Bush, Anti-Imperialist?; The Can't-Do Spirit; Penis Envy; Party Politics

Party Politics To a midtown gentlemen's club for a lunch given every year by my close friend Chuck Pfeiffer, West Point graduate, Special Forces captain, Silver Star for valor in Vietnam, and some less honorable things, such as acting in Hollywood movies and having actors as friends. Chuck's annual bash is for literary and military types, with a few television personalities thrown in for good measure. This year was no exception. I noticed the wonderful Peggy Noonan sitting between two roaring liberal gents, George Plimpton and David Halberstam. When I pulled her leg about being converted, Halberstam put his arm around her and announced that "The lady's not for turning, and I know it." In another corner of the room, deep in conversation with Jay McInerney, was the talented screenwriter and film producer Michael Mailer. Trying to get a free tip on writing, I cocked my ear and was shocked: Michael and Jay were discussing... women, another subject close to my heart. Mind you, I could have had literary help from the men at my table. P.J. O'Rourke and Christopher Buckley (the latter used to correct my copy when he was 13 years old) are the two funniest writers in America, in fact anywhere in the world, although I'm told that a certain Albanian drug dealer has written an extremely funny account of the time he spent in bed with Madeleine Albright. (Not to worry: although based on true characters, it's a novel.)

The talented Michael Nouri, of Flashdance and Victor/Victoria on Broadway, was a delightful postprandial speaker, as was Buckley, regaling us with one of the funniest jokes since Bill Clinton announced he had not had sex with that woman. My own contribution to the merriment was a rather weak one. After one bottle of very good red, a 64-year-old mind simply isn't what it used to be. But I will let you be the judge:

A father of three daughters is quietly sitting by the fire reading "Taki's Top Drawer." There is a knock at the door and he reluctantly stands up and opens it. A young man says, "Hello, I'm Joe, I'm here to get Flo, to take her to a show, is she ready to go?"

"Hey Flo," yells the father, "it's Joe, to take you to a show, are you ready to go?" In a flash, Flo descends the stairs and off they go.

The father goes back to the fire and continues to read. But to his chagrin, there is another loud knock at the door. When he opens it yet another young man announces, "Hi, I'm Freddy, and I'm here to get Betty, for some spaghetti, is she ready?"

"Hey Betty," shouts the father, this time rather irritated, "it's Freddy, for some spaghetti, are you ready?" In a jiffy Betty comes down and the two disappear into the night. The old man goes back to his reading. Suddenly another loud knock. Furiously he opens the door and encounters the third young man of the evening. "Hi, I'm Chuck..."

Mind you, jokes should be told, not written, not that mine brought the house down. Far from it. By then it was solvitur ambulando time, and for any of you who may have failed Latin in school, it means solved by walking. The drunken state, that is. (I am told that all New York public schools teach Latin: "Yo, matrem-coitando!")

But back to the lunch. It was on the day Gore finally threw in the towel, and walking around the room I noticed no one of the 40-odd guests was discussing the election. This is the way civilized people react to an event that is bound to divide the country right down the middle. The Draft Dodger and people like Barbra (disgusting) Streisand and other Hollywood phonies have been trying to do that since 1992. Streisand describes the Republicans as racists, sexists and anti-Semites. "It's a war against bigotry," says the dim-witted diva.

Jesse Jackson described George W. Bush as a Milosevic and without a moral mandate to be president. Why not try Hitler, Jesse? After all, he killed more people than Slobodan. Jackson is a man whose only talent lies in self-promotion and shaking down industries and institutions. If anyone has no moral authority to speak, it's the egregious Jackson, whose abuse of language and hyperbole belongs in a lowlife saloon, rather than on the national stage. A day after asking for street demonstrations against the incoming president, Jackson, having vowed to never accept Bush, was on the telephone to the President-Elect offering to mend fences.

Even more hysterical was Alan Dershowitz, a man who gives buffoons a very bad name. Like the Clinton-Gore gang, which expertly spinned the fiction of Republicans being Neanderthals who are antiblack, anti-Hispanic, antigay, anti-workers and anti-women, Dershowitz emulates Dr. Goebbels in demonizing anyone who doesn't agree that America is a corrupt dictatorship run by corporations and vested interests.

Oh well, I guess America is big enough to take even as subversive a figure as this clown, but for how long? The networks did their best to roll out every lefty gasbag they could get their hands on, and to a man, or woman, they all denounced the election as a fraud and the Supreme Court as political. What a crock. Stevens and Souter were both Republican appointees, and that Ginsburg woman would vote against the United States having a defense force if she could. George W. won fair and square and the radical chic can't take it. Too bad. A good cry in their limos will do just fine.

 

Petra Dickenson Feature The Can't-Do Spirit Let us eat, drink and be merry while we still can this holiday season, for the health Nazis are gathering outside, ready to bust in and trash the party. But don't expect them to wreak havoc by actually kicking the gin bottles out of our hands and smashing our favorite food with their jackboots. Being moral cowards, to them direct confrontation is about as abhorrent and physically dangerous as fettuccine Alfredo. They prefer to inflict damage from afar by invoking that ever-ready truncheon of the pure at heart?the oppressive power of the state. No one is keener to have the government kick us where it hurts than America's leading experts in the area of contrived health scares, the folks at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. The "Science" bit may give it credibility and an upmarket air, but the outfit is mainly run by legal hacks, and its board members are from the allied fields of business and Hollywood. For nearly 30 years these professional nags have been issuing nutritional bulletins demonizing practically every foodstuff except tofu and raw legumes, insisting that we have a moral duty to eat "healthily" and a social obligation to exercise regularly or we will die. But apparently we have been unresponsive to their earnest advice, so the CSPI has decided to call on the Big Brother to save us from the perils of the free market and yank the fruit of the Antichrist out of our mouths. (Readers from Palm Beach County, please note: fruit of the Antichrist is a figure of speech. Fruit, and yes, that includes dried prunes, are actually good for you. See the next paragraph.)

In a recent paper published in the American Journal of Public Health, the director of the CSPI and a Yale psychologist?the latter notorious for his "there is no difference between Ronald McDonald and Joe Camel" line?urge local and state governments to levy taxes on foods the authors consider to be of little nutritional value. Noting that while in an ideal world, "foods high in calories, fat or sugar [should] be subjected to special taxes and that the cost of healthful foods, such as fruits and vegetables, [should] be subsidized," the authors recognize that, at this point, the public may object and therefore they suggest that governments start incrementally, by taxing snacks and soft drinks because small taxes appears "politically feasible."

Even these two neo-Puritans don't think snacks are bad per se, snacks just "play little useful role in nutrition. Soft drinks and snack foods typically add unneeded calories to the diet...without providing significant levels of nutrients." But, and here is the clincher, the taxes might bring more money for hectoring activists and their programs, including "more bicycle paths and recreation centers."

The money is needed ostensibly to prevent what the authors estimate to be anywhere from 310,000 to 580,000 annual deaths from poor diet and physical inactivity, but what's a few hundred thousand more or less? The point is, Americans are still dying, and that can't be right. Admittedly, they are not dying the way they used to, from scarlet fever, smallpox, measles, diphtheria, diarrhea, TB, whooping cough, bronchitis, but rather from diseases associated with old age: heart disease and cancer. Still, death in America is no accident. It is an injustice, a national disgrace for which someone somewhere ought to be held financially accountable.

"Healthy" eating through taxation is just a beginning, and politicians like Hillary Clinton, who likes the idea, are already salivating at the possibilities. Worse yet, the political class that sucked hundreds of billions from the tobacco industry, even though the effects of smoking have been known and widely publicized, has an even bigger fish to fry?class-actions lawsuits against the food and beverage industries.

Don't laugh! In the country where governments can recover spuriously calculated "healthcare costs" from the tobacco manufacturers, where the wearing of bicycle helmets and buckling up are viewed not as individual choices but as a duty one owes to society, it is only a matter of time when eating, too, ceases to be a private activity and becomes a matter of collective responsibility. Bad eating habits apparently cause nearly as many deaths as tobacco, and if smoking is not a permissible gamble or a person's own business anymore, it is hard to see how much longer people will be allowed to risk eating or drinking what they like.

Obviously, personal responsibility can go only so far; there is no money to be made by blaming the individual for the thousands of little decisions he's made in the course of his life. If there are going to be proper financial rewards to lawyers and politicians, which is what litigation is always about, the fault must be shifted to the rich corporations that seduce us to buy their stuff to smoke, eat, drink and savor.

Citizens who are too confused to figure out how to read voting ballots will probably see nothing wrong with becoming wards of the state and consuming, in moderation and in preapproved amounts given their weight, age and gender, only such items the government experts deem safe and healthy. The rest of us who are sure how we voted will have to swallow that, 'cause that's the way the cookie crumbles in this land of the free, home of the brave.

 

George Szamuely The Bunker Unimperialism? "Praise be, the age of cynical Western interventionism may be past. Yesterday saw the final election (or selection) of a new United States President, George W. Bush. The event could mean little or it could mean much. That is always the case when an empire changes hands? Let us be optimistic." Thus Simon Jenkins writing in the Times of London last week. Jenkins is a sensible fellow, and while his optimism is understandable it may also be a little premature. To be sure, during the campaign Bush went out of his way to avoid vacuous Albrightian bombast: "I'm not so sure the role of the United States is to go around the world and say 'this is the way it's got to be.' I think one way for us to end up being viewed as the ugly American is for us to go around the world saying, we do it this way, so should you."

Americans have not heard refreshingly unimperial talk like this in decades. Bush also called for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Balkans. Yet when a spluttering Secretary-General of NATO?the fat and repulsive Lord Robertson?intervened outrageously in the election and confronted Bush about his intentions in the Balkans, the Republican immediately backed down. "NATO diplomats were left with the impression," The New York Times purred, "that, if he is elected, Mr. Bush is prepared to move slowly on the issue of Balkan peacekeeping to avoid any early political crises with NATO. Specifically, Lord Robertson said he had been assured that 'there will be no unilateral action taken in relation to peacekeeping forces.'" Nor was it reassuring that in his first major interview following the election, on CBS' 60 Minutes II, Bush declared "The principal threat facing America is isolationism?America can't go it alone."

Really? Principal threat? "Isolationism" is a tired cliche, long devoid of any real meaning. Its only purpose is to silence critics of America's imperial agenda.

Whether Bush was sincere during the campaign or merely courting the Buchananite vote matters very little now. Already he is coming under enormous pressure from Washington think tanks, Weekly Standard and Wall Street Journal types, the military-industrial complex, corporate lobbyists, international aid organizations, and former government officials now working as foreign agents to make sure U.S. foreign policy remains as interventionist as ever. George W. wants bipartisanship. He will not get it on tax cuts, privatizing Social Security or education vouchers. But he could get it on foreign policy. He can satisfy the "neoconservatives" by bombing the "rogue states"; mainstream Republicans by aggressively promoting U.S. commercial interests; and liberals by championing "humanitarian intervention."

Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser, is a charming and attractive woman. Colin Powell, the secretary of State, is clearly no demented Madeleine Albright. Yet it is hard to believe that either has the intellectual capability to take on the likes of Paul Wolfowitz or Richard Perle, who will most probably call the shots in a Bush administration. Rice because she is, perhaps, too nice. Powell, because his famous "doctrine" about using massive force, getting involved only where national interests are at stake and having an "exit strategy" says nothing about what America's "national interests" really are. Powell has no idea. He is a military man who follows orders.

Wolfowitz and Perle, on the other hand, do have a pretty good idea. America should be involved everywhere and at all times to ensure its global hegemony. Wolfowitz heads the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. His most famous foreign policy contribution was the 1992 memorandum, written when he was undersecretary of policy at the Pentagon, in which he argued that the United States had to maintain global military supremacy "to thwart the emergence of a rival superpower in Europe, Asia or the former Soviet Union." The United States had to "establish and protect a new order" to discourage "advanced industrial nations" from "challenging our leadership" while at the same time maintaining a military dominance capable of "deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role." He envisaged going to war with Russia if it threatened Poland or the Baltic states. Wolfowitz's belligerent, indeed nearly insane, vision caused uproar and was swiftly withdrawn.

But Wolfowitz has been nothing if not faithful to his beliefs ever since. He was an early advocate of expanding NATO. He frets obsessively about the rise of China. In a 1997 speech he likened China to Imperial Germany. He regularly warns of the military threat posed by Iran. In May 1998 he and Richard Perle signed an open letter to Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott calling for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Wolfowitz also urged the bombing of Serbia long before Clinton got around to it.

The agenda today will unquestionably be to thwart the emergence of Europe as a world power rivaling the United States. Since NATO serves no other purpose now than to ensure European subordination to the U.S., the policy will be to prevent the European rapid reaction force from getting off the ground.

Wolfowitz will seek to frustrate Europe at every turn. Whose lead will Bush follow? One clue: the Kosovo Albanians do not seem worried about the change in Washington. Bujar Dugolli, a member of the ruling council of the Alliance for the Future of Kosovo (AAK), says: "The Americans have spent too much money in Kosovo to pull out now." An AFP story nicely adds: "The main U.S. military base in Kosovo, Camp Bondsteel, is the largest constructed by the United States since the Vietnam war. Contractors employed to build some of its facilities told AFP they had been told it had to last for at least 15 years."

 

Toby Young The London Desk Penis Envy "Okay," said the Italian plastic surgeon, bringing his hands together and adopting his best bedside manner. "Let's 'ave a look at your penis." This is it, I thought. The moment of truth. I was about to find out whether I needed penis enlargement surgery or not.

Before going any further I should point out that I was on assignment. A friend of mine who's just been appointed the editor-in-chief of a British women's magazine had persuaded me to pay a visit to a penis enlargement surgeon, disguised as a patient, with a view to writing an article about it. At first I turned her down flat, but eventually she made me an offer I couldn't refuse. For a check that big, I was willing to put myself through the ringer. Not literally?she didn't want me to actually have the operation?but metaphorically. At that stage, I had no way of knowing just how humiliating my visit to the London Centre for Aesthetic Surgery would prove to be.

Things got off to a bad start when an extremely pretty girl answered the door. "Yes?" she said brightly.

"I'm here to see Dr. Roberto Viel," I said, blushing.

"Oh, Dr. Viel," she replied, quickly averting her eyes. Was I just being paranoid, or did she know what I was there for? I had no idea what percentage of Dr. Viel's patients came to see him about penis enlargement. She led me up the stairs and introduced me to another attractive girl, this one dressed in a nurse's uniform.

"This is Mr. Young," she told her. "He's here to see Dr. Viel."

"I see," said the nurse, adopting a suspiciously brisk, professional manner. "If you'd like to wait here, the doctor will see you shortly." The two hotties looked at me with a mixture of pity and contempt. I suddenly had an overwhelming urge to tell them I was an undercover journalist, that I didn't have a "microphallus," to use the medical term. "Here! Look! See!" I wanted to say, waving it about. "It's perfectly normal." But I managed to keep it zipped.

I flipped through the pile of magazines in the waiting room. I was expecting them to be in Japanese, but most of them were in Arabic. Was that significant? In addition, there was one in French, one in German and?another clue??three in Greek. The only magazine in English was called Cosmetic Surgery, and, to my surprise, it contained an article on Dr. Viel. Or, rather, the two Dr. Viels. Apparently, Roberto has a twin brother called Maurizio and they practice together at the London Centre for Aesthetic Surgery. According to the article, Roberto has "already performed a procedure on his brother," though it didn't say what.

After about 15 minutes, Roberto appeared and showed me through to his room. He was a tall, thin-faced man who appeared to be in his late 30s, with a pronounced Italian accent. I began by asking him whether he and his brother were the inspiration for the twin gynecologists played by Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers. I momentarily forgot that one of the characters in the movie is a homicidal maniac.

"Of course not," he said angrily. "I no like this movie."

He then gave me such a hostile look that I was glad I wasn't going through with the enlargement procedure. It's not very sensible to offend a man who's about to operate on your penis. Dr. Viel then proceeded to tell me exactly what he could do for me. Typically, he explained, he performs a two-part "penoplasty" whereby he first increases the length and then the girth of your little man. The lengthening procedure involves cutting the "penile suspensory ligament" and pulling the penis forward, adding one to two inches. However, he was quick to point out that this gain would only apply to my penis in its flaccid state; it would make no difference to it when erect. Not only that, but the angle of my erection might end up being significantly shallower, a consequence of cutting the suspensory ligament.

I couldn't believe it. The lengthening surgery was cosmetic in every sense of the word. I might impress my buddies in the locker room, but it would make absolutely no difference in the bedroom. On the contrary, there was every chance that my erect penis would flail around instead of standing to attention. There was no upside and, potentially, a huge downside. What kind of idiot would have it done? The widening operation sounded equally hazardous. Dr. Viel explained that it involves removing fat from the stomach or thigh and injecting it into the shaft of the penis, increasing the circumference by between one and two inches. However, the fat has a tendency to be reabsorbed, meaning the patient has to return for a series of "top-ups." In addition?and this is something the good doctor neglected to tell me?the plastic surgeon who pioneered this procedure, Ricardo Samitier, was convicted for manslaughter after a penis enlargement patient bled to death on his operating table. My God, I thought. Even if I had a "microphallus," I'd think twice about exposing myself to that kind of risk.

It was at this point that Dr. Viel asked to have a look at my little friend. Now, I have to confess, the moment I dropped my trousers I was expecting him to dismiss me with a wave of his hand and tell me to stop wasting his time. I've always assumed my penis is about average when it comes to length and width. However, he looked alarmingly unfazed, as if it was no bigger than that of the typical penis enlargement patient. To my horror, he then pulled on some latex gloves and started manhandling my member with all the expertise of a 16-year-old schoolgirl on her first date. Was he getting his revenge for my Dead Ringers question? At one point I actually cried out in pain. He then pulled out a tape measure and measured the length and width of my, by now, thoroughly demoralized little soldier. He read off the results in centimeters rather than inches, as if to cushion the blow.

"Yes, Mr. Young," he concluded, peeling off his gloves. "I can definitely do something for you."

Well, needless to say, I made my excuses and left. I told myself that even if my penis didn't quite measure up in its flaccid state, it was more than adequate when it was angry. And I bet the two Dr. Viels are the inspiration for the twin gynecologists in Dead Ringers.