by Judi McLeod
May 20, 2004
There’s a haunting resemblance between the Conrad Black affair and Jay Gatsby, the main character of a favourite book.
To my way of thinking, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby best chronicles the asundry intrigues of human nature. It is the book I most return to when the foibles of human nature drive me to contemplative periods. Indelible excerpts from what must be one of the world’s most interesting stories is Jay Gatsby’s "wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock", the parties people attended by the hundreds and how not a single one the partygoers attended the most genial of host’s sad funeral.
"…Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…and one fine morning-----
"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly to the past," Fitzgerald wrote in the last two paragraphs of his beautifully written book.
There’s a lot of Gatsby in Lord Conrad Black. The dream, the lifestyle, the parties, followed by the sniping, the backbiting, and the titillation of the media, the turning away in droves of the friends who sat at the Black dinner table.
Hollinger International’s launched lawsuit brings Lord Black under the microscope, and while the latest chapter has brought Lady Barbara amiel Black’s shopping and tipping to the forefront, many who broke bread at the couple’s table are distancing themselves should any of the limelight come their way.
But it is Lord Black’s own words this time last year at the funeral of a friend, and not the media’s descriptions of Black’s friends that linger. The words delivered by Lord Black at the funeral of his "dear wise constant friend" Emmett Cardinal Carter lit candles in despairing souls.
Just days before, CBC Television had ignobly hinted that the Cardinal had always hob-nobbed with the wealthy.
"But at the funeral, the perfume of incense outpowered the stench of old insults. If the television network could not mar the Cardinal’s dignity in life, how could they do so after his death?" I wrote in a CanadaFreePress.com column.
at the april 10 funeral, Lord Black described Cardinal Carter’s favourite literary sentence as the one at the end of the introduction of Cardinal Newman’s Second Spring.
"’ We mourn for the blossoms of May because they are to wither, but we know withal that May shall have its revenge upon November, in the revolution of that solemn circle that never stops and teaches us, in our height of hope ever to be sober, and in our depth of desolation, never to despair.’"
as it turned out, it was the words of a close friend that carried Lord Black through the funeral of his admired and beloved Cardinal: "On the day Emmett Cardinal died another close friend, who sometimes acted as legal counsel to the Cardinal, sent me a message ending, `May his spirit soar and may you meet again.’"
Those prayerful hopes were very much in Lord Black’s heart at the Cardinal’s funeral.
The Blacks, of course, also have the kind of friends who would send the type of message sent on the day of the Cardinal’s death, the kind of friends who never run when the caviar runs out.
In one of those strange coincidences of my life, I know both Lord and Lady Black by separate circumstances.
It was Barbara amiel, who went to then Toronto Sun publisher Paul Godfrey to have my columns on the Toronto Board of Education New Democrat Party (NDP) caucus more prominently displayed in the newspaper.
Years later, Conrad Black once approached me to help him with research for a speech he was to deliver to the Canadian Club. His approach was, and remains, the proudest moment of my professional life.
The kindness to others by Lord and Lady Black knows no bounds. Without them, there would have been no National Post, no wake-up call to the smug mainline media.
The Blacks are a cut above most of us, not as the media would have it because of mere money and dinner parties. They are a cut above so very many in kindness, class of the kind spelled with a small `c’, courage, drive and inimitable sheer talent.
Canada Free Press founding editor Most recent by Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 30 years experience in the print media. Her work has appeared on Newsmax.com, Drudge Report, Foxnews.com, Glenn Beck. Judi can be reached at: judi@canadafreepress.com
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