Conrad Black has become a media and literary phenomenon since his incarceration in 2008 on financial swindling related charges.More specifically, for obstruction of justice and diverting funds for personal benefit.Ultimately, errand money for a wallet of such Zeusian dimensions. Reasonable doubt or not, and whether justice was served or merely a breach of Kafkian logic remains unknown until the last appeal is heard. Charles Darrow for the defence or Rumpole of the Bailey, Black fights on.
The former newspaper magnate has written extensively for the National Post as a foreign correspondent from the Coleman Federal Correction Complex . He has termed his imprisonment as his ”Babylonian Exile’‘. This refers to the inhabitants of the ancient Kingdom of Judah being forcibly deported to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BCE, also referred to as the Babylonian Captivity. Many returned under Cyrus the Great in 537 BCE, though a somewhat more transformed and muted people. Black, despite stubborness, will be transformed by the strength of destiny as he evolves in his own personal diaspora which will inevitably ,by osmosis, metamorphize his perception.
Conrad Black & Barbara Amiel
His weekly columns for the National Post are very literary, and though they have few elements of the poetic they are convincingly grounded in the English literary tradition. His ”prison correspondence” does remind of Lord Chesterfield and his Letters to his Son. The reader is getting a form of history class mixed with personal vision and a dry subtle humour all in an engaging narrative.
Naturally, he maintains the Popular Front For The Wealthy and Insupportable, but remains consistent and authentic in his conservative values. Black can provoke though, and is not hesistant or reticent about a full bore attack of the take no prisoners variety. The absence of being politically correct is executed with much vigour and is probably reminicent of newspapers halycon and idyllic past of the Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain eras; when muckraking and antagonism were the norm in the bare knuckles version of the free press. He called Gwynne Dyer , a ”bedraggled old ringtail” or Obama ”In his foreign tours Obama heaps abuse on his own country- like an addict confessing past sins to a support group”. Nobel Prize economist Joseph Stiglitz is referred to as ”one of the Democratic Party’s noisiest economic junkyard dogs.”
He is a Hurricane Carter, ambiguosly imprisoned depending on perspective, though Black continues to jab and counterpunch and can show flashes of literary footwork previously unbeknownst to the reader. His pitches for the Post have nonetheless been able to keep the ball in the park and arouse the ire of the usual suspects. Its its an interesting scenario with the combativeness , intellectual rigor and breadth of thought of Black almost mortal before the viewer.
His contrarian point of view goes against herd mentality and at least forces the reader to reflect on established thought, such as his defense of Pope Pius 12 th ”A Noble Pope”. Black can be slighty testy and cranky at moments, but never flat and limpid. He essentially attacks the ”ego” of the left, perhaps a reflection in the rear view mirror, a fear of the middle classes rising beyond the old crocodiles in white shoes that are a part of his own blue blooded conservative heritage. Perhaps.
As a first hand witness, I sat at a Supper table dessert, as a young adolescent, with my Father and Benedict Arnold, make that David Radler. Radler offered and gave perjurous state testimony against Black in exchange for leniency.He appeared like a proverbial hustler out of a Mordechai Richler novel ; an even more indiluted form than the iconic Duddy Kravitz. He was fleet of tongue, neurotic and impressionably untrustworthy. In the most appalling manner, a poster boy that made the case for Communist programs of ”anti-cosmopolitanism”.
Radler represents something like the individual who is protected at great risk during the Second World War from the Nazis , who, once the coast is clear and the threat subsides, skips town in the heat
the night without a word of thanks. But, a hard worker and clever as hell. He had a very detailed analysis of the Jim Keegstra story at that time, a conspiracy theorist of Dutch origin teaching high school in small town Alberta. Radler understood the dynamic and the issues from a broad perspective and an editor’s insight.
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