a good citizen's cap

Bankers Seek to Debunk Attack on Top 1%

Tom Golisano, billionaire founder of payroll processer Paychex Inc. (PAYX) and a former New York gubernatorial candidate, said in an interview this month that while there are examples of excess, it’s “ridiculous” to blame everyone who is rich.

“If I hear a politician use the term ‘paying your fair share’ one more time, I’m going to vomit,” said Golisano, who turned 70 last month, celebrating the birthday with girlfriend Monica Seles, the former tennis star who won nine Grand Slam singles titles.

Must read »

Bard of Barbs: RIP Christopher Hitchens

Rather than wade into the legend, the myth, the Iraq War supporter, I’d like to share what was unimpeachably good about Christopher Hitchens: masterful take downs of worthy targets. In this case — oh my — that target is Norman Podhoretz.

Unsurprisingly, you could apply a lot of this to Norman’s son and current editor of Commentary, John — also known as Twitter’s resident bore.  

This essay was taken from what is likely his best collection, and the one Hitchens once claimed to be proud of most, Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in The Public Sphere.

Not to be moist but I’ll miss him.

REVIEW: Ex-Friends, by Norman Podhoretz. The Free Press. 256 pages. $25. 

Evelyn Waugh, discoursing on the etiquette of book reviewing, observed that one must always give favorable treatment to the work of close friends. Quite apart from anything else, he explained, it was the height of bad manners to give a poor review to a book one had not read. Waugh’s remark may have been cynical, but it had a certain lightness and paradox to it. Whereas Norman Podhoretz has no levity—unbearable heaviness is his preferred metier—and never strays into paradox,and gives a series of chiefly posthumous but always spiteful reviews to several authors whom he may have read but certainly has not understood. This is bad manners cubed, boorishness wrenched almost into a literary form.

True, the former editor of the supposedly solemn Commentary magazine has always himself sought to ease the life of the book reviewer. He does this small but welcome favor by making all his faults crashingly apparent from the very first page, sometimes even from the opening paragraph. Here are the initial two sentences of Ex-Friends:

I have often said that if I wish to namedrop, I have only to list my ex-friends. This remark always gets a laugh, but, in addition to being funny, it has the advantage of being true.

If he does say so himself. To be invariably witty and unfailingly truthful is a claim many of us might wish to make or perhaps (shall we hint?) to have made on our behalf. To reduce the claim to an assertion, frequently advanced-as we are assured by the author himself and no less often mirthfully received, is to force the question: Who is the audience for this sapient gag? How often does it meet, and where? Who pays for the dinner? Then again, if Podhoretz stands alone in a forest, and falls over as a result of laughing at his own mordant humor, and there is nobody to hear or to see, does he still look and sound such a fool?

But seriously, folks, Norman doesn’t want you to think that he is a mere Catskills jester, nor yet a pure and ascetic intellectual. Let us proceed, drying our eyes, to page two, where it is confided with perfect gravity that:

It will seem even stranger to my more recent acquaintances that in my younger years I was also full of fun, as Norman Mailer confirmed when he said that I was “merrier” in the “old days.” The same word was once used by Max Lerner, the historian and columnist (now among the almost forgotten), who after spending a few days in my company described me (to general agreement) as “the merry madcap” of the group.

Must have been quite a party. Norman setting the table on a roar and bearing Lerner on his back to the land of infinite jest. In the comer, perhaps, Irving Kristol screaming, “Stop! You’re killing me!” But as I contemplated this lugubrious fiesta, the image of Yorick faded from my mind to be deposed by that of Polonius himself, endlessly finger-wagging to the young and making himself useful around the court.He gave way in turn to Justice Shallow, cackling senescently about the chimes of midnight and the tales he might have told of a laddish youth.

A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realization that you can’t make old friends. This is redeemed somewhat by the possibility of making new ones, and in his late maturity—some might say that like the medlar fruit he went rotten before becoming ripe—Podhoretz has found companionship and solidarity with some new chums. He mentions them shyly, as if he were back in his lonely childhood and his mother    had secretly bribed them to play with him.

Here, in what is for me a rare submission to the principles of affirmative action, which dictate that I should strive to achieve greater name-dropping “diversity,” I will single out Henry Kissinger and William F. Buckley, Jr. In spite of our failure to form ourselves into a cohesive family, we have managed to join forces as a dissenting minority of “heretical” intellectuals who are trying to break the virtual monopoly that the worst ideas of my ex-friends hold (even from beyond the grave) over the cultural institutions of this country.

The purpose of recruiting these new chums is clear: to enlist them in the urgent task of pissing on the graves of the old ones. This makes them more like cronies, or accomplices, than actual friends. But perhaps that’s better than nothing. Is it Henry and Bill, perhaps, who get together and agree to laugh at Norman’s jokes? Whatever the case, the man who can describe this gleesome threesome as a trio of heretical dissenters is certainly eager to please.

Read More