A Colossal Wreck (3 page)

I parodied MacNeil and Lehrer once in
Harper’s
and that was it for Lewis Lapham. They never forgave him or me.

ROBIN MACNEIL (voice-over): Should one man own another?

MACNEIL: Good evening. The problem is as old as man himself. Do property rights extend to the absolute ownership of one man by another? Tonight, the slavery problem. Jim?

LEHRER: Robin, advocates of the continuing system of slavery argue that the practice has brought unparalleled benefits to the economy. They fear that new regulations being urged by reformers would undercut America’s economic effectiveness abroad. Reformers, on the other hand, call for legally binding standards and even a phased reduction in the slave force to something like 75 percent of its present size. Charlayne Hunter-Gault is in Charleston. Charlayne?

And so on.

Bob is an old friend. We’ve fished together. We’ve even done that most intimate, secret of things—we went to a tax accountant together. Back in the mid-1970s we formed a mutual support group of two, forcing ourselves to get abreast of the federal tax situation. At Jason Epstein’s instigation, Mr. Hoffman of Garlick and Hoffman agreed to see us. We arrived at the appointed hour with our shoeboxes filled with bus receipts and other records. Mr. Hoffman looked over the fine red velvet suit Bob had donned for the occasion. “Filing a joint return?” he asked cautiously.

March 1

On Monday, February 27, as Wall Street was digesting morning headlines about the Barings disaster, Treasury Secretary Rubin rose to address New York securities traders at a savings bond lunch. His chosen theme was “modernization,” which in Wall Street parlance—and Rubin, former chief of Goldman Sachs, is a Wall Street man par excellence—usually means the sweeping away of any regulatory inhibition on the power to make as much money as possible, as fast as possible.

And thus it turned out. Rubin announced that the Clinton administration plans to overturn the Glass-Steagall Act which separates commercial and investment banking. Separate legislation will allow banking–insurance ties.

Glass-Steagall was signed on June 16, 1933. It was designed to restore confidence in the nation’s banking system, reeling after a series of runs and panics. It established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. In return for federal support for their liabilities the banks were required to submit to regulation. Glass-Steagall forbade banks from short-term trading of most securities and from underwriting corporate offerings. Issuance of stocks and bonds was left to the securities industry.

It’s the aim of every captain of finance to preside over a universal financial institution where the velocity of capital can approach the speed of light.

Banks want to get into the securities industry because there’s extra money to be picked up in handling stocks, bonds and kindred short-term IOUs. Securities firms want to get into the banking business because it gets them access to the Federal Reserve payments mechanism, whereby the Fed stands behind banks as their lender of the last resort.

The Clinton administration, dominated in economic and financial matters by Wall Street’s man Rubin, is now aiming to give banks and the securities firms everything they have yearned for.

March 3

Dear Mr. Cockburn,

On March 29, 1994, my friend and associate, June Weinstrock, was severely beaten by a mob in San Cristobal, Guatemala. Her attackers were fired to hysteria by rumors that Americans were abducting Guatemalan children and selling their organs. Apparently unaware of the rumors, she approached and/or spoke with children at a bus stop in town. Meanwhile, nearby, a distraught mother called out for her child who had become separated from her in a crowd. A street vendor joked that “The Gringa took him … for body parts.” June is presently hospitalized in Anchorage, slowly convalescing from major brain damage—at present unable to walk, but beginning to recover speech.

I have been investigating the background of this event concerning child abductions and the so-called organ trade. I have read several
journalistic accounts of the event and its surrounding circumstances.

Do you know any of the documented cases that are trackable to a source? In particular, autopsy evidence would be compelling.

Sincerely,

Coert Olmstead

The body-part story has been circulating for years. In the early 1980s the CIA even said that it was disinformation put out by the KGB to discredit America. At one time or another many investigators from TV documentary programs and newspapers have tried to follow the body-parts trail but haven’t come up with much. The best discussion of the whole subject I’ve come across is in the Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s book about the Brazilian northeast,
Death Without Weeping
, where she discusses the not baseless fear of poor women there that their children will be kidnapped by middle-class women without offspring of their own. The body-parts fear surfaces there too. There are genuine accounts from all over the world—most recently India—of people selling one of their kidneys and so forth. Asset transfer …

March 23

It turns out that the directors of Barings Bank knew perfectly well that Nick Leeson, their man in Singapore, was staking their future on some bets on the movement of the Japanese Nikkei index. Since Leeson had made them a lot of money the previous year they thought he was going to repeat his achievement.

Then, in the hour of emergency, the Barings directors turned to the Bank of England to bail them out. The Bank’s top man was away skiing in Switzerland, so the decision fell on the shoulders of his number two, whose interest that Sunday evening lay not in saving one of the oldest private investment houses in England, but in advancing his adulterous liaison with an Irish girl with whom he was enjoying intimacies on the carpet of the governor’s office.

So the second in command said No to Barings, which promptly went belly up, though its directors still voted themselves enormous bonuses. The Irish girl decamped to her native sod, whence she
communicated details of the adultery to the British press, much to the discomfiture of the second-in-command’s wife, Helen Jay, who said she would stand by him, though not to the extent of appearing in photographs with her treacherous spouse.

I went out with the very nice Helen briefly in the mid-1960s. She and her twin sister Catherine were once taken as symbolic of a youthful Labour Party, poised to snatch control of the nation’s destinies from the palsied Conservatives who had been in power for fourteen years, until they met in defeat in 1964 at the hands of Harold Wilson and his Labour cohorts.

The pretty Jay twins attended the Buckingham Palace Garden party that year dressed in the Mondrianesque clothes of the French designer Courrèges and were thought to be striking exemplars of the new, go-ahead age of social democracy that was about to unfold.

Meanwhile their father, Douglas Jay, became President of the Board of Trade in the Wilson cabinet. Owing to his nympholeptic tastes he was known as Mucky Doug. I remember having enjoyable late night drinks with Gareth Stedman Jones and the twins in their father’s Hampstead Heath house when suddenly the door of the living room was flung open and there stood the cabinet minister, resplendent in his pajamas and flourishing one of those red dispatch boxes—like a small suitcase—in which cabinet members proudly carry home their papers. I hoped he was going to invoke the nation’s business and he did, bellowing that he had “the nation’s business to attend to” and would we “please leave,” which we duly did.

Later Helen took up with Nicholas Tomalin, a well-known journalist who hired me as number two when he became literary editor of the
New Statesman
. The editor was Paul Johnson. Tomalin’s adulteries with Helen tended to be the topic of his tipsy lunch-time reveries as we sat in some pub in Lincoln’s Inn of the sort later immortalized in fiction by my sister Sarah Caudwell. “Everything’s good if the fucking is good,” Tomalin would mumble as he slurped his way through his staple lunch-time bottle of white wine.

His literary editorship was meant to spell a new life instead of the “investigative journalism” by which he had made his name, exposing French shippers for mislabeling their vintages. But soon he wearied
of the kingdom of letters and went off to cover the 1973 Yom Kippur war, and was killed by the wire-guided missile of what Paul Johnson described in his memorial speech as a “Syrian savage.” Now Helen is with the assistant head of the Bank of England which shows you the trend of events in Blighty.

March 29

“Here and there in the midst of American society you meet with men full of a fanatical and almost wild spiritualism, which hardly exists in Europe. From time to time strange sects arise which endeavor to strike out extraordinary paths to eternal happiness. Religious insanity is very common in the United States …

“The soul has wants that must be satisfied; and whatever pains are taken to divert it from itself, it soon grows weary, restless and disquieted amid the enjoyments of sense. If ever the faculties of the great majority of mankind were exclusively bent upon the pursuit of material objects, it might be anticipated that an amazing reaction would take place in the souls of some men. They would drift at large in the world of spirits, for fear of remaining shackled by the close bondage of the body.

“It is not, then, wonderful if in the midst of a community whose thoughts tend earthward a small number of individuals are found who turn their looks to heaven. I should be surprised if mysticism did not soon make some advance among a people solely engaged in promoting their own worldly welfare.”—from “Why some Americans manifest a sort of fanatical Spiritualism.” Chapter XII of de Tocqueville’s
Democracy in America
.

April 12

An astoundingly silly quote from Antonio Gramsci, arguing that dumb toil can be liberating: “Once the process of adaptation has been completed, what really happens is that the brain of the worker, far from being mummified, reaches a state of complete freedom. The only thing that is completely mechanized is the physical gesture: the
memory, reduced to simple gestures repeated at an intense rhythm, ‘nestles’ in the muscular and nervous centers and leaves the brain free and unencumbered for other occupations.”

Read that to the next person who complains about carpal tunnel syndrome. I knew Lenin was a fanatic Taylorist, but it turns out AG was the same way. Gramsci came to this idiotic conclusion after considering type compositors whom he arrogantly supposed to be mechanistically transcribing without considering the text’s “often fascinating intellectual content.” He wrote this about the same time the British type compositors at the London
Daily Mail
prompted the General Strike of 1926 by refusing to typeset an article they regarded as anti-labor.

April 14

In a significant shift in its admissions policy, Harvard University apparently no longer regards murder as a useful, even decisively impressive credential.

When she was fourteen, Gina Grant killed her alcoholic mother, admitting to a South Carolina court that she struck her thirteen times with a lead crystal candle holder. This was back in 1990. Grant pleaded no contest to voluntary manslaughter and spent six years in juvenile detention. Then a judge agreed that she could go north to Massachusetts and try for a fresh start under the supervision of her (deceased) father’s aunt and her husband.

At first living with her relatives and then alone, Grant did extraordinarily well at Cambridge Rindge and Latin high school, getting straight As, tutoring poor children, flourishing in the school’s overall social life. Harvard offered her early admission.

But now Grant’s very achievements have turned back on her. The
Boston Globe
ran a story on Grant. The high school had recommended her as demonstrating unusual determination in overcoming obstacles. (Such obstacles did not, in the school’s mind, include Grant’s matricide, of which it was ignorant.) Publication brought a slew of newspaper clippings about the murder case, which had been widely publicized in South Carolina at the time. These clippings were
sent anonymously to the
Globe
, and also to Harvard, which lost no time in snatching back the invitation of early admission.

A spokesman for the university, Joe Wrinn, says that such an offer had been made under the Early Action program for exceptional applicants but had been rescinded “after careful consideration of new information that was not disclosed at the time of the application.” Grant’s lawyer says Gina thought the records of the case were sealed. When the
Globe
’s reporter asked her about her mother, she’d answered that her death was a very painful matter she didn’t want to discuss.

Thus the new Harvard rule. Murderers—even those who’ve passed through the legal system and emerged the other end—need not apply.

Now consider the case of Héctor Gramajo. At the time Grant was having that terminal confrontation with her mother, Gramajo was defense minister of Guatemala. He has superintended the counter-insurgency program of the early 1980s, during the presidency of Rios Montt, in which many thousands of Mayan Indians were slaughtered. Indeed, Gramajo was key in designing the entire program to eliminate all opposition, using tactics including massacres, selective murders, disappearances and torture.

Nor was he ashamed of his role. In a 1991 article in a Harvard journal called
International Review
Gramajo was quoted by Wellesley professor Schirmer as telling her that he was personally “in charge of” a commission that devised the 70%/30% civil affairs program. “You don’t need to kill everyone to complete the job,” Gramajo confided. “We instituted civil affairs which provide development for 70% of the population while we kill 30%.” Schirmer asked him how he came up with the numbers and Gramajo answered, “One said 30% just for the sake of saying it. We said 30% so that the repression would be less.”

As he once told another interviewer, “I consider myself a product of the American educational system … since the beginning of my basic training.” And indeed he had been part of a US Early Action program to pick out young comers, shuttling them north to attend military schools.