Isn’t it kind of divine that in the same week that Tim Thomas, the goalie of the Boston Bruins, refused to attend a White House reception in honor of the team’s championship last spring, Buckingham Palace released the names of 277 people who between the years 1951 and 1999 declined to accept one of the Queen’s Honors, including, in some cases, knighthood, and with it the right to be be called Sir or Lady. Among the refusniks were Roald Dahl, Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, JB Priestley, Lucian Freud, Robert Graves, FR Leavis, LS Lowry, Henry Moore, Philip Larkin and CS Lewis.

In a statement he posted on Facebook, Thomas was plain about his decision. “I believe the Federal government has grown out of control, threatening the Rights, Liberties, and Property of the People.This is being done at the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial level. This is in direct opposition to the Constitution and the Founding Fathers vision for the Federal government. Because I believe this, today I exercised my right as a Free Citizen, and did not visit the White House. This was not about politics or party, as in my opinion both parties are responsible for the situation we are in as a country. This was about a choice I had to make as an INDIVIDUAL.” Thomas has been tut-tutted by such political philosophers like Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser, who on ESPN played establishmentarian court jesters, saying that when one has been invited by the President, one ought to go, out of respect for the office.

Nonsense. First, this has nothing to do with the country. President Obama is merely copying a move pioneered by John Lindsay, who in the midst of tight mayoral race in New York City in 1969, barged into the locker room of the World Series-winning Mets and inserted his head under waterfalls of champagne. (The ploy worked; he won a narrow plurality in a three-way race.) President Nixon soon began rewarding winning coaches with congratulatory phone calls. Now it’s receptions. Clearly these are held as publicity opportunities for the incumbent, and I have no problem with Tim Thomas or any of these other jocks exercising his right to absent himself. The White House is such a bubble, it’s good when this or any president hears some disagreement.

Indeed, I wish it was plainer why the 277 would-be honorees in Britain declined their invitations; no reasons were cited, and the Palace took care in its response to a BBC request to release only the names of people who are dead. Over the years, explanations have been provided by some people who are not on the list. According to the New York Times, the writer J. G. Ballard said he did not want to be named a Commander of the British Empire because the whole thing was a “preposterous charade.” The poet Benjamin Zephaniah (left) refused membership in the Order of the British Empire, saying “Stick it, Mr. Blair and Mrs. Queen.” David Bowie declined a C.B.E. in 2000, saying “I seriously don’t know what it’s for.” (Selling records, duh!) In 1992, Doris Lessing declined a knighthood, saying “Surely there is something unlikable about a person, when old, accepting honors from a institution she attacked when young?” But eight years later, she accepted another title, the Companion of Honor, saying she liked that “you’re not called anything” special.

And that’s the point–we don’t know if these folks were trying to raise an objection, or to avoid being used as a monarchical prop, or simply because they were holding out for a better honor. After all, Alfred Hitchcock turned down a C.B.E. in 1962, then later accepted being named a Knight Commander of the British Empire. But I like what Terence Blacker wrote in the Independent. Noting that the opt-outs “have little in common politically or personally beyond the fact that their work is the product of uncompromising individuality,” Blacker suggests that “Simply by accepting a bauble of thanks from the nation, they would be sacrificing what was best about them – their apartness. Once they became part of the national community, their voice, their eyes, their strength would be changed. They neither accepted the honour nor, in what has become a new form of boasting, told the world that they had rejected it.”

Simon Doonan had a wonderful article in Slate last week about his experience designing the installation for the auction of Marilyn Monroe‘s effects for Christie’s in 1999. Doonan says the process of cataloging her belongings took months, but “Right away, I discovered that Marilyn was shockingly and unimaginably slender. She was sort of like Kate Moss but fleshier on top. Didn’t see that coming, did you? When it came to finding mannequins to fit her dresses, I simply couldn’t. M.M.’s drag was too small for the average window dummy.” Doonan says he developed alternate ways to show Monroe’s famous dresses, with the lone exception of the famous Jean Louis number Marilyn wore for JFK’s birthday, for which a custom Lucite mannequin was made. Says Doonan, “When you look at Marilyn on-screen and . . .realize that the busty, ample gal brimming over Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot is literally one-third your size, you have every right to become suicidal.”

Doonan’s second great observation was that Monroe was not materialistic. “Marilyn Monroe. . .owned diddly-squat. . . . There were no Renoirs or Picassos. Her knickknacks were pedestrian. Her cookware was greasy. Her spatulas were bent. Even her Golden Globe was broken. The majority of her clothing showed surprising wear and tear. She had worn it all repeatedly and there just wasn’t that much of it. Her jewelry? With the exception of her DiMaggio wedding ring it was a bunch of paste danglers and costume crap. Shoes? Yes, there were several pairs of black suede Ferragamo stilettos with worn heels. But Marilyn—brace yourself for another shocker—was more into books than shoes. Her poignant desire to cultivate her mind and give herself an education resulted in an extensive library of first editions.”

I love that!

In one of those bits of harmonic convergence that we used to call coincidence, on the same day I read Doonan’s article, I read that Eve Arnold had died. The brilliant photographer had created many stunning images of celebrities and nobodies alike, but she was perhaps best known for her pictures of Monroe. You can see why.

I have long admired the critic James Wolcott–his slashing wit, his erudition, his vocabulary, his taste and perception–but although we know many people in common, we have never met. Until I read his new book Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York, his lively memoir of a youth spent in Manhattan during a decadent, fertile decade, I didn’t realize how very much more we had in common. Wolcott, like me, grew up in Maryland, although his home was not Baltimore but Edgewood, where my sister now lives. He, like I, spent afternoons in libraries sopping up Norman Mailer essays and evenings watching Dick Cavett, trying to absorb their teachings of far-off New York. He mentions making exciting visits to Sherman’s newsstand (on Charles Street, was it? Or Cathedral?), just as I did, where under the dusty posters of Yves Montand and Steve McQueen and the gnarled supervision of the proprietor, Abe Sherman, he eyeballed exotic publications like Ramparts and The Nation and tasted an intellectual world far away. Later, his Old Line State roots served him well when he was able to decode the Baltimore Colt references in Diner for the New Yorker‘s Pauline Kael. Wolcott is a coupla-three years older than I, knew what he wanted earlier than I, moved to New York several years before I, and made important connections sooner; in reading his memoir, I felt like I was being caught up on what I’d missed about scenes that I had entered a few years later in their lives–garbagy, crime-ridden Manhattan, porny Times Square (“Wanna go out?”), punky Greenwich Village, the fesity, glamorous Village Voice and New York magazine, the city’s whole collapsing, Bronx-Is-Burning era. Those were different days,as Wolcott points out, when people didn’t spend much thinking about real estate or their salaries; when the city, as Christine Baranski recently pointed out, was governed by creative people who cared about the arts, not by financiers. It was a city that writers found it worth fighting to get into; now I wonder if it still a city worth fighting to hold onto. In one of the most valuable moments in the book, Wolcott shares the lessons he learned from his days working the front desk at the Voice, taking in over-the-transom submissions from optimistic freelance writers. “Avoid parody, which slides too easily into facetiousness. Avoid political satire, which has the shelf life of a sneeze. Avoid preamble–flip on the switch in the first sentence. Find a focal point for your nervous energy, assume a forward offensive stance, and drive to the finish line, even if it’s only a five hundred word slot: no matter how short a piece, there has to be a sense of momentum and travel, rather than just allotted space being texted in. . . Writing that was too talky lacked the third rail below the surface that suggested untapped power reserves, an extra store of ammo.” And danger, I might add. Thank you, maestro, for the lesson, and for the recollections.

Writing on redstate.com, Erik Erikson says “[Rick] Perry is rapidly becoming the front running and consolidating the lead.” Just speculating, I assume this has to do with his leaderly Texas macho swagger (“He’s a good lookin’ rascal,” said Bill Clinton, with what I detect is just a bit of mischief in his choice of words), as well as a strong record of job creation in Texas. I guess the theory is that if he can created jobs in Texas, he will be able to create jobs in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and so on.

This idea will never last. As Annie Lowrey pointed out in Slate, Perry benefited enormously from a decade-long rise in oil and gas prices that coincided with his tenure as governor. As she writes, “in December 2000, when he took office, the price of a barrel of oil was about $30, adjusted for inflation. Today, it is about $82. At its height, it was nearly $150. High oil prices mean high revenues for Texan oil companies. . . .Oil and gas currently contributes about $325 billion a year to Texas’ economy.” According to The Economist, the oil and gas industries have accounted for about 13 percent of the state’s job growth.

Don’t you think that sooner or later, don’t you think one of Perry’s opponents is going to point out that Texas’s enrichment has been at the expense of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and so on? Folks in those states are paying somewhere between $3.50 and $4 a gallon for gasoline, much of which is flowing into the Texas economy. And this isn’t just a lone example of taking advantage of a beggar-thy-neighbor opportunity; this is Perry’s economic policy. According to The Economist, “in 2003 the legislature established the Texas Enterprise Fund, a “deal-closing fund” that gives the governor subsidies and incentives to use in his efforts to woo, or if you’d prefer, poach businesses from elsewhere. This seems to deviate from free-market orthodoxy and it has exposed him to charges of crony capitalism, but it has also helped his administration create jobs.” He will be Governor High Gas Prices; you can write him off today.

The oil and gas industries are going to be chained around Rick Perry’s neck, and he will humble Houdini if he can escape that embrace. The coup de grace may come in mid-2012, when TNT rejuvenates the TV series Dallas with a ten episode run. Although the show will be an update of the 1980s-era hit, and will feature new characters, Larry Hagman will reprise J.R. Ewing. The embodiment of a scheming Texas oil man will be on display in all his mendacity just in time, I believe, for the California primary.

On Wednesday, Ginny and I and Cara headed out for the University of Kentucky in Lexington, where Cara will soon begin her freshman year. Thinking to combine some tourism with one of the last acts of basic parenthood (everything after this gets placed in the supplemental category), we headed first for Cleveland, where we saw the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (left), which sits inside a dazzling I.M. Pei pyramid on the shores of Lake Erie, which, as just as the advance word promised, is indeed a Great Lake. We stayed in a Crowne Plaza Hotel with bad room service, and then hit the Hall on Thursday. It was pretty cool, although it wa bit disconcerting to see one’s youth in a musem. The effect that is produced is not the warmth of nostalgia, nor the intellectual stimulation that is produced by going to, say, the Met. It’s kind of cool, but kind of dull. The best moment was seeing a montage of British Invasion groups, and being reminded how very cool the Kinks and the Zombies and the Animals really were. It was amazing how well Eric Burden could shake his hair and his ass simultaneously, but of course one now sees that lhe indeed loked like the spastic madman his critics said he did.

After lunch it was south on a very straight and boring I-75 (highlight: a huge billboard in a cornfield says Hell Is Real), through Cincinnati, and then onto Lexington. On Friday we moved Cara moved into her room, a process hectic enough to inspire a couple of stories that will be top of the line private stock family stories. After she settled in, we went back and spent the night in a very nice Hyatt. The next day, we visited Ashland, the home of the Great Compromiser Henry Clay, and then attended a couple of information sessions with Cara before sharing a pretty bland meal at an Italian restaurant (this is why Tony Soprano was neve drawn to the witness protection program), before taking our leave, and driving back up to Columbus, where we spent the night in an excellent Westin, of whose quality we were not worthy. (Top right, a new Wildcat in her lair; bottom right, Clay’s pile; Top left, Cincinnati, Thursday, 4:55 PM; bottom left, Columbus, Sunday, 8:30 AM.)

On Sunday, we drove from Columbus to Canton, which turns out to be far from everything, to visit the Pro Football Hall of Fame. (If you wonder why the Hall of Fame is in Canton, it’s because football had it’s roots in Canton specifically and Ohio generally. But football soon left Canton for the bright lights of the big cities, and it’s no mystery why.) I liked the museum–it had some pretty cool Baltimore Colts stuff, including the Marching Band’s drum and Tom Matte‘s famous play-inscribed arm bands–but a lot of it was kind of static. They really could do a lot more. The best part was the collection of amazing films. And then it was eight hours back through Pennsylvania, and home. Happy to be back, but already missing Cara.

Jayne Mansfield knew it. Whenever the blonde, buxom, modestly-talented starlet threatened to become lost amid the endless parade of up-and-coming bombshells Hollywood produced, Jayne found a way to display her breasts in view of a host of compliant paparazzi. Because Jayne knew the secret of success, she managed to support herself and her girls for years.

Buddy Hackett knew it. Whenever the moderately-amusing Catskills graduate threatened to disappear into the funny enough indistinguishable mass of Jack E. Leonards and Jack Carters and London Lees, Buddy would go onto The Tonight Show and say something obscene to get him bleeped. That would get him talked about and written about and boost his bookings. Because Buddy knew the secret of success, he managed to maintain a profitable show business career for decades.

Madonna knew it. Whenever the unremarkable pop star threatened to become eclipsed by other attractive warblers, Madonna would expose some part of her body or insult some sacred cow or so something provocative with a crucifix or a water bottle, and this would open a rich new vein of publicity that would help sell her albums and support her tours. Because Madonna knew the secret of success, she has become a beloved show business icon.

This spring, we have seen the flowering of a new phenomenon: politicians who have learned this secret of show business success. The new formula: run for president, say something outrageous, and cash in. Donald Trump, a man who has no aspirations to be president, no program for the nation, and no chance of winning, nonetheless floated the idea of his own candidacy. He then prosecuted the baseless allegation that President Obama was not native-born, and once that was decisively refuted, demanded to see Obama’s school transcripts. Having used the presidential bid to raise his profile and get the thing he always wanted–the renewal of his TV show–Trump retired his bod.

Sarah Palin has done the same thing. She clearly has no intention of running for president, but to retire form the race would immediately diminish her status. So she continues to refuse to announce, and continues to put no resources into building a presidential campaign, but continues to whisper and leak that she might be interested, and puts targets on her website and uses phrases like blood libel to continue to draw interest to herself. She’ll managle the story of Paul Revere and continue to push nasty’s inferences about Obama’s ancestry (“The perfect example of the media one- sidedness is Obama’s record not being explored. . .and now revelations of maybe some of his upbringing, some of his background, certainly his associations, how they impact his world view and how that affects his decisions today.”) She won’t run, but her bookings and fees will get one more bounce.

Newt Gingrich has done the same thing. As ABC News has reported, Gingrich has not held elective office since 1999, and now lives a life of luxury that includes a beautiful home, private jet travel, and, famously, a lot of jewelry. When he left Washington he was a busted valise, an ineffective partisan and political leader who’d been tainted by scandal. Still, he has managed to hold onto the tatters of a reputation of an incisive and innovative thinker that he once held, mostly by dangling his presidential potential, and by attacking Obama with blustery vehemence. “He is a food stamp president,” Gingrich has said. “He’s a natural secular European socialist. He is the opposite of freedom.” Gingrich’s entire staff quit when Gingrich went on a Mediterranean cruise instead of campaigning, but it matters little: Gingrich isn’t running to win; he’s running have a platform off of which he can launch partisan grenades and sell books and make speeches. Remember: Jayne Mansfield never went to Cannes in order to win the Best Actress award. She went to Cannes because that was where she could find the most cameras, so that when she bent over, her cleavage could get the widest exposure. Same thing here: Trump and Palin and Gingrich don’t run for president to become president: running is just the thing they have to do to create their brand.

The newest member of their club may be Michele Bachmann, the comely Minnesota congresswoman. Bachmann says she is running for president and I have no reason to doubt her sincerity, but it’s true that the things she has to do now to run for president in 2012 are also what she has to do to become a well-rewarded wanna-be in 2013: campaign, seduce the media, and fling wild accusaions at Obama. So far she is running, and has accused Obama of anti-Americanism, infantilism, “turning our country into a nation of slaves,” and most bizarrely, secretly wanting Medicare to go broke so that he can force senior citizens onto “Obamacare”–which is actually Rep. Paul Ryan‘s plan for Medicare.

Bachmann is pursuing a risky strategy. I have this vision of her on election night in 2012. She’s just been elected president, and she’s crying. “Tears of joy?” inquires her dutiful husband.

“No, numbskull,” she replies. “I don’t want to be president! I want to be a windbag!”

It was my great pleasure to participate in the 1st Annual Writers’ Conference of the Writing Center, now of Hunter College, late of Marymount Manhattan. I was on a panel that made pronouncements about the Blogosphere, of all things. Joining me in this mission was the estimable Patty Marx, Jesse Kornbluth, Susan J. Behrens, and moderator Marcia Yerman. It was fun, and there were many good questions. It was great to see my former students Millie Burns and Joe Lisanti. In this photo, as I speak, I turn Patty Marx into one of those children from Village of the Damned. Thanks once again to my friend Lewis Burke Frumkes for inviting me.

Sometimes writing for a weekly newsmagazine means being willing to ask a dumb question. Writing Time‘s cover story this week on the sexual trespasses of Arnold Schwarzeneggar, Dominique Strauss-Kahn and other powerful who did not happen to specifically get into trouble this week, Nancy Gibbs, one of the best to ever write in this format, asks the Duh-worthy question, “How can it be, in this ostensibly enlightened age, when men and women live and work as peers and are schooled regularly in what conduct is acceptable and what is actionable, that anyone with so little judgment, so little honor, could rise to such heights?”

Good question, Nancy–now why don’t you give us the answer? “By now social commentators have the explanations on auto-save: We know that powerful men can be powerfully reckless, particularly when, like DSK, they stand at the brink of their grandest achievement. They tend to be risk takers or at least assess risk differently — as do narcissists who come to believe that ordinary rules don’t apply. They are often surrounded by enablers with a personal or political interest in protecting them to the point of covering up their follies, indiscretions and crimes. A study set to be published in Psychological Science found that the higher men — or women — rose in a business hierarchy, the more likely they were to consider or commit adultery. With power comes both opportunity and confidence, the authors argue, and with confidence comes a sense of sexual entitlement. If fame and power make sex more constantly available, the evolutionary biologists explain, it may weaken the mechanisms of self-restraint and erode the layers of socialization that we impose on teenage boys and hope they eventually internalize. “When men have more opportunity, they tend to act on that opportunity,” says psychologist Mark Held.”

Delving into the deep secrets of this phenomenon is like delving into the mystery of why people like warm sunny afternoons. Even the most disciplined and moral of powerful people tend to try to get away with doing what they want to do, and because they are powerful, weaker people tend to permit them, if not actively encourage them. And when powerful people find themselves on thin ice, they invent high-minded moral reasons to do what they want to do. Ask Henry VIII, or Hitler, or Jack Kennedy, or Nixon, or Bill Clinton or Charlie Sheen. Everybody has his reasons. I need a son. I fear that I am going to die prematurely. The streets are in turmoil. I am a torpedo of truth.

What restrains them–if anything ever restrains them–are other people saying no. This, of course, is what must be killing Maria Shriver. People have known forever that Schwarzeneggar was a big, slobbering pig. As we reported it in Spy, one of his most effective pick-up lines was “Your bangability is very high tonight.” A lot of the most controversial of Heidi Fleiss’s business with the studios, as John Connolly reported in Us, was about supplying girls for Arnold. This couldn’t have been secret from Shriver, and it was certainly raised when he put himself forward for governor. Surely Shriver was an enormous help to his campaign when she publicly invested not only the credibility she had developed as a newscaster but the imprimatur of the Kennedys. “You can listen to all the negativity, and you can listen to people who have never met Arnold, who met him for five seconds 30 years ago, or you can listen to me.”

The peculiar circumstances of the Schwarzeneggar situation–the counterparty was not an ingenue or a stripper, but a member of the household staff–must be particularly galling to Shriver. The whle thing recalls the entry from the shrewd and perceptive Mary Chesnut, the premier diarist of the southern slavocracy. “Ours is a monstrous system,” she wrote at the start fo the Civil War. “Perhaps the rest of the world is as bad. This only I see: like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines, and the Mulattoes one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children–& every lady tells you who is the father of all the mulatto children in every body’s household but those in her own, she seems to think drop from the clouds or pretends so to think. . . . Alas for the men! No worse than men every where, but the lower their mistresses, the more degraded they must be.”

It is convenient to believe that men are different than women, or that rich men are different than the rest of us poor schlubs. It is comforting to think that bad behavior is somehow lodged in an easily idenitifed “other” that we can see and condemn. But the truth is that none of us is perfect. We are all sinners. Most of us do most of what we think we can get away with, and it is only the prospect of getting caught that restrains us. And that includes making up excuses and rationalizations for those people on whom we depend for emotional and financial security.

At a Paul Simon concert in Toronto last week, a Newfoundland woman named Rayna Ford called out for Simon to play “Duncan,” saying that it was the song on which she learned to play guitar. Perhaps feeling groovey, in any event feeling light-hearted, Simon promptly invited Ford onstage to pay the song. The video records a woman enjoying the thrill of a lifetime.