Hours spent reading reflections on America and the latest elementary school massacre have led me back to Christopher Hitchens writing about George Orwell. I very much want to believe – I plan to act in various ways in accordance with the belief – that there are enough clear-eyed and ethical Americans to start nudging us away from the nightmare the country begins to resemble.
From the simple, psycho, devotees of violence gathered in Idaho militias, to the less organized, more complex population of assault weapon adherents, we have a problem from hell, and must think calmly about how to solve it.
We must start at ground zero: NMAA.
No Motive At All. The older man who killed 58 and injured 1,000 in Vegas had absolutely no discernible reason for doing it, which serves to remind us that some people from vicious parentage/upbringing do what they do (Bernie Madoff, son of two financial criminals, had no discernible motive – he was already legitimately vastly wealthy) for deep-lying atavistic reasons.
The Vegas killer was the son of a big-time crook. Say he had it in his DNA; say he was one of those rare human animals living in a state of bestiality which he kept more or less under control for fifty years or so, but decided to let rip as he reached the end of his life. Although rare, such people really hit the jackpot when they’re born into a culture that begs them to collect massive assault arsenals.
We think Paddock killed a lot of people, but be assured that eventually two friends will do the same thing, shooting out of adjacent windows, and they will have learned a lot from Paddock’s errors.
I suspect for people like this, as with the two notorious Los Angeles bank robbers in the 1997 North Hollywood Shootout, the real satisfaction lies in the long, elaborate preparation — these people took painstaking years to prepare their climaxes.
In terms of sheer body count, NMAAs are our biggest challenge. I think serious intelligence organizations rather than local police forces/the FBI, should be involved in the identification/tracking/detention of these supremely dangerous people. At least until we figure out a way to stop arming them like high-functioning terrorists.
… group. There’s insider-trading-charges-evading-tho-no-one-knows-how-the-hell-he-pulled-THAT-off Steven Cohen; there’s all-round terrific guy Ron Perelman; most recently, there’s New York’s naughty Lieutenant Governor, just today arrested on big ol’ fraud charges.
It is UD‘s considered opinion that Brown is in some kind of obscure competition with Yeshiva University (Madoff, Merkin, and oh so many more) for grubbiest greediest grotesquest trustees.
Now see that’s the part I’ll never understand. You’re running a vast, multi-million dollar criminal enterprise against the United States government. If you get caught, the prospect of your ever getting out of jail is dim. And yet when some entity at some point in your complex shakedown process refuses payment, YOU SUE THEM.
Does it not occur to you that it would be better to take this or that secondary loss and keep your head down?
*******************
Reminds UD of MIT’s sainted Dean Gabriel Bitran. He had a great criminal enterprise going until he and his son CONTACTED THE SEC.
The scheme was uncovered by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission when, while investigating potential victims of the Bernie Madoff fraud, SEC officials asked for documentation to support the Bitrans’ returns claims. The Bitrans then made false statements to the SEC examiners and provided fabricated records.
Ja, ja, the common thread here is mindless bottomless promiscuous depraved and degenerate GREED. I get it. Not one cent that you’ve earned through unnecessary surgeries or investor swindling must be allowed to slip through your hands. And by the way if Madoff money is being handed out, you’re damned well going to get some. Etc.
The criminal mind certainly has its … caesuras. I mean, no one is perfect – I get that, too – but you’d think veteran villains would avoid making unforced errors.
In the case of Bernie Madoff, it was Harry Markopolos, who knew instantly, easily, that he was looking at a Ponzi scheme.
In the littler case of Temple University’s Moshe Porat, who wangled a number one ranking for the university’s business school by similarly brazen malfeasance, it took John Byrne, founder of Poets & Quants, no time at all for grotesque numbers to jump out at him.
[O]nly 16% of students at the University of Maryland’s business school had submitted scores on the GMATs or GREs. At the University of North Carolina’s business school, only 15% did. Both schools show large enrollment increases that year…
“Contrast these numbers with number one Temple,” [John Byrne] wrote. “Temple was able to increase its online MBA enrollment by an impressive 57% to 546 students from 351. Yet, the school claimed that 100% of the incoming class provided either a GMAT score or a GRE.”
Of course, that 100% figure turned out to be false. It was actually 42 of 255 students, or 16%.
Porat [and others] falsified how many students had taken standardized test scores to get in, faked incoming students’ GPAs, made it appear the college was more selective than it was and lowered how much its graduates owed in loans, according to the indictment.
In this 2010 photograph, entrepreneur Shawn Baldwin, 2015 recipient of the Boy Scouts of America Whitney M. Young Jr. Service Award, stands next to Michael Milken. Milken was sentenced to ten years and fined 600 mill for violating securities laws, while Baldwin was just sentenced to seventeen years for doing a Bernie Madoff.
UD thinks it’s always nice to get a sense of the real people behind these posed, expensive suit, MBA-type photos…. I mean, who are these people, really? Once you get to know them, they’re just like you and me!
‘In mid-2019, Madoff began applying for an early release from his 150-year sentence, given that he was terminally ill…
The records showed that Madoff’s application was blocked more than once by the prison warden and general counsel, on the grounds that Madoff’s offense had been so great and that he had declined to undergo dialysis as recommended by staff.
Medical personnel eventually stated that Madoff met the criteria for compassionate release and the warden agreed to submit the request to the judge in Madoff’s case, even though he recommended against it. In June 2020, Judge Denny Chin denied Madoff’s request, stating that he believed, “Mr. Madoff was never truly remorseful, and that he was only sorry that his life as he knew it was collapsing around him.”’
As Fran Lebowitz notes, you earn a million; you steal a billion. And the honorable Robert Brockman has devoted his life to demonstrating the truth of that statement, hiding record-setting billions in Switzerland and other fabled havens. Sudden-onset dementia unfortunately gripped the man the moment the indictment came down, and now he’s apparently staggering around trying to find his ass with two hands. Forget finding the money. What money. Let the man die in dignity.
The 39-count indictment includes wire fraud, tax evasion, money laundering, and destruction of evidence, among other charges. These crimes make up a nearly 20-year plot to conceal income in offshore accounts.
He sat on lots of university boards, and while some, like the Baylor School of Medicine, seem to have gotten out in front of the story (speaking of which, lucky Centre College! The whole school might well have been renamed for the world’s biggest white collar criminal.), Jesse James still has his big-shot page up.
The Brockman Hall for Opera stands next to the existing Alice Pratt Brown Hall, forming the Brockman Music and Performing Center. Additionally, in 2011, President David Leebron and Rice Board of Trustees Chair Jim Crownover thanked the A. Eugene Brockman Charitable Trust for its centennial gift at the unveiling of the Brockman Hall for Physics.
There’s a poignancy to all those music halls, because if Brockman’s co-conspirator hadn’t sung so loudly to the Justice Department he wouldn’t be going to jail.
Some world, huh? A notorious, spectacular, criminal cavorts about doing his thing for decades during which plenty of people squawk about him (just like they squawked about Yeshiva University treasurer Bernie Madoff!) but nothing happens except that he sits on high-profile university boards and has his name emblazoned for the ages on university buildings.
Here’s an excellent, brief, 2018 essay about the trend – especially among a group of Catholic scholars in America – to dump liberal democracy for theocracy. Shadi Hamid’s focus is fundamentalist Islam, but his argument applies as well to the emergence, here, of intellectual briefs for what UD calls a Cathophate.
Ol’ UD remains truly shocked right down to the ground that respectable American academics openly argue for a future of religious tyranny in this country, of “Christian authoritarianism — muscular paternalism, with government enforcing social solidarity for religious reasons.” I mean to say that the moment I grasped what Adrian Vermeule and Patrick Deneen and company were about, I was fucking gobsmacked, and I still am. I’m still all of a mucksweat about it. I’m like in permanent Margaret Dumont shock.
Chalk it up to UD‘s naivete + emotional instability if you like, but I actually don’t get why all sentient Americans aren’t shitting themselves over being told by Mariolatric Madoffs that they need only invest in the Edmund Waldstein Radiant Future Fund to realize Total Happiness Now and Forever. God does not want you for an Individual Liberty friend! In Bondage and Submission lies Salvation!
*****************
Whew. Hold on. Getting a little hot here…
… Margaret Dumont only pretended to be scandalized by the twisted Marx Brothers; similarly, maybe UD‘s sublimating her actual erotic attraction to The Story of O,Savedby Flagellants… ? To the idea of a total male total priesthood running their switches over her bum… ?
****************
Yet. As Hamid asks, “Is a lack of meaning really worse than a lack of freedom? … What liberalism’s critics appear unable, or unwilling, to address is whether a lack of meaning is a worse problem to have than a lack of freedom.” Maybe liberalism – “the political order that privileges non-negotiable rights, personal freedoms, and individual autonomy” – issues in some degree of conceptual confusion, and maybe even in a difficulty or refusal to commit oneself to clear philosophical/theological convictions – but is this really so unbearable a position to be in that one’s only option is rule by monks who think burning heretics at the stake is key to good governance?
“Endless free choice,” as Deneen disparagingly calls it, is a dead end. Choice needs to be a means to something else, but to what? Legally based religious systems—which only Islam among the largest religions potentially offers—quite consciously seek to restrict choice in the name of virtue and salvation…
And that’s the thing. Deneen can argue all he likes about the disabling side effects of individual liberty, but what he’s really about is damnation or salvation. The Medieval Church wafts you upward; free thought’s an express train to the abyss.
Although UD grew up right down the Amtrak corridor from New York City, she seldom traveled there; even as an adult, she’s visited shockingly few times. UD has spent more time in Ubud, Bali, than in NYC. Yet she notices that she has, over the years, developed a curious sort of home wisdom about one of the most prominent subcultures there.
These rough and ready truths of hers are not, of course, based on nothing; like many literate people, UD has been reading about that city and its inhabitants all her life; and from what she has gleaned, she has derived some modestly explanatory takes on some of its more notorious denizens.
Most broadly, she finds that firmly situating Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Michael Cohen, Charles Kushner, Marc Kasowitz, and many other Trumpish madmen — but especially Donald Trump himself — in New York City helps us understand them. It’s helpful to see them as emerging out of a particular ecosystem in which their behavior is perfectly normal.
On a lower yet still fascinating level, firmly situating two recent high-profile identity-fakers (Jessica Krug and Hilaria Baldwin) in NYC also helps us understand them.
Let me start with the lunatic White House.
New York City, let us say, rears, attracts, and encourages hyperdriven hypercompetitive crazies who just go all the way. Their nature is to charge into everything – money deals, marriages, parenthood, politics – with supermanic frenzy and without a thought – without one thought, I tell you – for the morrow. Bankruptcy? Divorce? Jail? Fuck it. Trump ran headlong into a ridiculous quest for the presidency and look what happened! NYC people simply keep breaking through – that’s the thing. They don’t think of life as a series of steps which will if you’re not careful eventuate in bad outcomes which will pain you and those you love and condemn you to hell or whatever — they don’t think like normal people. The Big Mo on steroids – that’s their thing. Competitive capitalism unbound. Competitive everything unbound. No shame, no fear, no brakes.
Did you see either of the films based on Madoff? In both films, if I recall correctly, someone at some point looks at him and says something like Why did you do it and why didn’t you stop? The why did you do it part has no NYC resonance; the not stopping part – not stopping until THE ENTIRE WORLD ECONOMY TANKED AND HE COULD NO LONGER PAY OUT REDEMPTIONS – is echt Trumpy NYC. If you’re a Trumpy New Yorker, only some form of global collapse will stop you. Recall that up to the moment of his arrest Madoff was a singularly respected, highly placed, and well-connected New Yorker. A pious New Yorker – Yeshiva University’s treasurer!
Hell, Trump’s the president. And in case you haven’t noticed, he’s not planning to stop being president. Susan Glasser writes:
… Trump has remained … obnoxiously unrepentant. … He does not want to let go, to cede the spotlight, to renounce his outsized claim on our collective consciousness….
And you know that at no point in the real Madoff story did anyone ask him why he didn’t stop – that line was edited in for hayseeds outside NYC like UD, cuz otherwise the film would make no sense in any moral world she and her like can imagine. No one around Madoff ever stopped doing anything lucrative or personally advantageous, no matter how sordid, and Madoff would never have stopped either.
Once Trumps and Madoffs are truly a spent force, once they decide it’s safe to slow down and decamp with their winnings (even spitfires get old and lose their fire), they make a purely lateral cultural move – to their house in Florida.
*******************
People look at Donald Trump as a singular, ab nihilo dude; they can’t fathom his past behavior and they certainly can’t fathom his present. But he and Giuliani are behaving exactly the way people pickled in their brine always behave: Advance, Advance, Advance and the world can fuck itself.
Central to NYC-style heedless advancement is lying. You misrepresent yourself; you misrepresent your financial worth; you misrepresent the value of anything you have to offer. And of course you lie about other people; you make up obviously jackshit stories about Obama being born in Kenya and George Soros controlling Congress and Joe Biden stealing a presidential election. Advance, advance, advance, lie, lie, lie. In your NYC world everyone’s obscenely on the make and everyone lies. Lie it forward. No lie is too edgy, absurd, out there, shameless. Bigger the better. Keep going. Seems to work fine in DC too.
************
Look at Harold Brodkey’s take on this slice of NYC culture. His perspective is that of an artist, not a crazed capitalist, but he evokes the same Trumpian world, one part mania, one part lying:
I was always crazy about New York, dependent on it, scared of it – well, it is dangerous – but beyond that there was the pressure of being young and of not yet having done work you really liked, trademark work, breakthrough work. The trouble with the city’s invitation was that you were aware you might not be able to manage: you might drown, you might fall off the train, whatever metaphor you preferred, before you did anything interesting. You would have wasted your life. One worked hard or not at all, and tried to withstand the constant demolishing judgement. One watched people scavenge for phrases in other people’s talk – that hunt for ideas which is, sometimes, like picking up dead birds. One witnessed the reverse of glamour – that everyone is jealous.
It is not a joke, the great clang of New York. It is the sound of brassy people at the party, at all the parties, pimping and doing favors and threatening and making gassy public statements and being modest and blackmailing and having dinner and going on later. (Renata Adler used to say you could get anyone to be disliked in New York merely by praising that person to someone nervous and competitive.) Literary talk in New York often announced itself as the best talk in America. People would say, “Harold, you are hearing the best in America tonight.” It would be a cut-throat monologue, disposable wit in passing, practiced with a certain carelessness in regard to honesty. But then truth was not the issue, as it almost never is in New York.
New York City is also where we find the highest-profile imposters – people who, like fictive Manhattanite Jay Gatsby, lie all the way down to their corpuscles. Jessica Krug: White, Jewish, affluent; Gatsbyized black, hispanic, poor. Hilaria Baldwin: Offspring of people whose ancestors arrived on the Mayflower; Gatsbyized a Spaniard with a strong accent and a shaky grasp of the English language.
Plenty of distinctions to be made amid all of this, I know. Hilaria (real name Hillary) ain’t much of a story. One… theatricalizes, mythologizes, oneself to be more interesting in the big city crowd. To stand out in hypercompetitive NYC. Baldwin is a strange woman, given to exhibitionism and self-praise, but who cares? Kim Kardashian for the west coast, and, for the sophisticated east, NYU-educated Hilaria Baldwin (though Kim comes by her exotic Armenianness honestly).
Krug’s far more insidious NYC tale carries ugly social implications having to do with the ideological corruption of universities and other institutions.
But both women share with the mad Trumpian lads that NYC thing: fake it til you fake it. Fake it more. Nothing exceeds like excess.
Epstein indeed has a long list of complaints about the falling off of moral and intellectual seriousness among university presidents. To which UD once again has to say: What a bald-faced hypocrite.
The sole university president in the country who considered Joseph Epstein worthy of an honorary degree was so corrupt that his tenure at Adelphi has a whole book about corruption devoted to it: SUNY Buffalo sociologist Lionel Lewis wrote, a few years after the ignominious fall of this greedy, amoral man, When Power Corrupts: Academic Governing Boards in the Shadow of the Adelphi Case.
If Epstein had a bit of decency, he’d return – or at least repudiate – this heavily soiled honor.
So by all means let us be lectured on university ethics by Diamandopoulos’s boy!
They represent one of humanity’s most enduring mysteries.
$300,000 (initiation fee only) for access to a golf course + Bernard Madoff… (You’re also guaranteed a glimpse of the president). (Or at least some of his supporters.)
And speaking of Madoff , the just-resigned felons at the Bel-Air Country Club in Los Angeles – Varsity Blues alums Lori Loughlin and Mossimo Giannulli – had worked it out that they’d be suspended from the club for the duration of their stay in the local lockup, and then, the moment they got sprung, the suspension would be over. Nice!
A member of the club’s all-male board, however, has “fired off” (this cliche feels unavoidable) a letter to all the other males to complain that this does not sit well with him. Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: Let’s take a look!
(SOS is aware that the super-secret boys’ club thing of boys’ clubs like Bel-Air makes it wet-your-shorts shocking that this letter came out at all into the light of ungated day; and SOS is thinking that the author maybe leaked it but who knows. We need only register here, preliminarily, the shock of this enigmatic island having let escape a loud epistolary fart.)
Gentlemen:
[In its very mode of address, the letter is already a reprimand. The letter indeed will turn out to be a meditation on the word/concept gentleman.]
On June 1st the membership was notified of the disposition of the “VarsityBlues” matter wherein two members of the Club have plead guilty to felony charges. “The Board has unanimously voted effective immediately to suspend both Members involved in their personal legal challenges until [emphasis added] they have completed their obligations to the government.”
[This guy gets right to it – no throat-clearing, no pleasantries, right into it. SOS says excellent. She’s always telling you to be surgical and direct.
Now, this is a country club guy, and I’m guessing he’s a lawyer, so we get words like disposition and wherein and matter. He’s penning the sort of letter Peter Wimsey might receive from his club in Gaudy Night. Fine. It’s not bad writing; and it neatly conveys the writer’s sense of himself.]
The above statement is misleading. What it does not clearly state is that the memberships of these felons continue essentially unabated. Suspension implies that a member otherwise capable of using the Club is prohibited from access for a period of time as punishment for a serious infraction. However, these individuals will be incarcerated for most, if not all, of the suspension period and will continue as members in “good standing” when released.
[No need for the quotation marks around good standing. We remain in the world of faintly legal and definitely Edwardian prose. No problem.]
This unprecedented board decision to allow felons to continue as members causes irreparable reputational harm to the Club and its members. Will we any longer be able to deny membership to convicted felons sponsored for membership? If the denial is based on the candidate’s felony conviction the answer would now appear to be no. Will the Club now be perceived as one that welcomes felons? Undeniably, the answer to that question is now yes.
[As with so much of this letter, this paragraph has a sweetly scented whiff of obsolescence to it, assuming as it does that the sort of character willing to shoot out millions for occasional visits to a golf course is going to be mentally and ethically sharp enough to comprehend/give a shit about felonious behavior.] [Note, for instance, how the sentence “We need to send this draft dodger back to his golf courses.” functions in this political ad.]
Let me point out the obvious. BACC is a Club of gentlemen and gentlewomen. Gentlemen are not felons, and felons in turn are not gentlemen. You cannot be a member in good standing and guilty of a felony at the same time, it is a non sequitur. Referring to felons as gentlemen in good standing is nothing more than an attempt to legitimize their continued membership. That “this situation” resulted from “their actions outside the Club” can only be considered a failed attempt at misdirection as it is completely irrelevant. These felony guilty pleas are of their own making and reputational harm comes from their continued “membership” affiliation with the Club. Suspending membership, while the offender is imprisoned, is an illusory penalty and does nothing to address the reputational damage brought on by their continued membership.
[Okay, now we’re into some seriously snippy shit. Remember that you should never write mad. You can feel as mad as you like, but your writing needs to be under tight emotional control. SOS would have thrown out the first sentence of this paragraph, since it conveys little beyond condescending rage.
And there are other problems. Note the string of very short sentences coming up. This rat-a-tat-tat business is risky, conveying as it does in this instance an annoyed parent’s series of simple statements to a child – something liable to piss off people who think of themselves as your equal. And he’s getting a little sloppy. Plenty of felons are gentlemen, and charming gentlemen at that, so the author needs to gesture in the direction of a definition of gentleman that would exclude some of these (only the most notorious are featured), not to mention gentlewomen like Martha Stewart. It seems awfully mean of the writer to exclude so many from his gentlemen’s club. Country clubs after all couldn’t exist without the super-rich, and, without wanting to sound like a commie, SOS will note the very strong correlation between personal billions and bad behavior. (Variants of You don’t make a billion dollars; you steal it are all over contemporary English usage.)
I’m not sure ‘good standing’ / ‘felony’ is a non sequitur; maybe better to call it a contradiction in terms.
Love the fact that the other all-males reasoned that since the felons failed to drop their doodoo directly on the golfing green it doesn’t count.
Okay, we’ll skip a bit of the letter here, because he becomes quite redundant, saying more than he needs to say it that keeping felons in the club damages its reputation. I’m sure he’s wrong about that, but anyway.]
This matter is already well known in the golfing world, domestically and internationally, and our Club has become a laughingstock.
[Here’s how you know it’s an internal letter. Phrases like the golfing world, domestically and internationally are themselves kind of a laughingstock to … okay, well, to SOS. And whatever the global golfing world may be, I really doubt it’s fanning itself with its hanky over naughty behavior.]
I have heard that some members believe the board has substituted its judgement for that of the law and the courts in determining whether felony crime is serious. That white collar crime does not count. This surely cannot be the case. The board could not be so unwise as to put itself in the position of judging felonies on a subjective scale, deeming some acceptable and others not.
[LOLOLOLOLOLOL.]
As a 25-year member in good standing, and a gentleman by act of Congress, I choose not to be associate with known felons. This board decision, however, forces acceptance of felons upon the membership – grata catalla felonum.
[Again, very much an insider’s letter, but SOSthinksgentleman by act of Congress means the guy has a military background; and she thinks grata etc. means something like Welcome, felons. The Latin phrase, the by now incredibly redundant insistence on moral uprightness – it really is The World of Sir Peter Wimsey.
Also note typo: Should be associated.]
I have been informed that the board is not willing to set aside this decision and take the cleansing action so desperately needed, namely terminating the memberships of the offending parties. That being the case, I am sadly left no choice but to hereby resign from the club I have long loved.
[By this last paragraph, the excellent straightforwardness of address with which the writer began has fully deteriorated into wordy self-aggrandizing pretentiousness. Get a load of all them adjectives and adverbs clogging things the hell up!
cleansing
desperately
namely
offending
sadly
hereby
long
Let us translate the two sentences down:
Since you will not end these memberships, I’m resigning.]
… Kinda sweetly reminiscent of Madoff, no? Madoff up to the moment of his arrest advised important financial and educational institutions; oversight agencies utterly failed to notice that he was stealing billions of dollars…
The Onion captures one of UD‘s favorite memes – she’s covered it for years on this blog – the Criticism of any Form of Financial Activity is Merely Jealousy of Someone Richer than You Are meme. It’s been fun to quote Greg Mankiw, Eric Cantor, and Lawrence Kudlow (read the whole page) on the “politics of envy” over the decades.
Last time I checked, using sensitive information to enrich yourself at the expense of hundreds of millions of other people was totally fine.
Absolutely; and you can read article after article calling for the legalization of insider trading, a move blocked by the petulant resentment of the many against America’s winners. And now Burr’s getting sued over something that should be totally legit!
Alan Jacobson, a shareholder in Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, sued Burr in federal court on Monday, alleging that the senator used private information to motivate a mass liquidation of his assets. It is illegal for senators to use nonpublic information in conducting securities exchanges.
************
There’s something so bracingly, so utterly, so fundamentally human about pleasuring yourself at the thought of screwing the unwashed, of being first in line for goodie bags at events no one else even knows are happening… In a great piece of satire – The Christmas Letter – Gregg Easterbrook captured the pleasuring perfectly. Here’s how it begins:
What a lucky break that I’m in first-class on the plane back from Istanbul, because there’s room to take out the laptop and write our annual Christmas letter. My brand-new laptop receives wireless satellite Internet from anywhere in the world. While I was at the board of directors session during the Danube cruise, I pretended to be listening to the chairman but actually was using the laptop to watch Emily’s oboe recital on live streaming video from Chad’s digital minicam! So the world really is growing smaller. And if you haven’t gotten one of these new laptops, you should. Of course, now there’s a waiting list.
Of course, now there’s a waiting list. When these rare birds are captured, we can, like Diana Henriques, interview them; but the secrecy at the heart of their pathology makes it difficult to yield much.
Now that Burr’s been unveiled, he’s calling for an ethics investigation into himself because, in the immortal words of George Costanza, “if anyone had said anything to me at all [about how] that sort of thing is frowned upon…”
