Oh, how sharper than a serpent’s tooth is the ungratefulness of a lowly employee?
The Chicago Sun-Times has reprinted an exchange between Conrad Black and Roger Ebert. The gist of it is unremarkable: Ebert tells his publisher he’ll join his fellow Guild members on the picket line if a strike is called; Black accuses him of ingratitude; Ebert returns fire.
Mundane enough. But readers can take delight in Ebert’s systematic dismembering of Black’s embarrassingly pompous verbiage. It’s a duel between an Ôø?pÔø?e and a cudgel, and Black winds up punctured.
There are some truly fine moments – “I hope you are grateful that I did not demand an additional payment for agreeing not to compete with myself” springs to mind.
But the most bizarre bit, and perhaps the most telling, is Black’s complaint that the Sun-Times provided Ebert with “your own Web site at the company’s expense.”
This is like Columbia Pictures bitching to Julia Roberts that they’d paid for the lights, cameras and film for Mona Lisa Smile. Ebert is the single most recognized name at the paper; he’s a huge draw for the site which, judging by the advertising, is not exactly run as a charity.
Black has to know that. So maybe his comment was just gratuitous bombast. But maybe it’s the kind of delusional thinking that made everything else about the man possible: both his inexorable rise to the top, and his rapid, oh-so-welcome descent.
We may never know (although pleading insanity may yet prove to be a useful and necessary strategy, m’lord). What is clear from the exchange is that inevitable oblivion can’t swallow that self-important gasbag quickly enough.
