as i sat on the crapper
and texted a tweet,
i looked down from my penthouse
at the crowd on the street.
how dare they feel anger
that i made such a pile!
i shake my big whanger
at the masses so vile!
i was always a winner;
never mind how i won.
if the poor have no dinner,
what’s to be done?
My brother in-law inspired this one. He posted the Grinch with a pseudo-Seussian bit of doggerel about being fired. (He’s a mechanic; his office is a stall. He portrays the garage owner as the Grinch.) I posted the above as a a riposte. And now it’s a re-post.)
Earlier this AM, on a whim, I checked out the activity on Lynn Chu’s FB page.
(I was lured there by curiosity. With Newt’s popularity in the Iowa polls making the rocket ship arc, I was wondering if she might comment. She had been his writer’s rep back in the day when he’d ousted Speaker Wright for making money on a book and then written his own. This was long ago and may or may not swing back around this cycle.)
Instead, I encountered her essay/rant, written as a post and a series of her own comments to avoid (perhaps) the word count limit. The topic: the connection between government, finance, and ethics. She favors ethics as the backbone of law (without which, she writes, the law is mere force). She got there by starting out with the concept of ‘brokerage’ as representing both sides of a transaction. Along the way, she shook her head at the CDO squared. She invoked the clotted nature of regulation (cynically tuned to turn a blind eye), and the ridiculous nature of the the political discourse that misleads by design or otherwise. She demurred at revolution; preferring the devoutly to be wished reason and clarity. She paused in mid air to ponder her net worth as either middle class or rich. (We’d need to see the figures on that brokerage!) She allowed as how her opposition to taxation was a general thing aimed at decreasing the size and scope of government, but she noted that her husband and partner opposed taxation to lower his own burden. These are fine, thinking conservatives.
In the past I have disagreed with her. I have turned away from engaging with her discourse because of her politics. Now, I realize, that her politics are much more aligned with mine. She has, it seems, turned away from politics per se, at least in this essay. This is as it should be for a thinking person. We have reached a tipping point as a nation, a society, and species. Her rant was less political than it was legal/philosophical. She was on a broader arc, taking a larger stance, attacking a huge shibboleth, seemingly going after the Grinch rather than the Gingrich. To expect ethics out of politicians and financiers seems to me a huge stretch. To posit ethics as the backbone of law is so noble that one wishes it were so. Can it be?
Law without ethics is force: life without compassion is empty. Greed is a social illness. To hear it being exalted as our way of life, and to hear compassion jeered in the public forum, is disheartening. Revolution is ugly even when necessary. It almost never turns out well. The jury is still out on the American experiment, but it would not be a huge stretch to imagine the democracy failing altogether. Maddow is as bad as Hannity. Facts are hard to come by. Lynn’s eloquence here is exquisite. I wish there were an easy way to share it!
What’s to be done?
