Today’s edition of the Globe and Mail, massively devoted to the conviction of Conrad Black, ought to be collected by those who treasure that which is ludicrous, banal, excessive, pandering and in its own way, highly revealing.
When I saw the front page with its stark headline “Why he fell”, it occurred to me for an instant that I had been transported back to London in 1649 for the beheading of King Charles I.
The editors of the Globe pulled out all the stops in multi-page coverage of the demise of His Lordship. The event received far more massive treatment than the Globe bestowed on Canada’s declaration of war on Nazi Germany in September 1939. Any foreigners who happened to read today’s paper could be forgiven for thinking that Canada is a backwater whose people are scratching their heads in disbelief because the only literate person ever born on its soil has been brought low in a courtroom run by slick and cutthroat Yankees.
“It is a shame to think that Lord Black,” bleated the Globe editorial “could end up confined in one of the United States’ countless lockups. There are any number of wealthy entrepreneurs, but very few with the intellectual luminosity and personality of Lord Black. He is far more than a Tory with an impressive vocabulary. He is an exceptional man, a public intellectual whose political asseverations have rarely failed to stimulate. He is also a serious scholar whose acclaimed 2003 study Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom was hailed by Publishers Weekly as ‘not only the best one-volume life of the 32nd president, but the best at any length.’ And for a non-Canadian, he is also a distinguished Canadian. His Order of Canada citation sums it up well: ‘a man of diverse achievements within the realms of Canadian commerce, education, literature and the arts.’”
The editorial could have added that Conrad Black was never shy about belittling those who were unfortunate enough to work for him, looking down on them with aristocratic disdain. It could have gone on to point out that as has been the case with former Canadian capitalists---Robert Campeau comes to mind---who fell in love with the bracing world of American free enterprise before ending up with their tails between their legs, Black had nothing but scorn for his native land. Canada was a squishy social democratic country with a suffocating nanny state as Black saw it.
Margaret Thatcher once described Black as the “most right wing” person she ever met. She meant it as a compliment.
Black’s comedy---if his fall was Shakespearean, it was more along the lines of the Taming of the Shrew (no disrespect intended to Barbara Amiel) than Hamlet---grew out of his misperception of the nature of American capitalism. Black’s toffee-nosed Toryism included the hoary view of the members of the Canadian Family Compact that they were born to rule and to own. The Anglo-Canadian ruling class was nurtured on the rejection of the American Revolution. If the American Revolution meant one thing, it meant that all owners of capital are created equal and that they are entitled to certain inalienable rights. In America, you are allowed to accumulate a personal empire worth billions of dollars, while tens of millions of your fellow citizens are mired in poverty and have no health insurance. But if you steal from your fellow shareholders, there is a real chance that the sheriff will load you onto a tumbrel and haul you off to the Big House.
The editorial writers of the Globe and Mail and Conrad Black, devoted believers in the achievement of a much closer union between Canada and the United States, will have to absorb the hard lesson that in America a Tory fop can end up as a convicted felon.
