This, That, a Bit of Madness, and a Night at the Beach

My heart has not been in the blogging business. I have been playing with my dogs and taking care of our new digs.

The whole political scene in this country has gone mad, and it is a madness that was clearly foreseeable. As I said before, one did not need to be Nostradamus to see what was going to happen to the United States and the West when the ultimate fraud became President, January 2009.

The haters of Western civilization and the low information public services-consuming munchkins got what they wanted: a President just like them. The results are everywhere to be seen from the streets of Missouri to the shores of the Black Sea; from our southern border to the arc of murderous insanity that now rules the fates of millions from Nigeria to Pakistan; from decaying blue California to rising Red China. We have a post-USA world, nay, a post-West world, and it is a miserable place.

We have a President with no concept of leadership. The world watches as he throws away our victories in Iraq and Afghanistan while he blithely, oozing bored condescension, tells that same world that--Surprise!--the USA has no strategy for dealing with the madmen of ISIS, but that--yawn--it is "a manageable problem." The real threat, of course, comes from global warming, er, uh global climate change . . . and the Washington Redskins need to change their name.

So, what did I do to keep my sanity? I escaped.

The wife and I went to a dinner on the beach in Malibu to hang for a bit with the hated "one percent." Nice party at a private club on the Pacific. Beautiful night, clear sky, zillions of stars, and steak and lobster and shrimp and oysters and, and . . . The party, given by our stockbroker, was attended by a few dozen evil rich white people. I was the only ex-government employee; the others, apparently, had had real jobs and created real wealth--I think, but I don't really know for sure.

They seemed mildly amused on hearing that I had spent some 34 years in the State Department; not very interested, but amused. One asked if that meant I knew which fork to use with the lobster. They never asked how I had gotten an invite to the party. There was even a slightly faded, with a lot of plastic surgery, Hollywood actress who had been "A-List" in the 1970s and 1980s, but was now a B-lister --although she still works regularly on a daytime soap pretending to be a doctor. She had zero interest in foreign affairs but expressed some passing confused "interest" in the environment--I couldn't make heads or tails of it. I didn't have the heart to say I had never seen her show.

The rich are different. Almost nobody talked about money or what they do now or had done in the past. We generally talked about cars, dogs, the weather, and the hoax of "rehab." A pleasant few hours in an apolitical Gatsby bubble. At  the end, they squeezed into exotic cars and sped off to Beverly Hills and Pacific Palisades; the Diplowife and I clambered into our 2010 Chevy Tahoe and rumbled off to a more modest zip code. It reminded us a bit of the three thousand or so diplomatic receptions we had attended while overseas, except the people on the beach in Malibu were much less pretentious.

That's my story and I am sticking to it.