New York
That Kim Kardashian dame being fined by the Securities and Exchange Commission for a “pump and dump” scheme should help add victimhood to her other assets. Everyone in this country revels in being a victim, or so it seems when watching the news or reading the papers. Here’s our own Jeremy Clarke, as ill as it is possible to be, and what we get is his brave and wonderful column every week, never complaining about how unfair it is, but expressing how lucky he feels to have Catriona taking care of him, and so on.
I was telling a friend about this, in a deliberately loud voice, hoping that some wise guy would take exception and confront me, but no such luck. Victims would rather cry than fight, and everyone here in the Bagel is a victim — rich, poor, black, white, men, women, young and old. The latest victim is one Jamie Fiore Higgins, whose memoir of Money and Misogyny at Goldman Sachs I did not buy and will not read because it’s too ridiculous and boring.
So how do I know anything about her alleged victimhood? By reading a book review in a trash newspaper, that’s how. Higgins worked at Goldman Sachs from 1998 to 2016, a long enough time, I guess, for her to become a victim. She’s astonished to discover two colleagues having sex on the premises while she was cramming for a presentation.
And it gets worse: more trauma and more victimhood. She finds cocaine in the office bathroom, something I have to admit would also traumatize me, and in fact it has done so in the past. And there are crude jokes during the office Christmas party. No wonder 32.8 percent of American adults last year — according to the July issue of The Spectator World — suffered from depression. Crude jokes, coke in bathrooms, “writhing and moaning in the back of a car with an older executive”; if stuff like that is not victim-making, then I don’t know what is.
Never mind. I’m also a victim, with my old friend Scott McConnell writing to the Speccie stating that I scribbled an untruth. Why would I do that? I originally financed the American Conservative and gave equal one-third shares to Pat Buchanan, Scott and myself. I wrote that Scott wished to distance himself from Pat. We argued over the telephone about it. Of course Scott liked Pat, but he also wanted to please the neocons who saw Pat as the devil. Twenty years on, it’s not important any more, but it’s a Rashomon situation (a Japanese film in which each character has a different version of true events).
True victims are the Sacklers, whose name has been removed from the V&A Sackler courtyard. The Sacklers are those nice guys who gave us OxyContin, caused 500,000 deaths, paid a couple of billion in fines and kept ten billion for themselves. Now that’s what I call real victimhood. And it’s worse for men and boys, in the Land of the Depraved, or so a new book and newspaper reports tell us. Political and economic decisions have made American life brutal for boys and men, thunders an asinine headline in the Bagel Times. Perhaps if left-wing American women would stop using the phrase “toxic masculinity” for everything that’s wrong on this planet, the boys would not feel as vulnerable as they seem to at the moment. If American boys and men are in crisis and consider themselves victims, there is one sure way of rectifying the situation: force strident left-wing journalists to shut up, and hey presto.
Real victims such as those who paid exorbitant amounts for 1776, the revival of the wonderful 1969 musical about the birth of this nation, remain uncomplaining, but dumbfounded and confused. Women, transgender and nonbinary actors are cast as the Founding Fathers, including a pregnant Thomas Jefferson. I am told that a few of the small audience needed help after watching the play. Oh yes, also-ran beauties in the Miss USA beauty contest are also victims and crying rather loudly about it. The loss has left them humiliated, all fifty of them, but I’m glad Miss Texas won, it’s the best state in the union by far.
Again never mind. Things have got so bad even The Donald is now a victim. The Mar-a-Lago raid was banana republic stuff, and politically engineered. At dinner last week chez my friends Pepe and Emilia Fanjul I had a good chat with Blaine Trump, ex-wife of The Donald’s brother. Blaine is a nice woman who doesn’t stick the knife in. But she made it clear that The Donald does not take advice kindly. He listens only to his instincts, which would be fine if he were, say, Margaret Thatcher about the Falklands and the miners, or Ronald Reagan about the Soviet Union and the Cold War. But he’s not. They’re afraid of him and they won’t stop until they jail him.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.
