Jay McInerney: As Shallow As a Snifter of Bad Brandy



(image via davidburn)

The Corsair has strode this Big Blue Marble long enough to surmise that rarely is anyone completely Good or Evil. No one is actually a cartoonish Black or White (Unless, of course, you are either the blue-black Wesley Snipes or the thoroughly-in-need-of-a-multivitaminish Courtney Love). We are all greyish mixtures tending toward one or the other side of the moral spectrum.

This leads us to Thomas Jefferson. The true charcter of Jefferson, Our American Sphynx, is probably somewhere in between the artfully-sketched hypocritical sexual predator of Conor Cruise O'brien on the one hand, and, on the other, Gary Wills' kind-of-hard-to-believe "Negro President (Exaggerated cough suggesting feigned detachment)."

And never the twain shall meet ..

Granted, while a discussion on Thomas Jefferson's voluminous writings on wine ought not to descend -- unduly -- into the question of slavery, it is also foolish to dismiss the discussion altogether (The Corsair pours himself a Caheteau Neuf). It was, after all, the slave labor on his plantation in Virginia that afforded Jefferson his forays into the French wine regions, his generalist study of architecture and his volumnious library of Scottish moral philosophy.

Which lead us to Jay McInerney, Conde Nast's resident wine slurper, and newlywed (To Anne Hearst). From the NYTimes Book Review:

"Perhaps life really is better seen through a single window,” says that famous voyeur Nick Carraway, a line decanted by John Hailman in his introduction to 'Thomas Jefferson on Wine.' Then again, perhaps viewing a life as multifaceted and eventful as Jefferson’s through the narrow lens of oenophilia is like training an electron microscope on an orgy; one is apt to miss some of the major events; or to see them from a bizarre perspective, as in a subchapter on the American Revolution entitled 'The Revolutionary War: Gross Inflation in the Wine Market.' And yet, that said, there are some of us for whom the question of whether Jefferson sired children with Sally Hemings is less urgent than the question of whether he preferred Bordeaux or Burgundy."

Sure, he sold his children by the enslaved half-sister of his deceased wife (the product of his father in law and his salve) for a profit, but --goddam it -- that man knew his Haute-Brion.

That counts for something, right?

Oh, and fuck you very much Jay McINERNEY (NYTimes)