Redwoods, Tutus and Power

Where’s the fashionable rendezvous for the World’s Secret Government these days? In the good old days, when the Illuminati had a grip on things, it was wherever the Bilderbergers pitched their tents. Then the Rockefellers horned their way in, and the spotlight moved to the Trilateral Commission.

Today, secret world governors spend a good deal of time in the air, whisking from Davos to Ditchley to Sun Valley. But come July, every self-respecting member of the secret world government will be in a gloomy grove of redwoods in Northern California preparing to banish care for the 122nd time as members of the Bohemian Club. Along the way, they will hash out the future of the world.

Past spies who have crashed the gates have found slightly shaky evidence that here indeed is the ruling crowd in executive session: hundreds of near-dead white men sitting by a lake listening to a pundit on the order of Henry Kissinger, plus many other near-dead white men in adjacent landscape in a state of intoxication so advanced that many of them fall insensible among the ferns, gin-fizz glasses gripped firmly till the last. And why the many indications that a significant portion of the secret government appear to be involved in some theatrical production, involving the use of women’s clothes and lavish application of make-up?

Many an empire has of course been run by drunken men wearing make-up. But a look at the Bohemian Club, its members and appurtenances suggests that behind the pretense of secret government lies the reality of a summer camp for a bunch of San Francisco businessmen, real estate plungers and lawyers who long ago had the cunning to recruit some outside megawattage--Herbert Hoover, a Rockefeller, Richard Nixon--to turn their mundane frolicking into the simulacrum of secret government and make the yokels gape.

The Bohemian Club began as a San Francisco institution in the 1870s, founded by journalists and kindred lowly scriveners as an excuse for late-night boozing. The hacks soon concluded that Bohemianism, in the sense of real poverty, was oppressive. So they pulled in a few men of commerce to pay for the champagne. The rot soon set in.

Near the end of the last century, the cult of the redwood grove as nature’s cathedral was in full swing and the Boho-businessmen yearned to give their outings a tincture of spiritual uplift. The club bought a grove about 60 miles north of the city. Soon the ancient redwoods rang to the laughter of the disporting men of commerce.

So it is even today. There are lakeside talks. There’s skeet-shooting. There’s endless dominoes--the club’s board-game par excellence. There’s Not Being at Home With the Wife. Best of all, there are the talent revue and the play. Visit some corporate suite in San Francisco in early July and, if you see the CEO brooding before his plate-glass window overlooking the Bay Bridge, he is not thinking about some merciless downsizing. He is worrying about the cut of his tutu for the drag act for which he has been rehearsing keenly for months.

In the ‘90s, the Grove’s reputation as the site of secret government was in eclipse. The young Christian zealots were scarcely Boho material, and Newt Gingrich himself--he did give a lakeside talk one year--was too tacky for the gin-fizz set. But here we are in the Bush II era, and the Bush clan is echt secret government, from Skull and Bones to the Knights of Malta.

But do they run the world? When he was joining the London Times in the 1920s, my father asked his uncle, who was on the Times’ board, who really formulated Times’ policy. “My boy,” his uncle said, “the policy of the London Times is set by a committee that never meets.” As with the London Times, so with the world. That’s why all those important people rush to the Bohemian Grove and Davos. They want on that most invisible of all committees, invisible because it is also imaginary.