The Nightclub Mystique; Twosomes vs. Threesomes; Sexual Congress; The American Empire's Latest Affront

Sexual Congress The Information Technology Association of America, in a recently released survey, has predicted that approximately 1.6 million new jobs will be created in the high-tech field in the U.S. by the end of this year. With demand for technically trained workers far exceeding supply, only about half of these positions will be filled. Employers who are unable to find skilled workers at home may, theoretically, recruit professionals from abroad. On a practical level, the annual quota of 115,000 was filled by March and the Immigration and Naturalization Service is no longer accepting new applications. Given the fact that the shortage of qualified people costs the U.S. about $4.5 billion in lost worker productivity a year, one would think that Congress would rush to increase the number of these H-1B visa holders, but that is not the way the government works. Democrats don't want to upset the AFL-CIO, which is "trying to protect and advance the interests of the work force that's already in this country rather than have them displaced by an imported skilled work force," as its legislative director puts it. As for the Republicans, they are too hot and bothered thinking about prostitutes to worry about the scarcity of qualified information technology employees.

Under a bill pending in Congress sponsored by Sen. Spencer Abraham, a Republican?who says Republicans are uncaring bastards??the U.S. would give special visas to working prostitutes from around the world. Unlike the highly trained H-1B workers who come here on a temporary basis, the sex industry personnel would be eligible for permanent residency status after three years. Also, unlike the H-1B visa applicants who need proof of their special training to be eligible for entry, the prostitutes, presumably, will not have to demonstrate their unique skills to the INS, although given the high standard of conduct set by this president, who knows? One assumes, however, that to require prostitutes to present a clean bill of health would be discriminatory.

The number of prostitutes allowed to come each year will be capped at 5000, a figure that, one hopes, may be adjusted upward depending either on market conditions prevailing in the future or the (political) needs of individual congressmen. It is not clear what the AFL-CIO's position on this bill is, but suffice to say that the bill enjoys complete bipartisan support. Nor is it obvious what it will do to the job security of America's own prostitutes when the new immigrants hit the streets, but perhaps what Congress has in mind is some sort of a G.I. bill for hookers to retrain the new entrants and to protect the work force that is already in the country from any unfair competition.

Too poor to form any trade association or union, U.S. sex workers weren't consulted about their strategies for coping with labor scarcity or their use of temporary employees and any outsourcing that may exist in their industry. Lacking cohesion, they were completely ignored by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims. What the subcommittee paid close attention to when drafting the bill were such cornerstones of American jurisprudence as the proceedings of the Fourth World Conference on Women (Beijing Conference), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the indispensable 1991 Moscow Document of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe to which the U.S. is a signatory. To anyone familiar with the politics of immigration, this ideological reliance on Beijing and Moscow is not news. Under Janet Reno, who oversees the INS, U.S. immigration policy has been so thoroughly rewritten that asylum is now given in accordance with the moral calculus of those who want to remake America into a society where preferences and special status are given to those belonging to officially designated victim groups. And who is more victimized and in need of protection than women? (Okay, homosexuals may trump even the distaff majority at the cutting edge of victimhood, but fear not. While her boss may be at his most heartfelt and savagely caring only about women, Ms. Reno has decreed that homosexuality may constitute a positive ground for asylum and so it does.)

By granting special visas to prostitutes, Congress is simply confirming the new INS policy of classifying hundreds of millions of people as victims, eligible for entry into the U.S. So what if employers can't fill thousands of jobs and the H-1B annual quota for professionals is met in the first three months of the year. Technical workers are too independent, middle-class and educated to be of any use to social engineers. What these do-gooders need to preserve their vanity and purpose are people who are the exact opposite, poor folk, the less educated the better, who can be controlled and manipulated by the enlightened few and introduced to the myriad welfare and tax distribution schemes the reformers love so much. For those addicted to the easy virtue of moral superiority, prostitutes are just about ideal. And when it comes to finding them, as most congressmen can tell you, it takes one to know one.

Sam Schulman Feature Oh, You Kid! Perhaps you're like me and have been following Andrew Sullivan's breathless account of the greatest movement for human happiness since the serfs were freed in the Old World and the slaves in part of the New?the movement to create a legal form of same-sex marriage. At the end of an article in The New Republic full of special pleading and mendacity (Hannah Arendt supported gay marriage, did she?), he perorates: one day people like him won't be seen as oddballs. No, "they will seem merely like people who have been allowed to see the possibility of a larger human dignity and who cannot wait to achieve it. For better or worse. For richer or poorer. In sickness and in health." Good. Wipe away all tears from all eyes, Andrew, and weep for the oddballs who opposed gay marriage. Vermont has spoken. Shall we move on?

I will let more vigorous pens than mine explain why, once a traditionally banned practice has been admitted, there is no way to draw the line at other kinds of unions. Traditional standards can no longer be allowed to stand before people in search of dignity and public recognition of their deepest emotional needs. We've learned that men who use men as women feel these needs. But surely these needs are also felt by brothers who love their sisters, by sons who love their moms, by fathers who love their little girls.

But there remains an unexamined preconception I'd like to kick in the shins. And that's couple-ness. Here's a social construct if there ever was one. Why does the world assume that lovers come in pairs? In fact, while only perhaps 3 percent of adults are gay (according to Sullivan), most surveys tell us that at least 10 times more have fallen in love?at least for one night?with a second person of the opposite sex. No doubt this is true of homosexuals as well?even they may feel that they love more than one person of the same sex at the same time. And yet these relationships with a third party are stigmatized, branded as "illicit." As Sullivan might put it, any bit of fluff on the side I might enjoy while married is "cut off not merely from civic respect, but from the rituals and history of their own families and friends. It erases them not merely as citizens, but as human beings."

The prejudice against carrying on with two women at once (if you are a man) or with two men (if you are a woman) is nowhere defended. And it is archaic! Why should duality be a privileged category, and honored, where three is not? I believe the problem can be solved in one fell swoop, purely by legal means. There is an area of law that is unaffected by religion or traditional customs, and that, if abolished, would free us all to lend the dignity of marriage to whom we feel loyal. But we don't have to look to the Vermonters to do this. We don't have to construct any new rituals or new codes of law. Let's decriminalize?in fact, let's eliminate the laws against?bigamy. I only got as far as taking the LSAT, but I can still draft the legislation: "New York Penal Law, Chapter 40, Part III, Title O, Article 255.15 (Bigamy) is hereby repealed." Imagine the bliss the day after. It would be better than the flat tax. Most divorce actions would simply be dropped. Who would bother to go through the agony of divorce if one could simply marry?tomorrow! If a gentleman fell in love with a lady other than his wife, well, even that ugly phrase "other than" would be eliminated. If a gentleman falls in love with a lady incremental to his wife, he can marry her too! If the senior wife objects, she can still sue for divorce (we may have to add a FIFO?First In/First Out?provision to divorce law). But if she is free to marry as well, why would she trouble herself? Ronald Perelman could be deposed by Patricia Duff's lawyers?on his honeymoon!

New and meaningful varieties of mispoches could be developed to enrich our lives. Sen. Torricelli, meet your new husband- and wife-in-law, Ron and Ellen Barkin Perelman. Think of the savings in time, money and agony. All our duties would remain the same, but our emotional lives would be richer. The sum of human happiness would be increased. Now, foursomes?that wouldn't be right. I stand with our next senator on this question. Mrs. Clinton said in January, "Marriage has got historic, religious and moral content that goes back to the beginning of time?" I agree. We have to observe its sacred beginnings. We live in a Christian country, thank goodness, and as Jesus said in Matthew 18:20: "where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them" (italics mine).

George Szamuely The Bunker Defense Against What? "The best national missile defense requires a bold rhetorical offense," William Safire exulted when George W. Bush called for the United States to adopt a vast missile defense system. Most of the rest of the world looks upon the prospect of our becoming invulnerable to other countries' missiles with some alarm. If the U.S. can bomb Serbs, humiliate Russians, destroy Chinese embassies and starve Iraqis today, what on Earth is it going to do when the antimissile "shield" is in place! We can never admit our imperial ambitions publicly. Therefore, all manner of ludicrous reasons have to be put forward to justify development of the system. The method has become routine. America, as always, is the victim. As always, we are threatened by other powers. Like who? It can't be the Russians. They've given up on communism and the Warsaw Pact, and drastically reduced the number of nuclear warheads they had in the Soviet era. It can't be the Chinese. We're in the process of establishing permanent normal trading relations with them. Besides, they only have 20 intercontinental missiles. Which leaves the "rogue states." Why a "rogue state" would lob a missile at a United States capable of swift, devastating retaliation is a mystery. Even if a "rogue state" did want to attack, it would make more sense for its agents to leave a nuclear device in downtown Washington instead of launching one whose provenance would immediately be known. Plus, "rogue states" are getting a little scarce. North Korea has just opened talks with South Korea. In a few years, the Pyongyang regime may be no more.

To be sure, there is still Iran. "Iran could test an ICBM that could deliver a several-hundred kilogram payload to many parts of the United States in the last half of the next decade," according to a recent CIA National Intelligence Estimate (NIE). Note the "coulds." One can conjure up almost any threat that "could" one day arise. These days, however, the U.S. is so anxious to get its hands on the oil riches of the Caspian Sea that it is making nice with the ayatollahs. Not always successfully. Recently, the Hideous Harridan of Foggy Bottom apologized abjectly for American involvement in the overthrow of former Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mosadeq. Albright?surely the most dimwitted member of any administration ever?seemed unaware that Iran's Muslim clerics loathed the secularist Mosadeq even more intensely than either the CIA or the Shah. That only leaves our old friend, Saddam Hussein. "Iraq could test a North Korean-type ICBM that could deliver a several-hundred kilogram payload to the United States in the last half of the next decade depending on the level of foreign assistance," in the trenchant words of the CIA's NIE. It seems unlikely, to say the least, that 10 years of sanctions have done nothing to impair Saddam's ability to build a rocket capable of reaching the U.S.

The CIA is a voice of reason compared to the hysteria of the 1998 Rumsfeld Commission. "Concerted efforts by a number of overtly or potentially hostile nations to acquire ballistic missiles with biological or nuclear payloads pose a growing threat to the United States..." it spluttered. "The threat to the U.S. posed by these emerging capabilities is broader, more mature and evolving more rapidly than has been reported in estimates by the Intelligence Community." Yet none of the "rogue states" is remotely close to having intercontinental missiles. Only the five major nuclear powers have them. Given that feebleness, it is hardly surprising that no one in the world believes that America would splash out $60 billion on a missile defense system out of fear of a few puny states. ($60 billion, incidentally, is just the cost of the less-expensive Clinton plan of 100 ground-based interceptors in Alaska and a few early warning radars. The Bush plan would likely be much more expensive.) No, the Missile Defense System is part and parcel of the American empire.

Fearing permanent subordination to the U.S., the Russians have already said that they will respond to any U.S. antimissile system by equipping their missiles with more warheads. If ever there was a case of imperial overreach, this is it! Current technology still can't distinguish a nuclear warhead from a decoy balloon. Interceptors are unable to handle warheads that break up into hundreds of small bombs. After innumerable failures, last October a missile intercept test was successful. The interceptor supposedly distinguished the target from the decoy. Much Pentagon high-fiving ensued. It turned out, however, that the test was so artificial as to be almost meaningless. As Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace explained: "The target followed a pre-programmed flight path to a designated position. The interceptor missile also flew to a pre-programmed position. A Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) receiver was placed on the target to send its position to ground control, and the necessary target location information was uploaded to a computer in the kill vehicle. The decoy released had a significantly different thermal signature than the target, making it easier for the sensors on the kill vehicle to distinguish between the objects." In a second test in January, the interceptor failed to hit its target altogether. The test again involved the use of a GPS receiver for tracking information. As the CIA report ruefully points out, "Historically, the development and deployment of missile defense systems have been accompanied by the development of countermeasures...by potential adversaries... The Russians and Chinese have had countermeasure programs for decades and are probably willing to transfer some related technology to others."

The swiftest and most dramatic end to the American empire will come about when some Madeleine Albright-type occupies the Oval Office. Drunk on the heady brew of "indispensable nation" claptrap, convinced of our technological prowess, the president will launch a military caper sublimely confident in our invulnerability.

Taki LE MAÎTRE Rara Yanna Avis As everyone knows, the definition of serendipity is searching for a needle in a haystack, and instead finding a farmer's daughter. Last week, right here in Noo Yawk, I serendipitously walked into a Russian place called Firebird, on W. 46th St., and found the farmer's daughter. Well, not exactly, but almost. Yanna Avis is half-French, half-Romanian, and there are no farmers in her family tree. The reason I walked into the place was because I had been invited by Ambassador Lorenzo Attolico, whose father was Italian ambassador to Berlin in 1940, and whose two brothers are also ambassadors. I first met Lorenzo in 1957-1958, when he was escorting the recently-dumped-by-the-Shah-of-Persia Empress Soraya (she could not have children), and I can't say that we hit it off right off the bat. Lorenzo has impeccable manners and did not appreciate the fact that a 20-year-old Greek told Soraya she should be stepping out with the victors, not the vanquished, of the Greco-Italian campaign of 1940-'41.

But back to Yanna Avis. She is married to the man who has always tried harder because he's always been number two. Warren Avis, another very old friend, is the founder of Avis Rent A Car, which I assume makes him rather well off. Warren has been a lucky guy all his life. First of all because he never hired a double murderer to jump all over his rental cars, as a certain Mr. Hertz did, and second because he married Yanna. Yanna Avis, you see, is a singer, and a very professional singer indeed. She's also a beauty who speaks more languages than there are name-droppers in Hollywood, and sings in English, French, German and Spanish. She's in the tradition of Edith Piaf and Marlene Dietrich, and her repertoire includes such wonderful love songs as "Ça C'est L'Amour," "Lily Marlene" (a new version), "10 Cents a Dance," "Just a Gigolo," "Parlez-Moi d'Amour" and so on.

The trouble with listening to Yanna, who was accompanied by piano, accordion and bass, was the nostalgia that came flooding in. Back in the good old days of my youth, going to a dark club to listen to a lady singing torch songs was what got the lady we were with eventually to bed. Ah! the debts I owe to Peggy Lee and Julie London, not to mention Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald. Now to Yanna Avis, although I happened to be there with my wife, a capital offense in the old days.

Incidentally, Yanna's new release will be available in June at major record stores and at La Maison Moderne, 144 W. 19th St. Also incidentally, my host Count Attolico has not changed much since the days he used to squire ex-empresses around Gotham. He still sports the dyspeptic demeanor of a prostitute who has mistakenly found herself in a church meeting. He complained about my smoking, thought the waiters much too slow and demanded intelligent conversation. Another old friend present was Ahmet Ertegun, the head of Atlantic Records and probably the greatest living Turk. When Ahmet saw me talking to my ex-wife?he nonchalantly asked if we still did things together. "It's called down memory lane," I informed him. Ahmet laughed and recounted how, 25 years ago, after about fifteen years of marriage to his present wife Mica, they went out during a theater break for a smoke. Ertegun is extremely worldly and a very intelligent man, but he tends to let his mind wander at times, especially when there are pretty girls around. As apparently there were that night on Broadway. A woman approached him and said hello. "Oh hello, hello," answered Ahmet, desperately trying to place her. Giving up, he asked her, "Didn't we meet at a cocktail party in Cleveland?" "No we did not, I'm your ex-wife!" "You son of a bitch!" said his present one.

The once wonderful clubs playing torch songs are now grotesque meat factories producing horrible sounds that could induce Gordon Liddy to betray?Dante-esque infernos with silk ropes up front, the customers a bunch of unshaven, t-shirted slobs, pumped with uppers and downers. The problem is that nightclubs have lost their mystique. Who the hell wants to see Puff Daddy surrounded by bodyguards with groupies slobbering around in the next table?

Can you imagine witnessing River Phoenix emerging from a club vomiting all the drugs he had been ingesting, and then reading the next day what a tragedy his death was for American youth? It happened to a friend of mine?no angel?who was nearby the Viper Room that night. At least in my day film stars killed themselves driving fast Porsches, a la James Dean. My friend Roffredo Gaetani has just returned from Cannes and the festival. Harvey Weinstein, a legendary slob and vulgarian, gave the best party, according to the Count. What crap. How can Weinstein substitute for, say, Andre Dubonnet, a legendary host, or Gianni Agnelli? Or even Jack Warner? As a young man I once felt a bit in awe in front of those gents, and the people they had as their guests lolling around their swimming pools. I don't think even as a fetus I would be in the slightest awe in front of Mr. Weinstein. But I better stay away from places where Yanna Avis sings.