Fascist the Snowman; Fat People on the March; Channel Crossing; Start Smoking

Taki Le Maitre Fascist the Snowman Here's something really funny to start you off for the new year: An English art historian, Dr. Tricia Cusack (some doc, some historian), recently produced a 15-page report attacking the snowman as racist and sexist. Yes, the snowman! Did you get all that? The report suggests that ethnic minorities find these pure white snowmen very threatening. Poor ethnic minorities! As if they didn't have enough troubles already. Now those big, bad snowmen are making their lives even worse. In her report, the half-wit suggested that snowmen should be more representative. "I'd like to see more female snowmen, and more ethnic diversity." What she didn't offer was how white snow could be fashioned into ethnically diverse snowpeople. (Perhaps in Switzerland and Austria, where cowdung easily mixes with the abundant snow...)

And it gets better. Snowmen reinforce "a gendered spatial-social system" that sounds impressive but is actually "wicked." In other words, and always according to this cretin, snowmen suggest that a woman's place is in the domestic sphere, while men's is in the workplace. (Gee whiz, I wish I were an academic and able to write such crap and get paid for it.) "His presence is a reminder of masculine dominance, order and surveillance? with its bulbous, over-indulged body, phallic carrot nose and black unindividualized eyes [it] has obvious elements of the grotesque..." The doc obviously does not like snowmen. She would rather have kids find a way to create skinny, black snowwomen instead.

Oh well, it could be worse. Or could it? The pipe the little ones used to stick in the poor snowman's mouth has long ago gone the way of high-button shoes and good manners. Smoking, remember, is a no-no, and now it's the snowman's turn. Although not an academic by a longshot, here's my take on the egregious sexist and racist snowman: Snowmen are white because?and this is a world exclusive?snow more often than not is white, and a female snowman is harder to make because bigger hips and breasts are impossible to model unless the snow is frozen. Mind you, I don't expect academics to understand such esoteric data, but what the hell, I'll spread the word nonetheless.

Heard enough? Just before Christmas, an English lady bought a traditional Christmas creche for her grandchildren, only to discover that Joseph was missing. When she inquired at the store she was assured that this was intentional. "It is to encourage the idea of a single parent," came the reply.

I have a friend in New York who comes from Lithuania. His name is Alex Sepkus, and he is a very talented jewelry designer. His stuff is sold at Bergdorf Goodman, among countless other megastores, but Alex is not the average designer. He happens to have been brought up under the most oppressive system known to man (sorry, also to woman), which was communism. I recently had a drink with him in New York and we talked about political correctness. "I see many similarities between p.c. and what we had to go through," he said. His father-in-law was a poet who wrote against totalitarianism. He was found dead one night, all his poems and manuscripts gone. They have never been found. "Just as the Wall came down and the evil empire collapsed," said Alex, "those who like to dominate others found a new way to do it, political correctness."

Hear, hear. Joking about snowmen aside, p.c. is a persistent form of untruthfulness. It's about pretending that things are different from what they are. It means adjusting what one says to what one thinks ought to be true, not what one knows actually is true. Liberty depends on memory, and cutting people off from their pasts and discrediting our ancestors are the chief techniques of modern tyrants, the politically correct.

Take the government propaganda backed by federal laws forcing people to be ashamed and frightened to even acknowledge the slightest of differences between the races. The power of p.c. has corrupted the media to such an extent that even conservative newspapers are full of odious drivel about hate crimes and diversity. All crimes are hate crimes, but the pleonasm comes in handy for those who insist the white man is a devil. Christian communities are being attacked by the liberal culture via television and the movies, while our colleges and universities have been reduced to "assembly-line factories that turn out sensitive, nonjudgmental anti-intellectuals, the worst of whom are hired to keep the machinery running" (Thomas Fleming in Chronicles).

It all has to do with you-know-what: p.c.c., politically correct cowardice. Maybe as his last act Clinton and his gang should outlaw snowmen.

 

Toby Young The London Desk My Nightmare I don't think I've mentioned this before, but I'm writing a book about the five years I spent in New York: How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. As the title implies, it's a humorous, self-deprecating account of my unsuccessful attempt to conquer the Big Apple. Now, I know what you're thinking: "Any schmuck can say he's writing a book. I'll believe it when I see it." Well, I don't blame you for being skeptical?the theme of the book is what a total fuckup I am?but I actually have a publisher. I sold the British and Commonwealth rights to Little, Brown last September on the basis of a 25,000-word proposal, and my deadline for turning in the manuscript is March 1. If everything goes to plan, How to Lose Friends and Alienate People will be published in Britain next autumn. At the moment I'm recovering from every author's worst nightmare: the discovery that someone else has written exactly?and I mean exactly?the same book. My nemesis is a man called Robert Kelsey and his book (a humorous, self-deprecating account of his unsuccessful attempt to...well, you get the general idea) is called The Pursuit of Happiness: Overpaid, Oversexed and Over There. A financial journalist for seven years, Kelsey joined a British investment bank and ended up spending a year in its New York office where, to judge from the blurb in the publisher's catalog, he didn't have a very good time. "Everything's great?except the office has moved to a sleepy suburb," it says. "Except his job disappears under the tide of a global financial crisis. Except that New York is no longer an urban hell?more a yuppie Ralph Lauren nightmare. And the women all follow The Rules and expect the man to pay for dinner, always."

To add to my problems, Kelsey is exactly 12 months ahead of me. Believe it or not, The Pursuit of Happiness is already out in paperback over here. Bantam Books published it in the UK last October. Fortunately?and this is why I'm recovering?it's gone almost completely unnoticed. I say "almost" but that qualification may be redundant since I haven't seen a single review of it in a national newspaper and I've been monitoring the books pages quite closely. Indeed, for all I know, this article is the first to ever mention the wretched book. I just hope no British literary editors are reading "Taki's Top Drawer" this week.

Just before Christmas I picked up a copy of The Pursuit of Happiness and?thank the Lord!?it isn't any good. Now, I can hear the skeptical reader again, this time thinking, "Well, he would say that, wouldn't he?" so, in order to prove it I'm going to quote the opening paragraph in full:

New York is the Coke of cities. It's Mickey Mouse, Marilyn Monroe, Microsoft. No other town can brand an image like this one. You could shout "New York" in the ear of a grub-eating Polynesian and he'd reply, "Liberty, yellow cabs, skyscrapers, hot dogs." Either that or he'd kill you with a poisoned dart. To me, New York looked like one great big comic-book canvas for adventure.

What's wrong with this paragraph? Take the third sentence: "No other town can brand an image like this one." What he means is that New York has a powerful brand identity, but by putting it this way he makes it sound like New York is an advertising agency that is particularly good at branding?"No other agency can brand an image like this one." Then there's the stuff about the "grub-eating Polynesian." I don't know whether any Polynesians eat grubs and I don't suppose Kelsey has bothered to check, but if one did, and you happened to shout "New York" in his ear, it's very unlikely that he'd respond by trotting out a list of the characteristics he associates with the city. It's even more unlikely that he'd respond in English. Presumably, this is all just a set-up for the joke that Kelsey delivers in the fifth line: "Either that or he'd kill you with a poisoned dart." Now, I don't know about you, but I don't find that particularly funny?and bear in mind it's the first joke in the book.

My book may not, in the end, be any funnier than Kelsey's, but I'm going to make damn sure that my opening joke is funnier than that one. Didn't anyone ever tell this guy that you have to hit your readers with a zinger in the first paragraph to get their attention?

Finally, there's the last sentence: "To me, New York looked like one great big comic-book canvas for adventure." In the trade, that's what we call a "mixed metaphor"?comic books aren't drawn on canvases?and it's a huge no-no, an example of sloppy writing Orwell gives in his famous essay "Politics and the English Language." It's symptomatic of the general lack of care Kelsey takes in the whole of the opening paragraph and, take my word for it, the rest of the book. Not to put too fine a point on it, the guy's a hack.

To be fair to Kelsey, The Pursuit of Happiness doesn't purport to be any great work of literature and it does contain one or two amusing stories. But the book suffers from the fact that he only spent a year in New York. Alexander Chancellor's book about the year he spent editing "Talk of the Town"?Some Times in America?is equally thin. It just isn't possible to gather enough material for a full-length book in so short a time. Kelsey should have written a 3000-word article for FHM and left it at that.

So, for the time being at least, I can rest easy. Though knowing my luck, The Pursuit of Happiness will become a huge sleeper hit, one of those real word-of-mouth successes, and How to Lose Friends and Alienate People will be dismissed as a feeble attempt to duplicate the winning formula. Christ, I hope not. We'll have to wait.

 

Claus von Bulow Feature Channel Crossing "London Bridge is falling down," goes the old nursery ditty with such an infuriatingly repetitive refrain that it has driven generations of parents mad. The Brits very sensibly therefore sold the damned old bridge to an American millionaire, who rebuilt it in a desert somewhere. Now Tony Blair, our photo-opportunistic prime minister, has thrown a new bridge across the Thames, and this bridge equally sensibly immediately started to fall down. In fairness I should say that it is visually a very pretty bridge indeed. It was meant to be a footbridge leading from St. Paul's Cathedral, Wren's masterpiece, to the almost equally stunning Tate Modern, the new 20th-century art museum on the opposite embankment. The trouble was that the designer, Norman Foster, and the engineers had not calculated the effect of thousands of pedestrian office workers marching in the rush hours, purposefully and in step. A thousand thighs swinging rhythmically gives quite a whoosh.

The British National Lottery, which is really a surreptitious tax on the poor, was supposed to provide funds, inter alia, for politically sensitive elitist causes, like the arts and the Millennium. The politicians therefore realized that the most uncontroversial buildings for the arts were cafeterias and lavatories. Man, even Kulturny Man, is, after all, just a digestive tract with an orifice at each end.

Every tourist should now make a special tour of London's art-oriented sanitation and comestible facilities. The fine Dulwich Picture Gallery now provides well-marked "nappy-changing rooms" where very youthful esthetes can retire after visiting the delightful Gerit Dou exhibition. The old inside courtyard of the Wallace Collection has now been converted into a giant restaurant for ladies-who-lunch, who can catch a glimpse of the Royal French furniture before munching on a salad leaf. The National Portrait Gallery is currently showing "Painting the Century," and its smart new penthouse restaurant is the in venue for food with a view.

The new Floral Hall at the Royal Opera House is a huge glass vault the size of Grand Central Terminal, and is milling every night with champagne-swilling investment bankers praising corporate patronage of Mozart. Roman emperors pacified the people with bread and circuses. Today's rulers just give us the plastic sandwiches and leave it to us to find the circuses on television. One wing of the grand Somerset House on the river has for a few years already been the home for the marvelous Courtauld collection, which also includes the Seilern pictures.

Thanks to Lord Rothschild, a former chairman of the National Gallery, another wing now houses a permanent, but revolving, exhibition of treasures from St. Petersburg's Hermitage. Yet another wing contains the Gilbert collection. Sir Arthur Gilbert was born in England but retired in America, where he made a fortune in real estate. His gift includes wonderful antique silver and a blinding collection of gem-encrusted gold boxes. Henry James said he could "stand a great deal of gold." I find it indigestible in such ostentatious quantity, but there is one small room I love: it is a replica of Sir Arthur's sunbaked and ormolu-glittering California office, where he sits in wax in a t-shirt and sneakers. In keeping with this endearing bit of kitsch is the installation of dozens of fountains spouting through the paving stones in the huge Somerset House courtyard.

Unfortunately, the government tax inspectors, who still occupy some of this huge palazzo, have decreed that the fountains may only spout about a foot high.

Janet Flanner was for more than 20 years the brilliant correspondent for The New Yorker in Paris. I cannot fit her stylish boots, but I have just spent a week in Paris and will tell you about it. If there was any doubt about me being a theater orgiast this will prove it: I saw eight plays in seven days! This included a Saturday matinee of Sartre's old picture of hell, Huit Clos, followed by Pirandello's last play, On Ne Sait Comment. The old Sicilian fantasist will outlast the sourpuss fellow-traveler, Jean-Paul, any day. The same praise, in a lighter vein, goes for a wonderful revival of Guitry's Le Nouveau Testament (nothing to do with Volume II of the Bible).

Sacha Guitry, who unfortunately dined with the wrong people during the last war, is now back in fashion. Several of his plays were revived in the course of the last year, and they have Guitry film festivals. Anyone who wants to hear French spoken with scintillating humor and elegance of diction can rent videos of his films and learn more than they ever will at a Berlitz language school. In the same vein was a delightful double bill by Jules Renard, the first one showing a regretful but necessary end to a love affair, the second one the beginning of a new one. The French do these things incomparably well.

They are also very good at revolutions. I witnessed this on the stage in a short play about the trial and execution of Robespierre, and, in a more verismo production, when I tried to get back to London. There were terrible hurricanes, so all planes were canceled, as were the splendid Channel tunnel trains and the ferries. I watched the employees of the French railways laughing with glee as octogenarians and babes in arms were huddled together at the Gare du Nord like Kosovo refugees. Old Robespierre would have approved. Happily I still had my room at the Travellers' Club.

 

George Szamuely The Bunker Start Smoking I am trying to adopt as many bad habits as possible before it's too late. In that spirit, I recently took up smoking. My teacher was my friend Alexis Trboyevich. It was a while before I got the hang of it. "You must inhale," she would insist. "Otherwise you won't enjoy the full benefits of the nicotine." She had a point. It comes as no surprise that scientists are now discovering that nicotine may not be so bad for you after all. According to a 1994 article in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, smokers are less likely to get ulcerative colitis?inflammation of the bowels?than nonsmokers. Indeed, the article claims, "the onset of colitis is often associated with the cessation of smoking." Recently, a Duke University Medical Center study found that nicotine helped Alzheimer's patients. Pharmaceutical companies are trying to develop nicotine medication for use against schizophrenia and depression.

Now, I am not saying that a pack a day will do you as much good as a two-mile run. On the other hand, I don't take the health warnings particularly seriously. The antismoking campaign, a noxious alliance of government and corporations, was from the start a giant scam to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich. It was not the shareholders of Philip Morris or R.J. Reynolds who were fleeced. They know how to look after themselves, and they have not gone poor. It was ordinary smokers, many who earned very little, who were forced to turn over an ever-larger share of their income to the state. Governments love sales taxes. They are not as readily noticeable as taxes on income. And their targets are usually the poor, who are unlikely to protest as vehemently as the rich.

More sinister was the role of the corporations. Anxious about the costs of providing their workforces with healthcare coverage, corporate managers launched a fierce campaign to compel their employees to lead healthy lives. It was not enough that they did not smoke in the workplace. They could not smoke outside the workplace. They could not drink. They had to maintain a proper diet. Ted Turner, for example, refused to hire smokers. A few years ago the Florida Supreme Court ruled that it was not a violation of privacy for an employer to ask a job applicant whether he had smoked over the previous 12 months. A desire to reduce health insurance costs, the Court argued, constituted reasonable grounds for not hiring someone.

The healthcare costs are ludicrously exaggerated. And deliberately so, for it provides the corporations with an excuse to intrude into their employees' personal lives. And it provides government with a basis to make a bogus financial claim. Smokers are not a net cost to society. The economist W. Kip Viscusi believes smokers will die before nonsmokers. Therefore, whatever the healthcare they may inflict on others during their lifetimes, these would be more than offset by the financial gains that arise from lower nursing-home costs, not to mention forgone retirement pensions and Social Security claims. As he calculates it: "Overall, smokers impose higher medical-care costs of 46 cents per pack; higher sick-leave costs of 1 cent per pack; greater life-insurance costs of 11 cents per pack; additional costs due to fires of 2 cents per pack; and forgone Social Security taxes on their earnings of 33 cents per pack? Smokers save society 20 cents per pack in nursing-home care and $1 per pack in terms of lower pension and Social Security costs. On balance, smokers save society 27 cents per pack from an insurance standpoint." And he is not even counting the taxes smokers pay, "which average 53 cents per pack of cigarettes."

But how much worse off are smokers as against nonsmokers? Interestingly, it is hard to get an answer to that question. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that 400,000 people die every year from smoking-related diseases. How it arrives at this figure has always been a bit of a mystery. For one thing, what exactly is a smoking-related disease? According to the CDC it is something a smoker is more likely to get than a nonsmoker. Thus if a smoker dies of heart disease, say, the CDC will count it as a smoking-related death. This means that other possible causes of death such as a family history of heart disease or chronic lack of exercise are resolutely ignored.

Moreover, the CDC does not like to tell us at what age these 400,000 died. The suggestion is they died young. Yet there is no evidence of this. Everyone dies of something. Dying of lung cancer at 75 is not the same as dying of it at 45. As a Cato Institute study pointed out: "Almost 255,000 of the smoking-related deaths?nearly 60 percent of the total?occurred at age 70 or above. More than 192,000 deaths?nearly 45 percent of the total?occurred at age 75 or higher. And roughly 72,000 deaths?almost 17 percent of the total?occurred at the age of 85 or above."

The CDC loves to cite meaningless statistics like, "Men who smoke increase their risk of death from lung cancer by more than 22 times and from bronchitis and emphysema by nearly 10 times." Well, it all rather depends on what the likelihood of nonsmokers dying from lung cancer is. If the chances are very small, then 22 times this number is still not a huge number.

"On average," the CDC claims, "smokers die nearly seven years earlier than nonsmokers." Seven years is by no means an insignificant number if true. On the other hand, it is a far cry from the doom-laden tales of the antismoking zealots. A 1991 RAND study claimed that smoking "reduces the life expectancy of a twenty-year-old by about 4.3 years." I think I can stand to lose 4.3 years from my life. As Harry Lime explained in The Third Man: "Leave the dead alone. They're not missing much, the poor suckers."