In which the pond gets distracted, though our Henry does his plodding astrological best to provide a little comedy ...

The pond only recently caught up with the HBO documentary about Roy Cohn …and so did Sophie Gilbert on 18th June 2020 in The Atlantic, drawing some of the obvious conclusions here:

…in Trump, the lawyer seemed to find something close to a kindred spirit: someone who was just as willing as he was to batter opposition without being troubled by scruples. In 1973, Trump was sued by the government for violating the Fair Housing Act and illegally discriminating against black tenants. Cohn’s advice was to countersue the government for $100 million. (Trump did, although he eventually settled without admitting guilt.) Trump, one interviewee recalls, “fell in love” with Cohn’s pugnacious approach, and his refusal to admit wrongdoing or defeat on any level. When Trump Tower was being built, Cohn also introduced Trump to his Mafia connections, who helped facilitate construction during a cement workers’ strike. And from Cohn, who both the documentary and legend attest never paid for anything—laundry bills, dinners, cars he’d leased, taxes—Trump might have learned that settling accounts or compensating people who work for you is for schmucks. (The future president learned from his mentor a little too well; he gave Cohn a pair of diamond Bulgari cuff links that Fraser discovered, after Cohn’s death, were knockoffs.)

Trump also distanced himself from Cohn at the end of the latter’s life, when the lawyer was dying of AIDS but still insisting to anyone who would listen that he had liver cancer. (“Donald pisses ice water,” Cohn reportedly said at the time.) Meeropol, who includes scenes from Angels in America in the film, seems struck by the sad irony of her subject’s demise—how a man who’d forever projected his own singularity and strength became another statistic, a name on a quilt panel alongside tens of thousands of others. Before Cohn died, he was also professionally humiliated, getting disbarred for trying to give himself control over a dying client’s estate. And after his death, the IRS confiscated everything he’d left to Fraser: houses, cars, a plane, proving not even Roy Cohn could outwit the inevitability of death and taxes. If Bully. Coward. Victim. has a message, it’s this: Frailty comes for everybody in the end, and the cost of habitually disdaining loyalty and respect is seeing how quickly people disappear when they no longer fear you.

The angle that interested the pond was that of the homophobic gay male, a phenomenon produced by a lifestyle that involved living in the closet while also fornicating like an alley cat.

In the case of Cohn, it turned rabid, because it mixed with politics and corruption. It's not so virulent in showbiz, where a Rock Hudson might fear a career ruined by exposure, and eventually some might do an Elton John and admit the truth (the pond's Liberace-loving aunt wasn't the only one to think Liberace was merely flamboyant - what she would have made of Soderbergh's fine 2103 drama Behind the Candelbra must remain a mystery.)

Locally, perhaps some day someone will get around to exploring by juxtaposition the contrasting miseries of Graham Kennedy and the parrot …though once again, there's the showbiz angle, and then there's the deeply disturbing sight of a vicious Roy Cohn living a double life of hypocrisy and a vitriolic anger, no doubt the result of deep self-loathing,  dysfunctionality induced by society's hypocritical warping of the human condition ...

But why did the pond get distracted?

Well when you're dead, you're dead, and when you're boring, you lead a very dull life, and produce very dull columns and today was a bad day for reptile enthusiasts … with even our Henry finding the fixing of holes in the bucket vaguely tedious … but still, he scored the second-rate illustration of the day (where is the cult master!) and so attention eventually had to be paid ...

Does our Henry understand that when you're dead, you're dead, and only when you're gone might you discover that the Bulgari cuff links are a cheap knock off, and who cares about the debts you left behind?

The pond did gasp in admiration at how smoothly our Henry segued from astrologers and the Weimar republic to doing a billy goat butt in the manner of "to say that is not to condemn governments for running large deficits."

Oh for the days when it was a mortal sin … way beyond purgatory, a lifetime in Hayekian hell assured ...

As the Donald has been mentioned, it's worth contemplating the headlines that litter the digital edition of WaPo at the moment …

What a world of pain … how comprehensively fucked ...

Like Roy Cohn, it puts the world in a different perspective, not that our Henry thought of starting there, when astrologers and the Weimar Republic seemed like a cute angle …

It must be comforting to live in an alternative reality, when the pond unfortunately inhabits a world illustrated by the immortal Rowe …

… and locally will in September inhabit the same world as SloMo, as evoked by the infallible Pope …

Yes, it's a very slow day for the pond, though the weather in Sydney yesterday was beautiful … which perhaps explains why the reptiles kept on trying to flog that strange Roy Cohn exercise in double think…

A welcome dose of reality? If that's reality, the pond might as well head to church to pray to imaginary friends …

Nope, back into the closet so the pond can finish with our Henry in a final Weimar-inspired gobbet ...

Of course it needn't have been that way at all, if the western powers hadn't been so bloody-minded and insisted on such punitive reparations, and instead had realised that we're all in this together, and instead had put together a Marshall Plan, but when you forget history, the inevitable happens …

But if the main course was so unsatisfying - and so much of it - what about a tasty mint for dessert?

Should the pond go with the meretricious Merritt, so keen to redeem Dyson Heydon, as the fall came like a Roy Cohn dose of reality checking …

… while suddenly and abruptly, thanks to a wondrous capacity for gear changing, the meretricious Merritt had turned keenly 'me too' and truly woke?

But what of the tabloid Daily Terror and its shocking and shameful behaviour in this entire affair? Well for that you should head elsewhere, at least if you can get behind the paywall …

Does any of this trouble the malignant, meretricious Merritt? Does it deserve a mention? Of course not, it's all rubbing of hands, and woke, and oh, the sorrow and the pity ...

Might the meretricious Merritt at least mention that this is not the way to be woke and do me too?

 

What a wretched rag it is, and how wretched is the malign Merritt, until recently casting saucy doubts and fears about Heydon, now suddenly discovering within a strand of full wokeness ...

Actually what you need is a newspaper not intent on sensationalist headlines and sordid behaviour, but if you want that, you must abandon the wretched reptiles, or pluck out eyes and throw them away …

And so to a local treat, because the by-election is but a sleep away, and Barners has been out and about, and stirring the pot …

The reptiles are, for reasons that escape the pond, in a complete tizz about Eden-Monaro … but really if you wanted to be in a tizz about anything, why not go big?

Sorry, it's shocking to use Barners and the fate of Eden-Monaro as a cartoon coat hanger, but hey, it's Friday, and the reptile follies lack zing …

Please, reptiles, enough with the worrying and the fretting, and the anxiety attacks, it'll all be over soon, while some things will endure …

Well that cartoon orgy done and dusted, thanks to Barners and the coalition, time for one last burst of Eden-Monaro anxiety before the big sleep…

A vote for chaos and anarchy? But what of the Ramsay Centre and Western Civilisation and the price of an arts degree, and oh the NSW heritage humanity, and what about the way that the Visigoths and Huns (no racial profiling intended) now run the NSW government? Was it wrong to blame the Visigoths, the Ostrogoths and the Huns? 

Perhaps just the Vandals ...