Café de Flore

Flore, Fishawi, Shati, McNamara
All accounts of gallantry, pleasure, and entertainment, shall be under the article of
Café Flore, Paris; poetry, under that of Fishawi, Jeddah or Cairo; learning under the title of the Shati Tea-and-Falafel-shop, Gaza; foreign and domestic news, you will have from McNamara Ground Ops Lunchroom, Detroit; and what else I shall on any other subject offer, shall be dated from my own apartment.

This is certainly an account of gallantry gone wrong: NY police used its superspy contacts with Homeland Security and ICE to take to court the 21st century head of the IMF, Dominique Straus Khan (DSK), the heritage of my mother's work at the Bretton Woods Conference helping Mendes France represent the French resistance, then in 1944 post-war collaboration with the US's European strike smashing(especially in Italy) and the setting of the US dollar as the standard in war-torn Europe. What would George Washington have said to see a French leader framed up by New York hotel MBA's, lawyers and managers, denied his right to travel, and put in a New York prison cell to await his chance to prove his innocence. As the competition between Europe and the US tightens during the banking and lending crisis today, we can expect to see more of such jousting at France by the US, even though the first American revolution owed so much to General Lafayette and the French.

What a long sentence that was! And the US president, fresh from his speech touting the "justice" of America's assassination of an old man in pajamas in far away Pakistan, and saying nary a thank-you to Britain, which split off Pakistan from their colony of India and made all the sectarian divisions in Central Asia--sectarian divisions, which the US now benefits from in its policy of holding Central Asia in underdevelopment and opium trade--nary a thank you to Britain for all her soldiers who died in Afghanistan; and now this same ungrateful president doesn't even bother to visit Dominique Straus Khan in Prison. He chit chats in the oval office with the King of Jordan, who has a much more beautiful wife than DSK, and doesn't lift a finger to freeze Bashar Al-Asad's assets (whose wife is also quite beautiful), although other leaders of the Syrian army's attacks on Syrian youth protester have had their Swiss assets sequestered.

There's gallantry for you.

Prisons are terrible things, especially US ones, which have the highest percentage of citizens behind bars of any country in the world. Dominique Strauss Khan should not be humiliated in this way. He is an elegant, convivial man, well known as a good conversationalist with women. He could not have molested any woman working at the Sofitel. The Americans must really hate the French, or perhaps it is just the New York police relishing the recent vist by President Obama to New York, and feeling they can do anything now that this presidential assassin of the man in pajamas in Pakistan(Ben Ladin) has graced New York with his presence. Will he have the courtesy to intervene in Dominique Strauss Khan's frame-up? Doubtful that he will. Could it be that the New York police are so stupid that they thought Khan was Pakistani?