Category: Under the Black Flag

The story thus far: Not content with plunging the world’s economy into the worst crisis since the 30’s, the avaricious and reckless bankers have been saved from ruin—momentarily—by our taxes, yet they continue to treat us with breathtaking contempt.  Far from feeling any remorse or humility, they pay themselves annual bonuses larger than what most...

A recent article in a glossy magazine about the rich and famous mentioned a $35 million house in Malibu, California, whose neighbors include Mel Gibson and Britney Spears.  The owner of this mega-structure is one Teodoro Nguema Obiang, son of a man who goes by the same name. Obiang Junior is 38 years old and...

Something’s bothering me about the Polanski business.  No, unlike Harvey Weinstein and Bernard-Henri Lévy—not to mention that Mitterand pedophile—I will not defend Roman’s actions with a 13-year-old, but I will say that with friends like his making fools of themselves defending him, it will be a miracle if he gets off with a slap on...

I sat down to write this column in the Big Bagel, as I call New York City, and it was to be about the latest hagiography of Winston Churchill, a man I not only dislike but consider to be a war criminal par excellence.  Then I heard the sirens outside my house and was deafened...

He is the clown prince in a continent whose rulers boast of more clowns among them than all the circuses of the world combined.  He uses more black shoe polish on his hair than a company of Rumanian hussars use on their thigh-high boots, and plasters more makeup on his face than Norma Desmond.  He...

By the time you read this the U.S. Open will be in full cry.  Tough, unsmiling professionals will be hitting balls back and forth with machine-like regularity, and Cyclops, the mechanical eye that overrides human decisions, will be resolving close matches.  It is Aldous Huxley come true, with a little Orwell thrown in for good...

If you think comedy is dead, just read Benjamin Netanyahu’s latest proposals regarding a Palestinian state and try to keep a straight face.  “Let us begin peace negotiations immediately without preconditions,” says the comedian, and then proceeds to state the following preconditions: Jewish settlement construction in the West Bank, where Palestinians hope to build a...

Fifty-four years ago this month, dizzy with happiness at having been freed from the jail that was boarding school, I ventured down New York’s 5th Avenue looking for fun and adventure.  I knew a place called El Borracho, Spanish for “the drunkard,” where my parents used to dine.  The owner was an agreeable Catalan who...

I recently attended a jujitsu tournament in Newark, New Jersey, a 15-minute train ride from New York City.  I had been to the Newark airport before but never entered the town.  It was quite a revelation.  I walked up the main thoroughfare, named after Martin Luther King, Jr., and saw only black people.  The solitary...

Sometimes I have to pinch myself to remember that Europe was the cradle of democracy.  For today Europe seems to be sliding inexorably into a culture of control that would have made Stalin proud. Carol Thatcher, the daughter of the great Lady T, was recently banned from the BBC for referring to an unnamed tennis...

At times I think they have to be doing it on purpose.  It’s simply not possible that such density of stupidity exists on such a high level.  Take Afghanistan, for example.  Like a hellfire and brimstone preacher who cannot prize his eye off the pouting dolly bird in the front row, Obama seems mesmerized by...

One of the more annoying gaucheries of the British tabloid press is that of always referring to the Kennedys as “American royalty.”  Back in 1963, with JFK still alive and in the White House, I escorted C.Z. Guest, a true American patrician, to a Park Avenue party given by Sam Spiegel, producer of Lawrence of...

By the time you read this it might be very old news, and if it is, treat it as a background briefing.  But if the son-of-a-bitch I’m writing about is still out on bail and moving his ill-gotten assets around Israel and the environs, pay attention.  What you read can one day save your savings....

So, the great nation builder is leaving the White House, his vision of a peaceful Middle East just a pipe dream, something poor old W used to know something about.  I say poor old W because he was, after all, taken in by his very own Vice President, a treacherous and cowardly man, a character...

I want to make something very, very clear.  This column’s review of the autobiography of Cheeta, Tarzan’s chimpanzee, has absolutely nothing to do with the man who just got elected to the White House last month.  Cheeta’s 336-page opus was published in Britain two months ago by Fourth Estate and has become a runaway best-seller. ...

Can anyone today imagine a clarinettist as a superstar the size of, say, Mick Jagger?  Or God forbid, the ghastly Madonna?  Well, 60 years or so ago, the biggest star in Hollywood, as well as the biggest stud, was Artie Shaw, whose combination of good looks, extraordinary musical talent, and great intelligence made him the...

In 2002, Vladimir Putin told a French reporter who asked about “innocent civilians” killed in Chechnya that—since the journalist evidently sympathized with Muslims—he would arrange to have him circumcised, adding: “I will recommend that they conduct the operation in such a way so that afterwards nothing else will grow.”  People of the pompous persuasion were...

Karagiozis is a mythical Greek character created sometime during the Ottoman occupation (1455-1827).  He manages to outwit the Turk at every turn by being funny, dishonest at times, and a very quick thinker.  For example, he discusses a business with a Turk and proposes an equal sharing of the wealth.  “What’s yours is mine,” he...

Just after the Berlin wall came down, I flew to Berlin with my German-Austrian wife and traveled around the city and its eastern parts.  On visiting the Olympic stadium I told the taxi driver that my uncle, a hurdler, was the first athlete the Führer’s gaze fell upon as the parade of the 1936 games...

Christie’s, the auction house, took a full-page ad in the New York Times to publicize the record sale of a painting by a living artist, Lucian Freud, to the tune of $33.6 million.  Thirty-three million greenbacks for a portrait of a horribly fat woman lying naked on a misshapen sofa.  The mind reels.  It is...

A few weeks ago, I attended a most wonderful party, with music, pretty girls, lots of champagne—and even some people who did not move their lips while reading the labels of the expensive bubbly and Scotch whiskey they were imbibing.  Namely, Tom Wolfe, Lewis Lapham, Graydon Carter, Edward Jay Epstein, and other such New York swells....

It was the merry month of May, 40 years ago.  I had been living in Paris for a decade, had just moved into a beautiful farmhouse ten miles west of the city, had recently become a bachelor again at age 31, and had given up competitive tennis for polo and the Bagatelle polo club.  My...

I do not normally take pronouncements from show-business folk seriously—they are almost always publicity ploys—but in the Mia Farrow and Steven Spielberg case against Beijing’s “Genocide Olympics,” I will gladly make an exception.  We all know that there is something rotten at the heart of modern sport, starting with the Olympics, which was, once upon...

I live in New York and London, and   among the gruesome sights I’ve had to endure these last few years has been the sight of a vainglorious James Rubin, of Madeleine Albright fame, prancing about the hot spots of these multicultural havens for the rich and infamous.  Rubin is married to Christiane Amanpour, the...

In an English court of law 21 years ago, I had the opportunity to discover firsthand how touchy judges can be when challenged from the dock.  It was a case of libel that caught both the tabloid and broadsheet imagination, not to mention the BBC’s.  I had referred to a very rich old woman as...

As I wrote five years ago in another place, beginning a new column is like the first date with a girl you’ve had your eye on for a long time but never had the courage to ask out.  One’s nervous.  But this is a new year, 2008, and let’s start it off right by telling...