Nobody really cares about the mylar balloons of feckless excuses Rupert Murdoch floated into the Parliamentary chamber yesterday, as polite British politicians decorously inquired about the criminal conspiracy that is News Corp. We’ve seen this all before: it was Richard Nixon barking he was not a crook, as the money trail got closer and closer to the White House back porch. It was Senator Larry Craig proclaiming he was not gay while zipping up his pants and being dragged out of the airport men’s rooms. It was Tom Delay, the former House majority leader and self-proclaimed M. C “Hammer”of the conservative movement, doing the perp walk for money laundering, while shouting to the empty skies that it was all a liberal plot. The conservative personality is synonymous with deep and unpersuasive denial, so only the most gullible of Fox News reporters would expect anything else from Murdoch (and they may soon be out of a job).
No, what really counts, what every honest voyeur wants to know, is where did central casting get that dragon lady spouse who beat off the pie attack against the Aussie octogenarian?
Indeed, in some ways, the lurid atmospherics of Murdoch, a white man in his eighties, married to a miniskirted asian half his age, the pearlescent yet befanged Wendi Deng Murdoch, is a perfect objective correlative to the man’s empire of hypocritical conservative journalism. Conservatism is nothing if not an excuse for the rich and the would-be rich to proclaim their righteousness while indulging their clichéd vices. It’s as if Murdoch couldn’t even transgress social norms in an original way and had to fall back on the trite mail-order-bride syndrome. That’s how intellectually bankrupt conservatism has become.
Deng’s journey to Murdoch’s boudoir reads like one of News Corp’s tabloid cover stories, only it’s better written. Deng is a Chinese national who befriended an American colonial couple, capitalist running sharpeis, Jake and Joyce Cherry. The appropriately named Cherries secured a student visa for Deng, who moved into their Southern California mansion, and thereafter Mr. Cherry’s bed. Joyce kicked her out of the house, but Jake, apparently a conservative himself, decided to do the hackneyed thing, muster a midlife crisis, leave his wife and marry post-teenage Deng, 30 years his junior.
Predictably, that didn’t last. True to the script, Deng was at the same time having an affair with a man more within shouting distance of her age, something the philandering Jake found out within six months of the nuptials, resulting in drama and divorce and one imagines, drink. Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown. But it was enough to get Deng her green card. She was on her way.
A few years later Deng met Murdoch at a party while she was working at Fox, and the elderly mogul, true to his conservative mandrake roots (and apparently after consulting with Newt Gingrich) had an end-of-life crisis and divorced his second wife to marry Deng. The sorry spectacle then turned to the dysfunctional family dynamics of the Murdochs, as James, the heir apparent, and the other blasé trust fund babies of Murdoch, found themselves with a stepmother who looked better in Abercrombie & Fitch than they did, vying for control of the News Corp domain while sleeping with their immensely old and frankly foolish-looking paterfamilias. I’m sure James is stewing today that Deng had faster reflexes and got to stop the pie thrower, and not him. In an unpleasant post-script Murdoch had more children by Deng, summoning images of the elderly Tony Randall on Leno, bragging unconvincingly about his pregnant twenty-something wife. Murdoch apparently hadn’t consulted with Mr. Cherry.
It’s poetic justice that a conservative who made his fortune peddling scandal and flesh in tabloids (I’m talking about Fox News here), should find his life, at the end, has become a circus of platitudes about delicate pearls of oriental beauty scheming to take over a crumbling empire and save a doddering old man from pie-throwers and parliaments. It’s like the only Simpsons episode that hasn’t aired, and if fortune smiles and the investigation engulfs Fox, maybe never will.
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