Career Success to Be Studiously Avoided

OK, so you're probably aware that Ted Kennedy died, but someone else fairly prominent died at the same time, but amid the hoopla it was like a person quietly slipping out of the house while a big party was going on. That person was Dominick Dunne, who wrote about our seemingly inexhaustible supply of celebrities on trial. Who'll do it now? Me? No thank you, he said, with a grimace of disgust. Once during the O.J. trial years ago I saw the camera pan across the spectators and there was Dunne, peering owlishly at the proceedings, and I thought how that was the last place on earth I'd wish to be day after day. That trial sprayed all of us with the kind of information you wish you could unlearn—the kind of thing that makes you wonder what ails the human race. I knew people who followed the story avidly, and people like Dunne get rich because of them. But that aspect of human nature, that ghoulish quality, the delectation of suffering and humiliation, that tendency to be like Madame Defarge gloating over her knitting as the aristocrats go to the guillotine—that part of human nature isn't the sort of thing I want to feed during my working day.

Not that the job's been offered to me, I hasten to add. I'll bet it pays pretty well, and all.

(Sigh.)