“You need a lot of buzz to sell advertising,” Tina Brown said. “You can’t sell advertising without buzz.”
Illustrated by Drew Friedman
JUNE 19, 2005 BY BEN SMITH
THE ODD COUPLE ’08
HILLARY CLINTON HASN’T HAD HER HAYMAN ISLAND MOMENT. YET.
Hayman is a resort off Queensland, Australia, to which Rupert Murdoch flew Tony Blair in 1995 for the annual conference of his right-of-center media megalith, News Corp.
It was a crucial step in the complex and surprising negotiation between the two men that would boost Labour’s Mr. Blair up the little stoop and through the door at 10 Downing Street two years later.
Now, the specter of an alliance between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Murdoch is beginning to whet the appetites of the chattering classes.
At the moment, the two speak of each other (through surrogates) in notably similar terms:
“Senator Clinton respects him and thinks he is smart and effective,” said a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, Philippe Reines.
“Rupert has respect for her political skills and for the hard work that she’s done as a senator,” said an executive vice president at News Corp., Gary Ginsberg.
What a couple they’d make! For the 74-year-old native of Australia, an embrace of Mrs. Clinton would be only the latest in a long string of daring and (mostly) winning political plays. For New York’s junior Senator, it would be the perfection of an art that she and her husband have practiced for more than a decade: keeping your enemies close.
“They are very similar—both hard-nosed characters,” said Nicholas Wapshott, who was at The Times of London when Mr. Murdoch arrived in 1980. “They would understand each other perfectly. Absolutely perfectly.”
Huffington’s Post delivers left uppercut to Drudge’s right-wing Report
Illustrated by Victor Juhasz
SEPTEMBER 12, 2005 BY CHRIS LEHMANN
The Story of the Hurricane in Washington, Lies, Third Worldliness—George W. as Imelda M.
THE TRAGEDY OF NEW ORLEANS IS NOT THAT DESPERATE need turned the city’s overwhelmingly poor and black flood survivors into “the Third World,” as so many put it. Rather, it was that the federal government feels free to behave like a tin-pot Third World regime in responding to crises involving its neediest citizens.
First there were the lies: President Bush’s false claim to Diane Sawyer on Good Morning America that “I don’t think anybody anticipated” the breaches in New Orleans’s levees, and Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff’s repeating of that big lie on Meet the Press. And somehow, Federal Emergency Management Agency head Mike Brown said on CNN last Thursday that he had not until that day seen any intel indicating that the New Orleans Convention Center had been designated an emergency evacuation site.
Mr. Brown also spoke glibly of the flood victims left in New Orleans in Katrina’s wake as “those who chose not to evacuate, who chose not to leave the city,” as though the flood victims in one of America’s poorest cities stayed home on some sort of madcap lark and now had to own up to the consequences of their poor individual judgment.
Yet Mr. Brown is at least as outrageous for what he represents as for what he says. The college roommate of former FEMA head Joseph Allbaugh, Mr. Brown perfectly embodies the thoughtlessly privileged yet reflexively punitive outlook of the Bush administration’s entire policy elite. Indeed, Mr. Brown has presided over the misguided patriation of his agency into Homeland Security and the corresponding shift of its chief mandate from disaster preparedness to terror response.
FEMA has worked toward an overarching approach of “disaster mitigation,” says Walter Gillis Peacock, who directs Texas A&M University’s Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center. The idea of mitigation is to develop a comprehensive “all-hazards” strategy for minimizing death and property loss.
“We ought to be building back better; we ought to be restoring resources as we rebuild,” Mr. Peacock said, speaking of the pre-Bush ethos of the agency. “But now the agency has been folded into D.H.S., and it’s forgotten its real mission. Actually, that mission has even been pulled away from it. That whole component has been ripped out.”
In its place is a single agency mandate to structure all agency efforts to address the terror threat.
As FEMA has been systematically hollowed out, the bulk of disaster-mitigation work falls to state and local jurisdictions. And this is the state of affairs that now permits administration apologists to cynically claim that Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans’ patchwork of underfunded parish and city authorities bear primary responsibility for the calamity after the flood. (Then again, maybe city residents just “chose,” in that feckless way of theirs, not to earn enough money to support a surrogate Corps of Engineers or FEMA directorate in their midst.)
Foreign critics of the Bush administration are quick to point out that such devolutions of power are commonplace in other parts of the globe. It’s hard not to see the fortunes of FEMA as a “parable” of sorts, according to longtime international-aid critic George Monbiot, author of the recently published The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order and a columnist for The Guardian. “You could begin it, ‘Once upon a time, there was a government which tried to serve its people’s needs…,” Mr. Monbiot said.
And the moral: “One thing that keeps occurring to me over and over again as I watch the coverage: This is what happens when you have minimal government. I mean, you have maximum government in the U.S. when it comes to things like foreign investment, but minimal government when it comes to providing essential services.” Mr. Monbiot referred to early Katrina reports that described FEMA workers arriving on the scene in New Orleans with anti-anthrax and chemical-weapons kits. “When people were asked what they were doing with all this, they responded, ‘Well, this is what we’ve been told to bring.’”
Mr. Monbiot sees such grotesque mismatches as of a piece with the thwarted priorities of traditional “Third World” powers, preoccupied with distant threats and indifferent to economic inequities within their own borders. “The prime example would be Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines,” Mr. Monbiot said. “Here was a regime which invested in military power on a massive scale. You had huge weapons-buying programs for complete white elephants; you had nuclear-power stations that were built on earthquake fault zones. So profoundly callous and neglectful was he that his wife, Imelda—she oversaw construction of a new sports stadium for the Asia Games. Workers fell into concrete—into the wet cement—and died, and she instructed the project contractors not to take them out, simply to press on and stay on deadline. It was a government which couldn’t give a damn about its own people, yet invested massively in prestige projects. And that’s what you’re seeing here.”
Anthony Borden, who directs the London-based Institute for War and Peace Reporting, which coordinates coverage of humanitarian-aid efforts across the globe, saw much of the Katrina coverage while on a trip to the institute’s Johannesburg office. “My African friends—their jaws are dropping. People have never seen poor folk in stadiums starving in the U.S. They just think it’s completely amazing. You never see it, this version of America, on TV in other parts of the world. You might know, intellectually, that it exists. But you never see it.”
“With Katrina, right now,” Mr. Borden said, “I think you’re seeing that same confidence and competency gap. I mean, it’s true in any disaster situation: A reasonable amount of shit happens. But in our reactions, I think there’s a certain level at which we can learn from this. I asked my friends, ‘Would you jump to the conclusion that you’re seeing a case for multilateral collective security’—of the ‘soft power’ versus the ‘go-it-alone’ superpower model? Does this enter into the discourse? I think it does at some point. I mean, look at the tsunami. There you had a more complicated disaster covering a greater stretch of territory, but aid got through pretty efficiently. It’s definitely confusing to see a response like this in New Orleans. It may be feeding a big d
ilemma for the U.S.: As a global emperor, you have a clothing problem. Are you clothed?”
There does seem to be a careful coordination of effort in one sphere, however. When the president finally managed to land on the ground at hurricane-devastated sites in the Gulf, presidential flacks and handlers made certain he was surrounded by impressive amounts of supplies and equipment, symbolizing federal commitment to the relief effort. It appears, however, that this equipment was chiefly mobilized for the purposes of photo-op display.
A German TV crew in Biloxi reported that a relief station was erected behind the president, even though Biloxi is a site where relief had managed to reach citizens in a somewhat timely fashion last week and therefore had few victims on hand to gratefully accept the feds’ symbolic largess. When the president moved on, ZDF correspondent Christine Adelhardt reported that the Potemkin relief stations were promptly dismantled.
Likewise, when the President toured the breached 17th Street levee, construction equipment bulked significantly around him as he burbled that “there’s a flow in progress.” Yet in a blistering press release issued over the weekend, Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu, who had accompanied Mr. Bush to the levee, said that the critical breach-repair equipment had flowed away.
* * *
First there were the lies: President Bush’s false claim to Diane Sawyer on Good Morning America that “I don’t think anybody anticipated” the breaches in New Orleans’s levees, and Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff’s repeating of that big lie on Meet the Press.
* * *
“Touring this critical site yesterday with the president, I saw what I believed to be a real and significant effort to get a handle on a major cause of this catastrophe. Flying over this critical spot again this morning, less than 24 hours later, it became apparent that yesterday we witnessed a hastily prepared stage set for a presidential photo opportunity; and the desperately needed resources we saw were this morning reduced to a single, lonely piece of equipment.”
A week ago Tuesday, after Hurricane Katrina’s landfall, Mr. Bush delivered his most hubristic speech yet on the Iraq war, using the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II to liken that epic struggle with the Iraqi occupation, and to liken himself to a latter-day F.D.R.
But a fortnight later, the nation’s worst natural catastrophe has blown away such fond reveries once and for all. Peel away the stage sets, the rote platitudes, the crony appointments, the stage-managed intelligence and precooked casus belli—and there stands Imelda Marcos.
JUNE 4, 2005 BY MARK LOTTO
Nude York, Nude York!
AFTER THE BIG JANUARY BLIZZARD, MANY BUCKETS OF purgatorial rain, a chilly, leafless spring-summer, suddenly. Greenhouse gas has cooked Manhattan into a tropical isle; all the hot, half-dressed girls have returned like robins. It’s getting so there’s no place you can rest your eyes without being assaulted by a salvo of flesh. The subway poles are like strippers’ poles, encircled with the most marvelous and terrifying variety of breasts; but don’t look down, because there’s always that flurry of filthy, flip-flopped feet. And in every other direction: man ass. “Ass cleavage is really in right now,” said Antonio Jeffery, a national denim specialist at Diesel Jeans in Union Square. Ass cleavage, like regular cleavage, used to be strictly for women. Even the least careful observers of fashion will recall that a few years back, the rises on women’s jeans plummeted with the stock market; at one point, pants got so low that Christine Aguilera was literally prancing in assless chaps. This summer, it’s the men who are artfully displaying the tops of their bottoms, as dudes, gay and straight, squeeze themselves into ever-lower-riding jeans from Paper, Prada and Levi’s. Even the Gap’s in on the action, selling its “1969 extra low boot fit (burnished sky)” denim.
Man ass is suddenly everywhere, from the chichi shopathons of Soho to the hipster suburbia of Williamsburg. Just last Friday night, on the Brooklyn-bound L train, an Asian dude posed, scruffy and tan: Between his too-short olive tee and his too-too-low gray Diesel jeans, the buttresses of his pelvic muscles flared architecturally. Try to ignore his pubes. And then, when he exited at the second stop into Williamsburg, his leather shoulder bag shifted just so, revealing the Metallica keychain dangling conspicuously out his back pocket, above which: a full inch of ass crack—at least.
This is becoming the norm—and, according to denim expert Mr. Jeffery, the waists of men’s jeans have actually been sinking like Venice for some time now.
“The rises have progressively dropped lower over the past five or 10 years. We’ve seen the rise go from the belly button to the hips, to right below the hips,” he said. “It has definitely picked up a lot of steam over the past few years.”
The disappearing pants seem to be a part of a much larger wave of disconcerting male fads. Lately, it’s as if men will accept whatever fashion trends are imposed upon them as happily and willingly as Vichy collaborationists. American men have come to vanity late and practice it with the zeal of the newly converted. And, frankly, it seems to be driving them a little bit nuts.
JULY 10, 2005 BY LIZZY RATNER
WELCOME TO MURRAY HELL!
THE STRIP OF THIRD AVENUE that runs between 29th and 38th streets in Manhattan is more than 1,500 miles from Club Med Cancun, but on sticky summer nights it could easily be mistaken for that spring-break frat-trap where youth is ascendant and every hour is happy hour. On almost any evening, the bars lining the strip pump and grind to the beat of screechy-boozy flirtation, while “Mambo Number Five” blasts over the sound system like a bad bar mitzvah memory. Girls in Seven jeans nuzzle up to banker-boys in baseball caps. The boys ply girls with Raspberry Stoli. Everywhere the night gyrates with the sound of suburban kids at play in the big city.
And yet, despite the riot of youthful hormones, there is something about this neighborhood, known as Murray Hill, that eerily resembles a Florida retirement resort. Perhaps it’s the dedication to challenge-free living, or perhaps it’s the abundance of ready-made leisure activities. But swap happy hour with the early-bird special, and it’s little Boca in the big city.
Never mind that Murray Hill has as much metro-cred as a cul-de-sac in Great Neck. Or that its new residents wouldn’t have survived a night in New York 15 years ago. The young Murray Hillites seem perfectly content with the mini-Manhattan theme park they’ve created, which allows them to feel like they’re living the Big Apple experience while safely ensconced in a bubble of familiarity. Indeed, what’s so jarring about Murray Hill is that its young people, who’ve been treated to everything from the best colleges to trips to Europe, have as much interaction with their adopted city as tourists on urban safari.
“Murray Hill has more young people that just graduated from college than any other neighborhood in the city,” said Kevin Kurland, the president of the eponymously named Kurland Realty Inc. “This is where they land, their first stop…. I would say 90 percent of the clients I’ve placed are between 21 and 25 years old.”
AUGUST 7, 2005 BY GEORGE GURLEY
SHOULD I GET MARRIED? MY HILLY JOINING ME IN COUPLES SESSION
DR. SELMAN WELCOMED us into his office, and Hilly and I sat down on a couch. He leaned back in an easy chair, popped the top off a Diet Sunkist, and asked what had brought us to see him.
GEORGE: I think we probably had some disagreements. Nothing that specific. Not one incident. Just general patterns of behavior. Maybe me being irritable, that kind of thing.
DR. SELMAN: Whose idea was it to go to couple’s therapy?
HILLY: A couple months ago, George was talking about maybe seeing someone yourself, and I said I thought it might be a good idea, because you get sad a lot. I said if you want, I’ll go with you.
GEORGE: It was a mutual thing.
DR. SELMAN: You think he gets sad a lot?
HILLY: Sad and anxious and irritable and angry. I mean, not all at once.
GEORGE: Most of the time, I have a great time with Hilly, think of her as my best friend, and we have our own
little special language. But part of me is…troubled. Just about…all kinds of things. General feeling of malaise and uncertainty. Not knowing how to have a stable emotional tie here. I don’t know if I’ve ever had that. I wonder if I can establish that with anyone.
DR. SELMAN: So why don’t you just go for individual therapy?
GEORGE: Maybe I can do that, too.
DR. SELMAN: Going for therapy like this can open up a Pandora’s box.
GEORGE: The other day, Hilly came over to my apartment, my little “sanctuary,” and started ironing and—do you want to tell that story?
HILLY: You can. Well, I just started ironing and I blew a fuse and—it’s actually one of my goals: “I’d like to minimize the number of George’s grumpy outbursts”—so anyway I blew the fuse, the air conditioner turned off, and he got really mad. He sat on the couch and he couldn’t even look me in the eye.
GEORGE: I knew as soon as I went into the bathroom, you’d start doing something, snooping around.
HILLY: His face kind of turned red and he got really upset. And I said, “Well, George, haven’t you ever blown a fuse before?” And he said, “No! Not in my entire life!” And I said, “Well, George, don’t worry—it’s really easy to fix it. All you have to do is find a panel and switch the fuse thingy.” So we just sat there and then I thought, “Well, it’s probably in the basement.” So I went down there and found the fuse box. Then I switched it off and switched it on and then I went back upstairs and I said, “Is it back on?” And you said, “No, no—now you turned my computer off, too!” So I went back down and tried it again, went back up and it still wasn’t working. And I said, “Well, maybe you should call your super.” So he called his super—still couldn’t look at me—then he threw the phone down and said, “On vacation for a month!” And I said, “Maybe I should go and talk to the neighbor—”
The Kingdom of New York: Knights, Knaves, Billionaires, and Beauties in the City of Big Shots Page 56
