Dear Tim,
I’m late in posting my first entry today because the phone repairman who came to do that slight, ahem, adjustment you wanted in our phone system began by asking me to move every stick of furniture in our office over to one side. Though he appears to weigh in at about 200 pounds, he made clear his disinclination to lend a hand.
Like you, I loved Frum’s piece this morning. (My favorite detail: that the Ohlmanns served American cheese on white bread as canapés.) That kind of Midwestern, Depression-baby thrift really is gone with the wind. It reminded me of the time, seven or eight years ago, I went to the home of skillionaire lobbyist Clark Clifford to interview his wife. (It was in the midst of the BCCI scandal, which I never was able to summarize in a sentence even when reporting on it. Suffice it to say that Clifford was widely suspected of cupidity in the deal.) It was this gorgeous old clapboard pile on Rockville Pike (the huge road that Wisconsin Avenue becomes if you follow it up into Maryland–some of the densest commercial real estate in the region), and Mrs. Clifford told me that scraps of ammunition from the Civil War still turn up in their front yard. There was a servant who brought us iced tea on a silver tray, and several swell cars in the garage. Yet the place was distinctly starved. There were actual cobwebs up on the walls, and it was about two years past needing a paint job. I can’t remember whether my hostess told me, or I surmised, that a lot of the furniture still wore the upholstery it had when they moved it from St. Louis during the Truman era. But I do remember that she showed me the shabby old chair that Clifford liked to settle in every night after dinner. It didn’t even look comfortable.
So much to discuss in today’s papers. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal both did me the favor of publishing long examinations of the Cincinnati Enquirer’s apology for its Chiquita story. (They ponied up more than $10 million and a huge apology after it was revealed that an Enquirer reporter had tapped into–in other words, stolen–the voice mail of Chiquita executives.) These two stories are best read in tandem; neither wholly got the goods. But if you have time for only one, read the Journal story, which at last offers one possible explanation for why Gannett ponied up such a huge sum before a single lawsuit was filed: It seems that the reporter in question, Mike Gallagher, had told the paper’s editor six months before the story was published that he had tapped into the company’s voice mail. He claimed to have done it only as a way to confirm the contents of voice mail that had already been given to him by a Chiquita insider; and the editor–who was Gallagher’s mentor from earlier jobs they had both held at other Gannett papers–told the paper’s lawyers and told Gallagher to desist. But it seems likely that this prior knowledge exposed the Enquirer to liability in a way that simply running the story did not.
That’s my theory, anyway. In general, the Journal does a better job of getting inside the paper’s culture; the Times handles the story as an effort to discern which of the Enquirer’s charges against Chiquita do and don’t stand up. Only one other thing is clear: a sidebar photograph in the Times of Gallagher’s home, which is now up for sale, strongly suggests that we should move to Cincinnati. That sucker would be out of reach in any suburb of Washington.
For fun, read Marc Fisher’s charming piece in the Style section of today’s Washington Post about a fellow named Bruce Sterling, who chronicles the deaths of communications technologies. His great passion, Fisher writes, is to combat the nice notion that one technology leads simply and cleanly to another. “Media ebb and flow, issue offspring, slam into dead ends,” Fisher writes. “Why? Why do mailmen still deliver paper messages to our doors on foot while the system of pneumatic tubes that transported mail in Paris in the 1860s vanished? Why did the Picturephone die, and Qube, and eight-track tapes, and the Rock-Ola Mystic Music System, a 1941 jukebox that had no phonograph?” Sterling, a science fiction writer, and a group of fellow enthusiasts known as the Necronauts, call their work the Dead Media Project.
Finally, I’m fascinated by today’s stories about the FDA’s decision to authorize the sale of Thalidomide. A small New Jersey company petitioned to sell the drug for treatment of leprosy symptoms, with the expectation that it will also be prescribed for other uses including AIDS and cancer; they developed an elaborate array of safety measures to try to avoid the horrendous birth defects that Thalidomide caused in the ‘60s. The Post offers a wonderful feature describing how Thalidomide survivors (mainly in Canada; since Thalidomide was never approved by the FDA in the bad old days, there are only ten “Thalidomide babies” living in the U.S.) and the new company came to work together in developing the safety system that will surround Thalidomide’s marketing. (Everyone who is prescribed it, for example, will have to watch a video featuring a woman whose mother took Thalidomide during pregnancy; women of child-bearing age must agree to use two forms of birth control simultaneously.) The story has a poignant description of the drug company executives flying to Canada for a first meeting, one of them agonizing about whether he will know the right way to greet someone who has the arm disabilities typical of Thalidomide victims; at the same time, the head of the survivor’s group describes watching carefully to see if these executives will flinch from touching the people they’re meeting with, and how important it seems to him when they do not. It’s one of those rare stories in which, without pretending they don’t have their own agendas, people actually talk about what’s true.
Time to go pick up my $3.14 latte at Starbuck’s.
Yours without thrift,
Marjorie
