The Latest(ish)
If there’s anything more guaranteed to set off my inner sans-culotte than pampered, arrogant Teresa Heinz Kerry, it’s a gathering of international bureaucrats, the spoiled, sanctimonious, worthless, and annoying aristocrats of our own sadly yet to be ancient regime. Locusts in limousines, they periodically descend on some unfortunate city, clogging the streets with their retinues, the restaurants with their greed, and the newspapers with their self-importance. Seen from this perspective, and judging by its remarkably unflattering cover photograph, “The World’s Banker” (The Penguin Press, 462 pages, $29.95) an account by the Washington Post’s Sebastian Mallaby of James Wolfensohn and the [...]
Other People’s Money
September 30, 2004
The World's Banker; published originally in The New York Sun
The notebooks—worn, creased, and drab, but haunting nonetheless—lay carefully set out on a table in the lobby of a New York hotel. Their pages were filled with notes, comments, and calculations, jotted and scribbled in the cursive, spiky script once a hallmark of pre-war Britain’s educated classes. Their author had, it seems, wandered through a dying village deep within Stalin’s gargoyle empire. “Woman came out and started crying. ‘They’re killing us. In my village there used to be 300 cows and now we only have 30. The horses have died. How can I feed us all?’” It was the Ukraine, [...]
A Hero of Our Time: Gareth Jones, 20th-century truth-teller.
September 17, 2004
So the GOP convention passed off, to use the bland, blinding bureaucratic phraseology, without major incident. There were many arrests, sure, and on the Sunday before a march involving hundreds of thousands of demonstrators, but these are part of the regular theater, or in the case of some of the protests, the pantomime, of American politics in our age of unease and unusual rancor. But the other possibility, the possibility about which we murmured, we whispered, we speculated and in anticipation of which not a few folk fled town, did not, thank God and, I suspect, good security, come to [...]
Comfort Zone
September 7, 2004