Daily Office: Monday
¶ Matins: Of all the outgoing Administrations that I have known, none has excited the prosecutorial zeal of its opponents as keenly as the current one. Bringing the Bush Administration to justice was the main topic in yesterday’s Week in Review section of the Times, with pieces by three visiting commentators and a remonstrance by Frank Rich. Something must be done.
¶ Lauds: The Golden Globes… The Carpetbagger reports.
¶ Prime: Sic transit. Quite a few of the blogs indexed at nycbloggers.com for my subway stop have closed up, or not featured a new entry in a year or two.
¶ Tierce: In a nice gesture, Bernard Madoff apologized to his fellow co-op owners at 133 East 64th Street: Sorry about that scrum of reporters at the door!
¶ Sext: I’ll say one thing for Joe the Plumber, currently “reporting” from Israel: he’s walking proof that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing — in front of a microphone, anyway. If people must be entitled to their opinions, then at least they ought to have the decency to acknowledge that their opinions are uneducated. (via Joe.My.God)
¶ Nones: Good news from Thailand: voters seem inclined to heal the urban/rural rift. Even more, the now-more-powerful government  won’t let itself get carried away.
¶ Vespers: Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) has achieved official immortality, in the form of a Library of America volume. The book appeared in September, but William H Gass just got round to discussing it.
¶ Compline: Let’s hope the same can never be said of Barack Obama: “After Receiving Phone Call From Olmert, Bush Ordered Rice To Abstain On Gaza Ceasefire Resolution.” Secretary Rice had carefully negotiated the wording of the resolution, only to have the rug pulled out from under her because of an imperative call from Israel.
Oremus…
§ Matins. According to Mr Rich, we must begin by compiling a complete accounting of the damage.
The tentative and amorphous $800 billion stimulus proposed by Obama last week sounds like a lot, but it’s a drop in the bucket when set against the damage it must help counteract: more than $10 trillion in new debt and new obligations piled up by the Bush administration in eight years, as calculated by the economists Linda J. Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz in the current Harper’s Magazine.
If Bernie Madoff, at least, can still revive what remains of our deadened capacity for outrage, so can those who pulled off Washington’s Ponzi schemes. The more we learn about where all the bodies and billions were buried on our path to ruin, the easier it may be for our new president to make the case for a bold, whatever-it-takes New Deal.
And that’s, I think, where Americans ought to stop. It would be hypocritical for a nation that allowed George W Bush uncontested occupancy of the White House on two occasions to prosecute him for his activities while in office. What we might hope is that our bill of particulars might be of use to an interenational court of law.
§ Lauds. Kate Winslet won once… twice!
§ Prime. I see that This Fish Needs A Bicyle — a site that I discovered through nycbloggers four-odd years ago — is still going strong, but Heather Hunter has moved back to Texas. I have reason to believe that she used to live on the other side of my building. Maybe this side.
Gabriel Cohen writes about neighborhood blogs in Brooklyn. So far as I know, there aren’t any in my part of town. There are too many people in too small a space for blogging comfort.
§ Tierce. We’ll find out later today if Mr Madoff will be bidding a final adieu to the doorman on duty. Ms Dominus reports that the fraudsters Christmas checks to the buildings staff were received and processed prior to the bombshell on 11 December.
The note of apology may be one of the few written documents in the Madoff case, and I won’t be surprised to read, in the inevitable — and, I hope, juicy — post-mortem that it was Mrs Madoff’s idea. We don’t know much about her yet — or how much longer she’ll be staying on at 133.
§ Sext. Journalistic bias is real and needs to be corrected. But not by the man in the street, thank you very much.
§ Nones. Meanwhile, in Greece, shipping tycoon Pericles Panagopoulos was kidnapped at gunpoint (the AK-47 kind). Could be organized crime; could also be a “resurgence” of December’s student riots.
§ Vespers. Porter was a big deal when I was starting out as a reader; her Ship of Fools appeared in 1962. Something put me off — it didn’t take much in those skittish days — and I’d be surprised to learn that I’ve read five of Porter’s short stories. Mr Gass makes a strong case for reconsideration:
Although its author might have been characterized, at one time, as a loose base-born woman, her much-admired style bore every mark of the aristocracy and had taken her to the White House of John F. Kennedy, where she had dined more than once. That style was neither very inventive nor exploratory, but it was precise about perception, adept at dialogue and scrupulous about dialect, rich in recollection, careful with abstractions, sensuous and frank though never coarse, otherwise always high-toned, never casual or breathless as if her vowels had been running.
§ Compline. The pity of American insularity is that it leaves our foreign policy a hostage to special interests. Think: Cuba, Israel, Ireland, Armenia. Disaffected exiles and immigrants, for whom life in America is apparently not enough (or for enjoying which they attempt to assuage their guilt), wind up calling the shots, whether or not it’s in the best interest of the United States.