High life

Here’s the definitive scoop on poor old Hellas, better known nowadays as the EU country that missed its day at the municipal dump. Greece will default sometime in 2012 and, if there are any doubters around, tell them this comes from the great economist Taki, the very same Taki who smelled a rat even before the Greek government was caught red-handed cooking the books by entering into a massive controversial (yet legal) deal with the poisonous giant squid Goldman Sachs. The latter took its giant fee and went back home in order to continue to screw the innocent. The Greeks stayed on the beach and are now paying for past follies. The trouble is that no one responsible for the disaster has been punished and allegations of corruption continue to surface.

Taki lives the High life New York Summertime and, as the song tells us, ‘the livin’ is easy’. The temperature is in the nineties, girls’ dresses are at their flimsiest, love is in the air, and sex is everywhere, so what else can one wish for? This is my last week in the Bagel, and as always I am reluctant to leave. I’ve trained diligently, played less hard than usual, read a lot and even managed to identify cedars, poplars, willows and cherry trees during my daily walks in the park. When it gets very hot, the city takes on a celluloid air, with old movies about the place playing again and again, like a rondo, in my memory.

New York In that wonderful old Broadway musical Guys and Dolls, gambler Sky Masterson is romancing Sister Sarah Brown of the Salvation Army after an all-nighter of boozing it up in Havana. Walking her home to her mission in New York, he tells her that the only place in the world where ‘the dawn is turned on by an electrician’ is Times Square. She swoons. That, of course, was the good old days, when Runyonesque characters like Nathan Detroit, Nicely-Nicely, Harry the Horse, Big Jule from Chicago and Liver Lips Louis ruled Broadway and its environs. In that magical make-believe world, Nathan married Miss Adelaide (after a 14-year engagement) and Sky got hitched to Sarah.

Why would a German playboy-billionaire industrialist with a large family and lots of old and good friends have dinner in Gstaad with one of his closest buddies, then go up to his chalet and put a bullet in his brain? As of writing, Gunter Sachs’s suicide is a mystery. But Gunter was always somewhat mysterious, and I have known him since the late Fifties. His uncle, Fritz von Opel, was the heir to the Opel car fortune and lived the grand life in St Moritz and St Tropez, where he had opulent houses. Von Opel was his uncle on his mother’s side. His father was also an industrialist — Sachs ball bearings, machines or something like that — and was probably richer than the Opels. Fritz von Opel’s son, Ricky, blew his share; Gunter’s side multiplied it.

New York How fair a rule is monarchy? A Byzantine scholar wrote that it was the fairest, to the point that God sustained it, as long as the emperors were elected by the army or an aristocratic senate. With their coronation, legitimate successors and usurpers alike automatically became sacred. The ancient Greeks went a step further. They did not require a god-like sustenance nor perfection from their kings, only greatness. Agamemnon, Menelaus, Odysseus, Achilles, Leonidas — they were all great kings but not perfect human beings. Practical Romans distrusted Greek morality about kings and heroes, and in Marcus Aurelius they produced the supreme type of philosopher-king that Plato had merely dreamed of.

New York On Tuesday last, 12 April, 150 years ago, the American Civil War began when Confederate forces fired the first shots on Fort Sumter, in Charleston harbour, South Carolina. The bombardment lasted 36 hours, with Fort Sumter occasionally replying with fire of its own. Then the white flag went up and the Union troops within the fort surrendered. Not a single man had a scratch on either side. It looked as if both sides had gangs fighting that couldn’t shoot straight. If only. In the next four years, 620,000 American lives were lost, from Bull Run to Petersburg, before the unequal contest came to an end at Appomattox, Virginia, in 1865. The figure 620,000 is a hell of a number of dead soldiers among an American population which stood at 31 million in total.

New York I went to see a revival of Arcadia in the beautiful Ethel Barrymore Theatre last Saturday night, and it made my day. Tom Stoppard is our greatest playwright, and I think Arcadia is his best play, although a couple of other gems of his come close. I was with Marine Major Michael Warring and Marine Major Chris Meyers (retd) and their girls. Both officers saw action in Iraq, both are extremely well educated and well read, and both think that Tom Stoppard is the greatest thing since the Marine Corps. There’s nothing like Sir Tom’s intelligent wordplay and mind-boggling knowledge to put one in a great mood, until we exited the theatre, that is. The warm glow of having witnessed something truly wonderful disappear quicker than you can say Gaddafi.

Twenty-two years or so ago, I wrote a column for the New York Observer, a weekly paper owned by a tycoon named Arthur Carter, a man who had come up the hard way and had made his fortune on Wall Street, but one who had retained his loathing for those who had made it the old-fashioned way, mainly by inheriting and the old-boy Wasp network.  The reason I was hired was Graydon Carter, no relation, a good friend of mine who went on to become the big Pooh-Bah at Vanity Fair these past 20 years. Mind you, my column made Graydon very nervous.

I’ve got end-of-season blues. I know I say this every year, but this has been a particularly fun winter, with friends throwing goodbye parties, dinners and lunches since the beginning of March. My liver has done a Gaddafi and taken a brutal revenge on my body, and the right ankle is doing a Saif as I write; if I stand on it or, worse, try to walk, it feels like it’s going to feel when the ghastly Gaddafis get through with those opposing them. I’ve had this lower leg problem for a year. About a month ago, I couldn’t stand it any longer and had an X-ray taken. The cartilage has done a Bin Laden and disappeared. Hence the pain as bone touches bone. And there was more news from the doctor.

Up to London to collect my PhD from the London School of Economics. It is Dr Taki from now on, and Jeremy Clarke can eat his heart out. If he’d stay out of pubs and do some research instead, he, too, might one day get a PhD. Like Dr Gaddafi and Dr Taki. Actually, my paper was on the environmentally friendly method of converting Gaddafis into waste. The ceremony did not last long. Less time than it took me to write my thesis on how to convert a Gaddafi into s***. Still, Professor David Held pronounced that I ‘cut an impressive figure, have a calm, articulate manner, and make many intelligent and perceptive points’. He also said that I was ‘genuinely popular’.

I haven’t got that much time left, but I’d gladly give ten years of my life to see that homicidal maniac Gaddafi strung up from a palm tree alongside his warthog sons, especially Hannibal Gaddafi, an expert in imprisoning and torturing helpless servants and beating up women in posh Western hotels. What a ghastly world we live in. Gaddafi has been bullying us for 42 years, his henchmen murdering an English policewoman, killing 1,200 Libyan prisoners in cold blood back in 1996, shooting down an unarmed civilian airliner, then cheering when the convicted terror-bomber is released by a spineless British government more interested in oil and gas than in justice.

I write this on Valentine’s Day, having run into the King of Greece early this morning in the local bank asking a teller where he could buy a Valentine card for his queen. (He received a blank stare for his trouble.) After 47 years of marriage, it’s nice to know that even kings bring Valentine cards to their queens. Personally, I’m not a big card man. Love letters, yes, Valentine cards a no-no, romantic emails only when dead drunk. The purpose of a love letter is obviously to seduce. If seduction has taken place already, then it means the seducer wants more of the good stuff. I know, I know, it sounds awfully cynical, but I’ve been around for much too long to fall for all the rest.

Philosophy has been known to be a bit of a struggle for many of us, except, of course, if we happen to be professional footballers, pop stars, film actors, reality TV performers or hedge-fund managers. Although in last week’s Spectator Quentin Letts offered a primer on how to pretend to be an Egypt expert, the poor little Greek boy, always ready to offer more to the sacrosanct Spectator readership than an Englishman, will now take you to the wilder reaches of philosophy as applied to real life. One of the reasons I always write about the past is ‘anamnesis,’ which is the exact opposite of amnesia, the latter a condition suffered by every single one of the world’s dictators and then some.

In 1940, Leo Amery, speaking in the House of Commons, rebuked Neville Chamberlain and his colleagues with the Oliver Cromwell quote, ‘In the name of God, go!’ This was after the fall of France with England on the brink. Those asking for Mubarak to go are on the street, not in parliament, which doesn’t exist in the way we know it.  Mind you, I was in Damascus back in 1970 when a Hearst correspondent, John Harris, burst into my room and announced Nasser’s death from a heart attack. We drove to the airport, got into a prop Electra laid on compliments of the Syrian regime, and landed in Cairo in a jiffy. That’s when Harris put on a Groucho Marx mask and walked up to passport control, where he was waved through.

About 15 or so years ago I received a very polite letter from Belgium asking me to list three of the most pompous and self-important people in the UK. It came with a self-addressed return envelope and stamp. The writer was known to me as ‘l’entarteur’, a man who would approach the pompous and vainglorious and shove a pie in their face. He would never insult the victims nor use foul language — in fact, he always remained silent — and he assured me in his letter that he used only the finest ingredients and very fresh milk. The first name which came to mind was Edward Heath but almost immediately I took it off the list. Heath was too bloated, his face too red, and the last thing I wished was for him to have a stroke while covered with a lemon meringue pie.

Gstaad Having spent a great part of my life charting the decline of civilisation, I am not at all surprised at the goings-on in Tunisia, especially as I never considered the place to be civilised. How apt that the arch crook dictator Ben Ali (Baba) slithered away to Saudi Arabia, itself a beacon of democracy and human rights — especially for women — instead of embarrassing my little community of Saanen and landing here in good old Helvetia. Mind you, Saanen airport can only take very small jets, something a crook like Ben Ali Baba would never deign to escape in. But it’s nice that crooks and dictators help each other. Imagine if Robert Mugabe had not taken in that arch Ethiopian murderer Mengistu. He’d probably be living in a place like Athens or even Rome.