So the end-of-the-year Christmas party was the best yet, even if I say so myself. The festivities began at 10 p.m. and ended somewhat hazily around 6 the next morning. My son JT provided the youth, I provided the gravitas. Actually, it was the other way round. I provided the brawn — judo and karate instructors and practitioners — he provided the artsy-fartsy types from Brooklyn with lotsa pretty girls. Cauliflower brains mixing freely with cauliflower ears.
To my great regret my buddy Michael Mailer, son of Norman and a very good boxer who has gone to Hollywood and now produces movies, had to fly to South Africa, but like a good friend he left three beautiful blondes behind who all came to the party. At midnight I announced that the three beauties sitting together in the Mailer corner were now my property because Michael had been eaten by a rogue lion somewhere near the Cape. The ladies thought it unfair, but I reminded them that life’s unfair and if one’s eaten, one stays eaten.
How strange it is to be writing about parties and good times when the world is in the state it’s in. Two days after the blast, I flew to Switzerland and was driven up to Gstaad. Chalet Palataki seemed awfully tame after the Bagel shenanigans, but at my age I guess I can get used to anything. The mother of my children looked at me as if I were a leper who had dropped in uninvited — an ‘I’m surprised you made it’ sort of greeting. Well, the answer to that is I’ve made it for so many years now, I can get across the ocean and up the mountain with my eyes closed. Which they were for most of the journey, as for once I overdid things. Now I’m looking forward to my New Year’s Eve mini-blast, mini because the Gestapo is around and the Gestapo does not like to see people having a good time.
I suppose entertaining oneself is antithetical to seriousness and literature, but I accept it. (Big of me, n’est-ce pas?) And yet I cannot really amuse myself while Europe and the United States are going down the Swanee. Just think how belle époque Vienna was infatuated with balls, modernity, style, glamour, and so on, and how by the end of the first world war the place was full of starving veterans huddling outside restaurants looking for bits of food. The clowns in Brussels have come up with an aspirin and they expect us to believe it’s a cure. The lessons of post-war Vienna have not been learnt by the clowns. The crisis of the euro is threatening their dream of technocratic and bureaucratic dictatorship, yet all they can come up with are more demands for ever-harsher austerity.
I cheered when David Cameron said no, and will cheer even louder when Britain gets out altogether. If Switzerland is by far the most successful country in Europe, and is not a member of the Brussels gang, why can’t Britain also be? The clowns allowed the PIGS to go wild, and now the same clowns will make matters worse even for those who are not responsible for the mess. Hitler must be smiling, in fact cackling. As is Stalin. Not to mention Benito. (Mao is too gaga even to begin to understand.)
The great economist Joseph Alois Schumpeter argued that capitalism meant ‘incessant innovation’, something these Brussels haemorrhoids do not comprehend. He called for creative destruction at times, as when one exploits an invention rather than sticking to the old game plan until the patient is long dead. The haemorrhoids do not possess the nous or the courage to change, hence the state we’re in. Otherwise, 2012 promises to be an even worse year than 2011. It’s starting off badly when a Bagel newspaper owned by Murdoch declares Salman Rushdie the sexiest man alive. Poor Giacomo Casanova, imagine what he’s thinking somewhere up in Heaven. Better to have preferred little boys than to be put in the same league as Rushdie.
And speaking of little boys, leave it to the New York Times to find a front-page story unfit to print because it wasn’t anti-Catholic: the Brooklyn DA recently arrested an astounding 85 Jewish Orthodox men and women on charges of child sex abuse. Back in 1985 a Hasidic ‘therapist’ was indicted for abusing five boys and police suspected he abused more than a hundred. Avrohom Mondrowitz fled to Israel, where he remains to this day a free man. Those nice guys who shoot rock-throwing Palestinian children refuse to extradite him. Charles Hynes, the DA, now has to tread carefully: 50 rabbis have signed a public announcement in a Yiddish language denouncing a Hasidic family who went to the cops. They asked — now get this — for any believer to kill the family that informed ‘on fellow Jews’. So what will happen to the 85 perverts? All I know is the Times has not published a word, whereas when the Catholic Church sex scandal broke, it led the news on the front page for months. There is something very evil when rabbis who hate the non-Jewish world can dictate whether or not the parents of an abused child talk to the mostly non-Jewish fuzz. Some parent should go and firebomb the Times and then we might see it appear on the back pages.
Otherwise, I have nothing more to say to all of you happy Speccie readers other than a very happy new year.
Comments