GSTAAD—Dinner parties are no longer verboten here, so I posed a question to some youngsters my son had over: Did any of them feel morally entitled to their privilege? The problem with discussing privilege is it turns in circles, original thoughts get lost, and what emerges says more about those conversing than the subject at hand. Ditto when I posed the question. There were no straightforward answers. Let’s face it: ...
GSTAAD—According to a little bird Boris has gone from brilliant to bawd, and according to me this village has gone from unlivable to perfect in one easy week. The slopes are empty, the snow is excellent, the restaurants now take reservations, and the slobs are visible but not dominant in town. If April is the cruelest month according to T.S. Eliot, January is the nicest month according to yours truly. The liver has a break, ...
GSTAAD—Who was it who said good manners had gone the way of black-and-white TV? Actually it was yours truly after watching the slobs parading up and down Gstaad’s main street. That was last year, but the bad news is that this year Slobbovia has come to stay. Mind you, Alexandra and I had planned to have fifty friends for a party to celebrate the fifty years of my enslavement, but Mister Omicron arrived and put a damper on ...
A revisionist-historian-anthropologist-anarchist, whose name is not important because his works are based on personal assumptions and prejudices, insists in a book he co-wrote before his recent death that agriculture was to blame for the sorry state humanity finds itself in at present. According to the departed, hunter-gatherers lived happily in bands, then agriculture was invented, and that led to surpluses, population growth, ...
GSTAAD—It is hard to imagine we have reached the year 2022 and still impose completely irrelevant restrictions on each other. By “we” I mean those of us in the supposedly enlightened West, where silliness, jealousy, cruelty, and wokeness rule the roost. I’ll begin with the Chinese virus that has contrived to dominate the headlines even more than Boris Johnson and Meghan Markle put together. I got Covid following my ...
A few weeks after Friedrich Nietzsche bragged to an admirer that he had completed a ruthless attack on our Lord, he collapsed, had convulsions, shouted like a madman, and never recovered his faculties again. It was the autumn of 1888. He was 44 years old, his books had just begun to be noticed, and he lived for a decade longer, empty-eyed, silent, and entirely unaware of the fame that was about to engulf him. Was his tragic ...
Imagine a European country today in which a newspaper of its most populous city launches a totally mendacious project reinterpreting its past. The practice was perfected during the old communist system that ruled Romania, Hungary, Poland, and the rest of the Soviet satellites. But it is no longer possible now that the old continent has rediscovered freedom. The place where such a big lie is taking place is right here in New ...
NEW YORK—It’s party time in the Bagel, and it’s about time, too. Good restaurants and elegant nightclubs are now a thing of the past, at least here in the Bagel, so it’s home sweet home for the poor little Greek boy, for dinner, drinks, and even some dancing at times. Here in my Bagel house my proudest possessions are my three Oswald Birley pictures. One is enormous and covers the whole wall of the entrance hall. The ...
Jon Gruden, an NFL head coach with a $100 million contract from the Las Vegas Raiders, was recently forced to resign after making what the Ebony Times called racist, homophobic, and misogynistic remarks in emails over the past twelve years. Shock horror, pro footballers making misogynistic remarks, why I never heard of such a thing, it’s definitely un-American. Call the midwife, or better yet, the fuzz. Gruden won a Super ...
NEW YORK—Will the American media ever face a reckoning for its fake Russia collusion and anti-Trump hysteria that lasted close to four years and was the main weapon of the lefty media against the Donald? Yes, if you believe in Santa Claus, as in Claus von Bulow, but otherwise not on your life. The left lies nonstop and when it gets caught it lies some more. Do not expect the Bagel Times to ever apologize or even correct its ...
NEW YORK—I’ve never met anyone named Othello, certainly not in Venice nor in Cyprus, but perhaps there are men by that name in Africa. The only one referred to as Othello, but always behind his back, was the greatest of all Russians, Alexander Pushkin: “As jealous as Othello but twice as dark,” was what les mauvaises langues in court called the great poet. Pushkin had a great-grandfather general who was Ethiopian. ...
NEW YORK CITY—Don’t let anyone tell you the Bagel is worse off than Kabul, where three people were recently shot dead by Islamic gunmen for playing music at a wedding. No sirree, people over here are shot every day and night, but not for playing music at a wedding. Give New York credit where it’s due. The city is a bloody horror if you’re living way uptown, way downtown, or in the Bronx, while the rest of Gotham is ...
There’s a narrow stretch of Chelsea south of the King’s Road from Oakley Street to Ormond Gate that reminds me of postwar London when I first came here with my dad. Names like Margaretta Terrace, St. Loo Avenue, Alpha and Robinson Streets bring back sweet memories of youthful innocence and desire. London back then was big on rep but dead last in comfort. Much later, during the end of the ’50s, Queen’s Club held the ...
I find most films nowadays as fascinating as a lengthy history of orthodontics, but then I’m spoiled rotten having watched old black-and-white pearls such as From Here to Eternity, The Asphalt Jungle, and Our Man Godfrey. When Chariots of Fire came out some forty years ago I went bananas. My uncle had competed in both the ’32 and ’36 Olympics in the hurdles, and my father was on the relay team. Athletics back then were ...
Back in the days when skin tone was not a criterion for worthy art, I used to attend the opera quite regularly, especially when Mozart, Verdi, or Puccini works were on offer. I mention skin tone because a black American so-called academic, Philip Ewell, claims that Western classical music is rooted in racism. Phil also thinks that Ludwig van Beethoven is kinda useless, and that our reverence for classical music is just an ...
NEW YORK—“The City of London Is Hiding the World’s Stolen Money,” screams a Bagel Times headline, as bogus a message as that caricature of a newspaper’s other captions of an antiwhite, anti-cop, anti-male, and anti-Conservative platform. (“Bid the binary goodbye,” is another pearl.) Not that anyone takes the Bagel Times seriously any longer since it decided that whites are very bad people, and that it will cover ...
