At ten minutes past four on the afternoon of April 28, 1945, a plumber named Moretti shot and killed a prematurely aged man and a youngish woman who was not wearing any underwear in front of the Villa Belmonte near Lake Como. Next to Moretti—who was later tried for theft and other misdeeds—was one Colonel Valerio, whose submachine gun had jammed while he was trying to shoot the defenseless couple. Millions of words have ...
GSTAAD—OK, sports fans! The Davos irrelevance is over, Gstaad is covered with the white stuff, and in St. Moritz the Russian crooks are making a Stalingrad-like siege on the town’s ultra-expensive boutiques. Let’s start with Davos, where publicity-seeking Shylocks such as George Soros pretended to be against income inequality. What phonies these bums are, just as bad as the Occupy protesters but with two or three private ...
It wasn’t Italy’s finest hour. Not even Gabrielle D’Annunzio—poet, patriot, propagandist, and proto-fascist—could spin this into a maritime Titanic-like drama. Once the Costa Concordia hit a rock off the Tuscan coast, the passengers and crew acted like cowards. This much we know. But knowing Italy—a country that successfully switched sides in both World Wars—the truth will never emerge. Human nature’s eternal ...
Edmund Wilson was America’s premier man of letters during the middle of the 20th century. The Wound and the Bow, To the Finland Station, and Memoirs of Hecate County are still in print, as are his journals about the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. He was a literary critic par excellence, a friend of both Scott Fitzgerald (whose death at 44 shook him greatly, as Wilson was only a year older) as well as Hemingway, who counted Wilson as ...
GSTAAD—“Mick Flick Invites you to the Roaring Twenties,” read the black-and-white invitation card. A flapper and a Rudolph Valentino type in white tie and tails flirted in the old-fashioned manner—she dreamlike, fluttering her eyes upward, he looking swarthy and passionate while standing over her. In the background, a roomful of swells tripped the light fantastic. It is rare for a party to live up to expectations, ...
GSTAAD—By the time you read this it will be mid-January and all your New Year’s resolutions will have gone the way of good manners. At least I hope so. Resolutions can be dangerous to one’s health and a hazard to one’s happiness. Here in snow-covered Gstaad—we’ve had more snow than there’s cocaine in South America—the green monster of envy has reared its hideous face. Of the seven deadly sins, I only recognize ...
When I was last in the Big Bagel (as I call Noo Yawk), a policeman who’d been awarded countless commendations for bravery over 22 years of front-line service was allegedly murdered in cold blood by a black drug dealer. Officer Peter Figoski was 47 and had raised his four daughters on his own. His last act of duty was to respond to a robbery in Brooklyn, where the fleeing black thug reputedly shot him in the face. The accused, ...
GSTAAD—For a cultural pessimist such as myself, things have never looked rosier. With economic depression, unemployment, environmental disasters, and endless armed conflicts, modern civilization’s final destruction is nigh. As a prophet of pessimism, I can hardly conceal my glee at being right, but I pray nonstop that I’m wrong. That there’s a cultural decay in a declining West is hardly worth debating. A powerless and ...
Seeing as how man didn’t emerge from the caves until something like 6,000 years ago, thirty-five years is a mere bagatelle in the grand scheme of things. Still, man’s day-to-day folly is always more fun than grand schemes. In September 1976 I went to Torino to buy a Fiat car for my daughter’s mother straight from Fiat’s principal shareholder Gianni Agnelli. He not only gave me a very good price but also had me stay in ...
I flew to Delphi to consult with the oracle, and the old girl had a lot to say about 2012. Pythia, her real name, is getting on in years—she’s around 2,500 years old. Despite her lifestyle—she smokes exotic cheroots, gets high, and then is able to see the future—she still makes sense. Pythia originally earned fame by predicting that Achilles, a supposed immortal, would not make it back from the shores of Troy. When I ...
A reader has registered surprise that I am not an atheist. I am surprised that he’s surprised. Theism, with its vision of an orderly universe and a moral creature created in God’s image, makes sense to scientists far more than the crap peddled by self-promoters such as Dawkins and the recently departed Hitchens. I realize it’s not considered polite to speak ill of the dead, but Christopher Hitchens did it most of the ...
My end-of-the-year Christmas party was the best yet. The festivities began at 10PM and ended somewhat hazily around 6 the next morning. My son JT provided the youth and I provided the gravitas. Actually it was the other way around. I provided the brawn—judo and karate experts—and he provided the artsy-fartsy types from Brooklyn with lotsa pretty girls. Cauliflower brains mixed freely with cauliflower ears. My buddy Michael ...
Let’s start with the bad news: In honor of China’s economic rise, a Chinese-looking woman served as Christmas Grinch here in the States. The sourpuss teacher up in Nanuet ruined the Christmas spirit for a class full of seven- and eight-year-olds when she told them that there is no Santa Claus and that the presents under their trees did not come from the North Pole but were put there by their parents. It’s outrageous that ...
Most of us Westerners are a happy bunch despite our countries being wracked by debt, rising prices, and job losses. Still, I know 4,700 people with no sense of humor whatsoever. I refer to those hardy souls who complained to the BBC concerning on-air remarks about shooting the strikers. What made me laugh out loud was Ed Miliband posing as Labour leader rather than the human biohazard he really is, complaining in his nasal ...
NEW YORK—Today’s protesters could learn something from Sophocles. A man before his time (496-406 BC), Sophocles was a schoolmate of mine, although he was a few years older. Antigone, among his greatest plays, is one that makes us think not only about politics, but also about what sort of ethics drive us to take a stance. If any of you missed it when he first put it on Broadway, here’s how it goes: The two sons of Oedipus ...
In a recent New York Times book review, Henry Kissinger says that according to Dean Acheson, “leaving high office is like the end of a great love affair—a void left by the disappearance of heightened sensibilities and focused concerns.” Dr. K. should know. He is famous for saying that “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” He was a swinger in his younger days and knew quite a few beauties in his time. He then married ...
