Exit For Hell On The First Right
Reading obituaries was the favoured pastime of elderly men seated in their clubs in the good old days —
Which, uh, reminds me of one of my favourite jokes, noted in Russia in the time of Comrade Stalin, and later revived in Britain for Lady Thatcher:
‘A man goes to a newsagent every day, buys a paper, glances at the front page, tears it in half and throws it to the ground; exiting the shop.
After some time the news-seller expostulates, and asks why he ruins each paper so ?
“I’m looking for an obituary.”
“Obituaries are at the back, not on the front page.” smugly points out the vendor.
“This one won’t be.”‘
— Anyway… obits are not the sort of thing I would generally read much of, particularly about some uninteresting ambassador I had barely heard of during his period here, and who passed over five years back, yet this one has it’s own charm…
Citizen Annenberg — So Long, You Rotten Bastard.
I’d prefer the headline, “Billionaire Son of Mobster, Enemy of Journalism, and Nixon Toady Exits for Hell—Forced To Leave Picassos and van Goghs at Metropolitan Museum.”
It’s a life that proves that you can earn polite notices in death no matter how you lived if you give away a billion dollars to the right places before you croak.
Walter Annenberg was born of a congenital criminal, a rascal who never saw a business proposition that he couldn’t improve with a bit of violence. Moses “Moe” Annenberg developed these talents in 1900 in Chicago when he worked as a circulation manager for the monstrous William Randolph Hearst, back when circulation wars were fought with clubs and torches. At Hearst’s behest, Moe and his gang cracked the heads of rival newsboys, burned uncooperative newsstands, and toppled competitors’ delivery vans. When Marshall Field’s department store canceled an ad in Hearst’s Evening American, Moe’s brother Max led 60 drivers and newsboys to the store, where they terrorized shoppers and employees by surrounding it and chanting, “Marshall Field’s closed! Marshall Field’s closed!” The store reordered its ad.
Annenberg also waged a smear campaign against Pennsylvania Gov. Milton Shapp, using his two dailies, two radio stations, and three Pennsylvania TV stations. In one example, reported in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer obit, an Inquirer reporter got Shapp to deny that he’d ever been in a mental hospital and then printed the denial on Page One.
— He should have just said to the reporter: “Yep, the same one you were in.” instead of denying a nullity… —
P’raps worst of all, this ghastly fellow was friends with what the reporter rightly calls, ‘The detestable Frank Sinatra’. Maybe his chosen milieu — lying journalism, Hollywood ’starlets’, jewish Mobsters, New York socialites, ‘philanthropic’ art foundations ( in itself a form of capitalist monopolization ), Cool music… — was merely practice for Hell.
