Probably every journalistic wretch in the business has by now tried his or her hand at shoving a 'gate' suffix onto the end of some dingy piece of chicanery. There have, admittedly, been a few quite funny examples of the genre. 'Tailgate' wasn't bad for the pantsdown episode in which Senators were found to be fornicating with the boy and girl pages who take messages through the marbled halls. 'Koreagate', on the other hand, was a lame effort to define the Washington influence-peddling of the arms-dealer Tongsun Park. The brittle and amoral wits of the new Post-Modern New Republic actually ran a competition to summarise the bewildering complexity of the Iran-Contra affair, and got gates galore. Since Oliver North and John Poindexter had communicated their fell designs through a system called the Prof computer, and since the thing hinged so much on transfers of hot and dirty money, I myself proudly came up with 'Profligate' which, though it won me no prizes, did get briefly adopted by the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

LRB 21 July 1994 | PDF Download