In Davos, Part I
January 27, 2005, 7:44 a.m.
Friends, I'm writing you from Davos, Switzerland, site of the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum. You know about these Davos jottings — I did them in 2003 and 2004; you may call these the third annual installment. I will spare you rhapsodies on the beauty of this Alpine hamlet — you have gotten the picture, in years past.
And no, I have still not made it through Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain (a book that is set here; I have stayed at that very sanitarium). (I hasten to add that it is now a hotel.)
In the past, I've described Davos as "the pages of the New York Times come to life," or, I think, CNN come to life. The answer to "Who's here?" is "pretty much everybody." Heads of state, foreign ministers, financial wizards, captains of industry, intellectuals, artists, blah, blah, blah. The phrase "international community" is one of the emptiest in our vocabulary. Except here: Here, it makes perfect sense (for better or worse); it is, indeed, manifested.
I will not inflict long lists on you, but I will not forswear list-making altogether. As for business leaders, I will mention Bill Gates, Michael Dell, and Carly Fiorina. Think of someone else, and chances are I can find him for you.
Heads of government? Allawi, Blair, Erdogan (of Turkey), Howard (thank heaven he was reelected), Karamanlis (Greece), Klaus, Kwasniewski, "Lula," Mbeki, Obasanjo (the impressive Nigerian), Saakashvili (from Georgia, as the "vili" will tell you), Schroeder, Yushchenko. And can you count Prince Albert, our Grace's son? Let's do.
Americans are here, but no one at the level of the vice president or secretary of state. (Cheney was present last year, Powell the year before.) We have Elaine Chao — the labor secretary — and a slew of officeholders: Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, Bill Richardson; Orrin Hatch, Bill Frist, John McCain, Chris Shays, Bill Owens. And Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco. (He hasn't performed any wedding ceremonies, that I've noticed.) And ex-pols, such as Al Gore and Phil Gramm. The roster is Left-heavy, but there are some righties — à la Gramm, and Steve Forbes — about.
Did I mention Bill Clinton? I guess not, but you don't have to. He seems to be Davos's favorite American, as Shimon Peres is the designated Israeli.
And speaking of Clinton, I wish to mention Phil Lader, one of his ambassadors to Britain. Phil, with his wife Linda, is the founder of Renaissance Weekend, and one of the nicest people on earth. One of the ablest, too.
George Soros is making the rounds, and Mohamed ElBaradei (the arms inspector — or putative arms inspector), and "Abu Mazen," and David Stern, the commissioner of the National Basketball Association. (I'm being totally random here.) I'll tell you this, too: I saw a name-plate on a dais, "Prince." I assumed it was some royal. It turned out to be Charles O. Prince, CEO of Citigroup, USA. But mine had been a reasonable assumption.
Et les artistes? We have Sharon Stone, Richard Gere, Sharon Stone — did I mention Sharon Stone? — Angelina Jolie, Peter Gabriel, Angelina Jolie — did I mention Angelina Jolie? — Lionel Richie. And the conductor Valery Gergiev (who is ubiquitous on the world scene) (or I guess I should write, "world scene").
The presidents of Harvard and Yale and other schools (to the extent there are other schools), and media panjandrums (the Howard Stringers), and writers such as Carlos Fuentes and Nadine Gordimer, and I love seeing the name Chief Arvol Looking Horse, and I also love seeing the name Robert Trent Jones Jr. — the golf-course architect — and I'm very excited about George Kell, but he turns out to be "Executive Head of the Global Compact Office, The United Nations, New York." Not the old Detroit Tigers third baseman.
The friendliest name in the whole Davos directory is . . . Giuseppe Buongiorno, deputy editor-in-chief of the Italian Panorama. (The name means, essentially, Joe Hello, How Are You?) How could Giuseppe Buongiorno fail to be friendly? I'm afraid to find out.
There is a group here known as Young Global Leaders, of whom I will mention only two: Sergey Brin of Google, and our own Bret Stephens. I take the liberty of saying "our own," because he is an editorial-board member of the Wall Street Journal, formerly editor of the Jerusalem Post. He is a marvelous writer, and on the side of the angels.
Oh, yes, another Young Global Leader: Lily Habash, out of the prime minister's office in the Palestinian Authority (member of the family of George Habash). I sit next to her one afternoon.
And how is your humble correspondent described? As an editor of a magazine "provid[ing] reporting, commentary and analysis on politics, economics, and current events from a conservative perspective plus book and film reviews." I'm not sure that anyone else is described by the political slant of his publication — besides which, words like "conservative" and "liberal" are meaningless over here (or rather, freighted with many — often contradictory — meanings). (You've heard me harp on this before: John Howard, the right-winger who heads the Liberal party.) And film reviews? We have few of those; how about the music reviews, baby!
(By the way, even those who care not the slightest about music may be interested in a piece published in the current issue — on the composer Lee Hoiby, who is wrongly unsung, for reasons that will likely vex you.)
Should I say something about the panels here at Davos? Okay, just a few remarks (which is what I said about the lists, right?).
One dinner is called "Why Rich Countries Can't Buy Happiness." Hmmm. Well, let's not assume that poor countries are happy in their poverty. This allows me to tell one of my favorite Naipaul stories (related to me by the writer's close friend — and our close friend — David Pryce-Jones). Naipaul was at a conference in India, and someone stood up to say, "Sir Vidia, India has always been the home of the spirit. And now materialism is encroaching on us. This is destroying India, as the home of the spirit. What should we do about this materialism?" Naipaul responded — roughly — "I'm rather tolerant of materialism. The poor need it." He went on, "You see this bottle of water? Clean, pure, good? Twenty years ago, we didn't have this. This is a mark of progress."
Gosh, I love that story: "The poor need it." Only Naipaul.
Another panel takes on the small-bore question of "What Makes Us Human?" Then we have "Redefining Success" — one can well imagine the directions of that redefinition.
Here's a nice title, for a panel on social investing: "Strengthening the Visible Hand." Another nice title, for a nanotechnology session: "Learning to Think Small."
A dinner on "Can Artists Still Change the World?" (Still?) features Prince Albert, Carole Bouquet, Peter Gabriel, and Chris Tucker. Later that night is a "Nobel Nightcap," which gives us, among others, Nadine Gordimer and Elie Wiesel.
A panel is titled "Middle East 2020: Island of Wealth and Opportunity." From their mouth to . . . Another panel asks, "Why Can't Europe Create Jobs?" That strikes me as admirably — and refreshingly — forthright.
Another cute title: "Living a Little Too Large" (the panel is on obesity). (And it includes an official from Nestlé.) And how about "Hate's New Medium," which refers to the Internet? Maybe, but there's a lot of love and humanity and enlightenment through that medium, too.
A dinner is headlined, "Can the English Language's Monopoly Be Broken?" Forgive my loud sighing (shades of Al Gore in the first 2000 debate). If there has to be a lingua franca — and there must — the world could do worse than to have it English. But we've discussed this many, many times.
I'll end with another good title: "Putting the 'Non-' Back into Non-Proliferation."
The theme of this year's Annual Meeting is Taking Responsibility for Tough Choices. To this end, a magazine is published, and its contents tell the tale. On Geopolitics & Security, we have articles by: Kofi Annan, Paul Martin, Javier Solana. We have an interview with Richard Holbrooke. We have further articles by Hanan Ashrawi . . . well, you get the idea.
The lead article on Economics & Finance is by Mikhail Gorbachev. Another one is by Sen. Jon Corzine, the zillionaire socialist (an amazingly common phenomenon these days).
On Culture & Values we have Lula da Silva, Rashid Khalidi . . .
Don't all ask for my copy at once.
A luncheon featuring Sharon Stone and Richard Gere. Am I allowed to say that Sharon Stone is really, really, really pretty? Really, really pretty? A little butch — but really, really, really pretty.
Okay, whether I'm allowed or not, I've said it.
You want to know what she's wearing? But I should turn to what we've come to call, in our culture, "substance."
The luncheon topic is AIDS, and when Sharon — we're on a first-name basis — rises to speak, she gets a serious, actress-about-to-address-something-grave look on her face. She gathers herself. Then she makes the most charming prefatory remarks you've ever heard: "It's good to be here with all you smarty-pants. I don't have your education, and probably not your world experience, although I have a certain experience. But . . ." A masterly downplaying of expectations. Right out of the Speaker's Handbook, page 1.
The gist of her remarks is that AIDS is readily solvable, but that "greed and arrogance stop us." We — we richies — simply don't want to spend enough, simply don't care enough. We are stingy and callous. (No mention is made of the Bush administration's remarkable efforts in Africa — efforts that the most knowledgeable and fair-minded can't help hailing.) Finishing up, the actress says, "If we just stopped arrogantly killing people all over the world, and channeled the money into AIDS, we would have a solution."
I imagine that "arrogantly killing people" is an allusion to the War on Terror. And I think for a minute about that phrase, "arrogantly killing people." It seems to me that two experts in arrogantly killing people were the Taliban and the Saddam Hussein regime. I think of Iraq's mass graves, the gassing of all those innocents, the putting of men into industrial shredders, feet-first (so that the torturers could hear the screaming). I think of the routineness of rape, and the cutting out of tongues for dissent, and the children's prisons.
And the Taliban? I'll say it again: There are people in this world — I suspect many of them are here in Davos — who would rather homosexuals be crushed to death by stone walls, bulldozed onto them by decree of sharia, than that they be freed by George W. Bush and the U.S. military.
But "arrogantly killing people": That sums up, better than anything I have heard, the ignorant or malicious Left's view of U.S. operations — operations designed precisely to keep bad people from arrogantly killing people.
I have to leave before Mr. Gere speaks.
Ach. Thanks for bearing with me. I will continue these Davos scribbles, in nationalreview.com course. |
