A Colossal Wreck Read online

  In one of his collections, The PreHistory of the Far Side, Larson offers what are purportedly childhood sketches saved by his mother from the kindergarten period of his career. These feature prison bars on the windows, slavering hellhounds, a father holding him above a crocodile’s jaws and other fun scenes from the dark vale of infancy.

  In PreHistory, Larson offers some cartoons he never even bothered to send out for syndication. “Jesus rises from the grave,” says the caption under a picture of a rather haggard Redeemer frying up some breakfast next to an open coffin and thinking: “I wonder what time it is … I feel like I’ve been dead for three days.”

  January 11

  The duty of the press—an over-roasted chestnut. For uplift we may turn to the editorials written by Robert Lowe for the London Times in 1851. He had been instructed by his editor to refute the claim of a government minister that if the press hoped to share the influence of statesmen, it “must also share in the responsibilities of statesmen.”

  “The first duty of the press,” Lowe wrote, “is to obtain the earliest and most correct intelligence of the events of the time, and instantly, by disclosing them, to make them the common property of the nation. The statesman collects his information secretly and by secret means; he keeps back even the current intelligence of the day with ludicrous precautions, until diplomacy is beaten in the race with publicity. The Press lives by disclosures; whatever passes into its keeping becomes a part of the knowledge and the history of our times; it is daily and forever appealing to the enlightened force of public opinion—standing upon the breach between the present and the future, and extending its survey to the horizon of the world … For us, with whom publicity and truth are the air and light of existence, there can be no greater disgrace than to recoil from the frank and accurate disclosure of facts as they are. We are bound to tell the truth as we find it, without fear of consequences—to lend no convenient shelter to acts of injustice and oppression, but to consign them at once to the judgment of the world.”

  From which high-minded sentiments we may turn to the views expressed by Sir Melford Stevenson, who was a British high court judge from 1957 to 1979. To a group of journalists discussing ethical procedures he remarked: “I think you’re all much too high-minded. I believe that newsworthiness is a firm realization of the fact that there’s nothing so much the average Englishman enjoys on a Sunday morning—particularly on a Sunday morning—as to read a bit of dirt. And that would be my test of newsworthiness … There is a curious synthetic halo around these people who are called ‘investigative’ journalists. Now so far as most courts are concerned—and I think most jurors—the concept of a journalist driven by moral fervor to investigate a public scandal is a lot of nonsense. He enjoys the comforting thought that he has a bit of moral fervor which is filling his pocket as well. And there are few more desirable positions in life than that.”

  January 15

  The Polish director Andrzej Wajda writes in his little memoir about movie-making, Double Vision, that once he started directing Hamlet and realized the whimsical, arbitrary quality of the plot, the hardest thing was to relate onstage the sequence of the events in proper order, from Hamlet’s first meeting with his mother and the king to Fortinbras’s victorious entrance in the final scene. That sequence of events could have been different if:

  1. Hamlet had come to terms with his uncle, the king.

  2. He had refused to believe in his father’s ghost.

  3. He had not succumbed to Ophelia’s charms.

  4. He had succeeded in killing the king while he was at prayer.

  5. He had not killed Polonius by mistake, thinking he was the king.

  Plus a whole lot of other “ifs.”

  And yet, Wajda goes on, “we have to admit that Hamlet has a steel-like logic.” One thing just inevitably leads to another.

  Wajda also tells a good story about something that happened the day the French left Algiers. People took to the streets and, in the course of events, still in a state of euphoria, arrived at the television studios. The gaping, empty studios, the television cameras and equipment scattered here and there, did not in the minds of the surging crowd seem to have any connection with what they conceived as television—that is, at least until the moment that someone in the know plugged in the cameras. Suddenly the blank screens of the monitors lit up, and the demonstrators saw their own bodies and faces on-screen. At first they were amused. Then they were emboldened. Hey, we’re on TV! They realized if they could see themselves on the monitors, the rest of the population could also see them on TV sets throughout the city. Maybe even further. They began to sing, dance, recite. The result was an uninterrupted television show that for once was completely authentic. It finally ended, as do all such spontaneous demonstrations, with the arrival of the police and armed officers.

  January 18

  Being without electricity for four days here in storm-lashed Petrolia gives one a keen admiration for gas-fired water heaters (to which I will be converting shortly). I enjoyed the recovered memory of living by lamplight, which I did for a number of years when I was growing up in Ireland. After 6:00 in the evening until about 7:00 in the morning, life becomes a matter of moving through a darkened house from one small pool of warm light to another. I have two lamps. Unlike the hard-edged world of the light bulb, everything is imprecise in outline. Everything looks like one of the those dark seventeenth- or eighteenth-century paintings. Most of my friends look better by lamplight too. Cooking becomes a different enterprise, based much more on smell or on the noise of a sizzle or a rolling boil. I’m fairly short-sighted, but in lamplight, it doesn’t matter, because you can’t see much anyway.

  This situation reminds me of a story I once read about endemic trachoma in the Egyptian village of Gamileya. Trachoma is an infection that causes the inner surface of the eyelids to become chronically inflamed. In Gamileya, people do not require conventionally “normal” vision to conduct their daily activities. Plowing, sowing seed and harvesting don’t require much vision. If there is some small task they are unable to do, their extended family does it for them, thus they do not perceive themselves as disabled.

  Early last Wednesday morning, as I felt my way around the house, falling over the cats, listening to hear if the water was boiling, Petrolia played a final joke. Amid the violent thunderstorm that was raging, with the waters roiling not far from my window, the earth decided to heave in a fairly modest—4.3—earthquake.

  February 10

  I was astonished to see Robert Hughes confess in the New York Review of Books that he and his wife watch the MacNeil-Lehrer show every night. Imagine, day after day, week after week, year after year. “Good night, Jim. Good night, Robin.”

  I parodied MacNeil and Lehrer once in Harper’s and that was it for Lewis Lapham. They never forgave him or me.

  ROBIN MACNEIL (voice-over): Should one man own another?

  MACNEIL: Good evening. The problem is as old as man himself. Do property rights extend to the absolute ownership of one man by another? Tonight, the slavery problem. Jim?

  LEHRER: Robin, advocates of the continuing system of slavery argue that the practice has brought unparalleled benefits to the economy. They fear that new regulations being urged by reformers would undercut America’s economic effectiveness abroad. Reformers, on the other hand, call for legally binding standards and even a phased reduction in the slave force to something like 75 percent of its present size. Charlayne Hunter-Gault is in Charleston. Charlayne?

  And so on.

  Bob is an old friend. We’ve fished together. We’ve even done that most intimate, secret of things—we went to a tax accountant together. Back in the mid-1970s we formed a mutual support group of two, forcing ourselves to get abreast of the federal tax situation. At Jason Epstein’s instigation, Mr. Hoffman of Garlick and Hoffman agreed to see us. We arrived at the appointed hour with our shoeboxes filled with bus receipts and other records. Mr. Hoffman looked over the fine red velvet suit Bob had
donned for the occasion. “Filing a joint return?” he asked cautiously.

  March 1

  On Monday, February 27, as Wall Street was digesting morning headlines about the Barings disaster, Treasury Secretary Rubin rose to address New York securities traders at a savings bond lunch. His chosen theme was “modernization,” which in Wall Street parlance—and Rubin, former chief of Goldman Sachs, is a Wall Street man par excellence—usually means the sweeping away of any regulatory inhibition on the power to make as much money as possible, as fast as possible.

  And thus it turned out. Rubin announced that the Clinton administration plans to overturn the Glass-Steagall Act which separates commercial and investment banking. Separate legislation will allow banking–insurance ties.

  Glass-Steagall was signed on June 16, 1933. It was designed to restore confidence in the nation’s banking system, reeling after a series of runs and panics. It established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. In return for federal support for their liabilities the banks were required to submit to regulation. Glass-Steagall forbade banks from short-term trading of most securities and from underwriting corporate offerings. Issuance of stocks and bonds was left to the securities industry.

  It’s the aim of every captain of finance to preside over a universal financial institution where the velocity of capital can approach the speed of light.

  Banks want to get into the securities industry because there’s extra money to be picked up in handling stocks, bonds and kindred short-term IOUs. Securities firms want to get into the banking business because it gets them access to the Federal Reserve payments mechanism, whereby the Fed stands behind banks as their lender of the last resort.

  The Clinton administration, dominated in economic and financial matters by Wall Street’s man Rubin, is now aiming to give banks and the securities firms everything they have yearned for.

  March 3

  Dear Mr. Cockburn,

  On March 29, 1994, my friend and associate, June Weinstrock, was severely beaten by a mob in San Cristobal, Guatemala. Her attackers were fired to hysteria by rumors that Americans were abducting Guatemalan children and selling their organs. Apparently unaware of the rumors, she approached and/or spoke with children at a bus stop in town. Meanwhile, nearby, a distraught mother called out for her child who had become separated from her in a crowd. A street vendor joked that “The Gringa took him … for body parts.” June is presently hospitalized in Anchorage, slowly convalescing from major brain damage—at present unable to walk, but beginning to recover speech.

  I have been investigating the background of this event concerning child abductions and the so-called organ trade. I have read several journalistic accounts of the event and its surrounding circumstances.

  Do you know any of the documented cases that are trackable to a source? In particular, autopsy evidence would be compelling.

  Sincerely,

  Coert Olmstead

  The body-part story has been circulating for years. In the early 1980s the CIA even said that it was disinformation put out by the KGB to discredit America. At one time or another many investigators from TV documentary programs and newspapers have tried to follow the body-parts trail but haven’t come up with much. The best discussion of the whole subject I’ve come across is in the Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s book about the Brazilian northeast, Death Without Weeping, where she discusses the not baseless fear of poor women there that their children will be kidnapped by middle-class women without offspring of their own. The body-parts fear surfaces there too. There are genuine accounts from all over the world—most recently India—of people selling one of their kidneys and so forth. Asset transfer …

  March 23

  It turns out that the directors of Barings Bank knew perfectly well that Nick Leeson, their man in Singapore, was staking their future on some bets on the movement of the Japanese Nikkei index. Since Leeson had made them a lot of money the previous year they thought he was going to repeat his achievement.

  Then, in the hour of emergency, the Barings directors turned to the Bank of England to bail them out. The Bank’s top man was away skiing in Switzerland, so the decision fell on the shoulders of his number two, whose interest that Sunday evening lay not in saving one of the oldest private investment houses in England, but in advancing his adulterous liaison with an Irish girl with whom he was enjoying intimacies on the carpet of the governor’s office.

  So the second in command said No to Barings, which promptly went belly up, though its directors still voted themselves enormous bonuses. The Irish girl decamped to her native sod, whence she communicated details of the adultery to the British press, much to the discomfiture of the second-in-command’s wife, Helen Jay, who said she would stand by him, though not to the extent of appearing in photographs with her treacherous spouse.

  I went out with the very nice Helen briefly in the mid-1960s. She and her twin sister Catherine were once taken as symbolic of a youthful Labour Party, poised to snatch control of the nation’s destinies from the palsied Conservatives who had been in power for fourteen years, until they met in defeat in 1964 at the hands of Harold Wilson and his Labour cohorts.

  The pretty Jay twins attended the Buckingham Palace Garden party that year dressed in the Mondrianesque clothes of the French designer Courrèges and were thought to be striking exemplars of the new, go-ahead age of social democracy that was about to unfold.

  Meanwhile their father, Douglas Jay, became President of the Board of Trade in the Wilson cabinet. Owing to his nympholeptic tastes he was known as Mucky Doug. I remember having enjoyable late night drinks with Gareth Stedman Jones and the twins in their father’s Hampstead Heath house when suddenly the door of the living room was flung open and there stood the cabinet minister, resplendent in his pajamas and flourishing one of those red dispatch boxes—like a small suitcase—in which cabinet members proudly carry home their papers. I hoped he was going to invoke the nation’s business and he did, bellowing that he had “the nation’s business to attend to” and would we “please leave,” which we duly did.

  Later Helen took up with Nicholas Tomalin, a well-known journalist who hired me as number two when he became literary editor of the New Statesman. The editor was Paul Johnson. Tomalin’s adulteries with Helen tended to be the topic of his tipsy lunch-time reveries as we sat in some pub in Lincoln’s Inn of the sort later immortalized in fiction by my sister Sarah Caudwell. “Everything’s good if the fucking is good,” Tomalin would mumble as he slurped his way through his staple lunch-time bottle of white wine.

  His literary editorship was meant to spell a new life instead of the “investigative journalism” by which he had made his name, exposing French shippers for mislabeling their vintages. But soon he wearied of the kingdom of letters and went off to cover the 1973 Yom Kippur war, and was killed by the wire-guided missile of what Paul Johnson described in his memorial speech as a “Syrian savage.” Now Helen is with the assistant head of the Bank of England which shows you the trend of events in Blighty.

  March 29

  “Here and there in the midst of American society you meet with men full of a fanatical and almost wild spiritualism, which hardly exists in Europe. From time to time strange sects arise which endeavor to strike out extraordinary paths to eternal happiness. Religious insanity is very common in the United States …

  “The soul has wants that must be satisfied; and whatever pains are taken to divert it from itself, it soon grows weary, restless and disquieted amid the enjoyments of sense. If ever the faculties of the great majority of mankind were exclusively bent upon the pursuit of material objects, it might be anticipated that an amazing reaction would take place in the souls of some men. They would drift at large in the world of spirits, for fear of remaining shackled by the close bondage of the body.

  “It is not, then, wonderful if in the midst of a community whose thoughts tend earthward a small number of individuals are found who turn their looks to heaven. I should be surprised if mysticism did not
soon make some advance among a people solely engaged in promoting their own worldly welfare.”—from “Why some Americans manifest a sort of fanatical Spiritualism.” Chapter XII of de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.

  April 12

  An astoundingly silly quote from Antonio Gramsci, arguing that dumb toil can be liberating: “Once the process of adaptation has been completed, what really happens is that the brain of the worker, far from being mummified, reaches a state of complete freedom. The only thing that is completely mechanized is the physical gesture: the memory, reduced to simple gestures repeated at an intense rhythm, ‘nestles’ in the muscular and nervous centers and leaves the brain free and unencumbered for other occupations.”

  Read that to the next person who complains about carpal tunnel syndrome. I knew Lenin was a fanatic Taylorist, but it turns out AG was the same way. Gramsci came to this idiotic conclusion after considering type compositors whom he arrogantly supposed to be mechanistically transcribing without considering the text’s “often fascinating intellectual content.” He wrote this about the same time the British type compositors at the London Daily Mail prompted the General Strike of 1926 by refusing to typeset an article they regarded as anti-labor.

  April 14

  In a significant shift in its admissions policy, Harvard University apparently no longer regards murder as a useful, even decisively impressive credential.

  When she was fourteen, Gina Grant killed her alcoholic mother, admitting to a South Carolina court that she struck her thirteen times with a lead crystal candle holder. This was back in 1990. Grant pleaded no contest to voluntary manslaughter and spent six years in juvenile detention. Then a judge agreed that she could go north to Massachusetts and try for a fresh start under the supervision of her (deceased) father’s aunt and her husband.

  At first living with her relatives and then alone, Grant did extraordinarily well at Cambridge Rindge and Latin high school, getting straight As, tutoring poor children, flourishing in the school’s overall social life. Harvard offered her early admission.