Hinc Lucem Et Pocula Sacra?

For all his political faults, it has always been perfectly apparent to me that Dominique Strauss-Kahn was the Dreyfus de nos jours, brought low by an alliance between those who will not have a Jew as President of the French Republic and those who will not have such a Jew who feels no civic allegiance to any country but his own. He was one of two protagonists who were being used as foreign proxies in New York's domestic feud between Jews and blacks.

The other was an African in America, but she was not an African-American in the sense that Jesse Jackson meant when he came up with that term. The demonstrators outside the courthouse were mostly Latina and unable to speak English properly on camera. Why did the police not demand to see their documentation? More is the pity, neither American party takes policing the undisputed border of the United States anything like as seriously as they both take policing the disputed border of the State of Israel.

But who the hell cares if Strauss-Kahn has addressed the Cambridge Union Society? Cambridge is now a Lib Dem-Labour marginal, having not had a Conservative MP for half a generation, and there is no Conservative on Cambridge City Council, although the Greens maintain a presence. Nor is there any Conservative City Councillor in Oxford, although again there are Greens, and there is also the Independent Working Class Association, as well as the tellingly frayed relations between the two. Yet neither city ever appears on the Oxbridge media's lists of blue-free municipalities, and the only coverage that either can expect is when Dominique Strauss-Kahn or David Irving comes to speak to a student drinking club.

The grown-up, working, tax-paying Cities of Cambridge and Oxford are politically fascinating and important, both in themselves and as examples or microcosms. But those whose bleary, beery memories of them involve no grown-up, working, tax-paying people have no means of understanding that such is the case, still less of communicating it to the rest of us. They sincerely believe that the Union Society is more important than the apparently permanent absence of the principal party of government, both from the parliamentary seat that it used to hold, and from the City Council that it used to control.