So the Lord of Crossharbour has opened a third act to his long-running tragifarce. This news leaves us shocked and yet, somehow, not surprised. Please forgive the third person plural. How else to begin explaining why the man has suffered enough?
As it turns out, during all those wintry months when we thought Conrad Black was shuffling around in jail slippers lecturing fellow inmates on American history, he had a top U.S. lawyer working on prying open his fraud conviction: Miguel Estrada, 48, like Barack Obama, a multicultural who once edited the Harvard Law Review. Right-wing, yes, but now that everybody’s wings have been clipped, a very presentable guy.
Today’s news reports suggest that at best Black might get out on bail while the appeal and other pending suits drag on for years. Not a brilliant exit strategy, yet markedly superior to the presidential pardon he reportedly sought from George Bush. How could his image ever have survived the association?
Which brings me to why Conrad Black should be freed: because he is a fiercely smart public intellectual, an energetic, eccentrically creative person, one of a handful this country has produced. I won’t judge what he did wrong, whether he swindled shareholders out of $6 million, or took those files with intent to shred. My arguments are simpler: artistic and humane.
Artistic: if a clever novelist beats his wives, seduces students, betrays friends and passes off his mother’s deepest secrets as fiction, he gets prizes and more girls. Civilised societies have long cut their best storytellers slack because we recognise instinctively, collectively, that talent – more so than publicly-traded assets – is a community resource. Why shouldn’t a brilliant writer of ‘creative non-fiction’ benefit from a similar jolt of immunity? And after all, it was only money.
Humane: Why do we put people in jail? 1) to keep them from doing more harm 2) revenge.
Let’s be honest, shame and retribution are fundamental to our justice system. Criminals are expected to ‘pay’ for their crimes by absenting themselves from civil society. While the world continues on its dizzy way, they are cast off into a tight, boring version of normal life. That Conrad Black in prison has been both productive and dignified surely testifies to the man’s immense fortitude. The picture of him sockless, standing beside one of his jail mate/protégés with a half-grin, made me want to cry. What an incredible waste of talent.
No matter how stiff the royal upper lip may appear in public, the guilty or somewhat or not guilty one-time owner of the Sherbrooke Record has suffered enough. While legions of egregious Wall Street swindlers are booking restaurant tables and mortgaging future generations of American taxpayers, the U.S. justice system is sitting on valuable Canadian brain power. The empire has long imposed a double standard. Generally, Americans don’t like our plays on Broadway and they don’t respect our genius.
I say, bring Mr. Black back home and let him write. Who can tell, maybe the man has learned something important. If so, we need to know.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Your going out on a limb, here. A very thin one at that. For your artistic reasons, it is true that society does cut artists some slack. But only after they are dead or in their declining years. And if they have beat their wives, they deserve to be punished for assault at some time in their lives. I simply cannot countenance the beating of women by anyone for any reason.
Which brings me to the humane reasons. Black is in prison because he broke the law and was found guilty. Not for revenge. Not to prevent him from doing more harm. End of story.
All it reveals of Black is that he is human after all, susceptible to baser human foibles such as greed and the will to survive. I would argue that it brought him down from that lofty place from where he blasted the ordinary as vulgar and stupid to a level where the vulgar and stupid can sneer and point fingers at the folly of the rich.
There is no doubt that he is an intellectual force and if this experience has worn off some of the rough edges to his commentary to the point where he no longer has to insult people to show how intelligent he is, maybe he will continue to write the positive works for which he known.
Leo, you make many good points. Surely Free Conrad Black is pure provocation. Is she serious? (by the way, I did not get the idea she was in favour of turning a blind eye to spousal abuse, merely stating well-known facts as part of the argument. As for the flippant statement, It’s only money? could we not respond by saying, well, okay, it’s only six years…
If I believed that we could trust that Black would do nought but write excellent books upon his release from prison, I might agree. There is no denying it is a waste of human talent, him sockless & humble on his cot. (Not). But then the same is true also of many of the youth currently serving time in prisons across the land–if only their heads could now be brought around–fixed–they would not pose a danger to others, many of them. If it is true, however, that they were set up in the first place by the socio-economic reality they lived with, perhaps prisons have become our mental hospitals, and we the vindictive public. We have to send these people somewhere, right? Black, since he did commit a crime, & could not even give the excuse of mental illness–if we say, okay, all those white collar crimes do not matter really–let him go free. The world is currently brought to its knees over white collar crime and greed & millions worldwide are going to suffer for this–but the chicanery of the Madoffs & Blacks of the world does not matter a pin? It’s that killer on your corner you gotta watch out for.
I believe the main reason Black is serving time is that his Ego, & also the Ego of his wife, became rampantly Out Of Control. Very likely what was served to him was REVENGE on a platter for humiliations inflicted upon certain powerful people– & his own revenge tactics–that he had served out for years, thinking it his Right. I cannot say for sure, but it is an artistic guess. Mr. Scapegoat Squawk.
I would take him on a public walk, fictionally, Marianne, to see what Conrad might say now–& I would far prefer him to be sockless, no matter his millions (if indeed he still has those millions). He might be far more palatable, approachable, less arrogant. I could better enjoy his cutting wit–if he ever could be so brave as to admit he WAS a thief. In fact, if he would go sockless for the rest of his life, I would say let him out tomorrow. Stinky feet to the world, maybe he could do more good, & practice less chicanery. Hard not to appreciate, as an intellectual, even so, I fully agree, such a Lear character as he. Sure take his socks and let him walk.
Is this an attmpt at humour? I for one ,won’t be reaching for the Kleenex in sympathy for Conrad –or his wife–greedy swindlers that they are. A donation to Amnesty International to help towards defence or release of true victims of ‘justice’ is more in order.
Kate makes another excellent point that I was hinting at – the ideal we follow in our society is that justice is blind. It treats the high and the low with equal measure. It’s an ideal that, as prison statistics reveal, has not been totally attained but for which we continue to strive.
As for writing, the man can write from his cell, an experience that has been entered into by countless predecessor prisoners. The quality of his writing will undoubtedly be the same with a slight hint of prison grit to give it some lift.
Back in town from distant lands, I stumbled on this only yesterday. Wow, Marianne. You are brave. Defending a jailed felon, Bilderberg and CFR member, and close friend of the Queen of England — this takes guts. And, of course, foresight, because sooner or later, the “definitive” biographer of Roosevelt and Duplessis, will be get out of prison, and you can bet he will remember his friends and their struggling little magazines. Reportedly he was bankrolling Books in Canada before his unfortunate conviction… and has always supported a certain kind of Canadian publishing and the small circle of people who control it. Chances are, he’s not as penniless as the National Post made him out to be. Organ transplants could keep him alive for another 30 years, at least.
Sometimes I wonder what happened to those Roosevelt papers, which he once bought for (I believe it was) $9 million, and kept under armed guard at his New York office. Where did they go? He’s a man of mystery. that’s for sure, with more layers than Barbara Amiel’s birthday cake.
Let him write. It’s very therapeutic.