Pardon clears Black’s legal woes, but his stain remains

I’m writing this column on an Apple iMac. Not the latest model — it’s from 2012. Quite old, actually — but a good size, 21.5 inch screen, and reliable.

Fifty bucks and it’s yours.

No? How about $25?

Kidding. There are two problems with my selling this iMac. First, I need it to write the rest of today’s column. And second, the computer’s not mine: it belongs to the Chicago Sun-Times. So if I did sell it, contrary to the company’s best interests, the money wouldn’t belong to me, but to them.

That, in a nutshell, if you puff away the bombast and legalese, not to mention the confusing miasma of conviction and acquittal, appeal and reversal, is the essence of the misdeeds of Conrad Black, former master of Hollinger International, a chain of newspapers that included this one. Crimes Lord Black was pardoned of on Wednesday by his friend and fellow fraud, President Donald Trump.

Black and his underling David Radler sold off pieces of Hollinger as if they and not the stockholders owned the place. They sold publications and skimmed off cash for themselves, arguing this was OK because the embezzlement was cast in the form of “noncompete” clauses, promises not to undercut the business of the new owners.

To return to our opening scenario, it’s as if I sold you this iMac for $50, passing $25 to the paper and keeping $25 for myself as payment for promising not to hurt your ability to profit from writing stuff on it.

“We believe the verdict vindicates the serious public interest in making sure that when insiders in a corporation deal with money entrusted to the shareholders, that they’re not engaged in self-dealing,” Patrick Fitzgerald, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois at the time, said after the convictions.

”Self-dealing” — now there’s a concept you don’t have to go back to 2007 to find relevant. That could be a chapter title for the history of America for the past two years and the next two. Or six. Trump may or may not have coordinated his campaign efforts with his Russian overlords, but nobody can deny that his every word, deed and thought focuses on what is best for himself.

Actually, they can and do deny it. Once proud Americans roll like puppies before Trump, praising every malicious lie. I’ll go to my grave puzzled by this. When Black’s pardon was announced, the media made much of the fact that Black wrote an obsequious book, “Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other.”

If it was designed for an audience of one, Donald Trump, it hit the mark. Since lack of gratitude is a long-established Trump trait, he perhaps is not rewarding a sycophant so much as sending a message to former flunkies now squirming under legal inquiry: I’ve got your back.

I never met Black myself, and only saw him once, after slipping into the back of U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve’s courtroom. I have nothing against him personally, even though he did bankrupt us, and sell our building to Trump and his developers, so that his shameful name could stand in letters 20 feet tall in the heart of our liberal city.

Both Black and Trump were born to wealth and are essays on the fatuousness of riches. Both are notorious for their condescension, their hunger for empty status.

Black was a man who renounced his own Canadian citizenship so he could become an English Lord: Lord Conrad Black of Crossharbour, as if that ennobled instead of damned him.

They fool themselves and fool others.

Black recognized Trump’s genius for deceit, predicted early he would be president and supported him from the start. Now he has reaped his reward.

And we are reaping ours. Millions of Americans took a long look at the carnival of reality TV bunkum, random cruelty and reflexive hypocrisy that is Donald Trump, and voted for him. If the Trump years seem to have lost their urgency, and taken on a grim, permanent, 1930s normalcy, that’s because they have. The stain against Conrad Black’s name being, not wiped away, but crudely smeared by this pardon, is one small reminder that we are in an upside-down, funhouse world, where the guilty are innocent, and the innocent guilty, to a greater or lesser extent, of exhaustion, distraction and despair if nothing else.