Expecting a good deal of tonight’s conversation will focus on Margaret MacMillan's new book about Mao and Nixon’s diplomatic revolution in 1972, Barb and are ready to show off that we've read it.

Margaret says, yes, that bilateral meeting marked the end of one period and the opening of a new one. Glasses now off, she builds on that theme.

Barb also mentions, in passing, that one of her ex-suitors in Chicago, a Chinese man, was inspired by Chou-en-lai, a pivotal figure in 1972's normalizing of Chinese-US relations. That suitor now is back in Beijing, himself a hot shot in the Foreign Affairs Ministry. That thread of conversation goes nowhere. Just as well.

I ask Margaret to elaborate on her view of President Nixon. [Globe & Mail subscription required] "Such a complicated man…clever…in some ways a great statesman [but] he did some really stupid things." Tom Hodgkinson, pink of cheek, prompts Margaret to talk about some of Nixon's stupid things.

Our group of strangers continues breaking the ice with each other. Gingerly.

Suddenly, our downstairs powder room is getting compared to Chinese ones. Seems that Chinese authorities in 1972 were so keen to please western journalists accompanying the U.S. President that they lacquered the wooden toilet-seats at the Beijing hotel set aside for the press. That lacquer caused such painful red boils that afflicted journalists referred to their rear-ends as “baboon bottoms.”

Sorry, I don't see our downstairs bathroom as anyway comparable.

Barb tells everyone that Margaret's first book, Women of the Raj, also recounts funny tales.

Overall thus far, the undercurrent is awkward. The mood, unpromising. I'm not sure our guests will stay the course.

We head into the dining room.

I am especially interested in that portion of Paris that covers Margaret MacMillan’s great-grandfather, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, and his role in peace negotiations.

The story goes that one of my great-grandfathers was a peacemaker too -- within his extended family. My other great-grandfather was a married minister who ran off with his unmarried choir director. I don't mention either great-grandfather's story tonight.

In an aside now, Margaret mentions that once, during a conversation about Art, the graying French Premier Georges Clemenceau showed Margaret’s grandmother (then a young woman) a set of salacious French postcards. We assume the sexual content was slight and not gross, and so that story somehow helps all five of us diners to twig to the frisky Monsieur Clemenceau. He seems more sparky, frankly, than that Metro stop named for him on Paris's Line 1 between Concord and Franklin Roosevelt (Rick's favorite subway stop). (Actually, it's Champs Elysees-Clemenceau, but darn if I can find on this keyboard the accented 'e' for the second 'e' in Elysees.)

Margaret is reflective about U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, "the most complicated" member of the triumvirate crafting the peace. He was “in some ways I think a very good man” with his wildly idealistic 14 Points and his notion of a League of Nations that seemed to promise many people the fulfillment of their dreams. According to our historian, however, Wilson was “humorless, stubborn, and vindictive. If someone disagreed with him, he thought there was something wrong with that person, morally wrong, and it made him a bad politician and he was self-righteous and he had this assumption, which was absolutely foolish, that he understood the people of the world better than anyone else did. And so whenever someone disagreed, he said, 'Well, the people are with me.'"”

With opinion pollsters around these days, I say Presidents have to be a lot more prudent in staking that populist claim.

According to Margaret, with the final decisions for Europe, Wilson, Clemenceau, and Lloyd George did "almost as good as could be done because the conditions for peace just weren’t there. It was impossible to draw boundaries that would satisfy people in the middle of Europe.” In dismantling bankrupt empires and thus sketching a still-troubled part of our modern world, in creating new nations like Iraq and Yugoslavia, the Allies in 1919 strove for stability. Nonetheless, they did not really solve the ills of places that are still problematic.

Margaret does not present her ancestor, the P.M., as flawless. Nevertheless, I suppose she could apportion a tad more blame tonight for the current ferment in the Middle East to her wily great-grandfather. True, Lloyd George was impressive as a war leader. And true, he did mediate ably between fellow-mustachioed Clemenceau’s harsh demands and clean-shaved Wilson’s so-idealistic proposals. I suspect, however, that it is also true that Lloyd George pushed for his country's mandate over the new Iraq, the better to expand greedy British Empire interests there in petroleum and military bases.

Tomorrow I must buy and read Margaret's Paris. If I e-mailed her asking more about her great-grandfather, she'd probably tell me true because, well, because I don't believe she wrote that book as an act of family loyalty.

Frowning, Tom Hodgkinson remarks that President Wilson sounds like he was a "botherer" with an attitude problem in Paris. That depiction sparks Margaret into observing that Wilson compounded his cause back home in Washington D.C.: "Where he really fell down, and I think it was a character flaw, was in not getting congressional opinion behind him in the United States. In my view, he unnecessarily alienated the Republicans...He tended to treat his Republican critics as if they were traitors and fools -- which is no way to win people over."...

Oh my, Tom Hodgkinson really lets the sunshine in, or is it the moonshine? Whatever, his pitch for perpetual idleness entices. Rick seems interested. Perhaps Tom's free-spirited vision also appeals to a side of Michael Jordan, super-affluent retiree. Margaret MacMillan, though, looks startled into skepticism. I feel wary too. Is Young Tom a role-model for doing nothing?

He takes cognizance of our reserve. Tom says that he has thought about a lot more than the idleness of, say, drunken sex. He says those last two words emphatically, like DRUNKEN SEX. Folding his hands casually (and defensively?), Tom claims that men are better idlers than women: it's an old story to say "that women's work is never done, but it's got some truth in it. Women tend to be thinking about a lot of different things at the same time whereas a man can work incredibly hard [on something he wants to do] and with great concentration on one thing, and then stop and do absolutely nothing. Women can't believe that we can just sit there doing nothing, when there's all this work to be done."

There's something to that. And when I bring up the transcendent gratification that comes with service and the use of one's talents to achieve goals, Tom springs forward: "What I've found in working less is you start to get a bit more involved...in your own community. Also, you have time to do things because they're fun and not because you get paid."

On the spot, shortly we all agree with Tom about what Society should do next. (By 'Society,' he seems to mean the big, bad Government he's dubious about.) Society should introduce four-day work-weeks. Hence Tom would bring back Saint Monday, a day off "widely honored throughout the 18th, 19th, and even the 20th centuries." In that spirit of fellowship that suffuses the dying moments of dinner parties, everyone promises to obey Tom's ultimate commandment, "Play." I'm thinking about playing with our grandchildren.

I am not sure if anyone at our party budged much from their pre-existing views on the apt balance between hard work and sheer idleness, between the State that does "most things badly" and the State that does yield benefits for its citizens.

Stand by, though: maybe Tom has had an effect. Rick is leering now, like he is more comfortable about becoming a libertarian or a hedonist. Or both...

I so love hearing professionals shop-talk. Guys in technical fields seem so much at peace talking about their work, as compared to the angst you can get from men who aren't technical.

Wonder if I correctly caught what Tim Berners-Lee was saying about sending information through the air as flashes of light? Did I overhear something about computer pros needing to sell their ideas to marketing and business sides of their organizations?

It is not fair that I am out of the room and can not keep-up with the conversation. Back when I was in the kitchen stirring gravy and cutting cumin-infused lamb, I probably missed out on good talk of browsers, infrastructures, protocols, servers, applications, the works.

When I rejoin the group, Jack Kilby is being questioned. Were his breakthroughs greeted well? Or did he get the cruddy sort of ‘blah’ reaction, Lisa Kudrow explores, that a comedian gets when a joke bombs?

At first, Jack recalls, “there was tremendous criticism…[and several of us] provided the technical entertainment at professional meetings for the next five years as we described and debated the merits of various miniaturization systems…The turning point was two highly visible military programs in the ‘60s -- Apollo Moon and Minute-man Missile.” Both programs adopted the integrated-circuit technology.

Jack singles me out for a sympathetic glance, likely as a follow-up to our discussion an hour ago. I had been talking about modern men and women, when suddenly Rick had said that 'wives are silent partners.' He had quoted from J.M. Barrie's play What Every Woman Knows: behind every successful man is a woman who must do two things -- 1) never allow her man to realize that she is helping him big-time, and 2) always allow him to think that it is his own ingenuity and intelligence that are moving him ahead.

Of course it had been sweet of Rick indirectly supporting my call for male scientists to take on more domestic responsibilities. (I think that's what he had meant with that quote.) Basically, however, I had replied that Rick's 'power behind the throne' argument was anti-feminist. Today's narrative focuses on a two-career couple, rather than the fix-it woman who stands quietly in her husband's shadow. Rick had agreed with my point affably.

That had sunk in with Jack too. He says 'humankind' now like it includes womankind:
“Humankind eventually would have solved the (circuit) matter, but I had the fortunate experience of being the first person with the right idea and the right resources available at the right time in history.”

For his part in history, Tim credits government backing for allowing him to do much of his highest-tech engineering, combining HyperText and Internet for “the Web address which you find in shortened form painted on trucks and vegetables and all kinds of things now.” Tim waxes about W3C developing open technical specifications through a democratic process. Any member can suggest that --

"What's W3C?" bursts Rick. Over to Jack who says to be it stands for the World Wide Web Consortium that Tim oversees in Boston. W3C strives for inter-operability, and thus keep the Web from splintering into factions –- academic, commercial, free. "W3C works for me," Lisa Kudrow says.

She builds on that show of support to launch a far more ambitious question: “What would you say was the Web’s overall achievement?”

For Tim, that's easy. “It allows people to exist in an information space which doesn’t know geographic boundaries. My hope is that it’ll be very positive in bringing people together around the planet, because it’ll make communication between different countries more possible.”

Jack is on the same globe: “I believe the best is yet to come.”

Well now, who wouldn’t believe them?...

Tonight I am boldly crossing my own cultural border, swooshing around in an embroidered Chinese gown. It is red silk. Hu Jintao, ever the diplomat, compliments me on it. I own up that I borrowed it from our next-door neighbor, Celia Wellborne. At a market in China, Celia had selected a material, taken it to the on-site tailor, picked through many style books for a pattern, been measured up, and returned a week later to a perfect fit.

At Rick’s bidding, Hu gives out with impressive numbers on improvements to the social net and about China’s progress in rural education. Rick whispers to me, “Things are going great.”

We Westerners roam beyond those topics that Rick had ‘planted’ for us, learning for instance about his wife and two children, his stint as a provincial governor, his having to compromise between competing personalities and factions within his Party. He does not mention restive minorities or his brutal suppression in 1987 of protests against China in Tibet.

With the pride of the hydraulic engineer that he was some 35 years ago, Hu does mention however the building along the Yangtze River of the mammoth 3 Gorges Dam, for flood control and hydroelectric power. Almost as one, we four Westerners come together as quizzical over that project’s wretched impact on the environment. Rick, who earlier tonight had asked us to steer clear of environmental topics, is the first to be caught up in the critical moment: I will have to ask him later what on earth got into him -- given his anxieties about being a good host, he is now a mystery, asking about valuable archaeological and folk-cultural sites that the Dam will submerge. For the rest of us too, it is as if a proverbial dam has burst open, as if Rick's 'ban' on environmental criticism is withdrawn. Elisabeth Lloyd follows through, noting how she has read that the mega-dam’s reduction of River silt will cause erosion and sinking of coastal areas. Lucian has heard of damage to biodiversity. I watch TV news and so I can wonder too about the dangerous landslides into the stinky Yangtze.

To which the President says, evenly, that authorities are working to minimize those costs and achieving cleaner technology. Only after a nation is well-off, however, can it afford to clean the environment. To his credit, Mr. Hu does not deny the Dam has forced the relocation of 1.3 million persons. Unfortunately, they are 3 Gorges’s short-term losers -- yet they have to be considered alongside the project’s many, many short- and long-term winners. (Hu is thought to be agile at table tennis, and he is up to returning the conversational ball too.)

My sense is that Hu understands his country's environmental mess. Still the bridge-builder, he does not dwell on pollution sources in our homeland -- vehicles, pulp mills, phosphorous as well as chlorine, and sewers that flush sewage, chemicals, and fertilizers into rivers during heavy rainstorms. Nor does he emphasize that China’s delivery of goods by transport is often cleaner than, say, North America’s. Also understated is that in effect North America, with its consumption of foreign goods, has outsourced much of its pollution to China. I suspect that Hu may be saving our face -- and his economy which needs the rest of the world as a market.

Rick deviates once more from his 'hands-off' approach to pollution. Now he has the chops to ask: "I hope I'm not overstepping, President Hu, but what if your government adheres to its present course? Within 25 years, China will emit twice the carbon dioxide of all the OECD countries, yes?" What could have triggered this from my mild-mannered husband?

Hu, the federal chieftan, deflects that question, characterizing the too-lax provincial governments as messing things up by poor implementation of his central government's environmental prescriptions. He's striving for better governance too.

I would say we’re pretty good foils for Hu to play off of.

Smoothly changing the subject, he refers approvingly to Newly Displaced Population, a 2004 canvas by the realist painter Liu Xiaodong. “Look,” he suggests, “Chinese authorities did not censor that critical painting. That openness is emblematic of China’s growing tolerance.” Pressed by Elisabeth Lloyd, however, Hu does admit that representations of the Tiananmen Square episode still are off-limits.

Flash forward to Lucian gamely asking about contemporary art in China. He does not bring up a topic he had remarked upon before Hu showed up, when we were talking art and anticipating Hu's arrival. Lucian complained then about those art factory villages where scores of Chinese artisans replicate original works from the West which they sell by the square meter. Rather than that concern, Lucian dwells now on the explosion of museums, galleries, and auction houses. That Shanghai and Beijing are very much “hot stops on the highly competitive international art circuit” comes as news to Barb and me, but not to the well-read Lucian.

He asks about the tension between younger Chinese artists who flaunt their personal styles in the face of their nation's official emphasis on the harmonious collective. Lucian wins no direct response from Hu to that, except I detect an eyebrow uptick, as if the President is reflecting that some Chinese these days go in different directions.

Lucian knows, moreover, about Beijing’s newish “798” district, a cultural quarter that clusters 300 artists’ studios, commercial galleries, bookshops, and restaurants. Lucian also is in the know about the top marks that Western critics and buyers give currently to important contemporary Chinese paintings, especially those not in the old social-realist mode. Happily, art professionals no longer have occasion to carp, “That’s pretty good for a Chinese painting.”

Few important Chinese paintings are purchased these days by mainland Chinese, the buyers principally being Europeans. According to Lucian, those buyers, and others, prop up the star system of international art. Hu asks, “But Lucian, is that a good thing?” That leads to our discussing whether that system is declining as the art market increasingly offers choice. I know middle-class people, for instance, who buy locally and thus value personal connectivity to artists whose work they hang in their homes. Lucian, though, tonight projects that the big-bucks crowd will continue buying globally…

Hu Jintao pours cream into his tea, stirs it, and says that yes, things are working out. ”On the whole, the opportunities outweigh the challenges.” Greater democracy is on the horizon inside the Party, with more candidates than there are Politburo positions. But at present social democracy can not usher in the gross domestic product that China needs for its hikes in people-oriented welfare. Accordingly, considerable faith is placed on revving-up in the country’s dynamic private sector: its entrepreneurs are demonstrating how newly efficient and profitable products or processes can elevate the entire economy. The state sector is certainly no slouch either, for it has produced Fortune 500 companies that list their shares abroad, thereby giving the Party a voice in global capital markets. State-owned enterprises now have stakes in global stability: they have been acquiring foreign companies for commercial purposes. Hu also cites technology -- and he explicitly values the world-wide-web invention of our last-month guest Tim Berners-Lee -- as a force for economic, social, and political change in China.

Silently I wonder if Hu regards that electronic force as a socio-political boon or bane.

Lu Freud, still on an economic theme, subsequently asks how the savings of Chinese play out in the country's evolution. Hu agrees his countrymen are prodigious savers. It is a point of pride for many Chinese to cheap out (my term, not Hu's). They track down the good deal and thus economize.

The country’s banks are awash with household accounts (some $2.25 trillion, Hu remarks). Happily too, citizens now have access to overseas markets where their investments can help cool China’s over-heated, export-addicted economy with its double-digit annual growth.

Silently I wonder if that remarkable economy, and the U.S. teetering economy, will go bust this new year.

State-owned enterprises also have stakes in global stability, Hu is saying now. They have been acquiring companies in other countries for commercial purposes. Avoiding extremes, Hu uses the neutral word ‘acquire’ rather than the provocative verb ‘take-over.’

I am not sure that Elisabeth Lloyd is satisfied that Hu has answered her timetable question about democracy, but she does give him some slack. I do too, even though a small paranoid voice in me wonders about overseas acquisitions by foreign countries’ state-owned enterprises. Will those takeovers geopolitically affect the security of nations whose business are taken-over?

And what about China's modernizing military and its foreign assertiveness, plus its efforts to buy up much of the world's oil and gas? How about that, Mr. Prez?

Right now, however, none of us want to spend time and energy arguing with the Paramount Leader.

I am interested to see that Hu does not talk, like his more flamboyant predecessors, about Marxism and anti-imperialist struggles. Rather, he speaks of China's peaceful rise and of overcoming the scarcities that evolve as cities, farms, industries, and state businesses compete for ground water. That shortage, he reminds us, is part of the complex larger picture where state-owned companies and provincial and city governments all compete against one another.

What is more -- and here we get a troubled tone from Hu -- 70 percent of the publicly traded companies are worthless. The banking systems have up to 1 trillion dollars in bad loans. The President quotes his Premier, Wen Jiabao: “The growth in the economy is unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated, and unsustainable."

Freud and Lloyd, whose last names could be the last words of a rhyming couplet, admire the Chinese leaders’ honesty. They strike me as truth-tellers themselves.

I could be misreading Elisabeth, but I also detect a wariness about all politicians’ claims of what happening or not happening.

Now Elisabeth is pondering aloud about the stability of families in the country’s rush to materialism and commercialism. Because parents work so hard to get ahead and make money, do they have much time and energy to nurture their only child? Hu replies that these families do have problems and that a growth industry in the service sector is psychological counseling for families.

Hearing that, Lu lets out a roar and a toss of his head. Although not directly deprecating his paternal grandfather Sigmund’s transformative analyses, Lu indicates that psychological counseling and hand-holding nurturing are definitely not his (Lu’s) style.

Oh my. Lu does not formally recognize his offspring until they are adult…

Inbetween first and second courses, Bob Geldof says that because his life history and style differ from Billy Graham’s and Joan’s, it’s only natural that he doesn’t couch his pastoral message strictly in Biblical terms. Rather, Bob tells us of “using art and culture to move something that’s a grievous sore.”

About leaders of G-8 governments in 2005 who promised to help make poverty history, Bob recalls having created “domestic heat to pressure them into doing something they don’t particularly want to do…We will not get there if we don’t do ludicrous circuses like giant concerts…and stars being rallied.” Named after the other big-name Irish rocker at these "circuses", a recent term of derision for this pressure from celebrities is the BONOization of aid.

In an ideal world, rock stars wouldn't need to cut deals with world leaders on behalf of folk in the world's have-not nations. In a world that's lame, street-level protests against inequities associated with the World Trade Organization become viable in Seattle and Quebec City. So the more I listen, the more I think this Geldof chap "gets it” -- or gets part of it -- about the need for citizen pressure to break the problems of poverty, aid, and world trade in places like Africa.

Bob specifies a percentage of Gross Domestic Product that modern nations should give to underdeveloped ones. As he is speaking, Joan of Arc is asking me for the bread basket (yeast rolls with herbed butter). I don’t hear Bob’s amount. So where did he get his statistic (whatever it was)?

Now Bob is augmenting his concern with a danger: if the West doesn’t live up to its G-8 promises, “China will be all over Africa…and they [Africans] will embrace any government.”

(My mind harks back to the geopolitical zeal of our Chinese guest from last month, President Hu Jintao. If through some scheduling snafu, Hu had been a month late and showed up here for this party tonight, would he fit in with tonight’s crowd?)

From his aura and the courtly way he carries himself, the Billy Graham I see is comfy with Power. Rick circles back to an earlier to & fro tonight and asks about Billy’s back-channel work as an ambassador for U.S. Presidents wanting to break the ice with certain foreign leaders (but not the African crooks we were talking about earlier). “You dress like an ambassador Billy,” winks Bob, as if that were the lowest state to which a person of character could sink.

We value that, different from certain leaders of his era, Billy’s avoided fiscal or sexual scandals -- and as Rick observes, Billy has apologized for insulting American Jews as found on a once-secret tape from President Richard Nixon’s White House. Billy, it seems, had put faith in Nixon’s character and his misadventures in Vietnam and Watergate. Once that faith was broken, “It was nearly unbearable to me,” Billy tells us. Bob suggests, “Nixon’s downfall was pretty unbearable for Nixon too.”

Rick further mentions how Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Nixon advanced their careers and policies by identifying with religious leaders. More often than not, those politicos sought out Billy, rather than the other way around. Rick quotes a biographer who attests that being in a newspaper photo with the solid, benign, family-respecting, and quite lionized Billy could bolster anyone’s approval rating in Middle America by 10 to 20 points. This correlation leads Bob to muse about getting a picture of himself alongside Billy to use as publicity somewhere and somehow for something.

Billy realizes that sometimes he has come across as these secular authorities’ unofficial chaplain, causing critics to accuse him of endorsing their policies. Naturally, Billy inquires how Bob cultivates his relations with governments’ big-wigs. Bob acknowledges that “I wouldn’t call [England’s] Tony Blair and Gordon Brown my friends, but I know them pretty well and this whole issue of Africa really does bother them. I think if they could do something while they had power, they would. Or to put it the other way, if they didn’t do anything, I think they’d regard it as almost a badge of shame.”

Bob tells about the time on television that he confronted one of Blair’s predecessors about the desperation of Africans. “People remember that as me telling [Margaret Thatcher] to go fuck herself, but that isn’t it. She said to me, ‘We’re very grateful for what you do.’ I engaged with her, very sotto voce and deferential, and she said, “Well, Mr. Geldof, it’s not as simple as that.’ I said, ‘No, Prime Minister, nothing is really as simple as dying, is it?’ And I looked at her and got the gimlet stare but I held it. So we went in for lunch, and she taps me on the shoulder and says, ‘Come and see me tonight.’ So we went to the flat and we had a scotch together.”…

Decked-out in a tux and evincing the presence of a Master, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau is lengthy and firm in shaking everyone’s hands. He looks fit, like he spends at least half-hour a day on an exercise bike. Dietrich says that he has a musician son, a cellist and conductor, who’s Kenny Chesney’s age.

Anna Amalia steps up to welcome Dietrich and later Kenny Chesney as if she is tonight’s hostess. The Duchess passes out wine spritzers and the carrot-stick appetizers that Barb obviously had made. Carrot sticks are what the weight-conscious Kenny had requested when Barb conference-called Dietrich and him last month.

Anna’s hyper-activity prompts Dietrich to whisper to me, by way of explanation if not justification, that “In old age, you shouldn’t abandon that which is most important to you.” Surely as the evening progresses, Anna and our guests will not abandon their important art either. We hope they'll sing some, but (as artists do) they’ll leave us wanting more.

It develops that Kenny came to the art of music in Tennessee at age 19, when his mother gave him a guitar. On the other hand, both of our Germans declare they’ve been hard-wired for music almost from infancy, both also encouraged by their moms. Kenny and especially Dietrich seem impressed that one of Barb’s great-grandfathers used to sing lieder around his parish house. (That’s the great-grandfather/reverend who left his family to run away with the choirmaster.)

For everyone's info, and as Anna modestly seems to shrug off my data, I spell out that our Duchess played the harpsichord, violin, and flute.

Nope, I have not come correct, for it turns out that too was not this Anna Amalia right here. Instead, the three-instrument lady was the Prussian Princess. Curiously, tonight's Anna feels compelled to add, perhaps out of regal competitiveness, that her aunt's marriage was quickly annulled. Our Duchess Anna here acknowledges that she too was into music and that she too largely lived single -- but as a dowager, her royal husband having died two years into their marriage.

The present Anna became Regent for her infant son. “With prudence,” she administered the duchy for 17 years, strengthening (as she notes) its resources and diplomatic relations. This Anna was independent enough to entertain all the literary and musical artists she wanted.

Was her Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach a great state, or what?

While driving here tonight, Perween Warsi and I had developed a certain camaraderie. Given that Rick and Jackie Robinson also seem to have developed that human connection, I grow emboldened. Current events are likely to crop up, and I hope we will not be reduced to talking pointlessly about vice-presidential possibilities in the States. Perween does not wish to talk about today's "horrible" stock market fall. She made that clear on our drive here.

“We’re all want to do racial and gender justice," I open. "But which animosity do you think has been more oppressive in the Democratic primaries? Racism or sexism? Both involve some fear of the other, the new.”

Right off, Rick attempts to add ageism to the mix of prejudices. He mentions jibes about John McCain’s 70 years. Rick wants people to recognize that septuagenarians like he and John can get out of bed in the morning, can get dressed, can have a life.

Jackie points to some anti-Muslimism in the presidential campaign too, even though no candidate is one. Religion, in the guise of Reverend Wright's televised sermons, may be reason enough for some whites not voting for his former parishioner Obama. Jackie also nudges us to consider the import of Obama's gender. "That may have been a sexist advantage for him. Likewise, it's possible Hillary’s race was an advantage for her."

Perween agrees, but first she wants to get some things off her chest about the England in which she settled 40 years ago. There were the ghettos, the inferior schools, and those “Go Home” messages aimed at non-whites. After 9/11, there was increased bias against “foreign” races and religions. Perween is concerned a pool of ethnic minority citizens does badly in the “marketplace as compared to mainstream society.”

Jackie asks her if Britain's prisons are as full of blacks as America's.

To myself, I think that being Britain’s first- or second- richest Asian woman must make Perween feel she is at home, as do those two Orders of the British Empire (MBE, CBE) that Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth, conferred on her before having lunch together. I sense that even although Perween may not have read Simone de Beauvoir’s foundational tract on feminism, she heartily sees herself as her husband’s equal.

At a soirée, spurs are not won by saying the obvious. Tonight the most obvious campaign point probably is Rick's, who helps move us back to American politics. That guy who held up that "Iron My Shirt" sign at a Clinton event "was a jerk." We are such pitiful conspiracy theorists, though, that we consider whether that guy was Clinton plant, provoking sympathy for a woman who was smart and competent.

Perween’s across-the-Atlantic impression is that putting aside paramount concerns like the war, racism trumped gender in America’s discrimination sweepstakes. She attributes that to 1) racial profiling, 2) police brutality against blacks, and 3) discomfort in certain quarters with presidential candidate Obama’s “blood lines,” affecting his ability to win over white voters. Granted, only Perween's last point bears directly on the just-concluded primaries, but a host can not very well police a guest who goes off-topic. And anyhow, who am I to delimit our topics? And with regard to blackitty black blacks, maybe profiling and police brutality do factor somehow into the political scene?

Dear Rick is still thinking baseball. He says America has come grandly far from the ‘50s when guys in the bleachers mocked Jackie by wearing mops on their heads. And when Jackie was at bat, members of the Phillies team tossed watermelons and black cats onto the field. Jackie’s view of that era’s national sport is rueful: “No black was given the chance to manage a ball club or to run its front office.”

Jackie says that, until recently, he had not given credence to a gender barrier for progressive leadership in the America. After all, his wife Rachel has been a working Director, not merely a symbol, for the Jackie Robinson Foundation. “Education is our pitch,” Jackie says of his Foundation that collects and gives money to needy members of minority groups. He is so proud, rightly proud, of that Foundation that I find myself almost hoping he will give us its web address and toll-free phone number.

Hillary's withdrawl is expected tomorrow and Jackie’s second thought is that sexism has been "the colder wind." He perceives a woman losing out to a black, his fellow-Americans having a problem with women as leaders of grit and iron. He did not care for the media featuring photos that showed her looking weak and vulnerable. She deserved a lot more respect.

Perween surprises with a Hollywood ‘take’ on the campaign. She suggests that Hillary C. -- with her mantra that she was a fighter to the end -- patterned herself on Million Dollar Baby. Specifically, she resembled the boxer that Hillary Swank played. The champ of the working-class, striving to make it in a man’s world.

Jackie is bothered that while other nations have had effective Prime Ministers who were female, 1) put-downs are common against a woman’s plausible campaign to succeed 43 white males in the American Presidency, 2) male supporters of the bi-racial Obama often are facilely portrayed as gender-neutral, while 3) women are damned if they vote for Hillary (“gender bias”) or damned if they back Obama (“no gender pride or solidarity”).

One of this blog’s first commenters, back last year, requested that we invite a poverty fighter. Acting on that suggestion, we invited Muhammad Yunus, but he has not yet presented himself. He could certainly add his two cents worth -- or his $27 worth on sexism or racism in a poverty context. Maybe that will come up later.

Before we move on, tired of this topic and of one movement overwhelming another, we reach something of a consensus: when race or gender cards are played, attention gets diverted from candidates’ skills, outlooks, dispositions, platforms, and track records. Well, if that is not much of a bright resolution, so be it.

Through all this, Rick and I cannot hide which candidate we are rooting for. We have come to identify with our candidate so much that we worry about certain friends of ours. How can Margo and Bob stay together when they are so split over which one to favor?

Back to you, Rick. I cut out for the kitchen, still in earshot at first. I overhear Perween pondering if “a female-led business has to be better than its male competitors to fare equally well in the marketplace.” Jackie speculates that testosterone levels increase as you progress up the business. Rick, in your next post, please jot down what else they say about this...

Barb opens the dining room’s windows to spring. Muhammad Yunus pulls out a chair for Perween Warsi to sit in. She appears to enjoy his gallantry, disagreeing with Hillary supporters who, at the end of one of their candidate debates, turned on Obama. Allegedly he was sexist in pulling back her chair.

We are not done yet with the campaign. Jackie Robinson alludes to comments Hillary received for a debate blouse that showed a little cleavage. Barb points out that the comments came from male pundits who were thinking sex. Jackie recalls Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to the Grand Canyon. When his translator asked the Soviet boss what that Canyon made him think of, Nikita replied, “It makes me think of sex. Everything makes me think of sex.” Muhammad laughs at that more than Perween.

Somewhere, somehow along the way -- okay, I eventually bring it up -- we value Sardar Patel, the Iron Man of India. When Jackie was debuting with the Dodgers and when the British were preparing to relinquish control over the subcontinent, Patel was the statesman charged with forging a united India.

I bend our guests’ ears about Sardar. He’s a hero of mine. Hero? I just mean he was important. At my age, it’s easier to pick the easy words rather than the right ones.

In 1947, some 565 princely states had the option of merging with Pakistan, or becoming independent, or joining up with India. More to Jackie than anyone else, I say, “By combining persuasion, bribes, threat, and force, Sardar convinced the maharajas and maharani that their independence would be imprudent, especially in the face of opposition from their subects. Sardar’s as central to India's founding as Ghandi and Nehru. Wish I could have been his aide or something.”

“I’ve understand your fascination,” Muhammad Yunus declares. “That was before my time, but I know about Sardar. He organized relief for refugees. He was an early proponent of free enterprise in Asia. And I agree, Rick. For India, Sardar avoided fragmentation and a weak central government.”

Perween cites a downside to strong central government, the autocratic Prime Ministership of Nehru’s daughter, Indira Ghandi. “Bihar was a center of resistance to Indira, to her authoritarianism, and to her gross interventions in a free society.”

In a drawer. god knows where, Barb and I have a long, narrow wall-hanging that’s from Bihar. We could have/should have hung it up for tonight.

As Barb takes something out of the oven, she reveals that I was so impressed by Sardar’s diplomacy that I even wanted to name our first-born son after him. I’d imagined our lad someday explaining with pride the doings of his predecessor. Our Mike was born decades ago, back when Barb was more traditional, and she resisted the exotic South Asian name. Now, however, after hearing guest endorsements of the Iron Man’s successes, Barb emits a hint of regret she’d said no. “Almost, kinda sorta sorry” are her words.

Jackie: “You brought me back from the dead. So invite your Sardar to next month’s dinner.”

Fork in hand for salad, Perween advises us to instead invite Dr. Rajendra Prasad, an independence activist, chair of the Constitution’s drafting group, 1st President of India. And like herself, a Bihari.