A Colossal Wreck (16 page)

December 4

The British Public Records Office is releasing seventy-year-old material, including Home Office files on Lord Alfred Douglas, aka Bosie, Oscar Wilde’s young lover. In 1923 Douglas was jailed for criminal libel of Winston Churchill, having alleged in a pamphlet that Churchill had accepted a bribe from a German-born financier named Sir Ernest Cassels, to publish a misleading report about the battle of Jutland. For this Bosie pulled six months.

While languishing in Wormwood Scrubs prison, Douglas wrote
De Excelsis
, a reprise on Wilde’s
De Profundis
, written in Reading Jail. The jailers confiscated this and never gave it back, on grounds that it repeated the libels Douglas had been imprisoned for. Douglas bitterly contrasted his treatment with the more generous attitude toward Wilde: “When Oscar Wilde wrote in prison a filthy and blasphemous screed entitled
De Profundis
which consisted largely of abuse of myself and others then living, and contained an apology for every kind of vice and abomination, the Home Office made no difficultly at all about allowing him to take out his MS.”

While it was denying Lord Alfred Douglas’s request the Home
Office was also upholding a ban on Radclyffe Hall’s pioneering lesbian novel,
The Well of Loneliness
. The Home Secretary, Chuter Ede, was sympathetic, noting carefully that “the perversion which it [i.e., the novel] is supposed to celebrate is more widespread than commonly thought.” But the ban lasted until 1968.

And after sixty years the Home Office has released papers showing that David Lloyd George, Prime Minister in 1917, successfully sought the release of Alice Wheeldon, a suffragette who had tried to poison him on the grounds that World War I, for which she apparently held Lloyd George partly responsible, had slowed the cause of women’s rights. Wheeldon had engaged in arson and sabotage in the feminist cause. She was a former postmistress who ran a second-hand clothes shop in Derby, fighting her battles with her daughter Hettie at her side. Alice got ten years for trying to poison the PM, a lenient sentence by modern standards. But Lloyd George had her released after a brief period on the grounds that her incarceration was a PR disaster and she was unwell and might die in prison.

December 17

Edward Said, passing through London on his way to India, gave a talk at an event sponsored by the
New Left Review
and the
London Review of Books
on “Co-existence.” Edward’s point was that after the wreckage of Oslo and the poison of Netanyahu and the “into-the-sea-with-them” irreconcilables, it behooves intellectuals in the Jewish and Arab diaspora to talk about coexistence inside Israel/Palestine. The intellectuals mustered for the occasion, such as George Steiner, agreed, though one can ask, Why just allocate the great task to Jews and Arabs? What about the rest of us, mongrels though we mostly are?

Later, everyone gathered at one of those functions the liberal/left excel in organizing: in the narrow, noisy basement of an indifferent restaurant, offering dank meatballs to be eaten with one’s fingers. I sat down next to Edward to say hello and almost immediately a man I’d never previously met and didn’t recognize rose up and addressed me directly. “Allow me to say I think you are a fucking asshole.” Before I could ask for clarifying evidence, he dashed from the restaurant.
It turned out to be Salman Rushdie. Rushdie was presumably still simmering from criticisms, richly deserved, that I made about him for his disgusting behavior after the Sivas massacre. Some Turkish secularists had gathered in the town of Sivas to make a public reading from Rushdie’s
Satanic Verses
. The same sort of Islamic fanatics as support the fatwa against Rushdie then set fire to the hotel in which the secularists were staying, and more than thirty were burned to death. Rushdie promptly denounced the secularists as acting in a manner he had not authorized. It was a chicken-hearted display. This happened a few years ago. The Islamic arsonists have just been convicted.

December 29

To: Patrick Cockburn

Subject: Bad King John, proto-Islamo-Fascist

Did you know he seriously considered becoming a Muslim? I’m reading R. W. Southern’s
Western Society and the Church in The Middle Ages
, vol. 2 of the Pelican History of the Church. In it Southern notes that King John of England while excommunicated by the Pope for nearly four years, gave serious thought to becoming a Muslim. The steps King John took in this direction were recounted in detail by a contemporary chronicler, Matthew Paris, laid out in
Chronica Majora
, ed. H. R. Luard, in R.S. (Rolls Series—Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland during the Middle Ages), 1874, ii, 559–64. I’m getting hold of this vital text which will no doubt be in Latin, unless Luard translated it.

1998

January 7

The Kennedys never go quietly, do they? Somehow it’s beyond their powers. And if you had to define an
echt
Kennedy manner of passing, Michael’s would surely be it. Here we had a phalanx of Kennedys, plus entourage, skiing downhill in mass formation, a menace to all others on the slope and for good measure tossing a football between them, with Michael video-taping with his other hand.

The assassination buffs are agog. For them, the question is: Who moved the tree? A home video taken by a German tourist the day before the fatal encounter shows the tree at least fifteen feet east of its final rendezvous with the speeding Michael.

January 9

How frail a thing is human memory! On New Year’s Day the
New York Times
ran an AP story about a settlement between the Quaker Oats Co., MIT and some former students. The students were among 100 boys, many of them wards of the state, who were the unwitting objects of research in the 1940s and 1950s when they were fed cereal containing radioactive materials. In the last week of 1997, Quaker and MIT agreed to pay over $1.85 million to the plaintiffs.

The way AP reported the story, Quaker and MIT had lured the
boys from Fernald School in order to “prove that the nutrients in Quaker oatmeal travel throughout the body.” Quaker’s aim was supposedly to match the advertising claim of its deadly corporate rival, Cream of Wheat.

This is by no means the whole story. In 1949 the parents of boys at the Fernald School, some of them mentally retarded, were asked to give consent for the children to join the Fernald science club. (The wards of the state presumably got the go-ahead from some Rep. of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.) The boys were then the unwitting objects of experiments, supervised by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), in partnership with Quaker Oats, in which they were given radioactive oatmeal. The researchers wanted to see if the chemical preservatives in cereal prevented the body from absorbing vitamins and minerals, with the radioactive materials acting as tracers. They also wanted to assess the effects of radioactive materials on the kids.

The AP story missed the AEC’s role altogether, which is just how the AEC—now the Department of Energy—would have liked it. There are many experiments from that era that sound like a continuation of the Nazis’ researches in the labs at Dachau, which is scarcely a coincidence since the CIA spirited out many of those same Nazi scientists, bringing them to work for the AEC and other bodies in the “Paperclip” program, as the CIA codenamed it.

To give just one other of these experiments: in 1963, 131 prisoners in Oregon and Washington had their scrotums and testicles exposed to 600 roentgens of radioactivity. They had given consent, but were not warned of the cancer risk. Later almost all of the prisoners were given vasectomies or were surgically castrated. The doctor who performed the sterilization operations said they were conducted to “keep from contaminating the general population with radiation-induced mutants.” In defending the sterilization experiments, Dr. Victor Bond—a physician at the Brookhaven nuclear lab—said, “It’s useful to know what dose of radiation sterilizes. It’s useful to know what different doses of radiation will do to human beings.” One of Bond’s colleagues, Dr. Joseph Hamilton of the University of California Medical School in San Francisco, said more candidly that
the radiation experiments which he had helped oversee “had a little of the Buchenwald touch.”

January 12

A fellow I know recently shared a sports box with President Bill and mentioned they had a friend in common. This friend was a woman—now an academic—Bill had had a big thing with many years ago, before he met HRC. Bill launched into fond reminiscence, misty-eyed and affectionate. As he listened, the fellow realized that Bill had absolutely no self-consciousness in his nostalgic reverie. He felt, the fellow said later, that if he’d asked Bill whether he had a kink in his cock, the President would have launched off on this topic with equal enthusiasm and lack of restraint.

All the while Bill was rambling on about his former girlfriend, members of Bill’s entourage were sticking their heads into the sports box, asking the Pres did he want to talk to this fat cat or that fat cat who were offering huge sums to the DNC. This is the man’s life. No wonder he didn’t want to stop talking about his old flame.

January 14

Girls love to talk dirty, given half a chance. Two days after Representative Bono had his last and positively final encounter with that tree in the Tahoe basin, California newspapers were full of ominous stuff about mandatory helmets for skiers. I read this in the
San Francisco Chronicle
in our local store and remarked to R. and A., the two women behind the counter, that in any given twenty-four hours in America there must be at least a dozen fatalities involving people falling out of bed while screwing, bashing their heads on the floor, etc., etc., and that the way things were going we’d soon all have to wear helmets before getting it on.

The girls lit up.

“And mandatory knee pads against carpet burn,” cried A.

“And mandatory pads against tile burn in the shower,” shouted R. merrily.

A couple of minutes later they were laughing about doing it in airplanes. Racy stuff. I headed for the door, ears a-tingle.

January 15

The big New Year’s resolution is the same one I always make. Really good tax records. This time, for $15 I bought a diary which has a whole page for each day. January 1 was a snap. I put the miles I drove in my car, plus charitable dispensations ($2 to a man standing in the rain at a street corner with a sign saying he’d work for food), plus cost of meals and brief reason why they could be counted as business-related entertainment. Then I put down the cost of all my newspapers. I entered check numbers, totals and deductible disbursements. I spent several minutes thinking how easy tax preparation will be in February 1998, and about the chagrin of the IRS auditor when he realizes that this time he’s met his match. I even called my brother and handed him a short lecture on the importance of proper record-keeping.

It took a whole day—January 2—for reality to creep back into my life. The virtuous, one-page-per-day diary is grim to behold, so I bought a nice little Mexican diary, with plenty of demotic iconography and almost no space for anything except for a couple of phone numbers a day. A spiral wire holds the flimsy pages and if 1997 is anything to go by, somewhere in July 1998, I’ll lose the first three months of the year. I’ll fall behind in my estimated quarterly payments. I’ll have to guess the miles driven. So, 1998 will be a year when, as with other years, I pay enough in interest and penalties to hold the B-2 bomber program together single-handed. All the same, the Air Force has come to rely on me and I’d hate to let them down.

February 17

Many people go through life rehearsing a role they feel that the fates have in store for them, and I’ve long thought that Christopher Hitchens has been asking himself for years how it would feel to plant the Judas kiss.

And now, as a Judas and a snitch, Hitchens has made the big time. On February 5, amid the embers of the impeachment trial, he trotted along to Congress and swore out an affidavit that he and his wife, Carol Blue, had lunch with White House aide Sidney Blumenthal last March 19 and that Blumenthal had described Monica Lewinsky as a stalker. Since Blumenthal had just claimed in his deposition to the House impeachment managers that he had no idea how this linking of the White House stalker stories had started, Hitchens’s affidavit was about as flat a statement as anyone could want that Blumenthal has perjured himself, thus exposing himself to a sentence of up to five years in prison. At the very least, Hitchens has probably cost Blumenthal about $100,000 in fresh legal expenses on top of the $200,000 tab he’s already facing. Some friend.

And we are indeed talking about friendship here. They’ve been pals for years and Hitchens has not been shy about trumpeting the fact. Last spring, when it looked as though Blumenthal was going to be subpoenaed by prosecutor Starr for his journalistic contacts, Hitchens blared his readiness to stand shoulder to shoulder with his comrade: “together we have soldiered against the neoconservative ratbags,” Hitchens wrote in the
Nation
last spring. “Our life à deux has been, and remains an open book. Do your worst. Nothing will prevent me from gnawing a future bone at his table or, I trust, him from gnawing in return.” This was in an edition of the
Nation
dated March 30, 1998, a fact which means—given the
Nation
’s scheduling practices—that Hitchens just writing these loyal lines immediately before the lunch—Hitchens now says he thinks it was on March 19, at the Occidental Restaurant near the White House—whose conversational menu Hitchens would be sharing with these same neoconservative, right-wing ratbags ten months later.

The surest way to get a secret into mass circulation is to tell it to Hitchens, swearing him to silence as one does so. His friends have known this for years. As a compulsive tattler and gossip Hitchens gets a frisson I’d guess to be quasi-sexual in psychological orientation out of the act of tattling or betrayal.