A Night with Sen. Teddy, and a Party with Marc Rich; Auberon Waugh; Overimmigration; Chopping Up Babies
Taki |[ Scott McConnell](#McConnell) |[ Charles Glass](#glass) | [Melik Kaylan](#kaylan)
Tough Teddy
In the late autumn of 1976 the senior senator from Massachusetts arrived in Athens, accompanied by his usual large entourage as well as his nephew, Joe. Kennedy had been invited by the then-Greek Prime Minister Constantine Karamanlis because of the Senator's ferocious opposition to the military junta which had collapsed two years prior.
I was living in Athens at the time, writing a book on the colonels and stringing for UPI and National Review. I was forewarned of the Senator's visit when Bill Van Den Heuvel, a Kennedy gofer, rang me from New York and asked me if I could have dinner with the visiting dignitaries. "If you have a spare girl," said Van Den Heuvel, "Teddy and Joe would appreciate it."
As it happened, I was going out with an American college student living in Athens, and she did have a rather pretty friend. Both girls got very excited at the prospect of meeting a couple of Kennedys. The group was staying at the Grande Bretagne hotel, and after a few drinks in Teddy's suite, Joe, my girlfriend and I left for a nightclub. Teddy remained behind with Anita Clifford, the pretty friend. All I remember from that fateful evening is that Teddy was drunk but jovial, Joe very reserved, and that he had asked me if he could smoke a joint in the car. (I said no; back then smoking a joint could land one in the pokey for a very long time.)
The next thing I knew, a hysterical Anita came over to my house accusing Ted Kennedy of having offered her drugs while trying to win her favor. The drugs turned out to be a bagful of poppers, which the Senator popped simultaneously, or so Anita insisted, and after a brief wrestling match she was allowed to go home. There was no rough stuff, but enough to scare her out of her wits. She continued to be hysterical and rang her father in America and asked him to come over. Although there were no witnesses?how could there be??I decided that Anita was telling the truth.
I did not have a chance to question Teddy as he had flown out that morning for an audience with the Pope. I nevertheless published the story a couple of years later when I had moved back to London and was writing for The Spectator. The only good thing that emerged from it was that the Kennedys stopped speaking to me. The story pretty much was squashed by the family's PR machine.
Why am I bringing up a story that took place 25 years ago? Well, Teddy's reading a 30-page statement attacking John Ashcroft reminded me of his and his family's history of manipulative mendacity, hypocrisy and double standards. There is no more decent person in Washington than Ashcroft, yet here was this relentlessly immoral buffoon attacking him with words I wouldn't use to describe Bill Clinton.
Ted Kennedy cheated and got thrown out of Harvard; he panicked, left a girl to drown and chose to lie rather than try and get help and perhaps save her life; he acted disgracefully in Greece, and has gotten away with God only knows how many crimes and misdemeanors. He smeared Judge Robert Bork and smeared John Ashcroft, and he and his family continue to think that ordinary rules that bind lesser mortals do not apply to them. His moronic son Patrick, the Rhode Island congressman, last year reverted to type when an L.A. airport official dared challenge him. With his rapper's fondness for obscenity, Patrick Kennedy belongs not in the U.S. Congress but in a seedy nightclub with Puff Daddy, while dad Teddy is serving behind the bar.
As Orrin Hatch correctly pointed out, the attacks on Ashcroft were mainly because of his Christian beliefs. I was not at all surprised that a sleazy, dishonest phony like Hillary Clinton voted against, but was happy to see Joe Lieberman coming out of the "decent person" closet with his two-faced attack on the nominee. Lieberman is not as phony as Kennedy and Clinton, but he sure ain't no gent.
What surprised me was Jean Carnahan's no vote. When her husband was killed in an airplane crash just before the election, Ashcroft refused to campaign against her, lost honorably and acted as nobly and gallantly as Ashley Wilkes. She still voted against him, proving the Democrats are the mean-spirited, hardball party, and that she's got the morals of an hyena.
And speaking of hyenas, I've got some more news on that great American, Marc Rich. The ex-fugitive fraudster and traitor is giving a grand party in St. Moritz on the weekend of February 24th. To a friend's eternal shame she is actually invited, but I better clarify this. No, she does not know people like Rich, and certainly does not hang out with crooks and traitors like him. What happened is that a childhood friend of mine invited her to stay with him in St. Moritz during that weekend, and his houseguests were automatically invited by Rich. His daughter Daniela Rich held a party last Saturday attended by quite a few socialites, or what passes for socialites nowadays. When I asked my friend who attended how she squared her patriotism with the fact that Daniela's lucre is as dirty as it gets, she agreed but said she would be attending anyway. I guess today's socialites can no more cut themselves off from a party?any party?than Faustus could reclaim his soul from Mephistopheles.
California's electricity crisis teaches that the most politically popular and expertly vetted deregulation plans can be gravely flawed, and that booming economies can lose their luster in weeks. But its greatest lesson lies in its confirmation of the total victory won by the forces favoring continued high immigration into the United States. Because of that victory, one of the principal causes of the biggest challenge to California's prosperity in a generation has become, for the entire pundit and political class, more or less unmentionable. As a result, trying to follow the debate over the source and solution of California's power ills has become like listening to a group of historians discuss the origins of World War II without reference to Hitler.
The electricity problem is complex: most papers have at most one journalist willing to feign mastery of the intricacies of public utility regulation (not me). But no analyst claims that the basic laws of supply and demand have been rescinded. Because of them, Californians endure rolling blackouts, while rate hikes and the construction of new and environmentally hazardous power plants loom down the road, for the Golden State and the entire American West.
The supply half of the equation must include, of course, the politics of utility deregulation, massive error in estimating the future costs of electricity on the wholesale market, and the influence wielded by California's powerful environmental movement. The latter oppose new construction of nuclear and coal-fired plants, a sensible view given the state's earthquake and smog problems.
The demand for power is driven by people in their sheer numbers. It is not, as one might imagine, pushed upward by any rise in per capita electricity consumption: despite the smorgasbord of electronic gadgets and computers now in common use, and urgent calls for Californians to use less power, greater efficiency has brought individual electricity consumption to a lower level than it was 20 years ago. But the rise in the sheer number of users drives demand upward. The state that numbered 10 million inhabitants in the 1950s now hosts 34 million and is projected to grow to 50 million within a generation. Last year it added 571,000 people, a one-year rate of growth higher than Bangladesh's.
This growth is driven nearly entirely by immigration. While more native-born Americans leave the state than arrive, 2.2 million immigrants entered in the last decade, and they have higher birthrates than the departing American-born.
Yet the role of immigration in the crisis is hardly mentioned. Since the retirement of Governor Pete Wilson and the ascendance of W's Spanish-accented "compassionate conservatism," immigration reform is no longer a subject for polite company. The large-scale influx, both legal and "undocumented," is treated not like the policy choice it is, but as an immutable force of nature, the rising of the sun. California will have to generate power for 50 million souls by the year 2025, though it can't properly supply it to 34 million now.
Immigration's contribution to the population rise has become a cow so sacred that even the environmentalists at the Sierra Club refuse to criticize it. (At least most of them: a substantial dissident faction of the venerable group is trying to put immigration reform back on the club's agenda. It used to be, but was dropped in 1996 as part of a minority outreach program.)
More people had better be a good thing, because if present immigration trends continue there will be a lot more Americans. The Census Bureau's current "middle range" estimate forecasts a U.S. population of 570 million by the end of this century: this estimate assumes both a slowdown in birthrates by 2050 (i.e., that foreign-origin birthrates will move closer to prevailing American norms) and that the current pace of Mexican and Central American immigration is transitory and will diminish.
The "high range" Census Bureau estimate yields a U.S. population of nearly 1.2 billion, roughly that of China, and we'd be growing at a rate of 18 million a year. It would be nice to think that this estimate?in the country many of our grandchildren will inhabit?is a worst-case scenario. In fact it's the middle range estimate that may be sanguine and less realistic.
All of America's problems with pollution, sprawl, overcrowding, water shortages, power shortages and destruction of green space are exacerbated by population growth, and population growth is almost entirely a function of immigration (since American birthrates have stabilized near replacement level). The growth also affects values not easily measured. A larger populace renders each individual citizen more remote from his government, with less potential to influence it. Such drawbacks exist no matter where the immigrants come from?without reference to the troubling correlation of multicultural diversity with limits on freedom of speech.
You would think then that the power crisis would have sparked a new discussion of immigration policy?which was widely debated as recently as the mid-1990s. It has not yet happened. The subject has been driven from op-ed pages and magazines by a determined alliance of free market neoconservatism and minority-sensitive political correctness, together perhaps the most formidable impediment to free debate the American people have ever encountered.
"More than all other men, that man was born for pain." That's Telemachus, speaking of his father Odysseus to King Nestor, in The Odyssey.
In 1981, an 11-month-old baby named Andrew O'Leary died in a British hospital. Recently, the hospital's solicitors invited his mother, Paula, to a meeting at which they presented her with her son's body. It had been dismembered into 36 parts and laid out on a table in the solicitors' offices. They allowed her to take him, or the parts of him, home in a plastic bag.
This should not have happened, especially in a land that claimed to bring civilization to much of the world. Yet what befell the O'Leary family has afflicted, in various forms, thousands of others. The practice of cutting up dead babies and fetuses has become normal in Britain. Pieces of children are kept for research, for transplantation, for analysis, even for sale. Hospitals rarely ask parents for their permission, and just as infrequently bother to inform them. Often, parents take tiny corpses for burial and discover later that the bodies were empty shells, all the vital organs having been removed. In some instances, hospitals have returned part after part of a child to its family, requiring several burials of the same child. When the corpse is disinterred for the missing organ to be placed alongside it, pain is reawakened. It is sinister. It is common.
A government inquiry that began with allegations of abuse at the Alder Hey Hospital in Liverpool has just reported that 104,300 organs, body parts and fetuses are in storage at 25 different hospitals. The practice of butchering the young, reminiscent of Swift's modest proposal that the Irish be eaten as a way of ameliorating hunger, is so widespread that those involved did not believe it worth reporting to the police, their superiors or government inspectors. Tony Blair's New Labor-Third Way government, which has had four years in power to notice what was happening, feigned shock and blamed callous doctors and nurses for this abuse of the dead and their families.
The scandal first came to public attention in 1999, when the president of the British Paediatric Cardiac Association mentioned to a public inquiry in Bristol that Alder Hey Hospital had "probably the biggest and best collection" of hearts in the country. Where, many wondered, did the hearts come from? It transpired that many had been removed, without family permission, by Prof. Dick van Velzen. Other doctors had done the same, but van Velzen has been singled out as the most egregious collector of body parts. Then, in January of this year, Alder Hey Hospital admitted that it had sold thymus glands taken from living children to a pharmaceutical company. The demands of commerce were overriding the sentiments of common people, who believed with all the force of superstition, tradition and religion that their body parts and their children's were somehow their own.
I would like to draw some conclusion from this mess that has been debated in Parliament, discussed in the press, examined on television and fretted about in public. But it is hard. The British are not known as a child-loving race. Their ruling classes, setting the tone for those further down the scale, left their children's upbringing to nanny and, when the sprogs became too unruly for her, packed them off to boarding school. Children are unwelcome in most English restaurants, in contrast to Italy and France where children guarantee warm attention from otherwise taciturn waiters. In the last few years, however, I have detected a slight change. The English are becoming more sentimental about their children. Fewer are sent to boarding schools, many of which have closed. Whenever a child is murdered, as several have been in high-profile cases recently, public indignation forces the police to act quickly (sometimes too quickly). Disclosures about cutting up fetuses and children have enraged large sectors of the population, who intuit that little bodies do not belong to the state or to the pharmaceutical industry. Perhaps to God, to the little dead child himself, to his mother and father, to those who love him enough to lay flowers at his grave.
Sometimes, it seems hospital staff have been coarsened by the widespread practice of abortion, particularly late abortions when little bodies that have been sucked out of the womb resemble very much the little bodies they would have become in a few months' time. Doctors and nurses who refuse to perform abortions have been dismissed. If the doctors can kill and dismember young fetuses, why not later term babies? At what stage does the hospital have the obligation to protect the child rather than the right to kill it? If you think these are trivial questions that have been satisfactorily answered by the slogans of the women's movement ("an embryo is the same as an appendix, part of my body to do what I like with"), then you can go to hell. In fact, you probably will go to hell if there is one. It is wrong, I believe, to take human life. Whether it is in the womb or on death row. In an Iraqi village that happens to lie under an American warplane or on an Indian farm that white Guatemalan settlers want to steal. Or walking down your street at night.
If someone is trying to commit murder, you can stop him?even if you have to kill him to do it. Otherwise, it is murder. It does not matter who does it?you, your friends, your government, your army, your doctor. When you deny another human being's right to live, what difference does it make what you do with his heart, lungs and eyes? You have claimed sovereignty over his life, and the corollary is your dominion over his dead remains. When Achilles killed Hector, he had his body dragged around the walls of Troy. That is what comes of claiming the right to kill, the right to own, the right to dominate. We the living, meanwhile, demand that our dead be accorded the respect and the honor of our traditions. That means lamentations in the sacred languages of Hebrew or Arabic, Christian burial, Hindu cremation, atheist memorial, anything but stealing them, carving them up and selling them off for others to abuse.
Does anyone know what happens in New York?
It has been a dark two weeks for me and for civilized people in general. I refer of course to the death of Auberon Waugh, the great English journalist and satirist, and son of Evelyn Waugh. I knew him personally: he was my editor for a stretch. Most of the Brit papers have already amply eulogized his life. Leftier voices like the screech owl Polly Toynbee of The Guardian took their chance, instead, to revile him. Naturally, they hated Waugh for being what he was all his life, an unreconstructed boarding-school boy with a scathing and fantastical wit. Count the sins: white, male, hetero, squirarchical and guilt-free, with a jolly country house and terrific wine cellar. Worst of all, he celebrated his fearful flaws so delightfully that readers laughed out loud and thought that they too might enjoy being thus flawed. Lest we forget, an entire century of Brit writers struggled manfully to overcome similar shortcomings and produced great work: his father, P.G. Wodehouse, Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and G.K. Chesterton, to name a few.
Bron fought the class war openly and in reverse. He considered the workers lazy, selfish and mulish, smelly even, and he actually said so. One should mention that in his pre-Thatcher embattled heyday Western countries employed their own indigenous working classes. The global economy existed, if at all, in socialist form, and the workers loathed working and insulted everybody?except in the Eastern bloc, where they had to work and like it. All students postured and moralized leftward, as did most journalists. That part hasn't changed. But imagine, in that setting, the shocking effect of a whimsical voice positing an alternative universe where all these liberators appeared as charlatans, alongside agonized intellectuals and charismatic African leaders with funny hats. Try that with the minority-worship and victimolatry of our time, and see what happens to you. Yet Waugh pulled it off.
I studied in England to the end of the 70s, and I cannot adequately convey the excitement of running with my friends to pick up his columns every week. In those rain-sodden, fog-darkened days of national strikes, sputtering gas heat and sub-Bulgarian school food, television saved us with Monty Python and journalism with Bron Waugh. He wasn't totally alone. He and a handful of spiny contrarians writing in Private Eye and The Spectator twinkled away in isolation and slowly converged into a full-scale exit sign for the entire culture. There was Richard Ingrams, who ran Private Eye and wrote a brilliant tv column for The Spectator. He simply rejected all the boob-tube conventions that we take for granted by regularly switching off his antiquated machine and going for a hot bath to loud chamber music. In the back of The Spectator, Taki's "High Life" and the sainted Jeffrey Bernard's "Low Life" columns dismantled political correctness by personal example and wild truth-telling.
I would make the claim with hand on heart that these four, culturally at least, provoked the dissolution of the gray socialist 70s in England?with Taki operating transatlantically. Until we encountered them, none of us could imagine that conservatives had fun?or sex, for that matter. Only rock stars and trade unionists and Che Guevara did that, and they'd long since failed us. Suddenly laughter came loudly from the opposite direction. Above all, pretenses to guilt-ridden profundity, to surly longhaired introspection or modish anger at "the oppressors" could be dropped, and you could enjoy the good life instead. You could even return to judging individuals by their personal charms and not their political identities. Didn't matter if you belonged to the jerry-rigged category of "women and minorities" or "people of color." You could still be a terrific bore.
When Bron Waugh became editor of the Literary Review in the mid-80s I was already penning their monthly "Letter from America." (Our quondam "Top Drawer" contributor Jim Holt eventually replaced me.) Bron put the publication on the map by launching the annual prize for the most embarrassing smutty fiction writing of the year. On one occasion, Graydon Carter and I happened to be in London together, so I invited him to meet the maestro over lunch. Graydon, being a long-standing Anglophile, knew and admired Waugh's work from afar. Waugh, though, proved a prickly lunch companion at first. He didn't like Americans or foreigners generally, and I even think my indeterminate Oriental roots confused him. That was fine by me. They confused me too. And Bron without his prejudices was like Lenny Bruce without epithets. So I never begrudged him, but I did want to enjoy lunch (my treat) and he wasn't co-operating. I asked him to choose some wine. He eyed the list and mumbled hopelessly about a splendid red Lebanese wine, probably too expensive, pity, lovely color, deep body, fruity, vivid. Seventy pounds sterling per bottle. I thought what the hell?of course he could order it. Bron turned seraphic. He schnozzed down the entire bottle and laughed incessantly and lit up the place until we all spilled out hours later the best of friends.
I gave up the "Letter from America" because Bron let his deputy edit it, a lovely but professionally leftist career girl. She kept slashing and sabotaging and burying it in the back. I complained but nothing changed. I didn't begrudge him that either. Quite right that her beauty should eclipse her politics in his eyes. Finally I balked when she let a nearly illiterate editorial assistant deal with my objections. I couldn't even begrudge that to Bron. The intern's name was Grub Smith. With such an absurd name, I would have hired him too. So I departed laughing, happy to have resigned over precisely such a silly trifle.