High life
When Harry met Stalin
Taki
`You spoil that lemming.' cousins known as the first world war had slipped my mind.
Needless to say, for a Greek not to give credit to Harry Truman is like a Frog not recognising the debt France owes Uncle Sam. Truman sent help to my country when the greatest mass murderer of all time decided to embrace us after the British Labour government had left us hanging out to dry. But those nice guys who gave us the Gulag and other such crowd control devices did not succeed, thanks to Truman and the Greek army. The Colonels raised his statue, one that is periodically vandalised by the Hellenic equivalent of Claud Cockburn and John Pilger, but the man's reputation is intact among freedom-loving people. The only thing I have against him is his failure to tell Joe Stalin to demilitarise and then drop the bomb if the murderer refused. It would have saved millions of lives and untold mis- ery for those under the Soviet boot, but as the saying goes, nobody's perfect.
And speaking of letters, never have I enjoyed them more than in last week's Speccie. I am referring, of course, to those written by two readers about Ali Forbes. Ali has been hurling abuse at me for years, but I have refrained from answering because of his advanced age. I will not change this, except to say that I consider Forbes to be to name-dropping what the moustache is to Saddam Hussein.
Mind you, Ali would be a great success in the Big Bagel. People do it here with the regularity of a metronome. In fact there is no conversation in the Bagel among the haves that doesn't involve a few drops here and there. The most often dropped names are those of dress designers, Wall Street tycoons and, alas, media stars. One name nobody drops nowadays is that of Donald H. Trump — the H standing for hubris. He truly is a victim of his own excess. Word is out that he will declare bankruptcy by the summer, but I for one hope he makes it. Trump has always been a Queens boy at heart, more eager to make it with the glitzy crowd than with the one that buys Sargent portraits and old English furniture and tries to pass them off as inherited .
Trump employs many people, far more than, say, little Henry Kravis, the billion- aire LBO artist who has given short men a very bad name. Trump left his vulgar wife for an even more vulgar blonde, but also a real sex bomb. The little Lord Fauntleroys who now pass as Wall Street giants left normal wives for social climbers posing as ladies, with the sexual attraction of a skele- ton. Of all the vulgarians who made the headlines in the last decade, Trump is the least phony. If and when he goes down, he will go back to Queens with his blonde and he will once more be a hero. After all, it isn't everyone who can convince the media that if he wished he could win the Presidency, something Trump had man- aged for a while. Though not even the press ever thought him another Truman.
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