High life
The blonde got it right
Taki
n common with other expatriate Greeks, I sat up all Sunday night waiting for the election results from the Olive Republic. Mind you, I was in good com- pany and drinking a very good Château Margaux, thus when the inconclusive re- sults came in they blended well with the Frog red. As a rather dumb blonde put it, the new electoral laws rammed through at the last minute by All Baba and his thieves made it impossible for the country not to remain in la merde. (I guess she wasn't so dumb after all, but being a Greek she wasn't a real blonde either.) Needless to say, we all knew what was coming. For Papandreou to play fair and put the country's welfare before his own interests would be like General Noriega turning himself over to the drug squad in Miami. Not very likely, n'est ce pas? But Papandreou's cheating aside — as well as my hangover the next day — what bothers me most is the silence over his shenanigans from those good-for-nothing Eurocrats, the grey people who one day soon will be running our lives. You know who I mean — the ghastly types Roy Jenkins and Edward Heath play footsie with, the kind I'd hate to find myself in a foxhole with under fire.
What is almost as pathetic is how wrong the blow-dried cretins of American televi- sion, and the pundit-experts they paraded in front of us for weeks, were about China. Here I am, an ex-jailbird, a drunk, a compulsive gambler and womaniser, and I knew from the start that the Chinese leaders were as likely to collapse as Roy Jenkins is to think of the common man. And yet the Dan Rathers, Peter Jenkinses, Henry Kissingers and Winston Lords of this world got paid a king's ransom to tell us that the party was split, the army about to fight a civil war and the students ready to make a new democratic China. If these people had any shame they would retire on top of poles in India and give away their ill-gotten gains, but waiting for that to happen would be like calling rock-'n'-roll an art.
The only ones correctly to predict what would happen were the Taiwanese, of course. And my buddy Richard Crenier, writing in the Washington Times that just because the press ganged up on China didn't mean that what the Chinese did was commensurate with the coverage: 'Where was US and European television during the repression in Tibet, or when tens of mil- lions were dying in China under Mao's Great Leap Forward?'
Well, as far as I know, they were busy collecting Pulitzers for giving away Amer- ican positions to the Vietnamese enemy. But I do know where they are at present: giving sound bites to a clown from Brook- lyn by the name of Stephen Solarz, who daily harangues the White House for its measured response to the events in China, and who threatens to cut off aid to a country that was civilised when the area Brooklyn is situated in was not yet in- cluded in the universe as we know it.
Alas, the Woodstock generation did not take over America, and is not about to in China, however much this inconveniences the Fourth Estate. My advice to the media is to concentrate more on Papandreou's paramour, and leave the Chinese to do their own laundry.
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