In defence of (the possibly drunk) Fergie

By Barbara Amiel - Monday, May 31, 2010 at 4:02 PM - 14 Comments

Photo by Picture Perfect / Rex Features

I’d like to say a word in favour of poor old Fergie, by which I do mean the relatively poor and relatively old (50) Sarah, duchess of York. She just got caught  accepting money from a reporter in exchange for an intro to her ex-husband Prince Andrew, now the unpaid special ambassador for British trade and industry. In saying anything favourable, I can hear the (imaginary) voice of Nancy Grace: “Barbara, is anyone here thinking of those children?” And yes, having a mummy like Sarah can be embarrassing, and while princesses Beatrice and Eugenie are as devoted to their mother as she is to them, mummy filmed selling meetings with daddy must be unnerving.

Having now been seen on worldwide television scooping up an alleged $40,000, Sarah Ferguson is in muck. Mazher Mahmood, a specialist in entrapment journalism, whose earlier stings included Prince Andrew’s sister-in-law the countess of Wessex, passed himself off again as a wealthy businessman keen on making a royal connection. His down payment was on Sarah’s alleged asking price of $750,000. (Sorry about the repetition. We know it’s alleged and that the duchess has apologized for her alleged crime but allegedly it’s the rule around here to keep repeating it.)

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Stormy weather, scary birthday

By by Barbara Amiel - Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 11:00 AM - 5 Comments

Bettmann / Corbis

I was thinking about Lena Horne at the time. “Stormy weather, since my man and I ain’t together,” which just about sums it up for me. She came to Toronto and sang that at the Prince George Hotel, which belonged to my first husband’s parents. That hotel was levelled to make way for the Toronto-Dominion towers so we could all spend lifetimes in a Hades of underground parking. Now Lena’s dead, I’m three marriages on, the sun never stops shining on my stormy weather in this subtropical state—but Lena did live till 92 and had a revival of sorts later in life.

The man on the gate phone who interrupted this train of thought said he was doing the census. I had no way of knowing who he was because the gate is miles away and it was dark out anyway. “I’m not a U.S. resident,” I replied (no point telling him the IRS says I am resident and so does the CRA—too much information), “I’m just visiting,” which I thought was polite when what I really meant was, stick it, I’m not going to fill out your damn form.

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Maybe I'm showing early signs of hoarding

By Barbara Amiel - Tuesday, May 4, 2010 at 3:00 PM - 16 Comments



CP Images

My dogs hoard. There isn’t a bone too chewed or too new to be ineligible for hoarding, and by now there must be at least a hundred of these disgusting decayed chewies, tucked under the dug-up and re-laid expensive grass that makes the lawn that covers the sand that disguises the swamps that comprise the state that would be Florida. Honestly, it would be cheaper just to spray paint the sand green each night, but I’m sure there is a bylaw against that in Palm Beach, which has bylaws against pretty much anything that is cheaper. (Though I noted in the mini-documentary about the designer Valentino, titled The Perfect Life, that he had his lawn spray painted green for a big bash at his French château, and whatever you say about Valentino, who also put sisal over the Aubusson so that the high heels of Joan Collins et al. wouldn’t damage it, he is definitely not cheap.)

I had six dogs staying with me this past weekend and haven’t had so much fun since The Nightmare started in 2003. We took them out on Worth Avenue where they exhibited model canine manners as they trotted past Van Cleef & Arpels, though shoppers armed with teeny dogs that fit in handbags, like the newly fashionable Havanese with its gene pool of 11 dogs, seemed apprehensive when 600-plus lb. of Asiatic dogdom wagged toward them. “Get a real dog, get a kuvasz” is my motto.

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What have voters wrought with Obama?

By Barbara Amiel - Thursday, April 22, 2010 at 11:30 AM - 13 Comments

Canadian Press

Anything can be found on the Internet, so it should come as no surprise that there’s a brisk business in sites proclaiming President Barack Obama as the Antichrist and Satan incarnate. More surprising are the regular folk who see Obama as Mephistopheles. American businessmen, including some who raised money for him, arrive here in Florida for a weekend of golf and spend their time exchanging tales of the Obama Shoah.

Never mind the proposed new financial regulatory agencies, Obama’s kiss of life to American unions is sending shivers around. On March 27, Obama made recess appointments—beloved of virtually all presidents—and put Craig Becker on the National Labor Relations Board after bipartisan rejection in the Senate. Unsurprisingly, Becker was not seen as even-handed. At the time of his appointment, he was lawyer for both the American Federation of Labor & Congress of Industrial Organizations and the Service Employees International Union. Unions have been unsuccessful in getting rid of the secret ballot in organizing employees, but only just. Now those U.S. industries which have chugged along without unions, like some of the largest coal-mining companies, see different times ahead.

Pissing off businessmen has always been easy for Democratic presidents, but this seems to be an equal opportunity piss-off. There were cheers among America’s prison population when Obama was elected. Given that about one in every 31 American adults is ensnared in the justice system—whether probation, prison, jail or on parole—and three out of four prison admissions are either African-American or Hispanic, they thought the day of liberation was at hand. Barack Obama, a community organizer and one of their own, would speed sentence reform and reinstatement of parole (federal prisons don’t have parole, just a possible 15 per cent good time allowance). Instead, Obama’s okayed the building of more prisons, which pleases the powerful correctional officers lobby. Currently, the U.S. Department of Labor lists the job of correctional officer as a growth occupation stemming from “rising rates of incarceration.”

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Putting out the truth about Israel

By Barbara Amiel - Thursday, April 8, 2010 at 12:20 PM - 122 Comments

AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner

How on earth did I end up this Passover week reaching into the murky world of the many Canadian groups that have formed an anti-Israel coalition? The impetus came via the University of Ottawa’s obscene letter to Ann Coulter, which led me to remember, not unnaturally, the letter written by University of Toronto president David Naylor last May to Maclean’s. His was designed to put me in my place after I had described university presidents such as Naylor as “enablers” of anti-Semitism. The place he actually put me in was the belly of the beast where the elements that make up the common front of Canada’s anti-Israel coalition dwell.

I’ve seen the detritus of Israeli Apartheid Week in previous years on campuses, including Wanted for Murder captions on photos of prominent Israeli and American politicians. I missed the York University decor of barbed wire and photographs of Jewish students with derogatory remarks on them. “I will eat my hat,” I wrote to Naylor, “the day any of [these university presidents] allow an anti-Islamism Week…organized by Jewish students with models of suicide terrorists and photos of Muslim students with negative attachments.” President Naylor sent me a hat, but the reason for which I had offered to eat it was sadly lacking.

“Three years ago,” Naylor wrote, “a Zionist student group at U of T organized just such a series of sessions.” The event he was referring to was “Know Radical Islam Week,” which was a series of lectures on civil rights and human rights under radical Islamism as well as a look at “Terrorism at Our Doorstep” by David Harris, former chief of strategic planning for CSIS, and “Domestic and International Terrorism” by professor Salim Mansur. Hardly a campaign to delegitimize a nation-state.

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Confident, truly huge beauties

By Barbara Amiel - Thursday, March 18, 2010 at 11:00 AM - 27 Comments

Photograph by Chris Carlson/Associated Press

Who will make her Oscar dress, I asked myself, as I suspect countless plus-sized people must have been asking. (I’m not a plus-sized person myself but have wish-fantasies of being one—in the right places, that is.) All you saw for the first pre-Oscar hour were skinny white person after skinny white person, like me only decades younger, and all just so incredibly thrilled to be here on the red carpet mantra-ing, “I never dreamt of this when I was growing up…,” not before the age of four anyway. The men wore Tom Ford and Burberry, the women Chanel, Versace, and Valentino with their wrists like Masai tribeswomen all tunnelled up with bangles courtesy of Chopard—which is funny when you remember that the Kenya Masai live with their bangles in huts made of dried merde. But which designer was going to get the starring dress of the night, the super-plus of all pluses?

Meanwhile, you couldn’t but wonder how it is possible for stomachs to be so absolutely flat. God, I know how difficult it is even when you starve for 36 hours to get into the special dress (and then at dinner reach for a piece of bread, which, as one New York stick-person reprimanded me, “is not the staff of life, Barbara.” So no bread that evening). Sandra Bullock, looking as whippet-narrow as a human can be, told the interviewer that after the ceremonies she was going to go out “and have a cheeseburger, deep-fried fries and a milkshake.” Oh yes, and visit the emergency room with a volvulus if she did half of that—there can’t be room in her intestines for a sorbet.

I digress. Along came the much-anticipated dress: the outsized Marchesa dress wearing Gabourey Sidibe. Draped chiffon, sapphire blue like the name of the author of the novel Precious, with sparkly bits around the neckline and hips. A size beyond 26, the same designer that Sandra Bullock, size zero, was wearing. “You look good, girl,” said the interviewer, using the lingua franca of African-Americans.

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I feel pity for Colonel Williams if he’s guilty

By Barbara Amiel - Tuesday, February 23, 2010 at 8:41 PM - 92 Comments

Reading about Col. Russell Williams, the soldier who allegedly has a taste for stolen ladies’ underwear, sexual assault and murder (likely sexual murder, though police are tight-lipped on details), gets one thinking, or at least it gets me thinking, about the “why”: why do any human beings have this special predilection? As far as I know, no other species kills for sexual excitement. Possibly there exists in tall grasses or stony wastelands some terrible creature, weird bird or testosterone-filled amoeba that needs to tie up the object of desire in sticky strands of something in order to satiate needs, but wouldn’t we have heard of it were it common?

A number of animals and insects kill their mates, but for logical reasons. The victim may be a food source or is simply an irritant. They may become homicidal because a mate refuses to mate or insists on it. The black widow spider does not inevitably kill during or after copulation any more than the praying mantis, but both can do it if the male is not cunning enough to dismount at the right moment and escape being a tasty snack. The notion that these insects are aroused sexual predators is one of those myths that human beings—who may indeed need violence to achieve arousal—have ascribed to the innocent arachnid in a display of redirected psychopathy.

Perhaps our uniqueness in this matter explains our culture’s fascination with a hint of sexual murder. The presumed innocent colonel had barely been fingered and fingerprinted before the announcement was made of a book about him to be published this fall. The author is a newspaper reporter, in itself not a promising start, but so in a manner of speaking was the great author Émile Zola. All the same, were it Zola or Tolstoy, a book purporting to say anything insightful about Williams by this fall, when he will be inaccessible and any letters, diaries or genuine artifacts unavailable, can only be alluring trash at best based on tittle-tattle.

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I don’t see any 'vicious' betrayal

By Barbara Amiel - Thursday, February 11, 2010 at 8:00 AM - 2 Comments

Last week my editor mused that, in light of the recent death of J.D. Salinger, I might want to write about the “vicious” betrayal of Salinger’s privacy by Joyce Maynard. Maynard was Salinger’s live-in girlfriend for some months in 1972-73 when she was 18 years old and he was 53 (commonly known as an “abusive” relationship unless you are really important like Pierre Trudeau or Salinger, in which case the young woman is the exploiter). That’s how I came to dip into what George Steiner referred to as “the Salinger Industry,” which, incidentally, doesn’t need any stimulus money to keep going, even though he published only one novel and some short stories and then went dead quiet for the last 45 years of his life.

I stuck to a few primary sources: Salinger’s own work, his daughter’s autobiography Dream Catcher, and Maynard’s memoir At Home in the World, which she published in 1998. That’s the book that caused all hell to break loose, because in it she forfeited silence to write about her time with this pathologically private man.

I can’t imagine why anyone was upset with Maynard. I found her account of weirdo life in Cornish, N.H., with Salinger, veggies, and the great search for her simillimum to repair her vaginismus (look them up; I had to) absolutely riveting.

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Amiel: I’m hearing a lot about loneliness

By Barbara Amiel - Thursday, December 3, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 7 Comments

She strides on the cover of this November’s Russh magazine, hair dyed blond, nipples showing through the sheer blouse and her trademark look—somewhere between a snarl and a sneer. South Korean model Daul Kim, 20, was found hanged last week in her Paris apartment—an apparent suicide. Kim had youth, beauty, success, a boyfriend—and a life ahead that she clearly felt was not worth living.

The newspaper reports said that Kim was battling loneliness and depression. She is reported to have written, “The more I gain the more lonely it is. I’m like a ghost.” Her blog was called I Like To Fork Myself. Even allowing for the mood swings of youth, these are not indicators of equilibrium. One can’t know much more about Kim, especially now that her blogger’s diary has been sealed and the video she made the day before her death is unavailable. Only that she had lots of friends, was mega-successful—she was Karl Lagerfeld’s latest pick for Chanel’s accessories ads—and was busy working on her sideline video career.

I read about Kim while listening—not inappropriately—to Kirsten Flagstad and then Waltraud Meier sing the Liebestod from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde on YouTube. I won’t bore readers with the lyrics, but this is just about the triple-star anthem of loneliness-gone-batty sung by the dying Isolde over the dead body of Tristan. Loneliness, though, is a much more deep-seated condition than simply being alone, and as a serious psychological problem it is difficult to diagnose in the presence of other problems. If your spouse dies or your child has a debilitating illness, the normal reaction is a sense of loneliness. The more difficult cases are those of people who, like Kim, seem to have everything.

Lately, I have become accustomed to people who are at the centre of social life with friends and admirers galore, earnestly telling me how “lonely” they are. One can’t be sure whether this is affectation—a sure sign a condition is becoming trendy—or authentic. Whatever, “loneliness” looks positioned to be the Next Big Thing in psychiatric and intervention trends. The condition appears to peak at two psychologically vulnerable points in life: the late teens and twenties and then in the post-seventies. Demographic trends show Europe and North America with increasingly aged populations prone to the condition, and I’m proud to report that Canada is in the forefront of research studies on this topic. With at least one in seven Canadians now “seniors” and lots in their eighties barrelling away to their nineties and 100s, our nation is in line for one of our famed bronze medals—this time as a top centre of lonely people.

Talented and neurotic people may put loneliness to good use, hence the club’s poster girl, poet Emily Dickinson. For most, the only way to combat the feeling is by seeking company, though for some this very company aggravates the pain. Apart from music, which itself can be toxic by the associations it invokes, my own lumpenprole solution is the television set. The TV is invariably turned on but with the mute button engaged. One becomes best friends with the television’s talking heads, enjoying their company in your home but avoiding the rubbish they spout. My chosen companion these days is the full-figured blond woman on the weather channel who seems perilously close to bursting out of her blouse or jacket as she reaches for northern Ontario.

I have dozens of DVDs stacked on sink tops to take my mind off “things” while in my bath. I’m enjoying a Bette Davis festival at the moment, with my favourite 1944 Mr. Skeffington just edging out Now, Voyager. Claude Rains plays the dream Jew in the film—wise, successful and handsome (if terribly short). It amuses me that in this 145-minute film which pivots on Skeffington’s identity as a Jew, the actual J word is used three times. Drop the soap and you could miss the whole premise.
Unlike those sufferers with full-blown mental illnesses, the psychic fragility behind loneliness is largely predicated on self-absorption. The extent varies but when you reach Kim’s state it is pathological. I don’t say this judgmentally: no mental makeup is blameworthy, only noteworthy. I’d like to reshape my own mind to be more resilient, just as one can reshape the body with exercise and care. But like one’s body type, the mind is a given and there is only so much strengthening you can do.

I don’t expect Kim did much. On her blog, she claimed to be reading Tolstoy. She might have been helped by reading something inspirational like the late Viennese psychiatrist Viktor E. Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Loneliness has some relationship to the existential dilemma that hits every human being when we wonder about the point of life. By the time you really ask this question and certainly before you kick the chair on which you have been standing with noose knotted, you have generally gone through quite a lot. Dr. Frankl, ex-Auschwitz, went through more than any human being should have, and his conclusions are not without use.

Our job, he wrote, is not to look for the meaning of life but to realize that life questions you. If suffering turns out to be your lot, then seize the opportunity to make something of it. Life expects, and no human being is without purpose etc. etc. But Daul Kim was only 20 years old and alone in the mirrored hell of a model’s life. All she could see was her own reflection—and, unlike the camera, she didn’t like it.

Dogs are victims in a scary war

By Barbara Amiel - Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 8:00 AM - 36 Comments

Looking at life from a dog’s point of view can refocus matters great and small. Take the Berlin Wall, which crumbled 20 years ago. Thousands of dogs policed that wall and just like that they were all out of a job—some 7,000 of them, apparently. The guard dog of choice was the Caucasian ovcharka, which coincidentally is a dog I hope to add to my two Hungarian kuvaszok if I am up to it. Some people rescue homeless dogs; I look for native East European breeds who share in an ersatz Jewish identity to this extent: in that part of the world, historically speaking, someone will try and do them in.

The wall fell and West Berliners feared packs of ovcharkas storming into the city. Given the dog’s size (up to 90 kg) and its heritage—tearing the throats out of wolves and escapees alike—I can’t blame them. Just a month earlier, after brutally repressing demonstrations before the October visit of Mikhail Gorbachev to East Berlin and fearing more, the murderous Stasi chief Eric Mielke stated, “I will now . . . show that our authority still has teeth . . . [demonstrators] are cowardly dogs . . . they will run like rabbits as soon as they’ve seen our dogs.” Continue…

Why Jews keep voting against themselves

By Barbara Amiel - Thursday, October 29, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 46 Comments

Remember when there were seats to lie down on in airports? Now everything has fixed arms, a barrier to anything but stern upright positions. A 10-hour delay last Saturday in Fort Lauderdale airport was quite a stretch with naught to stretch on except two tiny units of armless seats coveted by 154 stranded passengers.

Happily, I had just purchased a jolly good book. Less fortunately, it had a flypaper title: in bold large letters on a white background it read Why Are Jews Liberals? Continue…

Lock-Polanski-up rants are shocking

By Barbara Amiel - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 at 8:00 AM - 53 Comments

I’m not wildly excited to be at the barricades with film producer Harvey Weinstein, who has organized a petition on behalf of jailed film director Roman Polanski. But a thing may be true even though Lord Beaverbrook—or in this case Harvey Weinstein and Woody Allen—says it. Actually, not quite true because the petition isn’t really about Roman; its beef is that Polanski was arrested “on his way” to a film festival, which “by their extraterritorial nature” are special safe zones. If this decision stands, states the petition, no filmmaker will ever feel safe attending a fest again. The thought of a world film-fest free is almost enough to bring me on board against Polanski.

But let’s pretend that discussion on Polanski can yield to rational consideration rather than utter hysteria. On March 10, 1977, Polanski, 43, and Samantha Gailey, 13, had a sexual encounter in the home of actor Jack Nicholson, who was out of town. Only they know what happened. The reason we don’t know is that the case never went to trial. Grand jury testimony is meaningless since the accused and his lawyer are not present and the alleged victim not cross-examined. Continue…

When this baby finds out later…

By Barbara Amiel - Thursday, October 1, 2009 at 4:00 PM - 23 Comments

If you will forgive the awful image this conjures, I’ve been trying to put myself into the diapers of a 14-month-old child in an east European orphanage. Is this the worst situation I could be in? Being abandoned in Somalia is probably worse. But let’s concentrate on the baby with parents MIA in lands east of the Oder-Neisse line.

This little person has worked out that smiles and gurgles give him a good chance of being picked up, so he is gurgling at this nice stocky man with funny glasses who, wonder of wonders, wants to adopt him. Even though he’s already 14 months old and past prime adoption age. Even though chances are he’s HIV-positive. Even better, the nice man has oodles of money. This is too good to be true. Continue…

Madoff and his boring mistress

By Barbara Amiel - Thursday, September 10, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 5 Comments

Last week Mrs. Ronald Weinstein, 60, former CFO of the Jewish women’s organization Hadassah, published her first book, Madoff’s Other Secret. Her claim to have been Bernie Madoff’s long-time mistress is the “secret,” but that aside the major revelation is on page 123, when Mrs. Weinstein tells us Bernie “had a very small penis.”

I was rather dreading a bog of phallic analysis but only a page or so followed on the effects of penis size with the observation that Bernie was curiously intent on bringing this matter up. Still, men of all manner and size band together when penis matters surface and their defence mechanisms cannot be overstated. When I told a male acquaintance of mine whose mind is almost exclusively focused on philosophy and science that Sheryl Weinstein’s contribution to the Madoff affair was details on the circumference/length issue, he became nearly belligerent. “How did she know it was very small?” he asked. “Just how many penises had she seen?” Continue…

I even cooked in my Mad Men days

By Barbara Amiel - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 at 6:04 PM - 8 Comments

Last weekend was a nostalgia rush and all things considered I prefer yesterday’s madness to today’s. More challenge, more style. First, I took in Julie & Julia, the film biopic of the great American TV cook Julia Child set in the sixties. The lobster scene brought back my own ghastly attempts at being a murderess. “You can keep live lobsters in the refrigerator at around 37 degrees for a day or two,” Mrs. Child advised us all on PBS—now there’s a thought—and after the kill, “locate the stomach sac with your fingers, twist out and discard . . .”

Something of a shame, I thought, as Meryl Streep’s Julia Child plunges her knife into the writhing lobster, that she and Martha Stewart couldn’t have met, two splendid women wielding cleavers—probably on one another as they wrestled for camera position. On Sunday came the premiere of Mad Men’s third season about advertising men in the early sixties, when everyone smoked, wore uptight clothes and political correctness was being on the right rather than the left. Continue…

Fashion learns to make itself ‘useful’

By Barbara Amiel - Thursday, August 13, 2009 at 8:00 AM - 10 Comments

My fashion life got off to a rocky start in January 1949, with the purchase of a nasty off-white wool coat from the famous London department store Selfridges (now owned by Canada’s Galen Weston). Everything about the coat was wrong in my eyes. It wore me, though that was not a phrase an eight-year-old would actually use. The coat was trotted out on every “occasion,” and I was forced to wear it to my school’s annual Founder’s Day when everyone else wore mud-brown macs. “But darling,” said my mother, fussing over the ribbons in my plaits, “it took all your clothing coupons and some of Grandma’s. This coat will last. Look at the hem: real value.” The hangover of that particular incident, etched like a dagger in my psyche, is a lifelong aversion to clothing of “value.”

What goes around comes around. The theme song of the rag trade today is value, value. Luxe is “value.” Brands are value and most of all dirt-cheap clothes are. This is to strangle the newborn thrift that consumers have discovered and to reinvent spending as a value-enhancing enterprise. While Canada seems immune to the world’s economic meltdown, in big cities like New York consumers are sitting on—and in—their old purchases. The air is full of phrases like “shopping in your closet,” a destination that horrifies retailers and manufacturers. And so the gang-up has begun. Continue…

Hunted to death

By Barbara Amiel - Thursday, July 23, 2009 at 8:20 AM - 29 Comments

You might think little of the adult Michael Jackson but I defy even the most cynical to remain unmoved by the Oct. 18, 1969, video of the Jackson 5 featuring Michael Jackson on the Diana Ross show belting out I’ll Be There. The pint-sized 11-year-old with the huge Afro and eyes to match, a big sweet voice and a determination to outflank Miss Ross in camera position, was already an experienced performer, though his grown-up moves were slightly off-kilter. He could simulate sexuality as he did a pretend ad lib of “look over your shoulder honey” but he was a kid all the same. “You and I must make a pact / We must bring salvation back / Where there is love / I’ll be there” he sung, but you sort of knew he’d “be there” buying an ice cream cone.

Though the song was subsequently recorded by just about every vocalist, it was always Michael’s. The words drifted in and out of his memorial service. Mariah Carey nearly fell out of her gown singing them. And still, in all the analysis following his death, no one actually mentioned the slightly inconvenient fact that no one was “there” for Michael when he really needed it, when it might have been more onerous than simply going to the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles. Continue…

How Christopher Buckley blew it

By Barbara Amiel - Thursday, June 18, 2009 at 2:40 PM - 13 Comments

I talk to my dogs but, though a lot of enthusiastic tail wagging takes place, I’m not blind to the observation of William James that they have no more understanding of the delights of literature and music than I do of the rapture of bones under hedges or smells of trees and lampposts. They belong to a different universe. I’m aiming to get two more: a rescue kuvasz next and then perhaps a Caucasian ovtcharka.

These are not breeds to turn over to dog walkers or leave to idle in the kitchen, unless you are aiming to become that mythical old woman who dies and is eaten up by her pets. They are work if owner and dog are to happily survive. “Industry is the enemy of melancholy,” William F. Buckley said, and when I last visited him in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., shortly before his death, he had a new puppy creating havoc, was so ill he could hardly remain vertical, yet was still writing marvellous prose in his final book on Ronald Reagan. Inspired by this, on the level of mole to mountain lion, I find my two kuvaszok and writing deadlines leave me little time for elegant woe.

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Don't mess with Michelle Obama

By Barbara Amiel - Thursday, May 21, 2009 at 9:40 AM - 49 Comments

I thought about Michelle Obama on Mother’s Day. No special reason except I was in a West Palm Beach park walking my two dogs (who caught fleas as the town seems to be cutting its pesticide program now that President Obama has said they can’t use his stimulus money to operate the train system) and I passed several Mother’s Day celebrations. Swarms of children and women, but the fathers were, as President Obama puts it, MIA.

Half a dozen Afro-American kiddies came up to me and pointed at the dogs. “Will they bite?” they asked sensibly. “Not if you’re nice to them,” I replied as one little rotter started jabbing a stick menacingly toward the dog’s eyes. Little Maya (115 lb. of dog) did her well-known teeth-baring-and-snarl number known as “Holy S–t” around town. I was all for her taking the horrid child’s arm in her jaw but given my circumstances that’s not too helpful.

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School heads are ‘enablers’ of anti-Semitism

By Barbara Amiel - Thursday, April 30, 2009 at 8:00 AM - 86 Comments

The usual anti-Semitic incidents are listed in a letter from the Anshe Emeth synagogue in New Brunswick, N.J., to Rutgers University president William H.S. Demarest: officials failed to take action after a student mob attacked some Jewish students shouting “We don’t want you Jews here”; the campus allowed vandalism and “narrow-mindedness and bigotry” alien to its principles. The letter writers proposed remedial measures: that president Demarest publicly denounce statements “ridiculing and insulting Jews”; that he threaten expulsion to “students who interfere” with the rights of Jewish students and make serious attempts “to apprehend” the violators. President Demarest met with the synagogue committee, who professed satisfaction. And of course, nothing changed.

The letter and incidents took place at Rutgers in 1920. Israel did not exist. Hitler had not appeared. Islamofascism had not surfaced in the West. The situation, however, was pretty much identical to what goes on at universities year round these days, with highlights during last month’s Israel Apartheid Week, when anti-Semites got together on campuses to demonize Israel, the single democracy in the Middle East.

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Who will give in to despair is a mystery

By Barbara Amiel - Wednesday, February 25, 2009 at 8:00 AM - 10 Comments

Princess Luciana Pignatelli died in her seventies last October after taking sleeping tablets washed down with a bottle of gin. She had lost out on two currencies: her money and her looks. She could have managed with only one of them but not without both. “I can’t face being old and poor,” she told her friends after learning all of her investments were worthless. A memorial service was held two weeks ago in Rome for the woman who had once been the object of desire for Italy’s most dashing men about town, including Fiat’s Gianni Agnelli and his brother-in-law (Prince) Carlo Caraccioli, founder of the left-centre newspaper La Repubblica.

Older readers might recall her Camay soap commercials, described by Camille Paglia as “strangely somnambulistic.” There’s a 1974 one she did, when she was married to a cousin of photographer Richard Avedon, on YouTube. Her earlier marriage to Nicoló Pignatelli, a handsome, clever prince from Italy’s black aristocracy, gave her the name she kept. The New York Times Magazine’s beauty editor Mary Tannen profiled her in 2003, quoting from Pignatelli’s The Beautiful People’s Beauty Book: “I underwent hypnosis, had cell implants, diacutaneous fibrolysis, silicone injections, my nose bobbed and my eyelids lifted.” And that was just in 1970.

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Off with the hedge fund manager’s head!

By Barbara Amiel - Wednesday, February 11, 2009 at 8:00 AM - 23 Comments

Accused members of the intelligentsia in Mao’s China were marched through the streets wearing cone hats on which were written evocative slogans such as, “Down with the foul intellectual.” Placards identified the wearer as a stinking counter-revolutionary. This was all in the spirit of the times, summed up best for me by a People’s Fine Art poster captioned “Whoever is anti-Chairman Mao will get his dog head broken.” Succinct and to the point.

Those 1960s and ’70s marches, complete with stops at which foul intellectuals would kneel and allocute to the mobs, are not so different from the modern American perp walk. These days it’s the pointy-head intellectuals and the media class that are the Red Guard, and Wall Streeters the accused. Every night, some TV station posts photos of the day’s addition to the Top 10 Business Villains and another fund manager is added to the list of foul CEOs. Most have not been charged with anything—yet—but in the frenzied search for “whodunit” are singled out as forces behind today’s economic crisis. We are living through a collective madness, all part of the mob, finger pointing, judging, some driven by fear of economic chaos, others enjoying the schadenfreude express. Old labels are reappearing. After listening to a radio discussion about “economic criminals,” I wondered when we would start fingering “rootless cosmopolitans.” The Soviets and the Chinese preferred the first term, the anti-Semites the second, though in the Soviets’ case the two were often interchangeable.

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Bracing for the cold: both me and Obama

By Barbara Amiel - Monday, January 26, 2009 at 10:40 PM - 9 Comments

According to Genesis, Noah was 600 years old when “the flood of waters was upon the earth.” Which is exactly how old I felt when I awoke to find boxes of my personal files limp and soggy with escaped papers floating about. As with many homes in Toronto last weekend, the heating had failed and my bedroom was a bracing 5° C. I ought to have known that water pipes would burst but I had forgotten that bit of common sense due no doubt to the cryogenic suspension of my thought processes.

The interesting aspect of the experience was actually having to look at material I had stored from 10 years ago or more. I find it perfectly easy to throw out or give away clothes, but decades-old copies of Commentary worrying about Natan Sharansky’s imprisonment in the gulag and pamphlets from various think tanks have a perpetual-care contract with me. They follow my life about in cardboard boxes waiting to see the light. Or in this case the water.

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Under the Madoff mushroom cloud in Palm Beach

By Barbara Amiel - Monday, January 12, 2009 at 8:00 AM - 10 Comments

As I’ve spent the last 18 months, give or take a week or two, in our home in Palm Beach, it’s freakish that I was away for the Madoff explosion. “It’s as if an atomic bomb hit us,” said my closest friend’s husband, speaking of Palm Beach’s Jewish community. He never invested with Bernie Madoff. “Three reasons,” he explained. “He never reported a quarter where he lost money. In his financial reports, the footnotes were at least twice the length of the accounts, and I had never heard of his upstate New York accounting firm in Muncie.”

The mushroom cloud is centred over the Palm Beach Country Club, founded as a rebuttal to the de facto exclusion of Jews from the island’s tony private clubs. Sidelined even to this day by many of Palm Beach’s old families, its founders were determined to reflect the excellence of Jewish values. “Mitzvah” is a club rule, which translated means a substantial philanthropic background is a prerequisite for membership. Guesstimates are that one third of its 300 members are Madoff victims. The result: charity recipients beached as endowments vaporize and charities close.

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