I have only myself to blame. By default lately my cable box has been turned to CNN instead of my favorite channel, which under normal circumstances is DISCOVERY channel, the one that mostly shows documentaries about nature. And so when I
turned my TV on this morning, I heard Mr. Clinton pronounce the two words I least expected him to utter: INTERNATIONAL LAW.

To be honest, he did say the same two words 36 hours ago, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt. Everyone can make an honest mistake. I am sure that his speech writers are using Microsoft Word word-processing program, and as everyone knows if you click on "select," "copy," and "paste," too many times, weird things are likely to happen.

But that kind of a tragic accident is highly unlikely to happen two times in a raw. So I swallowed a mouthful of a high quality toothpaste, the one that is highly recommended by the American Dentist Association, and rushed to the living room to adjust the volume on my good quality TV set. In those few seconds my poor simple mind was struggling to make some sense of it. Did Mr. Clinton have a revelation during those lonely night hours. Did the considerately provided solitude result in him coming to his senses? Did he hear from God, as many a great men in history allegedly did during the moments of global crisis? Did Mrs. Albright come to him in tears and urged him (lobby is the word most often used when describing her communication with other beings) to wash the war paint off of his face and ask the world for forgiveness? Is my world of the last ten days going to
be turned upside down?

But this short story does have a happy ending. Mr. Clinton was not talking about his actions when talking about the International Law. Nothing to worry about, it did not even occur to him to question the complete disregard for the above mentioned international law that he showed all along in this global crisis. No, he used those two words to remind the president of Yugoslavia that there is something called the International Law.

As for Mr. Clinton, who went to the prestigious Harvard Law School, he knows better. He will apparently stick to the law of the jungle, or, as they say on my favorite cable channel, the law of the Wild. And we all know that according to that law the eight hundred pound gorilla sleeps - where? Wherever he wants. Interestingly enough, the strongest animal does not ask for permission from the other inhabitants of the jungle to act one way or another. Pretty much, if you can believe it, it does as it pleases.

So everything is still for the best in the best of all possible worlds, as Mr. Voltaire used to joke. Except that my good quality TV set now has a huge dent on its left side. And the future visitors to my modest studio apartment are hereby warned that I have only one ashtray left.