Diary

Thursday, 29th June 2006

Al Gore is a guest on the Larry King Show. He is promoting a documentary about global warming called An Inconvenient Truth. The last time I saw Al Gore on TV was in 2004 when he was bearded and full-bodied and fulminating wildly against the Bush administration. People used to joke that he was wooden. Then they said he’d gone loopy. On Larry King he cuts an urbane figure. The beard is gone. He is jowly, thoughtful, eloquent — perhaps a bit too eloquent. I suspect America has a problem with public figures who use subclauses when they speak. Larry King has shrivelled noticeably. With his prognathous jaw and his combed-back hair, he looks like an ageing silverback in shirt and braces. Gore says he opposed the war in Iraq. Will he run again? He says no, but doesn’t rule it out completely. ‘I don’t expect to be a candidate ...I haven’t made a Sherman statement, but I’m not trying to be coy ...no intentions, no plans.’ A few days later I read that in the last year an online casino has shortened its odds against Gore winning the 2008 election from 70–1 to 20–1. For a moment I consider placing a bet, then I think about it. Gore beating McCain? I suspect we’d have to see some serious global warming — with tropical-style lambada parties in northern Greenland — before that happened.

There is a large high-tech convention in town. I have to move hotels. From my new room, I can see the spreading valley, the Strip, the new building works and, beyond, the arid brown mountains that ring the city. It is these mountains that make you forgive Las Vegas its excesses. Whatever is happening here — the rampant development, the capitalistic free-for-all — it feels safely contained by its physical geography. That night my taxi-driver turns out be, of all things, French. He is 50 or so, from Nice. He had just got divorced and he was here for six months to improve his English. Is he popular with American passengers? What about the war? ‘Zey have forgotten about zis.’ He likes the weather, he says, as we motor along Paradise Road past the casino signs and the convenience stores. ‘But we are Europeans. Over ’ere zey have no eestory. Zey have no soul.’

Louis Theroux’s The Call of the Weird is published in paperback by Macmillan.