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One of the pleasures of my life is not owning an iPod, a BlackBerry, a Kindle or any contraption that has anything to do with Facebook or Twitter. I own a mobile telephone that I use only when on board my boat, otherwise I am mercifully free from these ghastly inventions that are turning modern life into a technological nightmare. Can you imagine flirting with a girl by text-ing her? Or by emailing her that you love her, or that you no longer love her, for that matter? Not to mention the morons that zig-zag down our streets, their eyes riveted to the ghastly gimmick in their hands, oblivious to their surroundings, slaves to a technological god that has turned the dumb into robots and the unimaginative into zombies.
Until last week, I was not aware that all this crap is called social media, until I read an article by Jonathan Franzen that declared he was sick to death of hearing social media disrespected by cranky 51-year-olds. Add 23 more years, substitute disrespect with the word closest to bowel movement, and you’ve got little ole me, moron Franzen. This guy is supposed to be a famous writer, so why does this sentence make very little sense to me: ‘A related phenomenon is the transformation, courtesy of Facebook, of the verb “to like” from a state of mind to an action that you perform with your computer mouse, from a feeling to an assertion of consumer choice.’ Huh? In other words, my feelings for The Spectator’s deputy editor are one click away with my mouse, whatever that is. I’ve got some unsolicited advice for you, Franzen. Stop looking into your whachamacallit, and start identifying trees in Central Park, zombie. It’s called living and you should try it.
Otherwise, everything’s hunky-dory. I had great dinners downtown with Graydon Carter and wonderful ones uptown with Conrad Black, in fine form, incidentally. A drinks party for Henry Kissinger’s book On China was also fun, the great man having written a hell of a book about a superpower that the more we get to know the less we really understand.
And then, of course, we have the scandal of the New York Mets, a baseball team hijacked by two real-estate sharks who made their big moolah with Madoff and are now playing the victims because it’s clawback time. Let the poor little Greek boy explain: Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz were two small-time real-estate developers who got lucky when Joan Whitney Payson died and her team, the New York Mets, went up for sale for a song. In partnership with Nelson Doubleday, the duo got the team by putting up only 600,000 greenbacks each, borrowing another ten million from the banks.
When television contracts pushed baseball franchise values through the roof, the duo bought out Doubleday — a descendant of the man credited with inventing baseball — for some $100 million. They had made serious money after purchasing the team from some very shrewd investments with an unknown genius by the name of Bernie Madoff. Well, you all know the rest, but what very few realised at the time is that the duo had contemplated time and again insuring themselves against fraud by — yes, you guessed it — Madoff. According to the trustee investigating the Ponzi scheme, Irving H. Picard, the decision of Wilpon and Katz to go shopping for insurance is proof that they knew Madoff was cheating.
An article about the Wilpon–Katz mess and the Mets appeared in the New Yorker a couple of weeks ago. What I found shocking was the tone of the piece, written by one Jeffrey Toobin in the tone I would use if writing about Robert E. Lee or Heinz Guderian. Toobin even quoted Madoff from jail saying what good guys the two sharks are. Needless to say, Wilpon and Katz do not want to give back the close to one billion Picard is claiming, using Toobin as their spokesman, so to speak. The New Yorker should never have run the piece because it’s obvious the two sharks schmoozed Toobin, a very funny-looking little man.
As far as I’m concerned, there is no rationale — in law or in fact — that justifies the retention of stolen money. But this is Noo Yawk, and the duo are whining, and whining very loudly. The money has to be given back because the duo became billionaires because of the fraud. At best they were greedy dupes. Most likely they knew very well after 25 years that Madoff was cheating. Give back the moolah.
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