Wednesday evening, I worked late downtown, and after a particularly stressful meeting with some gentlemen from Africa, I decided to stop by the Library Bar at the Melrose Hotel to unwind. Nobody can say that the Melrose is anything less than first-rate, but I was nevertheless astonished to find Bancroft sitting at the bar, downing what appeared to be his third Long Island iced tea. The Bancrofts have, of course, roughly ten times as much money as Croesus, and, among other things, own about sixty percent of the Wall Street Journal. I know Bancroft from the chess circuit, which I frequented in my youth. Not being able, despite my best efforts, to ever be rated above 2800, I decided to not to bother going pro, since you need to be rated at least 3250 to be taken seriously. Bancroft was pretty good, rated 2600, and beat me soundly plenty of times. That was a while ago, or course, but I could never forget his distinctive face; or he mine, it seemed, as he immediately recognized me as I slid into the stool next to his.
“Collins!” Bancroft’s face lit up, lifted in an instant from the depths of gloom.
“Bancroft!” I shook his hand heartily as the bartender approached “I’ll have what he’s having, thank you,” I told him.
“What are you doing here,” I asked, gesturing around at the Library Bar, “not that it isn’t a five star hotel, but I would have expected to run into you at the Four Seasons.”
Bancroft drained his drink and gestured to the bartender for another. “Oh, I’m not staying here – this just happened to be the first decent bar between my DC attorney’s office and that horse farm out on the other side of the river.”
What Bancroft described as “that horse farm,” dear reader, is a thoroughbred estate in the Virginia hunt country, which is where I would expect a Bancroft to spent their nights while visiting DC. Now things made a bit more sense, but not quite.
“Lawyer?” I knit my brows in concern for an old chess buddy. “Nobody drinks five Long Island iced teas after visiting their lawyer unless the news is pretty bad. What could a person with your kind of wealth have to worry about?”
“Losing it to…” he upended his glass again, “an Australian.”
“Oh,” I said, picking up my own Long Island ice tea as it arrived, “you mean the Murdoch bid for the Wall Street Journal?”
“Yeah,” Bancroft replied, setting his half filled glass on the bar, “that shrimp-on-the-barbie-grilling, Foster’s-swilling, sheep-shagging, kangaroo-humping, cane-toad-licking, emu-riding, Great-Barrier-Reef-diving, crocodile-wrestling, screwing-buck-naked-in-the-public-parks, descended-from-convicts, outback-walkabouting-down-under-upstart… Australian!”
“Gee whiz, Bancroft,” I sympathized, taking a sip of my Long Island iced tea, “I know that concept has got to be rough for you, a Boston Brahmin, to deal with. It’s got to be like when the Irish took over City Hall, or when the Red Sox sold Babe Ruth to New York or something.”
“It’s humiliating, that’s what it is,” the thought tossed Bancroft back into the depths again. “The idea… the very idea… the idea of somebody like that controlling the Wall Street Journal… it’s… barbaric, that’s what it is!”
“Well,” I philosophized, taking another drag off my drink, “you got the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Miami Herald… hell, that’s it. Those are the only world-class newspapers left in the United States, and they all have the same problem.”
“What’s that?” Bancroft asked, suddenly curious.
“They’re all… newspapers. That’s their problem. Newspapers got started back in the days when proper gentlemen like James Madison wore silk stockings, satin pants and powdered white wigs. They got really powerful when walrus-sized guys like William Howard Taft were wallowing in gilded bathtubs down Pennsylvania Avenue, smoking huge cigars, reeking of Bay Rum and plotting graft, corruption and genocide. Then they ruled the roost from right about the time the Kaiser picked a fight with France until Sarnoff dicked Armstrong with no Vaseline and started the Age of Radio. It’s been downhill ever since. Newspapers take time to print. You gotta chop down whole forests of trees to get the paper. You gotta depend on child labor to deliver the damn things. Once the consumer gets them, they pile up like crazy, creating a huge waste problem. When TV came along, that just accelerated the process – TV killed the Washington Star, for example. People just came home and watched the evening news with Walter Cronkite – who needed an evening newspaper? Now you got the Internet, the World Wide Web – that’s the nail in the coffin, right there.”
“Okay, I can see that slippery slope,” Bancroft conceded, slowing down on his intake just a bit as he considered my observations, “but what about The Onion? That’s a Web site, but tomorrow, they’re launching a dead-tree version of their content right here in DC!”
“It’s a novelty – a joke, that’s all,” I responded, “I mean, yeah, I’ll be at the launch party tomorrow night, and I might even give some of my friends subscriptions for their birthday or Christmas or whatever, but the print version of The Onion is just a satire of a dead medium. No way they expect it to outlast their Web site.”
“’A dead medium,’” Bancroft sighed, then took another swig, “two hundred fifty, three hundred years, the newspaper was king – it’s where we got our concept of ‘journalism,’ it’s why there’s ‘freedom of the press’ in the Constitution. But, damn it, Collins, ‘freedom of the press’ does not mean freedom to publish Fleet Street tabloid trash with eighty point headlines trumpeting the latest infidelities committed by some cretin pop singer as news! And that’s what that… that… Australian is going to do to the Wall Street Journal!”
“Come on now, Bancroft,” I chided gently, “look at the way the Wall Street Journal behaved during the last couple of decades. All that front page cheer leading for people who turned out to be crooks, for companies that were found to be scams, for federal government policies that history has proven to be frauds, for investments that ended up worthless – how does the fact that the Wall Street Journal printed hyperbole, propaganda and outright lies in smaller type than Murdoch’s trash tabloids justify doing it in the first place? Where’s the moral high ground in raping public opinion for corporate profit instead of box office revenue?”
“Boston Brahmins,” Bancroft explained, “are above moral issues. When one’s family has had as much money as the Bancrofts have had, for as long as the Bancrofts have had it, the way your managers run your businesses is no longer your direct concern. But your image, Collins – the family image – that’s another thing entirely. That must be preserved. And that,” he paused for another swig, “is why I’m drowning my sorrows tonight. Because one of my family is about to betray it; about to betray… us.”
“How’s that?” Now I was the one suddenly curious.
“While about twenty Bancrofts control some sixty percent of the voting stock, the family has been able to muster only slightly more than fifty percent of that stock which is firmly committed to staving off the Murdoch invasion. And that’s why I’m here in Washington tonight, Collins. I spent the better part of today working with my attorney to convince a certain member of our family who lives in the area not to go over to Murdoch’s side. Because if they did, then Murdoch would have over fifty percent of the stock under his control. And it’s a real and present danger, too, Tom, because this particular member of the Bancrofts is romantically involved with… an Australian.”
“I certainly hope it’s not a plot on Murdoch’s part,” I opined, “he might end up getting reported on by his own sensationalist newspapers.”
“Collins, you are one shrewd cookie; but I knew that from the first moment I saw you castle on the queen’s side. No, we got Pinkerton’s best to check the Aussie out and the entire thing is a bona fide genuine love affair,” Bancroft shook his head in disgust, “which, in some ways, is even more shocking than if my cousin had been duped by one of Murdoch’s operatives.”
“Is there really such a thing as a bona fide love affair when one of the people involved has the kind of money a Bancroft does?” Having seen what sorts of turpitude huge cash could spawn inside the Beltway, I doubted the lover’s sincerity, and would have done so even if Bancroft’s cousin’s paramour were pure-bred European nobility instead of, you will excuse the expression – an Australian.
Bancroft took a long pull off his drink and contemplated the ceiling briefly before answering. “No, you are right – which is to say, yes – I agree with you. There is no such thing as a bona fide love affair when one of the people involved has the kind of wealth any Bancroft has. No doubt that… Australian is after my cousin’s bank account and more social respectability than any Australian could ever hope to achieve on their own…”
“Rather like Murdoch!” I interjected. “I bet he wants to own the Wall Street Journal because owning it will get him into the same league as the Grahams and Sulzbergers.”
“I’ll bet he does, but he fails to realize that you can take the Australian out of Australia, but you can never take the Australia out of the Australian!” Bancroft slammed his glass on the bar with self-satisfied finality.
“What do you figure,” I wondered, “this cousin of yours sees in this Australian?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Bancroft said as he motioned to the bartender for another round, “that cousin of mine has always been the maverick, the black sheep of the family. Always going on about spontaneity, passion, creativity, intuition, emotion, sensitivity, the whole arts-and-humanities thing – as if any of that crap made the Bancrofts what they are today!”
“I beg your pardon, Bancroft,” I volleyed back, “but ‘spontaneity, passion, creativity, intuition, emotion,’ and ‘sensitivity,’ have nothing to do with the Australian national character. Australia is a huge, hot, dry, dangerous West Virginia with weird deadly plants, ridiculous poisonous animals and a beach. You want to know what I think your cousin is attracted to?”
“Sure,” Bancroft smiled as the bartender brought yet another Long Island iced tea, “tell me.”
“Raw nervous energy. Mindless lust for life. Hair-trigger temperament. Addiction to the thrill of the unpredictable. Prodigious capacity for intoxication. Simple minded reactions. Thoughtless thirst for unnecessary, adrenaline soaked risks. An impossibly shallow, yet totally self assured soul. Imbecilic devotion to worship of the muscular system. Vigorous, frequent and uncomplicated fornication. The sound, peaceful sleep of a healthy, sated and well-rutted barnyard animal. That,” I said, “is what your cousin sees in this Australian. And, moreover, I think I know how you can get your cousin interested in someone who is more Australian than this Australian is – but not at all likely to side with Murdoch in your stock proxy fight.”
Bancroft lit up like the Times Square sign on New Years Eve. “Who?”
“There is only one people on the face of this green Earth who can out-do the Australians at their own game,” I continued, “and fortunately for you, they are located nearby. I refer, of course, to the fabled Prince Georges County Rednecks.”
Bancroft’s eyes grew wide. “But, I thought all Southern Rednecks were the same!”
“By no means, Bancroft; the quality of Southern Rednecks varies considerably with the locality. Some of them, such as the Ozark varieties, are no better than savages; others, such as the North Carolina Mount Pilot Redneck, are lanky, retarded, slow and ignorant bumpkins interested only in pork barbecue and fruit pie; some, such as the Georgia backwoods Redneck, used to live entirely off a diet of moonshine and today subsist on a constant intake of home-made amphetamines and fraudulent Medicaid prescription OxyContin;” I elaborated, “so one must be careful when talking Southern Rednecks. But here in the Chesapeake Tidewater can be found the toughest, most virile and dominant genetic strains of American Redneck; and of them all, the Prince George County variety is the most handsome and remarkable. For centuries, PG County Rednecks have proved themselves to be a true, if somewhat dim witted, friend to civilized man – and the equal, if not superior, to any Australian who has ever lived!”
“Oh, I say, Collins, this is excellent,” Bancroft chortled, rubbing his hands together in glee, quite completely forgetting his thirst, “let’s get my cousin a PG Redneck right away!”
“Certainly. Ah – would that be a male or a female Redneck?”
“My cousin has a male Australian at the moment, so let’s stick with that,” Bancroft suggested.
“Right – go with what you know works. Has your cousin got an email address?”
“Sure,” Bancroft chirped, cheerfully printing it on a cocktail napkin, “here you go, Collins.”
After I checked the email address for legibility, I gave Bancroft a business card.
“How does your cousin feel about tatoos?” I asked, slapping a twenty on the bar.
“That Australian has about ten of them that I’ve seen,” Bancroft complained.
“OK,” I told him, “Give me a call in about three weeks.” Then, with a solid handshake, a wink and a nod, I bid Bancroft good evening.
When I got home, I created an account on www.potomacbass.com and posted the following message:
Bass Fishing Man Wanted – Be my bass buddy on the Potomac this summer and let’s see what we fry up this fall! I’m just the kind of fishing companion you want – you supply the know-how and I supply the bass boat and fixin’s! Looking for real men from Prince George’s County Maryland, only! Special consideration for roofers, dry-wall hangers, frame carpenters, brick layers, Harley mechanics, blues/hard rock/heavy metal musicians, water men, new construction plumbers (no drain-snakers), re-bar bosses, iron workers, welders, cross-country truckers (no short haul delivery or soda pop/beer drivers), tobacco farmers, personal trainers, ultimate fighters, bodyguards, bodybuilders. Tattoos a big turn on. No college grads. You must be able to drink, smoke and fish from sun up until sun down, and spend the rest of the night eating my bass and doing the rest of what a real man should do. Send a color picture with your shirt off, looking at the camera so I can see your face. Extra credit if you can show me some good looking bass.
I gave the email address for an account I set up at one of those Internet mail services that you can join for ten bucks. When the replies come in, I’ll screen them and then transmit them again, with the headers tweaked so they look like they came from the original sender, with forged introductory letters presenting plausible reasons for having the cousin’s email address. It’s unlikely that the one Bancroft’s dippy cousin selects will go out of his way to investigate any inconsistencies – hell, if I pick him right, he won’t even know what an “inconsistency” is. I figure inside of two weeks, Bancroft’s cousin will be off the Australian and ready to go bass fishing with a new muscle-headed dolt – one who, for sure, doesn’t know Rupert Murdoch from Kenneth Lay.
Maybe this will keep Murdoch from taking over the Bancroft’s beloved capitalist version of Pravda, maybe it won’t – but at least I tried to help out an old friend. And if it does work, then somebody very rich owes me a very big favor. I figure that can’t hurt any.