New York

Back in the Big Bagel once again preparing for the greatest debate ever, one that will decide the fate of the western world once and for all. In the meantime, the mother of my children is doing all the heavy lifting back in Gstaad, moving to my last address ever, that of my new farm, La Renarde. One of those American feminists remonstrated with me not long ago for making some chauvinist remark — on purpose, I might add —just to get her goat. My, my, how easy it has become to get that goat.

In a 1939 film, Dodge City, Errol Flynn plays a Kansas marshal circa 1872 who visits a local newspaper and sees the virginal and sweet Olivia de Havilland writing away at her desk. He’s keen on her and sits down and asks her what she’s doing in such an insalubrious place. She demands to know why he asked what he did. ‘It’s undignified,’ says Errol. ‘You should be home sewing buttons for some lucky man’s uniform.’ If memory serves, I saw that movie with my mother in around 1946, and she agreed with Flynn — not that she liked his wicked, wicked ways in real life.

I watched bits of the film last week on TV and loved the part I just described. Boy oh boy, show me a producer or director running a line like that today and I’ll show you a dead man. They’d probably lynch the actor, too, especially if it were Errol Flynn. Hillary, you’ve come a long way, baby. Gender-neutral bathrooms are on the rise in the Home of the Perverse, and woe betide any old guy who challenges the right of men to become women and women to become men, as well as men who become women but then change their minds and become men again but then change… oh, the hell with it, you know what I mean.

Incidentally, did you know who the first woman to run for president in the Home of the Depraved was? No, not the black congresswoman Shirley Chisholm in 1972, but the comedienne Gracie Allen in 1940, when FDR won his illegal third term. Gracie was married to George Burns, also a professional comedian, who had great success with the fairer sex. Well into his nineties, he was reverently asked on air who was the worst lay he ever had. ‘Fantastic,’ he whispered back. Gracie’s party was called the Surprise Party and she even held a convention where she nominated herself. When George told her that she would make a fool of herself and that presidents were born to be presidents, she answered, ‘What about me? Was I hatched?’ When the press asked her why she wanted to be president, she answered that she’d like to live in the White House. And unless you’re president you can’t visit at will.

Now we’re finally about to get a female president, unless The Donald pulls it off in November. Here’s my fearless forecast: Trump will win the popular vote but Hillary will prevail in the Electoral College, hence we will have the first female president. She will win every Hispanic, black and Asian vote, plus the gays and hipsters; the dummies like myself will go for Trump. If, by a long shot, Trump triumphs, it will be the first time a billionaire moves into public housing.

By the way, did you know that 71 per cent of black American women who are employed are the primary wage earners in their households, as opposed to 48 per cent of white women? It shows that our black male cousins ain’t that dumb. That’s why I’ve got the old princess back home working to move my stuff while I’m enjoying myself in the Bagel: let the little woman work while I stay home, get a bit high and chase some young pussy.

Black women in America have a great thing going for them. Minority-owned businesses in New York get more contracts from the city than white-owned businesses, and by a two-to-one margin. No white person dares complain.

I feel funny about women. They can never do anything wrong as far as I’m concerned. I cannot even hate Hillary; she did, after all, stick by her man. Norman Mailer wrote that people can win at love only when ‘they are ready to lose everything they bring to it of ego, position, or identity’. He thought love was more stern than war, and that men and women could survive only if they reached the depths of their own sex ‘down within themselves’, whatever that means. ‘They have to deliver themselves over to the unknown.’

Talk about existential statements; Norman certainly made them. He was accused non-stop by hysterical females of portraying patriarchal, male-dominated sex. What is patriarchal, male-dominated sex? Man on top, man horny, man pursuing? Sex is the presence of grace, the voluntary surrender of ego, the lust that is hopeless for some and divine for others. Just think, the first great war in history took place over a woman. Would the Iliad exist if Paris had run off with a son of Menelaus?

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