Schadenfreude

It just won’t stop…will it? I mean all the news from large corporations about platinum parachutes for executives who departed under a cloud with a small mountain of stock options, who’ve ordered the shredding of documents, authorized accounting games to ensure their wallets will be filled while the stockholders reel in shock at the results – these incompetent and dishonest employees, consultants, auditors. The innocent lose their hard-won pension funds; then the layoffs and firings of the innocent begin in order to “save the enterprise.”

After the events have been uncovered, the good ship Mendacity pulls up in front of the cameras, and the statements of innocence come down the gangway and present themselves for our delectation – the charges are baseless, without foundation, it didn’t happen, you don’t understand, we’ll leave it up to a jury of my client’s peers, what’s the big deal, everybody does it, I didn’t know that what I was doing was against the law, and I was not trying to avoid paying sales tax…you know the drill, you’ve seen it enough by now.

Enron, Arthur Andersen, Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Martha Stewart, Tyco, the Catholic Church in America, Global Crossing, Merrill Lynch, Qwest, WorldCom, and any American corporation moving its headquarters to Bermuda to avoid taxation, there appear to be so many miscreants you need a program to keep track of it all.

The distance between us and the corporations with which we do business or in which we own stock has become vast and uncrossable, and as our capacity to have much influence on how they deal with us is null and void . I used to put my money in bank with headquarters here in my home town. Now the bank is run from the West Coast, and to get my money, I go to what they call their local “store.” When I go to the big, bullseyed discount chain store, I am not a customer, I am a “guest.” When I go to the annual shareholders’ meeting of a company, that is the one day in the year when it is “my company,” at the end of which we ratify that salaries are up and the dividend is unchanged. “The map is not the territory it represents,” wrote Alfred Korzybski, the father of semantics, but, alas, the proxy statement and annual report don’t seem to represent the scheming and shenanigans of today’s swashbuckling corporate pirates.

In these parts and in a small way, we’ve had some fun with Martha Stewart, and it turns out that we weren’t doing satire as much as accurately anticipating the future (i.e., our “Martha Stewart Doesn’t Knead My Dough” products). No matter what your opinion on her ImClone transaction might be, she remains innocent until the law determines otherwise, but some of us must enjoy imagining her saying,”Yes, my new 7 by 10 foot home will look larger when I paint it in a calmingpastel color, and you can diminish the strong verticals of the bars by painting each of them in several contrasting hues.”

That’s called Schadenfreude, the pleasure we find in the misery of others, and none of us is exempt from it. So, as the mob did in the Place de la Concorde in Paris a couple of hundred years ago during another revolution, when aristocrats arrived at the guillotine in their carts, we shall look forward to the humbling of these corporate swindlers with their skewed values, their insensitivity to their larger responsibilities, their ability to foam at the mouth with claims of innocence which will, I am sure, turn out to be good old-fashioned codswallop which is English for bull droppings.

Lest we get carried away with our feelings of moral fervor, we might do well to look at how we’re doing as a country. Let’s see - we still haven’t paid our UN dues, don’t wish to participate in international treaties concerning human rights, international tribunals, or global warming, think of the environment as nothing more than an economic asset, celebrate our reliance on imported petroleum, and incarcerate aliens with no access to legal counsel. We have a hard time acknowledging the AIDS crisis as it sweeps through an Africa, one of several places in the globe where starvation rules, we are unlikely to admit that much of what is made for us to consume world is produced by children of the third world, and our government, in spite of its own scientists, pretends that global warming is not a fact. Nor are we shocked to accept the opinion that we are the moral judge of the rest of the world, label nations as evil without providing much in the way evidence, and we would like to determine who rules where.

This is the same country whose people contributed fully and freely to the victims of last September’s horrific events, whose people have sent and continue to send aid to a myriad of poor countries, many of which remain ungrateful, whose people were willing to stand up for the country of Afghanistan when it needed our help, and whose people welcome immigrants by the thousand each year, as these newcomers express anew the impulse of freedom which brought our forebears here in the first place.

Our barrel seems to have more rotten apples in it just now. Maybe it’s a phase and will pass, but only if we ensure that it.

Have a nice 4th. Read the Declaration of Independence, ooh and aah at the fireworks and the music, and let’s get to work – me, you, us.