DIARY
CHARLES GLASS
On Sunday night, the actress Goldie Hawn, her beautiful daughter Kate Hudson and Kate's husband, the rock star Chris Robinson, took me with them to the Balla awards. Kate was up for Best Actress, and I wish she had won because, sitting next to her, I was desperate to give her a victory kiss. The competition was stiff. Kate, who is only 21, has years to fill her shelves with Oscars, Baftas, etc. She was gracious in defeat, applauding loudly and enthusiastically the winner, Julia Roberts. Like her mother, an old friend from my youth in Los Angeles, Kate is a lady. She reminds me, in her combination of kindness and what we in California call `smarts', of my 16-year-old daughter Julia. God, did we drink afterwards! First, at a tedious dinner at the Grosvenor House hotel, where the waiter was a witty Romanian with an Irish accent, and then at a great party, given by my new best friend Harvey, at some nightclub in Mill Street. I drank so much that by four o'clock I caved in and did the one thing middle-aged white men must never do: I danced. I hope no one noticed.
The US government will expend unlimited quantities of its taxpayers' wealth to protect its soldiers from the foreigners whose villages and cities we bomb in order to rule the world. Yet it is the British government that has taken the protection of life an extra step in defending America's uniformed boys and girls, not from Serbian bullets or Iraqi radar, but from 'harassment, alarm and distress'. The Crown Prosecution Service has just conscripted Britain's anti-racism laws, which are in reality anti-free-speech laws, to save young Oklahomans and Californians from the sight of a protester mishandling an American flag outside the US base at Menwith Hill, North Yorkshire. A health-worker named Lindis Percy stands to pay a fine of £2,500 for having `trailed' the Stars and Stripes on the ground outside the National Security Agency's base that was, until recently, codenamed the 13th USNSA Field Station. (Where are the other 12?) Menwith Hill's 1.800 staff monitor communications — that is, they listen to your telephone conversations, read your faxes and download your emails. One wonders whether anyone criticising American foreign policy over the telephone might be committing a racist offence when he is overheard by one of the base's sensitive American eavesdroppers. As an American who is mortally offended by any hint of antiAmerican sentiment anywhere on earth, all I can say is `Watch out'. We are listening and observing. If you get out of line and hurt one of our soldier's feelings, Jack Straw will haul you before a magistrate. If you don't pay your fine, he'll send you to a prison managed by an American security firm. And those guys really don't like people who spit on the flag. Sometimes the effort to enforce American law around the world can be productive. One of the republic's first laws, enacted just after our constitution, was the Alien Torts Claims Act. It promised to punish British naval personnel who impressed American seamen. The extra-territorial application of American law has never been relinquished, in itself a pernicious doctrine that, among other things, makes the United States one of the only countries to tax its nationals living abroad — except, of course, those who, like Marc Rich, are exempted by President Clinton for tax (and other) offences. Some clever lawyers in the USA have in recent years used the Act to sue torturers from places such as Peru and Indonesia. A Peruvian national in the US was given leave to sue his Peruvian military torturer, then in America; and he won. When an Indonesian general was studying at Harvard, the journalist Alan Nairn served him with a subpoena for alleged war crimes. General Grarnajo fled the country, although I never did find out what he was taking his degree in. I wonder if any survivors of the 1953 Qibya massacre or the 1982 massacres at Beirut's Sabra and Chatilla refugee camps have moved to the United States. If so, Arid l Sharon ought to be careful to avoid process-servers during his first prime-ministerial visit to the White House.
Art interview with Professor Ehud Sprinzak, who specialises in extremist movements, on Israel's Channel 7, was reproduced in the weekly supplement of Ha'aretz newspaper. Interviewer: What do you think about the executions in the Palestinian Authority? Sprinzak: I have a very
positive opinion. I mean, it is a vital instrument, part of the struggle against terrorism. And I have no reservation, except for one thing. . . Interviewer: One moment. One moment. I was referring to the executions of collaborators [working for Israel] by the Palestinian authorities, not to the liquidations by our forces. Sprinzak: Pardon. Pardon. I thought you were asking me. . . . In any case, about the Palestinians: it is disgusting, nauseating. This is how a dictatorial system operates, without any judicial process. Absolutely unacceptable. Shocking.
We Americans are pretty good folk, really. We back Israel's occupation policies. let Britain join our bombing sorties on Iraq, and gradually take over your prisons, hospitals, schools and universities. It was particularly generous of British American Tobacco, whose abuses of the legal system in both our countries need no airing here, to grant £3.8 million to Nottingham University. The funds are designated for Britain's first (and last?) international centre for corporate social responsibility (i.e., ethics). Why not the Slobodan Milosevic Centre for Ethnic Understanding? The McDonald's School of Nutrition? The Clinton–Lewinsky Institute of Truth? BAT's generosity is part of the government's plan to hand British universities over to private corporations according to a pattern already established in (dare I admit it?) the United States. No longer education, but education in the interests of those who pay for it — those with the money who also pay for our politicians' elections and, in many cases, their private lives.
Athough my ancestors fought under the flag in most of America's wars, including the War Between the States, I bear no grudge against Lindis Percy for her actions at Menwith Hill. Neither she nor the understandably aggrieved Muslims of the Middle East, who occasionally set the red-white-and-blue aflame, can disgrace our national emblem. That is the job of our presidents. Bill Clinton, proving his critics were right all along, sat, spat and shat on the flag with pardons for the real criminals, who donated money to his cause (he has one cause: himself) and to his brothers-in-law; while leaving thousands of youngsters to languish behind privatised bars for inhaling marijuana. His successor, who doesn't need the money, may do better with fiscal probity. (But keep an eye on his brother Neil, the next Billy Carter/Roger Clinton in the making.) GWB's policies, however, of leaving Iraq's children to starve, Palestinian children to bleed and African Aids victims to die for want of the pharmaceutical corporations' expensive drugs will lower Old Glory to half-mast in shame.
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