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Saturday, October 08, 2005
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SNAPSHOTS FROM HOME A Regular University Diaries Feature Staggering the Turkmen I went to a modest little party many years ago at a modest house in Washington. So modest was this affair and its setting that I can’t quite recall the purpose of the thing, but a faint memory of Mr. UD raising a glass in celebration of a couple about to be married suggests that it was an engagement party. (And if I’m recalling the couple in question correctly, the marriage lasted four months.) Although there were a few Beltway types of some wonkish renown there (James K. Glassman?), it wasn’t a huge or in any way formal deal. Many of us, for instance, were sitting on the floor of the house’s cozy living room. Late in the evening, a minor Central European diplomat noisily arrived -- in a large black chauffeur-driven limousine. His uniformed driver hauled the thing with some difficulty up the short narrow driveway of this modest house, and out of it, with great ceremony, came this puffed up functionary -- overdressed, preening, utterly ridiculous. I thought back on this moment when I read the following snippet from this morning’s Washington Post article about the ongoing Benjamin Ladner story: Though she had a university-supplied car, Nancy Ladner hired a limousine to take her to lunch with the wife of the ambassador of Turkmenistan. Barely a country, and not even the ambassador, yet Madame Ladner felt an urge to forgo her impressive but not impressive enough company car, and instead stagger the Turkmen with her limousined arrival. This petty self-assertion, this absurd haughtiness straight out of The Mouse that Roared, was underwritten by serious young people (and/or their parents) trying to get a college education. It’s snippets like these, rather than the broad stuff of legal challenges and tax implications, that will do in Ladner. |