A Modern Purim Story

Paul Krugman stole my Nobel Prize. I don’t hold it against him, but I think the guy should at least publicly acknowledge the debt. As many of you know we were roommates in college (Yale ’74) who’ve maintained our friendship over the decades meeting each year on Boxing Day to exchange gifts and get hammered (he’s a Jameson’s man, I go for Glenlivet French Oak 15 year old). It was my idea that resulted in the paper that he was cited for in his Nobel ceremony; he just did the statistical analysis. He doesn’t exactly deny this, but he claims that anything written down on a sleazy bar’s coaster dated December 26 any year, doesn’t count as co-authorship. “Nonsense,” I counter, but he rejoins with “Ha!” and shows me his medallion.

But now his guilt feelings have paid big dividends as he’s shared with me in strictest confidence an explosive WikiLeaks revelation that he’s planning to release in his column on March 20, “Just in time for Purim,” he tells me. He thinks I’m going to sit on this, that I’m not going to scoop him, not beat him to the publication punch, that the promise I made last December 26 to keep his confidences holds the same weight as if spoken when sober? He thinks the Nobel is his exclusively? Ha! Read on.

Not content to embarrass American diplomats, the WikiLeaks people have tapped into the (formally) private correspondence of Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. Walker is nervous that a Cairo-like rebellion is in the making, that public employees, who are rallying at the State House in Madison demanding that he reverse course on his attempt to abolish their collective bargaining rights might soon demand his recall. He’s even sought advice secretly from Hosni Mubark who faced a similar crisis last month. That correspondence is part of the WikiLeaks revelations as are Walker’s concerns that the Book of Esther he’s been reading on the advice of a local rabbi describes a situation uncomfortably like his own, for just as Haman wanted to kill Jews because Mordechai refused to bow to him, Walker is trying to kill public employee unions which did not support him in his election bid. Just as Hosni called in his thugs to beat up the Tahrir Square protestors, Walker has called in the Tea Party to out-shout the Public Employees. Walker knows it didn’t work for his pal Hosni, but is trying it anyway; he also knows what happened to Haman, and he looks with fright at all those three-corned hats the cheeseheads wear to Packers games. The internal memos reveal that he thinks they are mockingly reminding him of Haman’s fate.

In another WikiLeaks revelation there is correspondence between Walker and his former top aid who has the euphonious name of Ima Goodheart. Goodheart, in E-mail correspondence with Walker, points out that “public workers essentially make a deal to get paid less now and collect pensions upon retirement. So we can’t renege on good-faith contractual agreements.” Thus Goodheart is described as a “former aid.”

In public Walker claims there is no other solution to Wisconsin’s debt crises. In private he thinks the solution is two-fold. “First,” as he puts in the WikiLeaks’ revelations, “we kill the unions and then we give big tax cuts to the wealthy.” When Walker sent an E-mail to George H.W. Bush asking what he thought about this, the former president tweeted: “LOL, Voodoo economics in the land of pasteurization. Will you never learn?”

Walker has also been corresponding with other Republican governors. WikiLeaks revealed that he congratulated Governor Rick Scott of Florida for rejecting $2.4 billion in federal money to build a high speed rail connecting Tampa and Orlando which would have created 24,000 new jobs at a cost to Floridians of only $1.25 million. As Scott wrote to Scott “Well, done Scott! Together we can deny public services to all!”

Can the Scotts be stopped, or do we all have to start drinking Scotch to forget some Scotts Welsh on obligations. After all, on Purim, which rapidly approaches, we are enjoined to get so drunk that we can’t tell an Aleph from a Beth. On Purim we tell stories that are not necessarily true in all details, like this one you’ve been reading—actually none of them are—but we tell the essential truth that arrogance in high places has its comeuppance if, like the protesters in Madison and in Cairo, like Mordechai and Esther, we stand up to manipulative oppressors. It’s happened before, Scotts; it can happen again.

Happy Purim.