Staying away
Taki
TNew York
his is a city that describes itself as 'adapting to terror'. There is nervous laughter about anthrax, some crankiness, lotsa anxiety, but also outrage and defiance. Anti-depressant sales are soaring and people are drinking and smoking more. One thing is for sure, however. Firefighters, cops and rescue workers have replaced drag queens, homosexual activists, race hustlers and poverty pimps as the media's (especially the New York Times's) favourite sons. Manners have also improved, as they were bound to. Cops and firefighters come from poor, close-knit, God-fearing, working-class families, and have good manners as a result. The freaks and conmen they've replaced in the city's affections were the very people who lowered the bar in the first place, making the in-your-face type of behaviour de rigueur.
Mind you, amid assorted panic-tinged government news bulletins saying not to panic, the media is doing its best to panic people. It not only pumps up the volume with each new case of anthrax; for once it practices what it preaches. Both Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw, CBS and NBC newsreaders known as anchors over here, went on camera with trembling jaws and teary eyes to announce that their respective offices had received letters containing anthrax. Nothing like the blind panic that struck the politicians down in Washington, needless to say, as they shut the place down quicker than you can say Harry bin Laden. As a result, everyone is freaking out, hoarding antibiotics, food and gas masks, and avoiding opening their mail.
When I say everyone, I mean the type of person who used to think Rudy Giuliani was a Nazi, the very same sensitive folk who didn't mind insider trading in order to make a quick buck, but felt outraged and 'violated' when cops gave a career criminal like Rodney King a going over. (Incidentally, good old Rodney has just been arrested for the 20th time since his famous beating; this time for allegedly breaking a woman's jaw.) My spies tell me that many of our great Gatsbys of the Nineties are hoarding, lying low, and have aeroplanes with engines running in case. The rest of the populace, of course, is going about its business as if a caveman like bin Laden had never existed.
The absence of Eurotrash, needless to say, is noticeable in places like Cipriani's and La Grenouille. They are staying away in droves, as is the Hollywood crowd. One very fat pig of a man, a Franco-Italian name-dropper who keeps a large flat above the Café des Artistes on the West Side, is reputed to have bought an old submarine which he keeps next to his house in Antibes in case of a biochemical attack. Another, a departed Greek shipping tycoon's son, has disappeared inside a Swiss tunnel built to withstand a nuclear strike, and is waiting out the troubles with champagne, caviar and cocaine. Our very own Drew Banymore cancelled a Big Bagel film premiere and fled the city, while the egregious Clinton and IRA lover, the foul-mouthed Rosie O'Donnell, cancelled her talk show for one week. The spirit of Thermopylae lives among our radical chic. Also Julia Roberts. The star who cannot keep a man but called Republicans worse than reptiles has avoided the Bagel like the plague. Perhaps she's in Ireland, where the French novelist and member of L'Academie Francaise Michel Deon is living. I am told that la Roberts fantasises about the French immortal to a dangerous extent.
But back to some good news. It took 11 September and the murder of 6.000 mostly working-class people — the moronic mullahs announced they had killed 6,000 Gordon Gekkos — to silence finally the media's and Hollywood's attacks on those who protect us in time of danger, namely the cops and firefighters. Twenty-seven policemen died and 343 firefighters. When going in those men knew they had a 50-50 chance of not coming out alive. Ever since the Sixties, Hollywood and the media depicted such men as redneck racists who flew the flag and stood up when the national anthem was played, a sure sign of cryptoNazism. Now they're singing a different tune. It's about time.
Alas, I predict our so-called elite will soon go wobbly. Over-information and media-induced hysteria are the problem. The American people are behind President Bush, but the elite are not. Its dissenting ruling class, the very one that adopted the view that Americans are racists, sexists and homophobes, will tire of the war and go about its business of blaming America first. Such are the joys of liberalism.
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