Countries need myths. Myths can only take so much battering. At one point some sort of unravelling of social cohesion takes place. Perhaps we are living through such a time.
So Enron compounds Vietnam, Watergate, S and L, etc. I guess if there is a future and history is to be written then Nov. 1963 and the lies and cover ups that took place will be seen as a turning point in modern US political life. arthur -----Original Message----- From: Ray Evans Harrell [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Sunday, January 27, 2002 10:30 PM To: futurework Subject: Waking Up To the List Over the years I've been listening to various types of stories about the art world, capitalism, free markets, communists, and most of all cowboys and Indians. I've thought of the future of work as a kind of future of the world. A world where real work, the kind that produces significant products that change and enhance people's lives for the better, would gradually grow more self sustaining and less exploitive of both the environment and the human soul. Work that would be imagined into being through an advancement in human consciousness. I've also thought that the sins of the past would at least be regretted, confessed and asked for forgiveness on the part of, if not the perpetrators then the heirs of the perpetrators. But instead the heirs always seem to claim that they are not responsible for their parents or ancestors evil but responsibility doesn't flow both directions. Those same people rarely suggest returning property lost to the original victims and the old eye for an eye and life for a life is considered barbaric so we are left with the rage, down to seven generations, of the victims and the guilt of the perpetrators in their pursuit of righteousness. If not in the eyes of the world then in their own eyes. It seems too much to expect that root causes would be explored as mistakes and that truly therapeutic processes would be worked out to correct those mistakes and eliminate them. I am aware that every human being has to make their own mistakes in order to grow. In fact that it is a kind of "sin" to steal the mistakes of the young from them. That being said, there is a great deal of difference between "mistakes" of the young that will be tolerated for human growth and the two youngsters who shot up Columbine High School. I was impressed with the German people who, while being on the cutting edge of genocide in the 20th century (a very old and honored tradition amongst countries of the world), awoke from their thousands of years old nightmare, apologized to the Jews and gave reparations to father's and system's Jewish victims. Of course I never read anything about that extending to the Romany. Perhaps their advancement didn't extend so far as groups they still consider "vermin" races. But one should still acknowledge movement even if it doesn't go all the way. If you're going to be on the cutting edge, why not express true redemption once in 2,000 years with the group that has more international clout? That truth seems to have been extended to the Swiss as well who has also given back the Nazi money and paid Jewish reparations. But orgies of righteousness never pay in the long run. As so many religions teach, there is no righteousness except maybe self-righteousness. What we are left with is growth and change. Performance rather than moral perfection. In the following article in today's NYTimes, the columnist Maureen Dowd, that Irish Catholic women's conscience of America who stalked the last President's sexual proclivities and betrayed her own church's story that "Marriages are Forever" in her ceaseless hounding of the President's wife for not leaving the "SOB." After all they weren't Catholic so they should have at least had the grace to get a divorce since there was no taboo against divorce in their church. She was so "righteous" about the "corruption" of the last President's story about what constituted sex that she chased him and even made up stories about theft from both White House and the Presidential Plane. It was strange reading her stories when any Catholic teenager, as well as theological lawyers in her own church, would agree that the President had not committed an act of sexual relations. In fact they seem to be defending the virtue of marriage at all costs. But she belonged to the same journalistic sorority as they National Review columnist who wrote a column decrying Chelsea Clinton's survival and the TV reporter who pitied the Clinton's dog since that was why he had been killed chasing a car. Well, there is not much in the future of anything, much less the future of work, in her columns from 1994-2000. But suddenly we have something new. A different idea. She has a real target. Something that really does touch the heart and soul of more people than were murdered in the WTC. We give money to those WTC shattered lives but it doesn't occur to us to give money to the lives shattered by the Free Market System that allowed and encouraged Enron. Indeed it must be another "planet." Well, it wasn't and isn't. It is this planet, this country and it has touched the lives of those I love in much the same way that the WTC did. They say, "well its only money and we still have our lives." But such gratuitous evil means that the time and lives spent in planning and caring for one's family and offspring is really a joke. A toss of the dice, a cut of the cards. Those who defend the system are the same folks who decried Social Security as a giant Ponzi Scheme but wanted to invest it in the free market but by individuals, not the government since individuals are helpless in the face of such a giant tsunami as engulfed the Enron employees. I saw it happen in Youngstown in the late seventies, when the Steel Mills closed and families, mostly Italian and Slovenian immigrants were stripped of their pensions and lost their homes. Future lives were enslaved to caring for the broken elderly and the American quality of life myth was a cruel joke. How strange that an area of such environmental chaos and damage as that area around Youngstown would be considered an example of the good life in America compared to Italy or Yugoslavia. But they had money and they had freedom and big families. Then it crashed and they had no money, big families and no freedom as a result. I saw it in the mines on the reservation in 1957-64. In Youngstown in the seventies and now I see it amongst my family clan in Texas in the year 2002. What is that? A cycle? The panics of the last half of the 19th century ran every twenty years when they had the immense wealth of the middle of the country to absorb their failures and Indians to blame as terrorists. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner even wrote about the end of the Frontier and what that would mean for these wasteful businessmen who considered that the sum total of American culture was filling their pockets with gold at someone else's expense. Well this is America and Enron is the old model, not the new and aggressive. We were saved from a large part of this when we had to prove that we were better than the communists to "win" the cold war. Now all we are left with is the evil of the system. We have met the seven deadly sins and they are us. We should remember that adultery is the mildest circle of hell in that myth. We are now back into the real thing. Maybe this Irish Catholic Lady journalist will now read her book and her Priest will get off his duff and teach her a little more of her own religion, than this Cherokee Priest should know not ever having gone to confirmation or read her text in Latin like those three opus dei scholars, the FBI man Louis, Freeh, Supreme Court Judge Antonin Scalia and the FBI spy Hanson insisted upon. Meanwhile the facts are right but the self-righteousness stinks. Ray Evans Harrell, artistic director The Magic Circle Opera Repertory Ensemble, Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED] January 27, 2002 Planet of the Privileged By MAUREEN DOWD Oh, the pull of Planet Enron. The atmosphere there was so rarefied that its inhabitants were blissfully oblivious to how privileged they were. It was a lovely place, sort of like Aspen with oil rigs. The skiing was great because there was always a pristine powder of newly shredded financial records on the slopes. There was offshore drilling off every shore and offshore subsidiaries on every corner. A red flag fluttered on Planet Enron, but nobody paid attention. Journalists in Washington were hunting for Dick Cheney for months, even as he was completely visible and accessible on Planet Enron, where he lumbered down golden boulevards. Phil and Wendy Gramm, the king and queen of the Enron prom, cruised around in their white stretch limo, rewarded for years of service, exempting and deregulating. Paul O'Neill was also ubiquitous there, his face emblazoned and his words enshrined on the currency, which begins with $1,000 bills. The motto: "Companies come and go. It's part of the genius of capitalism." Mr. O'Neill was not Treasury secretary up there, though, merely a private citizen. Kenneth Lay, still smarting that the president decided not to name him Treasury secretary on Earth, anointed himself with the title on Enron. The Bushes summered there, and W. and Jeb dropped by when they needed campaign cash. But lately, they began putting brown paper bags over their heads when they visited so no one would notice them hobnobbing with Kenny Boy. Everyone was upwardly mobile on Planet Enron, a world more consumed with havens than have-not's. There were, blessedly, no lower classes or riffraff. Denizens were blue blood or blue chip but never blue. There were the born rich, and there were the new rich the born rich made rich. The congenitally rich create the crony rich by ushering them onto the boards and payrolls of oil and energy companies and defense contractors. There was no conflict of interest on Planet Enron, only confluence of interest. No income tax, only insider tips. No S.E.C. or G.A.O., just C.E.O.'s, S.U.V.'s and N.O.B.D.'s (not our bankruptcy, dear). Q.E.D. All meetings on Planet Enron were held in secret, and everyone liked it that way. Auditing was considered rude. It was a very empathetic place. On Planet Enron, it seemed only fair that chairman-for-life Kenneth Lay should reward himself with $51 trillion in a severance package, as opposed to the $51 million he was seeking on Planet Earth. On Planet Enron, Secretary of the Army Thomas White could whine that he came out with only $12 million from sales of the company's stock. He bravely said he "would persevere." On Planet Enron, Karl Rove could expect people to mist up at the poignant tale of how he made mere millions instead of more millions when government ethics rules forced him to sell all of his stocks. And he could ingratiate himself with the conservative leader Ralph Reed by offering him a piece of the Enron rock. On Planet Enron, the president, his words muffled by the brown paper bag on his head, could strike a chord complaining that his mother-in-law had lost $8,000 on Enron stock when less connected mortals lost their entire retirements. It was a beautifully sheltered place (and not just in the Caymans sense). A place where inhabitants deluded themselves that their accomplishments and windfalls - Ivy League degrees, energy company sinecures, lucrative consulting contracts, advisory board booty - were the result of merit and hard work. But then turmoil struck. The planet has been overrun by the Wrong Kind: government lawyers bearing subpoenas and grand juries poking around. The thin and tony air has become noxious with the threat of litigation and incarceration. Dick Cheney is still there, but he's hiding in a secure location. Now he has caves on two planets. President Bush, distancing himself by light-years, has ordered the U.S. government to look into cutting off all business with the planet. On Friday, the once-serene orb imploded with the news of the sad death of a leading citizen, who shot himself in his Mercedes after telling friends he did not want to have to turn against his own. But Planet Enron is bigger than one company or one tragedy. It's a state of mind, a subculture, a platinum card aristocracy. Its gravitational pull has long proven irresistible. Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company | Privacy Information
