A London and Paris hiatus

 

Greetings from a London hotel, located within hailing distance of the Abbey Road crosswalk immortalized by the Beatles. Notwithstanding the time zone hurdles and the various welcome distractions, I plan to write during my six days abroad. The posts may show up at odd hours, athough I hope to be somewhat timely the morning after the final presidential debate.

I was invited to come speak here about the presidential election, and on Tuesday I’ll be doing a similar gig in Paris. It’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it. My guess is that the American expatriates in the audience will ask, “What the hell is going on back there?” And rightly so.

Although we can certainly ask the same of the Brits. Today’s news: A popular TV host has been outed as a molester of at least 60 underage girls, the BBC is under the gun for shelving a documentary investigation of the TV host, Rupert Murdoch wrote a nasty tweet about Hugh Grant and had to apologize, the prime minister is under the gun again for failing to come clean in the Murdoch phone-hacking scandal, a prominent right-wing leader is being investigated by police after he tweeted the home address of a gay couple and urged his followers to “wake them up with loud music,” a newspaper cartoon (in one of the respectable papers, no less) depicted a politician breaking wind….I used to live here. Today’s typically batty news provoked deja vu.

But I digress.

Meanwhile, my newspaper column today highlighted a major issue that has barely been mentioned during the ’12 presidential campaign.