The Mome Rath

I have stayed in the Millenium Hotel and eaten at Itsu. The last time for both was years ago, so I guess I didn't get any polonium -- Litvenenko croaked less than 3 weeks after his last visits to these establishments. Ironically, the first time I stayed in the Millenium (which then had a different name) was the week when we filed our Mareva injunction against a Russian company and froze their UK bank accounts. This was about ten years ago, when our company was involved in a major legal case against a Russian company which had been taken over by thugs. These guys were small-time hoods who had happened to get involved with aluminium and were making more money than they ever knew existed. We managed to relieve them of some of that money, but they went on to much bigger thefts and extended legal and commercial battles with Oleg Deripaska. Deripaska won those battles, and he now controls all the Russian aluminium business. He is also one of the few moguls who worked out a modus vivendi with Putin, and the two of them still dine together. At last report the (other) thugs were living very well in Paris.

I would guess that Putin is smart enough to know that poisoning guys like Litvenenko is bad for your image, and he personally is not involved. But he has supervised the creation of a sick culture, one wherein power cannot be challenged, and force remains the determining authority. There remains virtually no forum in Russia for the give and take which, in mature societies, produce the laws and mores by which people improve their lives. But we live in a world dependent on energy, and energy is worth over $60 a barrel, so Russia is rich, and Putin speaks for Russia. As a result, European "leaders" like Chirac fawn over him and invite him to their birthday parties.

Hugo Chavez has also just been reelected. Did you notice all the red t-shirts at his victory rallies? These were distributed for free by his party, paid for by $60 oil, oil which he has decreed belongs to the state, and the state belongs to him. One of my wife's students is Venezuelan, and she came to class in tears the day after the election. The fact that this girl attends a private school in Switzerland defines her as a daughter of the wealthy - she surely did not come from the horrid favellas which surround Caracas, the source of Chavez' support. But think for a moment about this girl's situation: Like her, many of us have recently seen our preferred party lose an election. But this does not mean we no longer have a voice, that we might well lose our jobs and possession, that we very likely will end up raising our children in a different country. That is what the manipulated "election" of Fidel Castro meant for the producers and thinkers of Cuba, just as Putin is creating a vast diaspora of productive and dynamic Russians - along with a certain number of thugs.

Jimmy Carter travels all over the globe, declaring elections such as those in Venezuela, Russia and Iran to have been fair. When Jimmy Carter turned out to be an incompetent president, the Americans simply turned him out of office. Putin, Chavez, and Ahmadinejad, however, will relinquish power when they decide they are good and ready. Judging by Castro's example, the only one who can speed that process up is God, and He seems excessively patient.

All the important pundits and commentators are reporting from Davos this week. I am sure my own readers are anxious to have my report (speaking of common 'taters).

While walking around town or the corridors of the Hotel Belvedere, you check every face to figure out if it is someone important. While doing this, one should maintain a serious demeanor, and occasionally talk into your cell phone. This is so people will look at you to figure out if you are someone important.

Full disclosure requires me to say that the only people I talked to beyond "how do you do?" were people I already knew. From this you may deduce that none of them has ever had a platinum recording, dated Brad Pitt, or been impeached. Also, I was there for the trade discussions, which took place in the morning, and I then had to leave. People in the preceding categories are not ambulatory in the morning. Anyhow, I was not a panel member, I was seated in the audience. In fact, from what I saw on television that evening, George Soros was sitting in more or less the same chair for the afternoon session.

Anyhow, the trade panel discussion did have its moments of frisson: Ambassador Portman threw down the guantlet to the Swiss to approve the Free Trade Agreement, and to the EU to come to an agreement on agriculture for the Doha round. But you saw all that on television.

During the reception afterwards, I was able to discuss briefly the anti-Americanism of the European press with a State Department representative. We did not have time to get into the anti-Americanism of the State Department personnel.

Accidentally happening on the NBC Nightly News this evening, I saw Brian Williams say, without any apparent sense of irony...

"In Iraq tonight, two United States military personnel have been detained on charges of kicking and shoving a detainee. Also in Iraq, three U.S. personnel were killed by a roadside bomb. In other news tonight..."

The universe has come full cycle in our lifetime.

When we were in college, we were happy to pour scorn on those pop idols who invited public ridicule by singing such lyrics as

I've stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains,
I've walked and I've crawled on six crooked highways,
I've stepped in the middle of seven sad forests,
I've been out in front of a dozen dead oceans,
I've been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard,
And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, and it's a hard,
And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.

In fact, Graybill and I, as college freshmen, attended a concert in McCarter Theater, confident that having sat through a couple of hours of lyrics such as these, mumbled by Mr Dylan (nee Zimmerman), in a voice no better than our own, we had favourably impressed the young ladies at our side. They were impressed, but in those days, “impressed” plus a proposal of marriage got you where you wanted to get. Fortunately, we stuck to the concert and pouting.

Mr Zimmerman went on to represent our generation, all its irony, rebellion, pretense and confusion. Graybill and I got jobs and found better dating material with whom the proposal condition became feasible.

Tonight, 38 years later, more or less to the week, due to a hindered social calendar, I watched Bono doing his full hour on Conan O’Brian’s Late Nite show.

We will overlook Bono’s pink sunglasses, earrings, chain necklace and Sgt Pepper jacket, allowing today’s pop idols their own bling things, and acknowledging the age divide.

But when today’s champion for the world’s suffering masses, proposes this as his anthem

I'm just trying to find
A decent melody
A song that I can sing
In my own company

We can only wish that he limited his singing to his own company.

It’s very nice that you want to feed hungry people, but your music sucks, and you are using your Cause to sell records.

You, Bono, are so phony, untalented, and synthetic, that you make Bob Dylan seem avuncular and wise. At his most pretentious Bob never pretended to save all the starving masses of the world, to take a place next to the world’s leaders, and to lead millions up out of the mud to the chuck wagon. Bob merely claimed to be cool. We knew he was a dork, but Hey, he has willy nilly become our dork, better than you kids’ dork, who is a serious, total, dodgy dork.

In Paris Charles de Gaulle, after an all-night flight, at passport control: there are two windows open, one for EU Citizens, with a short, fast-moving line, another one for All Passports, with another, much longer and apparently immobile line of people. The EU line is composed of mainly white, urban-looking people, whereas the All Passports crowd looks more like a massive Benneton audition.

Another agent comes and opens a second window for All Passports. Amazingly, everyone stays in the same long line, which now begins to move perceptibly, as the people at the front break off one by one to one of the two windows. I am asking myself how long this will last. By and by an airline agent comes along, pushing a lady in a wheelchair, and takes her straight to the second window, bypassing the line. Everyone lets this pass, and all remain in line. Then, towards the back where I am standing, a gentleman who appears to be from someplace east of Babylon wanders up, unsure where to go. He looks over at the EU line, then sees All Passports, where one window has no line, only one person in a wheelchair. He goes up and gets behind the wheelchair. All hell breaks loose as half the people in the long line now race over the other line.

Question: was the Eastern gentleman showing a complete disrespect for the social conventions of those who were there before him? Or was he the smartest one there?

By the way, the only reason that the single line lasted as long as it did is because Italy is in the EU.

Graybill tells me that Joan Baez was at the anti-war rally. Let's see, was that this last weekend? Or was it in 1967? Or was it at every anti-war rally from then until now? It's actually kind of endearing, like the little old ladies who would never dream of missing the church fete. Cindy Sheehan has managed to become part of this regular group, in only a few short months. Doesn't this lady own a dress?

T he problem is most people involved in politics today are mind-numbingly predictable. Think you will ever see Michael Moore do a film about the Hollywood hype industry or, for example, all the deaths related to Whitewater? Not likely. Teddy Kennedy votes agains John Roberts, and the networks send cameras to watch him do it. That's news? The only excitement left is to watch with keen interest to see to what rhetorical excess Howard Dean will next ascend. Thank you, Pat Robertson, you also make it occasionally worth opening the newspaper.

Tonight I wanted to have a look at my own blog - not post anything, just have a look. And I was denied permission to view it!

The model is flawed, Google! What is with this whole Hello thing I had to join in order post pictures? Now I get all these spurious pop-ups like the sirens, beckoning me to log in, when I have no need of nor inclination towards photographic expression.

I am told that there is a message on my blog inviting those interested in on-line dating. I wouldn't know - I'm denied permission. To accesss the blog, on-line dating, I am on a very short leash.