There are few intellectual pleasures greater than hearing, and not being the target of, a world-class insult. I suppose this antisocial behavior has its genesis during the five years I spent imprisoned in a tony, British public school-style New England boarding school, where insulting (colloquially known as “ranking”) was an art. School wasn’t materially different from Hogwart’s, getting there via train and complete with the Oxbridge-schooled masters boxing your ears for talking in class. The magic occurred in March, when the Harvard acceptance letters arrived and you realized some of the fat letters were addressed to individuals whose family portfolios where larger than their SAT scores.
The best part of my five years: I’m very hard to beat in a game of Six Degrees. The Queen of England, Greta VanSusteren, Vladimir Putin, Astronaut Story Musgrave, Governor Tom Kean, John Sculley, Ron Perelman, Roger Penske, Bruce Hornsby…I’m one jump from all of them. Well, one of those connections is mine, another is my sister’s, and one is my brother’s.
But I digress, which is, after all, the point of blogging.
Watching Alec Baldwin’s profile on 60 Minutes reminded me of his comments (in a 2006 blog in the Huffington Post) about Dick Cheney:
“I want to apologize to all of the readers of this blog for referring to Vice President Cheney as a terrorist. I suppose that, in the post-9/11 world, one would be hard-pressed to refer to anyone other than a militant Arab fundamentalist who hijacks a plane and pilots it into a building somewhere on our shores or a Palestinian who bears a bomb into a cafe in Israel as a terrorist.
“How about something more measured, then? How about…a lying, thieving Oil Whore. Or, a murderer of the US Constitution? No wait! Try…the worst Vice President in US history? Anyway, let me work on that.”
Soooo…I think Mr. Baldwin left out “paranoid” in one (or both) of his characterizations. And I’m anxiously awaiting a high-class ranking on Mr. Baldwin from anybody on the right side of the spectrum.
And how about this reference to Kim Basinger’s (his ex-wife’s) lawyer?
“A 300-pound homunculus whose face looks like a cross between a bulldog and a clenched fist.”
And Ms. Basinger’s lawyer is female. This guy is a hoot…
