Page 2 of 2 Fun and games on the
Arab
Riviera By Pepe Escobar
by
this particular phenomenon - unless they are Texas
blond bombshells having a ball posing for French
Riviera specials of Bikini International. One year
ago, the Washington Post even published a piece
titled "The art of doing nothing, and nobody does
it better than the French".
Americans
rather identify with French President and
Jogger-in-Chief Nicolas Sarkozy, the archetypal
Homo freneticus of the
"new"
center-right European trio (Sarkozy, Germany's
Angela Merkel, Britain's Gordon Brown).
Against a predominant, consensual
hyper-activist ideology, the French Riviera
counterattacks and seduces everyone - including
Americans - with the joys of slow travel, which
feature deep immersion in the intricacies of the
art of the siesta or the art of people-watching
for hours sipping Perrier with mint. This might
lead to turning the workaholic's typical burnout
into a bore-out - a neologism invented by a couple
of Swiss consultants (no wonder: Switzerland holds
a master's degree on boredom).
Get me
to my yacht on time The art of reaching a
full bore-out comes to full fruition in St Tropez,
once the sleepy refuge of Brigitte And God
Created Woman Bardot. Brigitte - driven nuts
by facing her younger, out-of-this-world self in
the mirror via countless 1960s paparazzi photos -
still lives in seclusion at her countryside-style
La Madrague digs. The lovely Vanessa Paradis and
hubby Johnny Depp live in Plan-de-la-Tour, just
one hour outside St Tropez.
The aspiring
have-somethings may have invaded St Tropez as a
plague of locusts - and real-estate speculation
may have blemished its cool Mediterranean charm.
But when it comes to the definitive hymn to the
power of globalized ostentation, nothing beats
making an entrance in the port by boat.
The rosy play of light in the little
half-moon bay is postcard-perfect. For mere
mortals, be it on a ferry or a sailboat, it's
imperative to dodge the armada of parked
multimillion-dollar vessels, some equipped with
their own choppers (ready to conquer Mogadishu or
Baghdad?). But to the sound of "Ride of the
Valkyrie" - or perhaps a sleazy Julio Iglesias
standard - the ultra-haves, and only them, have
the chance of parking their four-story-high
behemoths right in front of the sidewalk, to the
delight of a stream of gaping onlookers.
This mega-yacht catwalk is the abode of
the Laysh La, the perennial Las Brisas, the Tooth
Fairy, the Veni Vidi Vici, the Disco Volante, the
Deja Too and the Blowsy - virtually all of them
registered in the fiscal paradises of Guyana or
the Cayman Islands.
But it is actually St
Raphael, a former fisherman's port turned seaside
resort 50 minutes by ferryboat from St Tropez,
that is the richest city in France by per capita
value. St Raphael could be perfectly at home in
Florida or California - with the added bonus of an
"Arizona" nearby (the red rocks in the Esterel
forest range).
This is a retirement
nirvana to business people, artisans and
small-scale industrialists - doubling up as a
real-estate-speculation Valhalla of Chinese
proportions. "Visionaries" who bought a piece of
land in the "pampa" a few years ago are now
virtually in the heart of the city - and boasting
a 1,000% profit.
A 120-square-meter
apartment now sells for no less than $1.2 million.
The secret of St Raphael, and its surrounding
upscale communities of Valescure, Agay and
Boulouris, is, according to residents, a
"culture-sport-security" added-value guarantee.
Not by accident, St Raphael boasts double the
number of police compared with the French national
average.
For all the Arab wealth on
display in Cannes's California or in St Tropez,
France's Richistan of course is not confined to
the Cote d'Azur (and after all, these Arabs don't
pay their taxes in France, they just keep
secondary homes). Former French president Valery
Giscard d'Estaing would never contemplate the bad
taste of settling into a Hariri family
Arab-Lebanese-owned apartment by the Seine, like
former president Jacques Chirac (buses and vans
were ordered out of the way so as not to disturb
the regal sleep of the Chirac couple).
Giscard lives in his own hotel
particulier in the chic 16th
arrondissement of Paris, just like France's
richest man (almost $40 billion, and counting),
Bernard Arnault, the chairman of Louis Vuitton
Moet Hennessy, the world's No 1 deluxe market
conglomerate (as every Chinese counterfeiter
knows), who has his own "private hotel" at the 7th
arrondissement.
As for the next
French billionaire generation, trans-Atlantic love
is the name of the game; after all, Sarkoland
loves America. Arnault's son Antoine loves to hang
out with Uma Thurman and Scarlett Johansson. As
for Francois-Henri, the son of Francois Pinault,
the fourth French fortune (about $18 billion), he
also poached in Hollywood, marrying the sultry
Latina bomb Salma Hayek.
And just as the
French Riviera was in full swing, an Arab ghost
made a spectacular comeback. Osama bin Laden,
appearing for only 50 seconds in the latest
40-minute special delivered by al-Qaeda's
production house, Al-Sabah, blessed those happy
few Allah had chosen to become martyrs. He didn't
reclaim his brother's villa in Cannes; after all,
his purpose was to stress that al-Qaeda remains
alive and kicking.
Is he dead? Is he
alive? Is he worth $50 million - as the US
government says (the price of two modest-size
villas in Cannes)? Who knows, he might even be the
mysterious shadow behind the tinted windows of
that light-cream Maserati Quattroporte cruising
the Croisette. Quelle horreur! Perrier with
mint, anyone?
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