When the American economy has fallen like Rome, and the ruins are being parsed for the reason, more astute analysts than I will be able to fully catalogue the causal relationship between penance foregone, and the end of an empire. There is a need for blood. If the economic elites don’t placate the populist fervor with some platelets, all our necks will meet the slit.
Massive bonuses at Goldman Sachs, and the gold-plated hookers to follow, are blood-boiling and symptomatic, and they are ours to own. We have allowed (if we were duped, it is still our disinterest and exceptionalism that left the fine print unread) our system to run on atavistic excess without an equally primitive leveling system, like the guillotine. Evolution would entail a surge in humility, humility with which the 21st century has yet to flirt. We have, however, been stealing some tender afternoons in a motel room with hubris.
Our access to humility seems stymied by a convenient, catch-as-catch-can version of morality in which riches received are, de facto, earned. While it takes a wealth of skill to orchestrate the combination of bundled mortgages, bailout money, and short-selling that leave the stockbrokers’ pocket’s well-lined, every dollar gained on definitively extinguishing some delinquent’s hope also gives its owner a percentage of the rot to his soul.
Our current economy is a feast of venality and relativism for the rich and poor alike. Soon, maybe in my lifetime, the poor will run out of money to pay, and blood will cease to be a metaphor. The same Everyone’s Doing It equivocation one banker invokes to siphon off another man’s subsistence will give the broke man no pause before flaying that banker and drinking from his skull.
Eye for an eye is a paltry binary, and vengeance absolves no one. Repentance isn’t found in the refuge of moral equivalence. This is your chance bankers: take back the image of white collar workers leaping out of high rises from Al Qaeda like black people took back the n-word. Your penance will be drastic, to mirror your sins, if it has any hope of salvation. So jump you sons of the American Dream. If you want to live.
I had decided that inspiration could not strike me of its own accord. That I might access it only through quest, at my peril, at my frequent failure. And so I chucked my spiral-bound Cambridge notebook, yellow pages, thick paper, alternating graph and rule print, as an optimist’s debris.