought of those pundits squirming makes it so much fun, while the pleasure comes from the fact that what I consider to be the most evil of empires, will be contained for another four years and hopefully more to come after he has brought American might up to par.
The one legislation that even Ronald Reagan will be unable and probably afraid to try and pass, is the one I dream about night and day. It has to do with pomposity and self importance both of which should be declared felonies, or at least, misde- meanours. But even I cannot expect mira- cles from Ronnie. After all, if such a law was passed the jails would literally over- flow, and the media types who would fill them would be unduly punished by their proximity to the common man.
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