SPEAKING OF MARGO

A reader sends in a passage from John Lukacs’ ‘Confessions of an Original Sinner’ which brought to mind the kind of people now making jokes about W and looking down their Harvard-Cambridge noses at someone from another planet. It’s a perfect Blue Zone moment: ‘I remember, too, how about 1948 at an upper-class liberal dinner party in Philadelphia I ventured to say that Roosevelt’s view of Stalin had not been very realistic, and that I was harrumphed down by a high-powered social medico who, as I had gathered from his conversation, was a local snob of great assiduity and precision, qualities that I hope also marked his practice with his patients. Going home I was racking my brains as to what kind of man this American doctor reminded me of. Then it came to me: of the kind of self-satisfied bourgeois patron of the arts who in a fashionable seat at a fashionable concert or opera asserts himself amidst the applause by shouting a Bravo!’ Yep, he sure did vote for Gore.