None of this would have happened had I accepted my neighbour’s invitation to dine with a Swiss billionaire banker, or bb. (Sorry, Real life.) He’s an old friend, the bb, and untypically Swiss. He boozes, schnoofs, and chases women, or Afabs, as the absurd youth of today call them. Booze, alas, now goes to my head, and as the song says, it lingers like a haunting refrain for at least a couple of days. I had kick boxing early the next day so I chose to watch the 1949 classic, Sands of Iwo Jima, and snub the Swiss bb.
The film was made in 1949 and stars the greatest of them all, John Wayne, luckily no longer with us to see what his beloved America has turned into. The movie is very patriotic and all that, gung-ho Marines charging up Mount Suribachi, but it gives absolutely no acknowledgment to the Japanese soldiers who were shelled from air and sea for months on end and died defending to a man what they considered to be sacred Japanese soil. I suppose that back in 1949 Pearl Harbor, where a few thousand sailors died, was still raw, but 130,000 incinerated women and children in Tokyo, courtesy of Curtis LeMay’s bombing campaign, and 200,000 dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki didn’t count. The film doesn’t show a scintilla of the bravery of the Japanese defenders dying for a grubby landscape far from home.
Well, Japan, Hungary and Poland are the only three countries I respect nowadays. The rest are ruled by brutality, as in Africa, or, in the case of a dehumanised Europe and America, by Silicon Valley freaks. I was expounding about this while lunching with Boris – no, not the blond one, but an Aiglon alumnus who had attended that good school with my daughter – when a sneering, hysterically intemperate woman looking like a spurned groupie took umbrage at what I was saying.
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