High life
Hollywood DC
Taki
The stench of Hollywood was gone by the time I got to Washington this past Weekend, but the painfully correct and Piously sincere spirit of the phony Left lin- gered on. I flew to Foggy Bottom for the Conservative Summit Conference, organ- ised by the National Review Institute, founded by William Buckley to promote conservative ideas and causes. But before I tell you about the most successful and fun Weekend since the 'bop until you drop' Orgy in Gstaad last year, a word about the debauch that took place just before.
Never before has so much money been spent on a Presidential inauguration, never has the Hollywood contingent of radical un-chic been so mobilised, never has such mawkish sentiment been so plentiful. The Hollywood glitz sounded as if they were reclaiming America, and many of the tin- seltown types uttered Saddam-like rhetoric in denouncing George Bush. %There is something very wrong here. People who have the opportunity to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars each year should not be allowed to portray America as Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, yet the media in general said nothing. In fact it cheered.
The locals were not much better. One Peggy Cafritz, a sort of Pamela Harriman Democrat — you know the kind, the only part of her that seems genuine is her false teeth — actually went on record saying that `It's like being in Czechoslovakia when freedom came', an outrage which my old friend Zographos would surely describe as `vomitif.
Here are some of the horrors that flew in by private jet into the nation's capital to celebrate Baron Mfinchhausen's inaugural: Bianca Jagger, Tom (Jane Fonda) Hayden, Ingrid Casaras (Madonna's squeeze), Lau- ren Bacall, Barbra (disgusting) Streisand, Michael Jackson, Diane von Furstenberg, the egregious Mort Zuckerman, Oprah Winfrey, in a full-length fur coat that had some eco-freaks howling, and others too revolting to mention in the elegant pages of the Speccie. The best (worst really) I kept for last. Ghislaine Maxwell was there in all her glory, laughing uproariously when Streisand told the draft-dodger that had he lost the election she would have left the country. Then there was Peter Guber. Guber is slang for spit, but he's also the head of Sony, of Pearl Harbour fame. He and a friend of his by the name of Mort Engelberg flew in on the Sony G-3 jet into my old alma mater, Charlottesville, Vir- ginia, with the former decked out in a Ralph Lauren Polo .trenchcoat lined with faux fur, black suede shoes and an Armani suit. Then the two boarded a bus for Wash- ington (get the symbolism) and talked to the press covering the trip.
La Streisand's song-writer, Marilyn Bergman, said she would forsake a limo in order to do her bit to preserve fossil fuels, then left with the disgusting one in a corpo- rate jet for California. As most of us who fly private know, one of those jets uses more gas than a thousand limos. Al (tree- hugger) Gore beamed and said nothing.
As the draft-dodger's brother has done time in the stammer for dealing cocaine, I thought it was a good touch on the part of the organisers to fly in the Bob Dylans, Fleetwood Macs, Michael Boltons, Jack Nicholsons and so on. I'm not saying these august names deal in the stuff, but it is their world which glorifies the drug scene, which is more profitable than dealing, and unlike Roger Clinton, it doesn't land you in the poky. But I must end on a positive note. The poem of Maya Angelou. Please excuse the crudeness, but with that bar-
barism she uttered on the inaugural stand, Angelou did for poetry what panty-hose has done for finger-groping.
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