ORGY NEWS

BEING A GENTLEMAN of some standing and knowledge of the world, people often come to me and ask, "David, have you ever been involved in a sex orgy?" The short answer to this is, of course, "Yes", although it was only once, a long time ago, when I was an undergraduate at University College London. (Nothing of this sort ever took place during my later time in Magdalen College, Oxford.)

 

THE OCCASION WAS SOMEWHAT DISAPPOINTING, as one of the ladies fell asleep after drinking too much cider, and the other, who was my ladyfriend at the time, refused to have any sex because we had had a flaming row earlier when I had informed her of the impending party, to which she had not previously agreed.

 

IT IS THUS WITH GREAT ADMIRATION that I hear testimony today in a court in Lille, France, from Dominique Gaston André Strauss-Kahn, a former potential future president of the Republic of France and one-time Director of the International Monetary Fund, thus someone to whom one should look up, about his attending of "sex parties" involving as many as thirteen men and "at least" seven girls, more or less "four times per year", which is, in his words, "not very often at all".

 

I IMAGINE THAT EXPRESSIONS such as "often" can only really be comprehended in relation to what one expects "very often" or "seldom" to mean, and in that case M. Strauss-Kahn must be comparing to what he knows about other people's sex parties and how often those took place.

 

THERE IS SOMETHING BERLUSCONIESQUE in the unfortunate Strauss-Kahn's complaints that he did not know that the women involved were in fact prostitutes and that he was not sure where they came from, although the offices of the French prosecutor today announced that Strauss-Kahn knew what was going on when what was going down went down, as the children say today, and was actively involved in the procurement of ladies willing to participate in return for money. This is perhaps only one of the diferences between young students who can only afford bottles of cheap cider and multi-millionaires who have been living off the public purse for their entire lifetimes and have no idea what money really means.

UN VALLS A DEUX TEMPS

 

FRANCE HAS ALWAYS STRUGGLED to keep up with the more advanced countries in their pursuit of democracy, modernisation, equality and the well-being of their populations. I am not, of course, going to include the expression "pursuit of happiness" here, as the last thing any French citizen would ever wish for is happiness, given that they would be left with no raison d'être if a need to complain was removed from them.

 

BUT IN THE ABSENCE OF THE REALITY of being a modern cosmopolitan state, French statesmen have always had the inspiring ability to create an illusion of a modern cosmopolitan state, much in the manner of how the morose philosopher René Descartes managed to reduce the world to nothing and then build up a simulacrum of the same world and pretend it was real. Without ever leaving his bedroom. Which is an ideal state for a large number of Frenchmen, preferably when in the company of someone young and with whom to indulge in a little amourette.

 

IF FRENCH SOCIETY has been turning its back on the real issues de nos jours for some time now, then that time, it appears, has come to an end, as we now see that recognition of the déraciné condition of so many of those who live in France and should thus feel French is no more than an idée reçue that never became based on fact.

 

CURRENT FRENCH PRIME MINISTER Manuel Valls spoke valiantly last week in the wake of the murderous attack on a Parisian satirical magazine, stating "France is one nation (...) one republic". The determination he showed, as a semi-anonymous politician, was to appear to be a statesman of the first water, which is extremely rare among French prime ministers, whose names are often unknown even to the population of France.

 

EARLIER TODAY, HOWEVER, M. VALLS seems to have suffered an attack of realpolitik as he stated that France had collapsed into a state of "apartheid" in which the country was divided into ghettoes and leaderless ethnic enclaves. This remarkable volte face could possibly suggest that France is coming to accept itself as it really is rather than pretending to be a liberal democracy, or that M. Valls would like to become better known than most French prime ministers. I suspect neither will come to pass.