New York
So, Sarko and Bruni are out, Hollande is in and I’m off to the Actor’s Studio to brush up on my acting lessons. (Stanley Kowalski is reborn. Stella!) I wonder whether DSK is thinking: ‘There but for an African maid go I.’ My friend Edward Jay Epstein has written a quickie book about Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s little problem of last year here in the Bagel, one in which Epstein reiterates the disgraced ex-IMF chief’s suspicions that he was set up by his political enemies. Epstein does not agree, he simply states Dominique’s case.
Personally, I was delighted when the frog was busted, and it wasn’t simple schadenfreude either. (I am neither English nor that Greek.) DSK was simply a man wearing a suicide vest waiting to explode. The word had been out for years. The last thing he needed was the Sarkozy camp to set him up. He was such an arrogant man it never entered his mind that teaming up with a global prostitution ring would ever get out. But as a hooker-stripper named Jade testified, ‘I did not sleep with DSK simply for pleasure…He is old and stout.’ Now I wonder. Was DSK arrogant enough to believe those girls were sleeping with him for his looks? Did he fail to look in the mirror some days? Are there men deluded enough to think they’re princes rather than frogs? I’ll tell you one thing, not poor little Taki. I used hookers non-stop when I was young and OK-looking, but I wouldn’t go near any of them now. I feel too sorry for the girls having to put up with my old bones.
Nah, DSK is too intelligent to fool himself to such a degree, but not smart enough to stay away from the one thing he never managed to attract with his mental skills: women. Sure, he used his three wives to get ahead — and he was one step away from the Elysée — but he was never a girl-puller, and in my experience if one lacks in that department one’s marked for life. One’s vulnerable, easy prey, a sucker, and DSK was all that where women are concerned. And it gets better. Did DSK really believe no money was exchanged during ‘les soirées libertines’ at hotels in Washington, Paris and Lille? If he didn’t pay the ladies, then he was being used by others, but I do hope you see what I mean by the word sucker. DSK has given men like myself who love women a very bad name. Shame on him.
In the meantime, back in old Athens, a man by the rather vulgar name of Akis Tsochatzopoulos — it means a man of cloth — has been doing a Taki in a central Piraeus jail. His alleged crime, and I use the word alleged in the most outlandish manner, is corruption. As defence minister for the socialist regime of Andreas Papandreou, he kindly accepted hundreds of millions of drachma for procuring not girls this time but TOR M-1 missile systems from Russia and some submarines from Germany. The word out on the Athens street is that he pocketed around €250 million at present rates.
Both the Russians and the Germans agree that they paid kickbacks but they think it was to the Greek government. ‘Submarines are purchased by politicians, not by individuals,’ said a German court. Well, the court doesn’t know the Greeks very well. The man of cloth made a DSK-type of mistake. He arrogantly bought the most beautiful house next to the Acropolis worth millions upon millions of euros, having already got married in Paris in a manner most of us wouldn’t dream of paying for. All that on a ministerial salary of fewer than 3,000 smackers per month. The man of cloth had always hated the rich and had made a big brouhaha about his lowly origins. He laundered the money through Panama and had his new wife pay for the house. He also got his daughter involved, thus landing both women in jail as accomplices.
Now here’s what will happen. Tsochatzopoulos will get off on a technicality, statute of limitations. The Greek government has been known to change the law in order to suit its purposes, but not this time. The trouble is that there are many others, just as greedy and just as crooked. These ‘gentlemen’ are about to be re-elected as I write. The man of cloth has openly threatened to open his personal records and name names. The newly elected are mostly the old bunch. As JFK’s press secretary Plucky Pierre Salinger famously said when asked whether he would follow the Kennedy example and hike 50 miles, ‘I may be plucky but I am not stupid.’
The new bunch of Greek politicians do not wish for open government because Greece is fun in the summer and obtaining a sun tan inside Korydallos prison is impossible. The best we can hope for is for the thieves to stop stealing, but as far as giving anything back, or being punished for their crimes, fuggeraboutit.
The irony of the Greek result is that Chavez has come to the Med. Chavez without the oil, that is. Alexis Tsipras, a sworn enemy of my class and background, is, however, honest and has clean hands. Next time he will do even better and manage to clean out the Augean Stables that is the Greek political scene. Although he will default and tell the EU to go and reproduce themselves, turning Greece into a pariah, personally I am for him only because of the rot that is Samaras, Venizelos, Karamanlis, Dora and the rest of the names that have plundered the country these past 35 years.
DSK and the Man of Cloth are different but very much alike. They both thought they could get away with it and showed monstrous disregard for caution or restraint. A smaller house would have drawn smaller attention. A less glitzy wedding ditto. Fewer hookers and more discretion would probably have seen DSK lording it over the French right now. Such are the follies of arrogance. The great moralist Taki has spoken yet again.
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