The Dish

Then there’s the death of Princess Margaret. Now here’s a classic litmus test of whether Britain has changed. Margaret was perhaps the least popular (and it’s a close contest) among her generation of royals. The reaction to her demise after decades of heavy drinking and sixty cigarettes a day has therefore been somewhat mixed. I get the feeling that the death of Diana exhausted any possibility of English emotion about their monarchy for at least another decade, which is why enthusiasm for the Queen’s Golden Jubilee seems so tepid. But Margaret would be a hard case in any circumstances. She was only loved by a coterie of silly upper-crust homosexuals who saw her as some campy icon of monarchy-gone-bad. One more representative tabloid recently described her thus: “She’s spoilt and ill-mannered and over the years has drunk enough whiskey to open a distillery.” Others weren’t as kind. Writing in today’s Telegraph, Kenneth Rose captured the odd mixture of intimacy and hauteur that typified Margaret. Her habit of demanding that friends or colleagues suddenly shift from treating her like a normal person to treating her like royalty was particularly obnoxious:

“Hopping back on her twig,” they called it. She came to insist that her private secretary should be a peer: first the 14th Lord Napier, then the Second Viscount Ullsworth, who had succeeded to the peerage of his great-grandfather, the ennobled Speaker Lowther. Both served her well, sometimes in difficult circumstances.

I love that English under-statement, “difficult circumstances.” I think it means she could be a complete pill.

Still, the Brits are still the best at anecdotes. I love this one from Rose’s piece again:

A Labour peer, having endured an evening of ostracism [at a Royal bash with Margaret] remarked to the host: “I am not a republican, but I don’t seem to have much luck with the Royal family. I once had quite a struggle helping the king on with his overcoat until I realized he was trying to take it off.”

Then there’s that wonderful English habit of using the impersonal pronoun “one.” From the Times this morning, here’s a classic piece of self-puffery from William Rees-Mogg, former editor of the Times of London:

In 1967 Roy Thomson bought the Times and created Times Newspapers. He later made a fortune in North Sea oil. I have always had very fond memories of him, for his good nature and generosity. In any case, one feels grateful to a man who buys the Times and makes one editor.

GREAT INSULTS: “I know your name, but I can’t recall your face.” – Oscar Wilde.

RUBIN SUCK-UP WATCH: “Mr. Rubin calmly ate a bowl of plain blueberries during a long breakfast interview in his red-and- beige office. Among fly-fishing trophies and official photos, Mr. Rubin hung an engraved chart of all the Treasury secretaries he had reproduced from the original at the Treasury Department. Wearing his customary charcoal suit and white shirt, he is youthfully trim but gives little evidence of overt vanity. Mr. Rubin – who carries the title at Citigroup of chairman of the executive committee – masks an overpowering intellect behind verbal modesty, hedging his views with a courtier’s self-effacement (“Maybe I’m wrong,” and “this is just my opinion, for what it is worth,” or “this could be a bad idea”) in a way that disarms bosses and opponents.” – New York Times today.

Terrific piece in the Washington Post yesterday that confirms my suspicions of Enron’s motives in setting up its “advisory board” for pundits and policy-makers. Even ” some Enron officials privately suggested [paying pundits] did not pass the smell test.” Paul Krugman wasn’t the only liberal for rent. They approached James Carville (who turned them down) and a man called Paul Portney, of the liberal environmental group, Resources for the Future. Here’s a key passage:

Paul Portney, president of Resources for the Future, said he attended five council sessions. Also participating, he said, was the foundation’s vice chairman, Robert Grady, a senior aide to the first President Bush and a drafter of the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments. In June 2001, Grady wrote a column for Time magazine that endorsed the trading of greenhouse gas emissions rights, a business from which Enron hoped to profit. Grady did not respond to requests for an interview. Enron gave Resources for the Future annual gifts of up to $45,000, and Lay’s family foundation pledged $2 million to endow a research chair. Portney called the stipend granted to advisers a “dream,” but said the money did not influence his views — or his foundation’s decision in April 2000 to name Lay to its governing board. “I am pretty cantankerous; I say what I want,” Portney said. The advisory panel fed Lay’s ego and was “consistent with the idea that you buy your way to success,” said a former Enron political operative. “It was clumsy and the joke was these people took the money and ran. They accomplished little.”

Took the money and ran, eh? And that’s the assessment from Enron itself. Bill Kristol’s still spinning, though. He boasts that, for his $100,000 +, he actually told Lay that John McCain could beat Bush. I wonder if he also told Lay about his own beliefs in campaign finance reform. It turns out Kristol opposes corporate bribes for corrupt politicians, but not for journalists. The hacks, it seems, are beyond reproach.

HEAR THE ONE ABOUT THE CHEAP JEW?: “The last time Andrew S. Fastow got in a public brawl about money, it was with a cab driver and concerned a 70-cent tip. The cabbie got so upset he punched Fastow in the face… The picture that emerges is of a greedy, self-dealing executive whom others dare not cross. Friends say they find that image impossible to reconcile with the synagogue-going, happily married, stand-up guy they know.” – Los Angeles Times, February 7. (Update: after a couple of querying emails, I hope it’s clear that I meant this item to be a criticism of such a clumsy if probably unconscious recitation of an anti-Semitic trope.)

Poor new British Tory leader, Iain Duncan Smith. He’s been judged too lifeless even for a Madame Tussaud’s wax figure. “Frankly, there are better ways we can spend that sort of money,” a spokeswoman for the museum told the Times of London. “We want figures who will inspire strong emotions and provoke strong reactions. In our view Mr Duncan Smith, who most people have never even heard of, is unlikely to achieve either of those feats. Ever. He is hardly in the news, nobody ever talks about him, and the people who do know who he is do not seem to care less about him either way.” As for my friend William Hague, the former leader, they’ve melted his body down but kept the head. What an honor.

Clinton’s “leadership”, loyal opposition to Bush’s war, more from multicultural Scandinavia, etc.

First he wears an American flag; now he’s stopped demonizing the pharmaceutical companies. At Davos in New York, the lead singer of U2 said, “I don’t think they (the big pharmaceutical companies) are the bete noir that all my friends think. I think they need to make profits, we need to do research.” Thanks, Bono. Now please tell Ralph Nader.

I can’t put out of my head a piece by Sasha Abramsky in the American Prospect about the actual conditions in many “Super-Max” maximum security prisons, now all the rage around the country. Yes, the inmates are probably dangerous. Yes, they’re in there for mainly unspeakable crimes. But this form of punishment strikes me simply as inhumane. Here’s her description:

The cells are arranged in lines radiating out like spokes from a control hub, so that no prisoner can see another human being–except for those who are double-bunked. Last year, the average population of the Pelican Bay supermax unit was 1,200 inmates, and on average, 288 men shared their tiny space with a “cellie.”… Meals are slid to the inmates through a slot in the steel wall. Some prisoners are kept in isolation even for the one hour per day that they’re allowed out to exercise; all are shackled whenever they are taken out of their cells. And many are forced to live this way for years on end.

It’s no surprise that many mildly depressed inmates become catatonic under such conditions. There seem to be no opportunities for rehabilitation whatsoever, appalling loneliness of a kind that would turn any human into an animal, and conditions far worse than the ones we are imposing on terrorist prisoners of war in Guantanamo Bay. It seems to me that this kind of set-up should be changed for the better. Look, I’m not soft on crime. But I think the way we, as a society, simply abandon many people in prison is a terrible indictment. Perhaps one form of volunteerism that could be encouraged by the new Freedom Corps might be focused on prison inmates. I don’t mean in Supermax jails where such efforts might be fruitless – but in many others, where this vast and growing population, at enormous expense, lies ignored.

JOEL GREENBERG’S AGENDA?: It’s rare to find an editorial in the Jerusalem Post arguing that a New York Times correspondent is furthering a far-left agenda, so it’s worth taking a look at the piece. It concerns a front-page Times report by Joel Greenberg on some soldiers apparently resisting deployment to the West Bank and Gaza in protest of Israeli army policies toward the Palestinians. It was a major piece and may well, in the Post’s eyes, have exaggerated the support for such resisters among the American public. I can’t judge the veracity of the report, but it does seem to me relevant that Greenberg himself was once such an army resister. According to the Post,

An Associated Press article of November 25, 1984, about the refusal of Israeli soldiers to serve in Lebanon stated: “And the worst thing is, we’re still there (in Lebanon),” said Sgt. Joel Greenberg, 28, a Philadelphia-born Israeli who lost his position as squad leader when he refused to go to Lebanon. Like the other conscientious objectors, he isn’t sure he will refuse again.” A news release of the Zionist Organization of America (August 6, 1999) quoted: “Greenberg served a jail term in 1983 for refusing to serve with his army unit in southern Lebanon [Moment, May 1984]”. Greenberg subsequently became a journalist, and was a staff reporter (1986-90) for The Jerusalem Post.

Here’s an interesting question. Should Greenberg have disclosed this history in the piece or should the Times have assigned the story to its other excellent reporter, James Bennet? I’m not sure I know the answer to that, but Greenberg’s past political views – taken to the point of conscientious objection – are certainly useful information to know.

GREAT INSULTS: Here’s a contemporary one, from the invaluable Joseph Epstein, in Commentary last month:

I have never met a reader who has derived pleasure from the novels of Joyce Carol Oates, yet she continues to publish novel after novel, at a rate slightly faster than most office temps can type.

ROMEO AND ROMEO: Two Kansan teen-age boys consensually fooling around – one 18, one almost fifteen – has resulted in the 18-year-old going to jail for seventeen years. The 18 year-old’s sentence was made harsher by a previous sex-crime record (he would otherwise have been jailed for around four years). But it still seems to me an extraordinarily tough sentence for consensual oral sex. If the 18 year-old’s partner had been female and nearly 15, he would have gotten a maximum sentence a third as long as his current punishment. That’s a result of a sensible “Romeo and Juliet” provision in Kansas law allowing for greater leniency if the two partners are teenagers, and one is under-age. I’m not defending sex with a minor, even if it’s allegedly consensual and with another school-mate. But there is no escaping the fact that this kid is being triply punished not because he had oral sex, but because he had gay oral sex. The state’s defense of its unequal treatment of gay and straight sexual crimes is its own sodomy law, which explicitly allows straight oral sex but makes consensual private gay oral sex a crime. This is called unequal protection for the same crime. If it isn’t unconstitutional, it should be.

KRUGMAN NOW SAYS HE WAS JOKING: The guy can’t stop writing about it (makes two of us, I guess). Now Paul Krugman is saying that his original response to his $50,000 Enron junket was not meant to be taken seriously. It was all a “self-deprecating” joke. Stop it, Paul, you’re killing me. For the record, here are his preliminary remarks: “This was an advisory panel that had no function that I was aware of. My later interpretation is that it was all part of the way they built an image. All in all, I was just another brick in the wall.” Ha ha ha. I’m sure he thought he was being funny. But making light of the fact that he was getting paid a small fortune for a board that had “no function” and that was designed to burnish the image of a criminal racket, is humor that actually makes a point. The point is and was that Krugman sees and saw nothing wrong with feeding at the corporate trough for doing next to nothing. I guess humor is subjective and maybe others find this funny. But even if it was humor, it sure wasn’t self-deprecating. Like everything Krugman writes, it was self-inflating. If he gets any more inflated, one of these days he’s gonna pop.

THOSE COLORS: Every day, I get an email saying that someone can’t read the site clearly because of a) the purple links and b) the white-on-blue type. As to a), we’re working on a quick fix. As to b), you’ll see a little button at the top of the Dish that says “Black and White.” Click on it and you’ll get a more traditional-looking website. You can also get the same effect on other pages by clicking the print button. Thanks for keeping us on our toes.

A recovering pedophile discusses the Church’s scandal.

It was Ronald Reagan’s 91st birthday yesterday. Here’s the column I wrote last year to mark the day.

NPR AND STEVE EMERSON: This Jeff Jacoby column is a must-read on publicly financed media bias.

STONE THE CROWS: The evils of the free market can be found everywhere. Take this report of concern about the preponderance of crows in Minneapolis in the Star-Tribune:

A woman named Lynne said she initially welcomed crows moving into her neighborhood. “I think them to be handsome, forthright, yet mysterious,” she wrote. “They have an arrogance that I really quite like in a bird. . . .But my pleasure in their huge and raucous lobbying of my back yard was disturbed when I read somewhere recently that crows take over a neighborhood from other birds. They are, in the aviary world, like gangsters… Like Capitalists.”

You think they might even vote Republican?

NOAH’S DEFENSE: Tim Noah argues in the Washington Post today that publishing a private email is ok as long as the information is already in the public domain. He claims that David Frum’s alleged authorship of the phrase “axis of evil” had already appeared in Canada’s National Post. But hold on. I thought Tim’s original argument was that he published the email because it was newsworthy. Now he says he published it because it was not newsworthy. That surely makes printing the details of a private email even more gratuitous. I think he probably ran it because it was great gossip and he didn’t really think before he pressed the publish button. Hey, we’re all human. We’ve all done that in this wonderful new tech-world of instant self-publishing. I don’t think Tim is a bad person. I just still don’t think what he did was right.