Mugger: Landmarks and Institutions

It was just after 7 a.m. on August 8, the day of the alleged global warming thunderstorm in New York, and I was riding down an elevator at the Carlyle Hotel with two older men in three-piece suits who apparently, and pleasingly, have never cottoned to the summertime “casual business attire” that’s become the norm over the past decade or so. (I’m as guilty as anyone on that score, sporting a polo shirt under my own suit jacket.) One of the fellows took a look at my battered Asprey’s briefcase—12 years old, a present on the occasion of my 40th birthday—and let out a hearty laugh pointing to the myriad of anime characters, Power Rangers stick-ons and Red Sox decals that the boys have affixed to the case over the years.

 “It’s somewhat silly,” I said to the man, but he quashed that notion quickly, answering, “Thank God for our kids. Besides, it’s refreshing to see a “Bush for President” bumper sticker in Manhattan these days.”

Maybe that reflects the clientele of this storied hotel, which, if true, is one more reason to book a room there instead of a boutique (tiny quarters, sniffy attendants) destination Downtown or even the Four Seasons in Midtown. After a quick lunch the previous day, one of my brothers accompanied me to the Carlyle to check in, and he remarked—in a comment that lamentably won’t make sense to anyone under 45—that there’s nothing like spending a night at a Manhattan institution that John F. Kennedy made famous, mostly posthumously, for his various trysts a lifetime ago. The Carlyle, around since 1931, is dark and somewhat “old money” dowdy (although its rooms are spacious, and management has adapted to the 21st century in small ways, such as including a Dylan’s Candy lunchbox in its mini-bars), and I said that it reminded me vaguely of “the late Lutece.”

Underscoring the rapidity of the comings and goings of landmarks in the city, Jeff quipped, “Isn’t there a point when you stop using the word ‘late’ in describing a person or place that is no longer among the living? It’s kind of like referring to the ‘late FDR.’” I agreed, and was somewhat stunned to find out later that Lutece, which had become the object of culinary ridicule in the 1990s, didn’t actually fold until February of 2004.

It could be the circles I sometimes travel in, but those two old-timers at the Carlyle weren’t the only people I encountered who are unafraid to voice their continued support of Bush, as unpopular as that is even among the four or five separate kinds of conservatives. I was dining at the impossibly noisy San Pietro the night before with a party of 11, and a friend across the table was trying to convince a companion that, although Bush has taken deserved lumps for his administration’s mistakes in its Iraq strategy, when all is said and done, the embattled president will be remembered, perhaps not in his lifetime, for a muscular and moral foreign policy. I couldn’t agree more: Bush’s major failing over Iraq was not the run-up and justification for the war, but his lack of explanation to Americans that the military action would be a long and hard slog. Instead, he (along with Cheney and Rumsfeld) couldn’t resist toasting themselves for the quick ouster of Saddam Hussein, while never articulating or carrying out a sensible timeline for the years ahead.

The discussion migrated to the upcoming battle Rupert Murdoch plans to wage against The New York Times now that he’s acquired Dow Jones. Although this is a topic that’s consumed thousands upon thousands of column inches in newspapers (and online entries), its resonance, and the likely cataclysms within the media industry that are forthcoming in the next several years, makes it a fluid story with ever-changing narratives. One of my favorite recent examples is the hit job on the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page editor, Paul Gigot, that was administered on Aug. 6 by the Times’ business/Oscars reporter, David Carr.

I’ve socialized with Carr a few times, back when he was editor of Washington’s weekly City Paper, and like him very much, so it was with surprise that I read his piece about Gigot’s alleged insistence on a deal that guarantees him complete independence from Murdoch. The permutations of the sale were so Byzantine that I doubt Carr is in full command, or was given access to all the accurate details. But what the hell: It appears that David has been so fully acclimated to his status as a decorated Times-man that he didn’t let facts get in the way of currying favor and winning applause from his colleagues, at his own newspaper as well as other anti-Murdoch outlets.

Surely Carr, and the rest of the media world, know that, as owner, Murdoch wouldn’t have forked over five billion dollars only to be rebuffed when ordering changes at the Journal, whether in the news, arts or opinion pages.

Still, consider this paragraph from Carr’s story: “So how did Mr. Murdoch permit this deal to happen? The editorial page at the Wall Street Journal has always been its own little kingdom [I suppose the Times’ edit section is run by an ad-hoc commune], known for a medieval brand of conservatism and willingness to take on anybody in defense of its version of liberty, including strafing its own news pages.”

“Medieval” conservatism? An aversion to punitive taxes, excessive government regulation and obscene litigation—all generally favored by liberals—is hardly a middle-ages point of view. In addition, calling the men and women who work for the Journal’s opinion section “crazy cousins” to the news section reporters who hew more to the mainstream—meaning Democratic—is the sort of juvenile insult I thought was beneath Carr.

Carr, incredibly, also takes a whack at a Journal editorial for referring to Donald Rumsfeld in the “chummy” vernacular of “Rummy.” Granted, I don’t blame Carr if he doesn’t read his paper’s op-ed columns, but surely he knows that Maureen Dowd is the Queen Bee of “chummy” nicknames.

Finally, in another example of the Times editorials which scream “Do as we say, not as we do,” the paper printed two edits within a week of each other (Aug. 1 and Aug. 8) about the virtues of recycling water bottles and switching over to tap water. There’s a reasonable argument here: Evian, Fiji, Poland Spring and fancier brands are expensive and do clog up the garbage. But it defies the imagination to believe that Times executives, in the comfort of their summer or second homes, ever offer a dinner party guest a glass of the “plain” tap water that most of us grew up with. Such a gesture just isn’t done within elite, polite society, and it’s certain that Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., or his servants, would ever risk being castigated as “tacky.”