Black Watch: Today’s Top Stories
Like a gaggle of prattling private school brats straight out of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, the British press launched this morning into fevered speculation as to how many extra lashes, er, years Black will receive after mouthing off on the BBC. “Prosecutors in the former Telegraph chairman’s fraud case have filed a recording of the interview on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme with the court before his sentencing in Chicago on Monday,” writes Times man James Bone, throwing his share of chum in the water. “Prosecutors seized on the interview as evidence that he continues to refuse to accept responsibility for his crimes after his conviction in July for financial fraud and obstruction of justice.” The rest of the “quality” press threw in along similar lines.
On a more intriguing note, my pal Jeet Heer—who, when he isn’t musing in a scholarly fashion on the cultural politics of Little Orphan Annie, writes think pieces for The Guardian, the Boston Globe and various other journals of record—made some interesting observations on the blog Sans Everything. Heer notes Black’s suggestion that the British press is redolent of “a kind of false bourgeois piety and priggishness.” This, Heer argues, points up a division in conservatism between bourgeois values favouring “prudence, humility, industriousness, and a philistine suspicion of high culture” and the aristocratic bent toward an “open avowal of rank and privilege” that scorns “middle-class strictures about thrift and modesty.” Heer concludes that, “Perhaps at the root of Conrad Black’s tragedy is the fact that he forgot Marx’s great maxim: the bourgeoisie own the means of production. They are the ones who really run the world, who write the laws and administer the courts, who take capitalism seriously. You can play at being a Lord all you want, but if you mess with their money, they will be remorseless in destroying you.”
Right on, brother.
Conrad Black: Enemy of the Bourgeoisie: Source [Sans Everything]
‘Unrepentant’ Conrad Black merits extra jail spell, lawyers say: Source [The Times]
Judge asked to consider Black’s ‘contempt’: Source [The Independent]
Conrad Black prosecutors want extra jail time: Source [Telegraph]
Fed Filing: Black is still not regretful: Source [New York Post]
Hard time even more so for Lord Black: Source [The Globe and Mail]
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