High life
Poetry
Taki
T istening to the harangues at the Demo- cratic convention in San Francisco reminded me of those mobs that haran- gued the crowds 196 years ago in Paris. Either I am out of touch with reality, or the haranguers are completely out of touch with the people they purport to speak for. Just consider the following: Governor Cuomo of New York belts out that Ronald Reagan does not care about the abject poor, the unemployed, or the disenfranch- ised but cares only for his (Reagan's) `hysterical commitment to an arms race that leads nowhere', and the press and the floor go wild for days over the greatest speech since the Gettysburg address. The fact that unemployment was 18.8 per cent when Reagan took office and today it is around 10.6 per cent is judged immaterial. Although defence spending is well below the levels which even Jimmy Carter pro- posed as necessary is also dismissed by the Democrats. But wait, the most egregious lie is yet to come: 'We give money to Latin-American governments that murder nuns and then lie about it,' says the capo of the great state of New York. Maybe he speaks with forked tongue, say I, when even the last idiotic delegate knows that the nuns in El Salvador were murdered while the peanut man was in office, and the perpetrators of the crime were prosecuted under Ronald Reagan.
The capo di tutti capi of New York, however, was not the most brazen. Jesse Jackson and the lady from Queens (and I don't mean the tennis club) are the ones who established an atmosphere of hatred unheard of in American politics. Jackson's speech was predictably too long, too loud, and much too theatrical. The response of the faithful was to burst out crying. The TV cameras kept zooming in, focusing on the tears, and the only thing that struck me was how truly ugly most of the delegates were. And overweight. And hysterical. And how the press manipulated them by zooming in on them with their cameras and how they responded by raising the decibel levels even higher. Pavlov would have cried in shame.
I almost cried with frustration at what has happened to the Democratic Party of Harry Truman and J. F. Kennedy, but finally I decided it wasn't worth it (I've already seen much the same happen right here, to the Labour Party) — especially after seeing that distinguished literary fi- gure, one Leroi Jones, a.k.a. Amiri Baraka (if he's a true poet, I'm a teetotalling, drug- free virgin), scream: 'You're a whore, Andy, you're a whore. No, you're not even a whore, you're worse,' at Andrew Young for supporting Walter Mondale. So, taking the advice of Mr Anthony Trollope — who described San Francisco as the least interesting city he had ever visited in his travels — I decided I'd rather be in Philadelphia.
One night in the city of brotherly love and then it was up to Southampton for the annual George Plimpton bash last Sunday. . Plimpton's house is right on the ocean and has an enormous lawn at the back where the baseball game takes place. Unfortu- nately, most of George's friends are liber- als, so when I wasn't taking batting prac- tice I chatted with my other friend, Bob Hughes, the art critic. Bob was sad about the death of James Fixx, the man who spurred the jogging craze with his best- selling books about running, and puzzled as well. 'Here I am,' he told me, 'a boozer who never takes exercise but is still around, and Fixx is dead.' Write some- thing about the irony of it,' someone told him, and the Aussie sat right down in front of me and in ten minutes wrote the following:
The Glutton, gross in paunch and thigh, Eludes the Reaper grim: Swollen of nose, and pink of eye, The Drunkard laughs at him.
The chairbound Journalist, the Don, Carelessly quaff champagne, The Pop-Star lives for ever, on Pills, bimbos, and cocaine.
Frustrated by this doleful news, DEATH newer victims picks, He laces on his jogging-shoes, And catches up with FIXX.
Well, it ain't Keats but it's good enough for me. So good, in fact, that once again I overdid it over the weekend and when I landed back in London I was finally invited by the Queen to be her guest. I guess it was about time. I'd been angling for an invita- tion for ages.
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