Sex and the city

It’s patronising, sexist and just plain wrong to see Hillary Clinton as the long-suffering wife of the reprobate Bill. The woman is a reprobate in her own right. She’s not a gangster’s moll but a made member of the gang.

But that doesn’t mean we should let Catholic fascists diss her at will.

A report last month from Catholics for a Free Choice (CFFC) exposed shocking remarks made about Hillary by Austin Ruse, president of a group styling itself the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (CFHRI).

CFFC quotes Ruse saying that a priest from the Vatican’s UN delegation promised him “absolution if I just took her [Hillary Clinton] out – and not on a date.” Frances Kissling, president of CFFC, described the remark as “part of an increasingly war-like mindset that permeates the thinking and action of conservative groups at the United Nations…

“Considering increased global awareness about violence against women and the diplomatic demands of the UN, it is hard to believe that a member of the Roman Catholic clergy would even joke about such things”. (Actually, some of don’t find it hard to believe at all, but, for the moment, no matter.)

Kissling had received a tape of Ruse’s remarks, which came in an address in New York to the Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation, a far-Right organisation named after a Hungarian Nazi collaborator made a cardinal by another Nazi collaborator, Pius XII. CAFHRI was set up by Human Life International (HLI), an anti-abortion outfit closely associated with “pro-life” organisations in Ireland. HLI constantly proclaims that the “abortion industry” is run by Jews – a claim echoed last year in an interview with a Scottish newspaper by Bernadette Smyth, leader of HLI’s Irish associate, Precious Life.

The reference to taking Hillary Clinton out might be dismissed as a mere mis-pitched insult were it not for a tendency within the “pro-lifers” which openly advocates the murder of doctors and others who support women’s right to choose. We were reminded of how serious and sometimes close to home these crazies are when James Kopp, wanted for the 1998 murder of Dr. Barnett Slepian in Buffalo, New York, was arrested a fortnight ago in Britanny. He had spent more than a year on the run in Ireland.

Irish “pro-life” groups denied that they had helped Kopp stay ahead of the law.

“We’d be the first to hand him over to the authorities”, claimed John Smyth of the Pro-Life Campaign.

“People involved in abortion violence are never in touch with mainstream groups in any country”, said Justin Barrett of Youth Defence.

It’s hard to know how mainstream an adolescent zealot like Barrett would consider the Vatican to be. But, clearly, some Vatican representatives don’t see abortion violence as entirely anathema. More a matter to be made a joke of. Assuming that the Vatican priest quoted by Ruse was making a joke...

We are not about to change our

mind about Hillary Clinton. But given the choice between the fraudster

from Arkansas on the one hand and this gang of “pro-life” anti-semites on the other, we say: Let’s hear it for Hillary!

The only thing anybody needs to know is that nobody knows anything.

So said William Goldman in the funniest, truest (and just recently republished) book ever written about movies, “Adventures in the Screen Trade”.

Goldman had spent a working life in Hollywood, wrote Butch Cassidy..., The Stepford Wives, All The President’s Men, had a pair of Oscars for bookends on his mantlepiece. So he knew what he was talking about. Which is not to say he knew anything.

He reckoned that of all the hustlers and hype-meisters, studio bosses and bankable stars he’d done business with, none knew any of the things which it’s vital to know in the movie capital of the world. Such as what made one film hot and another not, or whether the commercial success of a Roman epic, say, would prove a once-off aberration or the start of a new trend. Everybody whose job required them to appear to know everything actually knew nothing. That’s all anybody needed to know, Goldman advised.

Same thing with capitalism. Read the finance pages of the Dublin broadsheets or listen to the chaps in striped-shirted accents pontificating on

drive-time radio shows, and try to

work out what they are saying about the health of the Tiger Economy. Will it be boom or bust this time next year? And if so, why? Tune in tomorrow and learn from experts that whatever’s going to happen will have come closer by the day.

Or tune instead to CNN for a daily dose of fixed-grin forecasters learnedly explaining that last month’s dip in the Dow-Jones index presages a slide into outright recession or, alternatively, amounts to a bottoming-out before an inevitable surge upwards towards hitherto undreamed of stock-market heights.

Or listen on BBC 24 to every commentator in Europe forecasting that plummeting prices on Wall Street will assuredly drag London and Frankfurt down, too, or, just as inevitably, send European stock values soaring as Euro-business banquets on the carcass of the US economy.

One of the reasons there are no answers to any of these questions is that nobody knows why the Dow-Jones dipped in the first place. Just as nobody knows why the stock market crashed in 1929, and crashed again in 1987.

In a book published last month, Towards Rational Exuberance: The Evolution of the Modern Stock Market, Mark Smith of Goldman Sachs, one of the weathervane price-watchers of Wall Street, examines the 1929 experience in close detail and observes that, just before prices collapsed, not a single commentator was predicting that any such thing would happen. And the commentators, he argues, were absolutely right. There was no reason whatever, just before prices collapsed, to believe that prices were going to collapse.

Smith quotes Yale economist Irving Fisher’s thesis (not intended flippantly: Prof. Fisher didn’t do flippant) that “The market went down because it went down”.

Likewise the crash of ’87 was not predicted before it happened, nor were the reasons for it amenable to rational explanation afterwards. “It seemed to occur without any reason”, an Economist editorial mused last month. “The Dow fell by 23 percent on a day when there was no news”.

It happened because it happened.

On March 23rd, the American Federal Reserve – the US equivalent of a central bank – cut interest rates by half a percent. Fed boss Alan Greenspan, the guru of all gurus in these matters, explained that this would perk the ailing market up no end. The market reacted by taking a fit of the staggers, and looked green around the gills and distinctly groggy for a few days. At the time of writing, reports say it is sitting up in bed and taking a little light nourishment, being kept under constant observation.

Then there’s Japan. It’s only the day before yesterday Japan was being held out as a brilliant example to lazy uncompetitive sods like ourselves. Disciplined, motivated work-folk cheerfully coming on like robots for 12-hour shifts without a break, and that after a half hour’s formation feng shui in the public park before sun-up.

Now all of a sudden, Japan is a basket case. Half the country’s businesses are technically bankrupt. Interest rates have been reduced to zero. The Economist pronounces that this “is still not bold enough”. Which would seem to mean that minus interest rates are what’s needed. Except that it obviously doesn’t mean this at all since The Economist goes on to predict that such a move would be sheer madness and for a certainty would matters worse.

We could all sit back and enjoy this latest episode in the long-running global hit-and-miss known to regular readers of this space as The Flummoxing of the Flippertygibbets were it not for the fact that it’s the plain people who feel the pain in lost jobs, repossessed homes and worthless savings when-and-if the system comes a serious cropper.

A good enough reason surely for us to ponder the fact that we live in a mad, mad, mad, mad world (Stanley Kramer, 1963) and begin seriously to entertain revolutionary thoughts of

sanity.