Julian Assange Plus Cocktails with Elderflower Liqueur

[mallorys_camera]

The big news story right now is Julian Assange. He’s dominated the news cycle for two straight days! In vain, does tRump seek revenge on asylum cities, does the federal deficit hit a new high, does Theresa May twist in the wind. The wind cries Julian! Julian! Julian! Will he be extradited to the U.S. or Sweden? And what the hell happened to his cat?

Most of the coverage is negative.

The Daily Mail—my main source of news—paints him as the world’s worst roommate. He left dirty dishes in the Ecuadorian embassy’s sink! He crammed shit-stained drawers down their toilet. He neglected his cat.

The New York Times and The Washington Post are more measured in their reportage since any criticism of Assange’s legacy must perforce be viewed as an assault on freedom of the press. WikiLeaks gave us the Hillary Clinton email archives, which proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Democratic primaries were rigged; in the Democratic Party’s version of recent history, it was those emails that compromised Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and cost her the Presidency. (I have a feeling she would have lost anyway, but what do I know?)

Outlets like The New Yorker that specialize in intellectual whimsy focus on the book Assange was holding as he was dragged from the Ecuadorian Embassy. If you’re interested, it was History of the National Security State, purportedly by Gore Vidal, though not really since it was transcribed from a long, rambling interview Vidal gave when he was old and drunk and despairing. (Full disclosure: I more-or-less taught myself to write by reading every single word in Vidal’s United States: Collected Essays 1952-1992 10 times.)

The most sensible analyses come from the left-tilting The Nation and the classically liberal The Economist, which point out that Assange’s crime was two-fold: He conspired with the ill-fated Chelsea Manning to hack a database without a password and he connived to disseminate WikiLeaks dirt.

The hacking charge is irrefutable.

But the conspiracy charge is what’s making news organizations nervous. In the present political climate, it’s difficult to see it as anything but an attack on investigative journalism.

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I used to date Huey Newton. I knew Tom Hayden in Berkeley.

And I’m here to tell you that activists on the left are just as unpleasant as activists on the right.

What drives them is not idealism but ego. They’re like predatory animals evolving up the food chain. They identify a niche they rightly surmise they can dominate, and they proceed to do everything they can to dominate it. Much of the time, they are suffocated by the narrowness of the niche, so they die disillusioned.

Assange is no martyr. I am quite sure he’s a genuine creep.

But I’m puzzled how to respond to his arrest since all in all, I think whistle-blowing and investigative journalism are good things.

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In other news, L took me out yesterday for a b-day lunch to the Village TeaRoom in New Paltz, which is the most delightful place and sadly will be closing its doors forever tomorrow. No, they aren’t going broke. The owner just got tired of running a restaurant. Who can blame her?

Here is the amazing cheese and potato tort I consumed for lunch:



And here is their cocktail menu!



I had the Devereux.