Sunday, February 04, 2018


1-
You know,…it is easy in America to take a very tiny sum like five hundred thousand dollars and turn it into three hundred million! So easy! But you know what? I don’t want to. Because eet means raping those poor fuckers the American public even more than they are already. You know what ees the difference between the European peasant and the American peasant? The American peasant eats sheet, wears sheet, watches sheet on TV, looks out of his window at sheet! How can we go on raping them and giving them more sheet to buy!
2-
Omygod, I think, this is the man who dragged Cambodia into the Vietnam War, but of course I say nothing, even when a waitress comes by to ask what we want to eat.

“What’s on the menu?” asks Kissinger, and I can barely restrain myself from shrieking, “What’s on the menu, Henry? Would that be Operation Menu?

Instead I obsequiously offer to go and fetch some nibbles. With success comes compromise, and it’s amazingly easy to forget two million massacred Cambodians as one is passing around the cheese straws.
Context

The first passage above is "an unnamed Italian art dealer" in NY, as quoted by Tina Brown; the second is from a memoir by Rupert Everett, used by the author of the review as a comparison and model of what a chatty jet set memoir should be. I'm not sure he's fully aware of the relation.

"Craig Brown has been a columnist for Private Eye since 1989." His first piece for the NYRB, courtesy of Ian Baruma.

According to Wikipedia, Everett is a former sex worker, supporter of legalized prostitution, opponent of gay marriage and Starbucks, and a patron of the British Monarchist Society.
He's there, [now archive.org] right between Andrea Leadsom and Boris Johnson, just above John Barrowman.

a gentleman never lets politics get in the way of a friendship etc.

new tag for Aristocrats.

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