The tomato soup was delightful. The quail, neither greasy nor dry. Though I preferred the white wine served with the appetizer to the following red–which seemed a bit casky–I wasn’t about to mention this to my host, the ambassador.
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Jews were the favorite object of public contrition but not the only one. President Clinton gathered the few surviving victims of the infamous Tuskegee experiment and invited them over to the White House so he could look them in the eye and repent from the bottom of his heart. Clinton’s good at that–from the sincere look of dolor slapped all over his mug, you’d think he was there at the clinic, pretending to treat syphilis and lying to patients. He even trembled on the brink of issuing a mea culpa for slavery but then pulled back, perhaps because there are no ex-slaves still around to summon for a photo op.
But nobody was as energetic as the Swiss. They sent Ambassador Defago on a whirlwind display of repentance. Apologia U.S. Tour ’97, the T-shirts might have read.
But the implied threat was there, which stripped the gold from his glittering apology, at least for me.
Frankly, I didn’t even like being in the room. I kept gazing down at the polished surface of the mahogany table, at the basket of fresh-cut flowers. There was something obscene about it. I felt as if I were participating in one of those countless high-level meetings, those frank exchanges and urgent appeals, that took place in a thousand private dining rooms before World War II–talking, talking, talking while the gears of history ground heedlessly on. This was theater.
Only after the evening was over, after something happened in Skokie that was infinitely worse than the awkward confrontation I’d imagined, did I realize just how much I’d been co-opted and finessed at lunch.
It ended, and I left wishing they had seized the ambassador and hung him, on general principles. Just because Jewish people are a fierce, warlike race known for their unprovoked savagery. Give those Swiss banking bastards back home in Zurich something to think about as they pore over their accounts.
