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    Volume CCXXXIII, Number 38        October, 2003              Page 3

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The former celebrity known as Madonna, not-so-fresh from the triumph of her previous tome, Sex, turns her sights on a different variety of juvenalia: children's fiction. We're sure this is a delightful tale for the whole family about a little white-trash girl from Michigan who becomes a fairy princess, or at least a princess surrounded by fairies, thanks to her magic powers, including a supernatural ability to suck the chrome off of bumpers.

Having emptied movie theaters with her dreadful performance in Swept Away, the born-again authoress will be able to refute vicious rumors that the book was concocted by anonymous scriveners putting their Firsts from Somerville to good use on her behalf. After all, her defenders will note, she has been able to sign checks for years. Children's fiction is not much of a leap.

We're just a little worried about the type of parent (or grandparent, for that matter) who would regard this literary, uh, effort as just perfect for little Tiffany. But in an age where celebrity, however earned, has replaced marrying Prince Charming as every girl's fantasy (and their mom's), perhaps this volume will find itself in the pint-size fishnet stockings of tomorrow's JonBenet Ramseys.

We welcome Peggy Noonan back to the ranks of the unreadable (For her first appearance, see Spy No. 20 (April 2002)). You've got to hand it to her: she can churn 'em out faster than we can dismiss them. (Only Alan Dershowitz and Dick Posner have a similar record of lack of accomplishment.)

This time, Peggy shifts her gaze and her advance to the good solid ethnic Republicans who apparently saved America in the aftermath of September 11. While latte-sipping liberals applauded the destruction of the World Trade Center and the massacre of 3,000 innocents, in the world according to Noonan, right-thinker right-wingers helped clean up the mess, or at least transfer the mess to Baghdad.

Why Peggy feels compelled to vent her bottomless spleen on supposed elites whose only crimes were to attend colleges that didn't admit her and to vote against her favorite empty-headed Republican Presidents remains a mystery to us.

Perhaps she suffers from an efflorescence of the entrepreneurial spirit so limned by Republicans when repealing the graduated income tax. Peggy probably understands that any Republican sock-puppet can afford to rent on the Vineyard for a month, but buying a place of your own on the island takes several reactionary blockbusters (like those churned out by her fellow bottle-blonde soul-sister Ann Coulter). After all, Vineyard real estate is expensive and hard to find, especially if you're looking for a place far away from those nasty elites.

Based on what Harvard Business School teaches its narcissistic dummies to do to the rest of us, you'd expect a book advising the reader to use HBS techniques in their personal life to have been written by Kobe Bryant.

Instead, we get handy advice from a woman who's been trained and licensed to plunder, cheat and steal. Those same techniques that worked for Mitt Romney and generations of corporate raiders and parasites can help the single gal climb to the top of the greasy pole, at least before she's married.

Now that we think about it, the techniques taught in business school probably do as they say at HBS add value to the quest for the MRS degree. First, you're taught to put a pretty face on a content-free package: Powerpoint in class, and a Wonderbra, semi-buttoned silk blouse and short Prada skirt afterwards.

Second, you've also got to obscure your simple goal under a gooey layer of incomprehensible jargon. At HBS, you learn to toss around terms like value proposition, e.g., the nuts, caramel and chocolate represent Snickers' value proposition. But to get from proposition to proposal, you've got to use terms like "commitment" and "soulmate" and "a good sense of humor" to obscure what you're really after: a tall, rich investment banker or hedge fund manager who will build a $4 million palace in Greenwich for you, Tiffany and Justin and then generally stay out of the way.

Sadly, we're willing to concede that the same shallow, manipulative techniques that lead clueless MBA's into the executive suite probably work equally well for Rachel and her fellow golddiggers.