"Where else in our weak economy are there so many good job opportunities as in racketeering?" (Charles Simic)

Relax, Mr. Crook! If you're big and powerful
enough, there's no need to hide your face!

"It ought to be obvious by now that if we ever become a genuine police state, it will not arise from an authoritarian ideology necessarily, but as the end result of that insatiable greed for profit that has already affected every aspect of American life from health care to the way college students are forced into debt."

-- Charles Simic, in a NYRB blogpost, "A Thieves' Thanksiving"

by Ken

Earlier tonight Howie pointed out ("Corruption At The Top -- In China They Punish It . . . For Real") that the People's Republic of China is becoming known for seriously prosecuting corruption at the upper levels of government and Communist Party ranks, in rather stark contrast to certain other economic powerhouses, including one whose initials are U.S.A. This might be a good time to look back at the jolly little blogpost I've cited above, served up for Thanksgiving by the poet and trenchant essayist Charles Simic.

As I noted in a June 2013, post, "'I thank God there is no God to see what we've done to the world' ('part-time pessimist' Charles Simic)": "I'm not much of a poetry guy, so I'm not up much on Charles Simic's poetry. But over the years he has become a cherished companion thanks to his cultural and historical ruminations in the New York Review of Books." For Thanksgiving, Charles begins his ruminations:

It’s never been such a good time to be a crook. In what other country of laws does one enjoy so much freedom to defraud one’s government and fellow citizens without having to worry about cops showing at the door? Small-time crooks sooner or later end up in the slammer, but our big-time con artists, as we’ve come to learn, are now regarded as the untouchables, too well-heeled and powerful to lock up.

What's more, he notes, "the most famous among them" rouse the admiration, not just of "peers and politicians on the take" but by such worthies as the president, "who, six years after the worst financial crisis since the Depression, calls them good businessmen." And so our best and brightest come out of prestigious schools boasting of their intention to follow in their footsteps. "Besides," he adds, "where else in our weak economy are there so many good job opportunities as in racketeering?" And, he notes, the career white-collar crminal now faces "so few risks."

Everyone knows about Wall Street bankers having their losses from various scams they concocted over the years covered by taxpayers. But now, even when bankers lose billions for their bank by making bad or reckless deals, or have to pay regulatory penalties, as Jamie Dimon, the current chairman, president, and chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase did earlier this year, they are more likely to get a 74 percent raise, as he did, than to lose their jobs. As for the federal agencies that are supposed to watch over them and the Justice Department that is supposed to haul these hucksters into court, if they so much as bestir themselves to confront the banks, they simply ask them to pay fines, thereby avoiding a judge or a jury and making sure that the details of their swindles can remain secret from the public.

And that's nothing comparied to "the kind of thievery that went on in Iraq and Afghanistan," which also seems to have lost its once-deadly stigma. (He recalls President Abraham Lincoln's admonition during the Civil War, "Worse than traitors in arms are the men who pretend loyalty to the flag, feast and fatten on the misfortunes of the Nation while patriotic blood is crimsoning the plains of the South and their countrymen mouldering in the dust," and President Franklin Roosevelt's declaration with the U.S.'s entry into World War II, "I don't want to see a single war millionaire created in the United States as a result of this world disaster.") He contrasts this with the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting's finding regarding Iraq and Afghanistan that "somewhere between $31 billion and $60 billion of US government money has been lost through contract waste and fraud," not to mention the more than $400 billion shelled out "to companies that had previously been sanctioned in cases involving fraud," the very same companies, by and large, that continue to suck at the teat of "the new homeland security–industrial complex."
"However shocking," Charles insists, "these revelations don’t really come as a surprise."

Can anyone imagine a candidate for office talking about war profiteering and demanding accountability from both the military and civilian contractors and those who hired them? I cannot. Nor can I imagine a reporter asking Presidents Bush and Obama what happened to all that taxpayer money. The days when the subject could be raised are long gone. We now live in a country whose political system is too corrupt to defend itself from crooks. Should some senator or congressman have a sudden attack of conscience and blurt something out, “dark money” brings them to their senses and reminds them that their job is to facilitate the transfer of public funds into the pockets of the few and to not ask too many questions. Almost $4 billion was spent on this year’s midterm election and out of that $219 million on dark money, all with the blessing of the Supreme Court, which in its 2010 Citizens United decision made bribing men and women running for office legal and turned politicians who could not be bought into an extinct species.

Finally, Charles recalls Mark Twain, "while pondering by what process our own republic may turn into monarchy," recalling being taught in school: "Rome's liberties were not auctioned off in a day, but were bought slowly, gradually, furtively, little by little."

It ought to be obvious by now that if we ever become a genuine police state, it will not arise from an authoritarian ideology necessarily, but as the end result of that insatiable greed for profit that has already affected every aspect of American life from health care to the way college students are forced into debt. Huge fortunes are also made from spying on us and coming to regard every American as a potential enemy. They are right to think that way. If we ever as a nation grasped that criminality on such an immense scale is bound to lead the country into ruin, there might be serious consequences for the perpetrators. At the present time, the only ones likely to get in trouble are the leakers who want to let the rest of us know what goes on behind our backs. No doubt about it, in the coming holiday season our crooks will have a lot to be thankful for and a lot to celebrate.

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"I thank God there is no God to see what we've done to the world" ("part-time pessimist" Charles Simic)

"Recently a reviewer complained that my new book of poems is much too preoccupied with death. He appeared to suggest that I ought to be more upbeat, dispensing serene wisdom in the autumn of my life, instead of reminding readers every chance I get of their mortality. Just you wait, I said to myself, till you reach my age and start going to funerals of your friends. Nobody warns us about that when we are young, and even if they ever did, it goes in one ear and out the other."

-- poet and essayist Charles Simic, in a
NYRB blogpost, "Looking It in the Face"

by Ken

I'm not much of a poetry guy, so I'm not up much on Charles Simic's poetry. But over the years he has become a cherished companion thanks to his cultural and historical ruminations in the New York Review of Books.

"Of course, I never really believed it would happen," Simic begins this lovely new piece. "Grow old, I mean."

I knew it was coming, saw the evidence of it in my friends and relatives, but despite that, I acted as if aging had nothing to do with me. Even having people congratulate me on my seventy-fifth birthday doesn't sound right to me. Either they or I must have screwed up the count somewhere along the way. Knowing the truth, of course, is better than fooling oneself, but who wants to look truth in the face every morning?

Over the years, I've watched a few people on their deathbeds and they were not entirely convinced either about what was coming. They held on to a small hope that they would turn out to be exceptions to the rule. "You'll get caught," I remember telling a couple of chums in my youth who were planning to break into a garage in the neighborhood that night and carry off some tools. How they cackled! How they made fun of me! Dummies get nabbed, but not smart guys like them, they assured me; and promptly found themselves in jail the next day.

I know a lot of people who are likely to be delighted by Simic's own fudging of the reality of growing old.

On certain days I feel like a car with too many miles on its speedometer. There's a knock in the engine, the radiator overheats, the oil leaks, the body is rusty, the upholstery is ripped and stained, one windshield wiper doesn't work, and the muffler is full of holes. "Don't worry about it," my Doc says. He insists that I'm in terrific shape despite high blood pressure, old-age diabetes, and growing deafness in both ears. He sounds like a used car salesman to me, trying to get rid of a car that's ready for the junk yard, but I lap up his words all the same, and speed away after the checkup singing at the top of my voice and trailing a cloud of black smoke from the exhaust.

At four o'clock in the morning, after a night of tossing and turning, I'm not so cocky. I go and squint at my face in the bathroom mirror and don't like what I see. Even Peter Lorre playing a child murderer in that 1931 German movie was more wholesome to behold.

Of course the people I know who are apt to be delighted by this are my age or older. Simic understands that none of this will have much interest or even meaning for people who haven't arrived at this age of discovery.

"You'll see when you grow old," someone was always telling us when we were young. In the days before cash machines, when we had to run to our grandmothers for emergency funds, they made us sit and listen to a lecture first. They told us how the world had changed for the worst, how when they were young, boys called their fathers Sir, and girls from good homes had the modesty to blush when spoken to by boys. I would sit at the edge of my chair, nodding in agreement, waiting for grandma to click open her purse and hand over the money.

Even then, I vaguely understood that grumbling about the young was one of the few satisfactions people have left in old age. I didn't mind hearing about the calamities that befell members of our family who failed to listen to the sensible advice I was getting -- and I would get all that I could put up with, until she started sighing and telling me how I'll come to understand everything she was saying now when I reached her age. I couldn't wait to get out of there. Poor grandma, what a drag she was, though I have to admit today that she was right. With age, I do see things differently than I once did.

"I've grown progressively more exasperated about our species and foresee a day when I will no longer be able to bring myself to read newspapers and watch television out of concern for my mental health. Already I have to ration myself. I give Tom Friedman sixty seconds; George Will thirty." But Simic sets himself apart from his father, a confirmed pessimist who came to delight in reading gloomy philosophers who "confirmed his long-held suspicion: the world was going to hell." No, Charles sees himself as only "a part-time pessimist" -- "I wake up most mornings full of hope."

Not, apparently the morning several days before his 50th birthday when he woke up and "grasped the enormity" of that span.

When I was already old enough to pull the tail of our cat in Belgrade, German tanks were rolling into Paris. It wasn't the gray hairs on my head that got me, but the deluge of memories. I remembered sitting in the first grade classroom in the fall of 1945 staring at the pictures of Marx, Stalin, and Marshal Tito that hung over the blackboard. I recalled the long forgotten brands of Balkan cigarettes; Russian, French, and American pop tunes from the war years, and the 1930s movies, of which few people alive today have any notion, that were still being shown in my childhood. So many memories came back to me at once; all of a sudden my life seemed to be that of a complete stranger. It took months to get used to it -- if one can ever get used to knowing that the world and people one once knew have vanished without a trace.

Simic, as you may have gathered, is Serb-born, but he has written a great deal about the degree of discomfort he feels about that identity. He also knows that "other people are not much interested in an individual's lifetime experience and what has been learned from it."

And who can blame them? Even for the old, experience only serves to torment the mind on sleepless nights.

Which leads him to this luscious set piece:

Sooner or later, everyone with a long memory comes up against his or her own Grand Inquisitor. (A black robe and hood, incidentally, is no longer mandatory.) Tonight, mine wears sunglasses and is painting her nails red as she asks her questions:

You once said that Hitler and Stalin were your travel agents. Does that mean that you have to thank them both for what you have become?

I've been racking my brains about that this very night, Miss.

And what about God?

I thank God there is no God to see what we've done to the world.

What about the devil?

I saw him yesterday on TV kissing babies and grinning ear to ear.

You are not making any sense, Mister, she says to me. How is it possible to believe in the Devil and not in God and then go around crossing yourself from time to time?

I agree with you Miss, I tell her. Making the sign of the cross must be an inherited habit with me, since I come from a long line of village priests.

Once she stops pestering me, I steal a peek at the clock and can't believe my eyes. They say that time goes faster after you pass sixty. No question about it, it's true. Where are the long, lazy summers of my youth when I sat moping from morning till night unable to think of anything interesting to do? I recollect walking up to a mirror and repeating with greater and greater conviction, "Life is boring." On such days, the old clock barely budged, just to spite me.

You fool, I'm thinking today, that was pure bliss. The mystery of happiness was right there in that cheap clock your mother bought at Woolworth. Time graciously came to a stop in it; eternity threw open its doors and you hesitated or grew wary on its threshold and breathed a sigh of relief when the door shut in your face and the hand of the clock moved on.

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