The Birth of the Blowjob; Buchanan for President; Back in Da Bush; Sweet Energy Deals;
Fellatio's prominence is a 20th-century thing. Abse shows that even in the heyday of Victorian prurience, fellatio was nearly unmentioned even in the most encyclopedic catalogs of naughty things to do. There's not much mention of it in Krafft-Ebing or the novels of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Freud and his followers thought it was regarded as fairly repulsive, except between the most intimate and happiest of lovers?and rare. For Abse, the poet Philip Larkin was wrong when he said that "Sexual intercourse began/in nineteen-sixty-three"?but fellatio may have.
This was well before fears about AIDS made it desirable to avoid direct contact between the sexual organs. But Abse thinks that the universality of fellatio, "if uninformed by tenderness and bereft of whole relationships between the protagonists, tell[s] us how unemancipated, not how liberated our society has become."
It is bad news for women on the whole. On the one hand, Abse believes that women get a series of sadomasochistic satisfactions from performing fellatio upon a man. It is a way of becoming empowered?in his highly charged language, an empowerment that "now finds expression in bedroom and Oval [Office] as well as the boardroom, her partner's manhood literally in her hands and between her teeth. She alone determines the rhythms which formerly were the male prerogative that so often left her dissatisfied when the replete male insensitively turned away. In this enactment, however, there is no doubt in her mind as to who is in charge, who is the leading player, and who literally has been assigned the bit part." And yet this kind of revenge is self-mutilating as well, making fun of her own generative organs, even as she takes revenge against the man by causing in him a denatured climax, having nothing to do with paternity. As Abse says, "the blows she directs against herself, and the blows against her partner, are all subsumed in the act."
At the same time, we gentlemen on the receiving end are harming ourselv?es and our partners at the same time. By making love in this fashion, we avoid any merging of ourselves with our date. In fact, a Gen-Xer in the act of being fellated is "in the grip of emotional paralysis, one from which he seeks to release himself by unconsciously denying the very existence of the whole vagina-endowed woman." At the same time, he is placing himself in the power of a woman with the ability to castrate him?for Abse an act of pure masochism. You may think you're having fun as a man, but you're wrong. Let someone unzip your trousers, will you? When you do, Abse thinks you are pursuing "the lure of total helplessness, of freedom from responsibility, of the relief of total dependency, of, in short, emasculation."
What has caused this outbreak is a mystery. Abse thinks that it's a consequence of careless mothering that beset the children of the Rosie the Riveter generation, and has continued. This is his explanation of President Clinton's mad pursuit of punishment-by-blowjob: Why do men need, in "presidential style, to risk their whole manhood and place their trust in women who are often little more than strangers to them?" Clinton is seeking masochistic relief from the ghastly childhood he suffered at the hands of his casual mother and her boyfriends.
There is a refreshing seriousness about sex in Abse's eccentric book?and some wonderful psychosexual interpretations of politicians like Enoch Powell, Tony Blair and of course the Laocoon of Clinton/Monica/Starr. Abse believes that what we do with one another matters?which would be a nice change. In the meantime, we have to wait for future generations, if there are any, to tell us whether fellatio is one of the great horrors of the 20th century, like social engineering and disarmament, or one of its great blessings?on the order of One-Click Shopping and CallerID.
Our entrepreneur qualified for four million barrels, only slightly less than the biggest winner, BP Amoco, but considerably more than the other petroleum giant, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, which received a paltry two million. In fairness to the fellow, a couple of other nonentities without refining capacity, tankers or previous experience in this type of business have been given the chance to borrow some "Hackberry Sweet," as the oil is called. Together, they were awarded more than a third of the released total, with a market value of several million times greater than their combined net worths.
A company incorporated only weeks before the deal was announced, a one-man shop in Tallahassee with the same odd habit of not listing its number in the phone book, managed to get three million barrels of the Hackberry Sweet. Another unknown, an outfit in Colorado, also successfully bid on three million barrels, although this company is a bit of a grand fromage. It has a published phone number, even if it sometimes rings in the owner's residence, and lists that latter-day incarnation of John Paul Getty, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, as its adviser. Reference-wise, it does not get any better than that.
The Dept. of Energy was certainly impressed with everybody. Within a vertiginously short period of time, it reviewed all the bids and announced the allotments. The three juniors had to be granted extensions to obtain financial guarantees, but the Tallahassee guy quickly resold his oil, netting him, according to the company that bought it, a "lot of money." A barrel of oil went up $6 in the interim, so do your own math. Alas, the other two failed to secure the necessary letters of credit and are out of the game. Considering the deal essentially risk free, the owner of the Colorado firm said, "It's not an Einstein-ish thing to do. You'd think every banker...would want a piece of this." When they didn't, he concluded he was a victim of discrimination. He's called on Janet Reno to investigate?how he lost the deal, not how he got it in the first place, obviously. His belief in the system is not shattered, however, and he is planning to bid again.
The government put the seven million barrels back into play, and the spokesman for the Dept. of Energy explained how to get them. "It's an open bid process. In awarding the [previous] allotments, we did a database search and spoke with the principals."
I am ready to talk and to participate in solving whatever crisis our political masters say we're having. I am incorporating. I might give Taki a few shares in my company; while admittedly the man is no Rev. Jackson, his father used to ship the stuff around the world, and?you never know?the government might like a good reference. Even so, qualification-wise, I am okay on my own: I am a woman, I could even be a lesbian for all anyone knows, and I want to join what Al Gore so convincingly calls the "fight" against the "agenda that is of big oil, by big oil and for big oil." The best thing is, I am not even white. I have positively turned green reading about everybody but me making a killing by serving this great country of ours.
Yet, I fear that the Dept. of Energy is as likely to e-mail me an invitation as Taki is to elope with Andrea Dworkin. It is a cruel and inscrutable world, indeed.
Destroying people's reputations has been a hallmark of the Clinton years. Sid the Scumbag Blumenthal and that Carville thug started the Clinton attack machine eight years ago, and now it's become a way of life. The Clintons did not go after Buchanan?why should they, he was taking away votes from George W.?it was just the ground rules they had established. Play dirty, play for keeps and if in doubt, make it up.
But before I go on about Pat and why I will be voting for him, a few words about Hillary. She is corrupt, a woman who sold the Lincoln bedroom to fatcats and who continued to give White House access-for-cash until today. She sees New York as her personal trampoline to propel her to the presidency and, as it was recently revealed, had no compunction whatsoever to lie about the Travelgate firings. To me the real Hillary is the one who oversaw the pimping that went on in the White House, when Bill was smuggled out, or when whores were brought in, and is a cynical control freak whose campaign has mostly been funded by Hollywood.
And yet this woman could be the junior senator elect for New York come November because of name recognition, the celebrity clique and the blessing of race hustlers like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. She is also a globalist, and wants America to be involved in all aspects of people's lives in every corner of the world. A certain scenario for disaster, but one no power-hungry person like Hillary can resist.
But back to Pat. He has been accused of being an isolationist by those who spent their youth marching against the Cold War policies that brought America victory. Yet he supported virtually every foreign policy initiative from Kennedy to Reagan. What he's against is the mindless nation-building and shapeless foreign policy of this gang of incompetents, the Albrights, the Bergers and the Holbrooks. Somalia was a disaster and continues to be lawless. The Haiti embargo and invasion have proved ruinous for the people of that impoverished island.
The firing of missiles to divert attention from a personal scandal is unacceptable, according to Pat, as is the fact that 10 years ago Ronald Reagan was being toasted in Moscow, and today anti-Americanism is at an all-time high. Buchanan rightly points out that Clinton broke America's word to the Russians that if they withdrew the Red Army from Eastern Europe, we would not move NATO an inch closer to their frontiers. And we colluded with two former Soviet republics, Georgia and Azerbaijan, to build a pipeline cutting Russia out of the Caspian oil.
These decisions are overlooked by average Americans because they do not directly effect them. But they are provocations that might come back to haunt Uncle Sam. According to Pat, America's role should be that of peacemaker, rather then military interventionist. The defining foreign policy of the Clinton presidency was his unconstitutional war on Serbia, says Pat. Never have truer words been spoken. Albright's rage that Serbia would not sign a Rambouillet accord, which called for the removal of all its troops from Kosovo and permission for NATO troops to tramp through the country, meant war. A war from 15,000 feet, one that we were told was to prevent ethnic cleansing of Albanians, but one that saw more than 175,000 Serbs either killed or forced out of Kosovo by the drug-running Albanians under Uncle Sam's protection.
Buchanan is also very good on Iraq and China. Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Iraqi children are dead because of our sanctions against Saddam?not a Christian condition for a just war, according to Pat, because the targeting of innocent civilians is forbidden. As for China, Pat says the most powerful weapon America has to effect change in its policies is our control of our $8 trillion market. "From its sales to us, China earns a trade surplus of over a billion dollars every week. But by bringing China into WTO, the President threw away our trump card and turned his trade portfolio over to the global bureaucrats." Again, all I can say is hooray!
America, as Pat insists, has to be a republic, not an empire. Empires have a tendency to disappear overnight. Look at the Soviets. Russia is now smaller than she was under Peter the Great. The whole structure came down, and we still haven't figured out how. Because of our meddling, American tourists are prime targets of terrorism worldwide. Although, like Buchanan, I am against isolationism, Uncle Sam cannot afford to be the world's policeman. Terrorism will be the Great Satan of the 21st century, and America will be its only target.
In this so-called information age, I find Americans extremely badly informed. If the liberal media elite did their job properly, Pat Buchanan would have had a serious shot at the presidency because most Americans agree with him on the issues. And on family values such as duty, self-reliance and respect. And just because he will not win does not mean a vote for him is a wasted one. There is still such a thing called principles, and mine is that the most honest man running (Nader is honest too) should get my vote.
As Alexander Chancellor, the ex-editor of The Spectator who lives just off Shepherd's Bush Road, put it: "It's like Notting Hill Gate before it was ethnically cleansed." One indication that Shepherd's Bush has finally arrived is that the local residents are no longer embarrassed about living in the area. Five years ago almost no one would admit to living in "Shepherd's Bush." Rather, if you asked them where they lived, they'd say "Brook Green" or "Brackenbury Village" or "Ravenscourt Park," depending on what name the local estate agents (real estate brokers) had dreamed up to describe the bit they lived in. Now, they're happy to proclaim their membership of the Bushoisie, the term journalists have coined to describe da Bush's burgeoning middle-class population.
"If people ask, I say I live in Shepherd's Bush," snorts Johnny Boden, a mail-order tycoon who lives just up the road.
"The only people who use the term 'Brackenbury Village' are estate agents," agrees Robert Fox, a theater producer who lives just off the Goldhawk Road with his wife Fiona Golfar, an editor-at-large at British Vogue.
These days even the estate agents are happy to describe the area as "Shepherd's Bush." Indeed, da Bush is now regarded as such an up-and-coming neighborhood, the men in the shiny gray suits have taken to describing nearby Acton, a postindustrial wasteland, as "the next Shepherd's Bush." They've benefited in more ways than one from the district's cultural renaissance. For instance, the protagonist of Tim Lott's White City Blue, last year's winner of the Whitbread prize for a first novel, is a Shepherd's Bush estate agent. "I'm the first writer to make a Shepherd's Bush estate agent a heroic literary figure," chuckles Lott.
Lott is by no means the only member of the literati living in da Bush. "You can't throw a stone round here without hitting a writer," complained Nicholas Lezard, a freelance journalist, when I bumped into him at the Crown & Sceptre, a local pub. "I went to my literary agency's 125th birthday party recently, got horribly, degradingly drunk and the next morning, as I was dropping off my kids at school, saw two of the people who'd been at the party the night before."
The phenomenon of a run-down neighborhood suddenly finding itself in fashion is a familiar one to New Yorkers. Indeed, The Evening Standard recently quoted a celebrity chef describing the area as being "just like East Avenue around 24th," wherever that may be. However, it's a comparatively new development in London. It took Notting Hill about 30 years to become gentrified; the East End is currently in the throes of the same process. Shepherd's Bush, by contrast, appears to have upped and come almost overnight. This is in spite of the fact that, unlike every other hip area of London, da Bush is completely undistinguished architecturally. The streets are either Victorian or Edwardian and the area has few squares or communal gardens. The only public park to speak of is Wormword Scrubs, a few acres of wilderness dominated by a high-security prison.
So how did it become so chic? The answer is: it's full of journalists. I wasn't the only hack to buy a flat here in the early 90s because I couldn't afford a place in Notting Hill, and while I've been away they've all been writing articles saying how cool da Bush is in the hope of raising the value of their property. It's worked, too. When I last had my flat valued I was told it was worth £250,000, almost three times what I paid for it in 1991. A few more articles like this one, announcing how much more desirable Shepherd's Bush is than anywhere else, and I'll be able to sell up and move straight to Notting Hill.
Or will I? In spite of myself, I've developed quite an affection for da Bush. As Alexander Chancellor points out, it's genuinely multicultural in a way that Notting Hill isn't. Within a stone's throw of my house there's a Polish restaurant, a Lebanese cafe and a Syrian supermarket, not to mention a mosque, a Catholic church and an Australian pub. I can walk from one end of Shepherd's Bush to the other without hearing a single word of English, a pleasant reminder of the days I spent living in Hell's Kitchen. Now that the Bush Bar & Grill has opened, I don't even need to schlep up to Notting Hill to meet the beautiful people. As I discovered last week, they've started schlepping down to da Bush.