Banquo's Ghosts Read Online Free PDF Page B

and admired the footwear of a frail but winsomely vulnerable young woman wearing finely crafted wooden boxes on her feet instead of pumps to accessorize her little black cocktail dress. Yes, he knew how to ooze approval.

    The boxes were about the size of women’s cardboard shoeboxes, but fitted together with finely carpentered slats, plain and unvarnished. Her ankles emerged from their little sarcophagi through circular holes that rubbed her skin raw as she wore them. Like Hindu or Christian ascetics mortifying their flesh with metal collars or shackles. But what was she punishing herself for? A mystery.
    The wooden boxes on the frail woman’s feet turned out to have something to do with urban poverty or the rain forest, but as Johnson was on his third Knob Creek, the difference between the two causes had become immaterial to him. He just knew to nod at whatever she said and be sure to get her number. Rain forests or poor yobbos, it was all the same to him.
    Then something even more curious happened. He overheard two men holding forth to a half circle of admirers. The word “Jews” said with a particular twist, veiled condescension. He knew the men, and he listened as each academic trumpeted his pedigree. One from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, a Belfer Professor of International Affairs. The other academic was from the Institute for Policy Studies, a Wendell Harrison Professor of Political Science at Chicago.
    Professors Deerwood and Lenzheimer had recently worked together on a foreign policy white paper of some note, the thrust being that U.S. foreign policy was twisted on the fingers of . . . well, you know . What struck Johnson was the use of the phrase “the Jewish question”—those exact words, with an academic’s sneer, bringing him up short.
    Knowing he was too tight to join the magic circle of admirers he listened from afar until Professor Deerwood said, “Look at the numbers, 1.5 billion Muslims, 5 million Jews in the Holy Land—yet we dance along to their every whim.”
    Johnson felt a surge of anger crawl up into his throat. Yes, he could admit, he was a little dishonest, a little greedy, and even a little corrupt. Add to that a lush, a womanizer, and three times divorced. You could even throw in manipulative and selfish for good measure.
    But he could honestly hate a thing as well as any saint or sinner. And the thing he reviled more than any other thing—honest to God—were Jew-haters. Jew-haters in every form and guise, from the toothless rube
to the well-heeled WASP. But of all the Jew-haters he despised—more than any neo-Nazi skinhead—were the pointy-headed intellectuals, the sophisticated, sleight-of-hand Jew-haters, the let’s-adopt-the-Saudi-peace-plan, and gosh-aren’t-these-people-awfully-pushy-and-greedy-for-such-a-little-country? Jew-haters. The covert Jew-haters, covering their slimy tracks with position papers for think tanks and “peace” conferences in Belgium. “Look at the numbers, 1.5 billion Muslims, 5 million Jews.” Yeah. That said it all. Never again?
    Johnson decided to join the circle, spouting a bit of poetry at them, knowing the chances of making an ass out of himself ranged from quite high to near certain. He felt a good stab of regret coming on for later, but what he had to say came out coherently enough:
    “As the journalist and good Commie William Norman Ewer said back in the 19 th century,
    ‘How odd of God
To Choose
The Jews.’ ”
    He got a few nervous smiles. No one was quite sure where he was going with this. They didn’t know the reference to Ewer-The-Obscure. At least Johnson had broken their moment. And so out of sheer spite he kicked the shards across the room:
    “But many feel Norman Ewer lost the poetry battle to Cecil Browne, who replied,
    ‘But not so odd
As those who choose
A Jewish God
But spurn the Jews.’ ”
    This got a general chuckle, and suddenly, drunk as he was, Johnson realized that not one person in this circle,