As in I did an amycooper/I amycoopered, when we perform such extensive wrongness in the course of one brief continuous action that we actually manage to ruin our lives. This New York City business executive decided she was entitled to be (in the precisely correct word of her victim) an obnoxious “scofflaw.” Why should she leash her dog in a part of Central Park where leashing is the law? Let lesser people obey rules. And here comes this nobody to ask her to leash her dog. Begone, nowhere man!
This man, in fact a rather famous birder, wanted to bird-watch unimpeded by a loose animal, and he did not back down.
Mr. Cooper, 57, [no relation to Amy Cooper,] a Harvard graduate who works in communications, has long been a prominent birder in the city, and is on the board of the New York City Audubon Society.
Words were exchanged, and rather than demonstrating the simple civic understanding that would entail her apologizing and leashing her dog, Cooper became hysterical, called the police, and said a black man was threatening her. Although she is intelligent enough to have graduated from the University of Chicago, she behaved in this way knowing full well that her adversary was filming her.
“I am pretty adamant about not being a participant in my own dehumanization,” [he later explained in an interview].
His film attracted more than 40 million views in fewer than 48 hours.
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There’s an interesting footnote. Christian Cooper, clearly a deeply decent person, is unhappy that the woman’s life has been destroyed.
“It’s a little bit of a frenzy, and I am uncomfortable with that,” he said. “If our goal is to change the underlying factors, I am not sure that this young woman having her life completely torn apart serves that goal.”
He is absolutely right; and though it’s hokey as hell, one way out of her total destruction would be for the two of them to meet again and shake hands. For him to accept her personal apology.
From Richard Burr, On Going Away
Tell me not, citizens, I am corrupt
That from the Committee
Of the Senate I all abrupt
(To spend more time with family) fly.
True, more golf balls now I chase,
More leisure time I yield;
And with a stronger faith embrace
Insider trades afield.
Yet this self-dealing is such
As you too shall adore;
I could not love thee, dears, so much,
Lov’d I not stock dumps more.
Ahem. Mes petites.
We have arrived at that point in the Jeffrey Epstein story where barely conceivable plausibility goes leaping out of the window, marooning us in the fictional world of Don DeLillo’s Zero K, in which a cryogenics-obsessed billionaire sets up his own vast body-freezing laboratory and gets to work being immortal.
Like all great artists, DeLillo has his finger pressed firmly on the pulse of the future – in particular, the way, in America, unimaginable personal wealth, staggeringly sophisticated technology, and an entirely unmitigated death-fear (see also, among DeLillo’s other novels, Cosmopolis) is generating people like Jeffrey Epstein, at once the toast of the world’s greatest, most celebrated scientists, and out of their fucking minds.
Yes, trailed by Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss (hm), Steven Pinker, Stephen Jay Gould… trailed by all of them as they sniffed out his beyond-big research bucks and enjoyed his private island, Epstein made it clear to anyone who’d listen that he had a bag of Caligulagenic I am a god tricks up his sleeve.
He hoped to seed the human race with his DNA by impregnating women at his vast New Mexico ranch…
He told one scientist that he was bankrolling efforts to identify a mysterious particle that might trigger the feeling that someone is watching you.
At one session at Harvard, Mr. Epstein criticized efforts to reduce starvation and provide health care to the poor because doing so increased the risk of overpopulation, said Mr. Pinker, who was there. Mr. Pinker said he had rebutted the argument, citing research showing that high rates of infant mortality simply caused people to have more children. Mr. Epstein seemed annoyed, and a Harvard colleague later told Mr. Pinker that he had been “voted off the island” and was no longer welcome at Mr. Epstein’s gatherings.
Then there was Mr. Epstein’s interest in eugenics.
On multiple occasions starting in the early 2000s, Mr. Epstein told scientists and businessmen about his ambitions to use his New Mexico ranch as a base where women would be inseminated with his sperm and would give birth to his babies, according to two award-winning scientists and an adviser to large companies and wealthy individuals, all of whom Mr. Epstein told about it… Mr. Epstein’s goal was to have 20 women at a time impregnated at his 33,000-square-foot Zorro Ranch in a tiny town outside Santa Fe.
[He was also interested in] cryonics, an unproven science in which people’s bodies are frozen to be brought back to life in the future. Mr. Epstein told [one] person that he wanted his head and penis to be frozen.
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A sweet and amusing 1940 short story, “Inflexible Logic,” features a very rich dilettante, Mr Bainbridge, with an interest in ideas who, overhearing mathematicians talking about the infinite monkey theorem, decides to fill his house with monkeys and typewriters and see how long it might take for one of them to write a Shakespeare play or whatever. As it happens, all of the monkeys immediately start producing, without a single error, the world’s great literature.
Mr. Bainbridge led Professor Mallard downstairs, along a corridor, through a disused music room, and into a large conservatory. The middle of the floor had been cleared of plants and was occupied by a row of six typewriter tables, each one supporting a hooded machine. At the left of each typewriter was a neat stack of yellow copy paper. Empty wastebaskets were under each table. The chairs were the unpadded, spring-backed kind favored by experienced stenographers. A large bunch of ripe bananas was hanging in one corner, and in another stood a Great Bear water-cooler and a rack of Lily cups. Six piles of typescript, each about a foot high, were ranged along the wall on an improvised shelf. Mr. Bainbridge picked up one of the piles, which he could just conveniently lift, and set it on a table before Professor Mallard. “The output to date of Chimpanzee A, known as Bill,” he said simply.
“‘”Oliver Twist,” by Charles Dickens,’ ” Professor Mallard read out. He read the first and second pages of the manuscript, then feverishly leafed through to the end. “You mean to tell me,” he said, “that this chimpanzee has written–“
“Word for word and comma for comma,” said Mr. Bainbridge. “Young, my butler, and I took turns comparing it with the edition I own. Having finished ‘Oliver Twist,’ Bill is, as you see, starting the sociological works of Vilfredo Pareto, in Italian. At the rate he has been going, it should keep him busy for the rest of the month.”
“And all the chimpanzees”–Professor Mallard was pale, and enunciated with difficulty–“they aren’t all–“
“Oh, yes, all writing books which I have every reason to believe are in the British Museum. The prose of John Donne, some Anatole France, Conan Doyle, Galen, the collected plays of Somerset Maugham, Marcel Proust, the memoirs of the late Marie of Rumania, and a monograph by a Dr. Wiley on the marsh grasses of Maine and Massachusetts. I can sum it up for you, Mallard, by telling you that since I started this experiment, four weeks and some days ago, none of the chimpanzees has spoiled a single sheet of paper.”
Innocent days, huh? Daft, obsessed billionaires concocted harmless (well, the story does end in a bloodbath…) experiments then; but coming up on 2020, we’re in DeLilloland, and things have taken a rather insidious turn.
Can we still laugh at Jeffrey Epstein and his buddies like Alan Dershowitz, with their own demented grandiosity?
Of course we can. Nothing is funnier than a good Kafka short story, and that’s what we’ve got unfolding in front of us – Kafkan absurdity with a postmodern twist. To be sure, the insidious thing is absolutely there – as in, you probably don’t want to be a woman around Dersh or Ep. But Dersh is going down in flames, and Ep, well…
… should be afraid of (not this poor guy), has just maybe moved a few steps closer to serious exposure in the upcoming sex trafficking trial of his client and pal Jeffrey Epstein. Legendary Harvard personality Alan Dershowitz, defender of female genital mutilators, has long been accused of preying, via Epstein, on underage girls.
‘Paul Cassell, one of [alleged victim Virginia] Giuffre’s lawyers, told the court that if the records [of an earlier Epstein legal case] are made public, they “will show that Epstein [was] trafficking girls to the benefit of his friends, including Mr. Dershowitz.”’
Other commenters on this newly-reopened case will be more interested in higher-level Epstein connections – our current labor secretary and our current president – but this is University Diaries. We do universities.
So far, in the wake of the college admissions scandal, that school has only had to deal with evil coaches and scummy parents… and, as of this morning, a lawsuit from the son of one of the scummy parents – a guy with real balls, if you ask me. He doesn’t want his fraudulently obtained degree to become meaningless when Georgetown expels him.
But listen up: For years G’town has been admitting all the teenybopper descendants of the crowned heads of Europe. Have you noticed? Town and Country has noticed. This short piece only brushes the tiara: they all go there, and … you know… you have to wonder…
I mean to say everyone’s going to start to wonder now, what with the larger scandal drawing attention to this particular campus. Royal pain a-comin’.
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UPDATE: Uh-oh.