Hope Club

I always feel at home in places like the Hope Clubwith their dark varnished wood, wide, creaky staircases with their heavy banisters, thick oriental rugs, the newspapers fanned out on a table, oil paintings on the walls, sculpture here and there, sometimes flowers, and always, always coats and ties. Stuffy places for old farts and wannabes, like me or maybe not. I think this was my favorite thing about the New York Yacht Club, along with the spectacular model room and the library, not to mention the second facility in Newport called Harbor Court. Ah well. Better luck next lifetime, I guess. Ivy Club was all of this as well, if smaller and boatless, it has the cachet of Princeton behind it, after all, and F. Scott Fitzgerald's reference to its embers as "breathlessly aristocratic." And very stuffy and farty as well. Women were only invited in as members under the duress of massive legal expenses and the certitude of losing a sexual discrimination case. In the old days, neither had women members; today both of them do, and for the better in my opinion. Quite often there is the lingering scent of cigar smoke in the air. Oh, and the food is never very good, though it has become much, much better. they had to, in order to survive. The Hope Club's food was pretty indifferent last night, however, though I ate every bite on my plate. The long and short of it is that one never should go to one of these places for the food.

The people at the Hope Club last night were familiar, too. People from Little Compton and Providence. All kinds of connections, criscorssings. So it is the company and the occasion, of course. The speaker, my landlord's guest, turned out to have been at Princeton the same years I was there, leaving in 1975. Alan Tonelson certainly is accomplished. He painted an extremely gloomy picture for America in terms of its economic trends. This nation is in a colossal economic decline. The almighty dollar is slipping hugely. Foreigns countries, particularly China, are buying control of the US through loans to satiate the American appetite for credit. And Americans apparently save 0.1% of their income versus the Chinese, for example, who save some 40% of theirs! A new reason for this economist to be labelled a "dismal scientist" but he might also be cast as a man yelling out a warning in the middle of the desert, a purveyor of the truth.