Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
For instance, Rex Murphy observing (subscription required) in the Globe and Mail that a new Canadian federal budget had been eclipsed by “The Great Chicago Litigation of Lord Black of Crossharbour,” the prime minister having failed to compete with “Lady Black’s stage-wise and shattering remarks through a closing elevator door about certain journalists as ‘sluts’ and ‘vermin.’” Murphy went on to insist that while “Lord Black is too frequently singled out for his polemical virtuosity, the sheer exuberance and gothic luxuriousness of his diatribes, Lady Black is no slouch either. Barbara Amiel [Black’s wife] has a more concentrated thrust, a more disciplined wit.”
Unless certain Canadian writers get hold of themselves, they will soon be describing those jurors (six alternates included) as rabble rounded up under Chicago’s drawbridges. At this moment they’re being construed as ghastly specimens of the American petite bourgeoisie. “The lawyers tried, bless their condescending little hearts, to talk like the real Americans in the jury box,” wrote Christie Blatchford (subscription required) in the Globe and Mail. “There are 18 of these, middle America in her full flower –four men and 14 women, each of whose thighs appears to weigh more than all of Barbara Amiel on a fat day, many garbed in the improbably cheerful colours (royal blue, baby blue, lime green, coral, turquoise) of this continent’s big-box malls.”
