He is out of sight behind bars now, but the maddeningly blank face of Bernard Madoff is still with us like the smile of the Cheshire Cat. The mild-looking little man who stole billions with minimal exertion is proving to be irresistible to the literary imagination.
In a New York Times OpEd, Daphne Merkin, who is writing a book about Jews and money, maintains, "There is no single code word--no 'Rosebud'--that will lead us to decipher the Madoff phenomenon...
"Indeed, what is lost amid the fury of some of those who handed their money over to him is that theirs was a voluntary--nay, eager--association. No one was holding a gun to anyone’s head, saying sign up with Mr. Madoff or else.
"Far from it: people scrambled to find a home within his financial orbit, auditioning for the role of Madoff client the way you would try out for a place at an Ivy League college, nudging connections to put in a good word, calling in favors to get in on a piece of the Madoff action."
She concludes that "to call Mr. Madoff a sociopath isn’t really to explain him so much as to explain our failure to pick up on his scam. 'Everything that deceives,' decreed Plato, “can be said to enchant.'"
In the New Yorker, Woody Allen conjures up two Madoff victims who have been reincarnated as lobsters in the tank of a Manhattan restaurant: "The day I found out he could handle my account I was so thrilled I cut my wife’s head out of our wedding photo and put his in. When I learned I was broke, I committed suicide by jumping off the roof of our golf club in Palm Beach. I had to wait half an hour to jump, I was twelfth in line.” When Madoff shows up for a seafood dinner, the crustacean victims see their chance for revenge.
Life and art intersect in the person of Elie Wiesel, the bard of the Holocaust, who lost all his own and his charities' money. Madoff, he recalls, "presented himself as a philanthropist," and they talked about ethics and education:
"It was a myth that he created around him...the myth of exclusivity...He gave the impression that maybe a hundred people belonged to his club. Now we know thousands of them were cheated by him."
The myth was an echo of the Midas Touch with no memory of the curse that comes with it. Whatever happens to Madoff himself, he is on his way to becoming a symbol of "the stuff that dreams are made on" in the long line of literature from Shakespeare to Sam Spade in "The Maltese Falcon."
Showing posts with label Elie Wiesel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Elie Wiesel. Show all posts
Monday, March 23, 2009
Sunday, March 08, 2009
Our Town, Their Century
Frank Rich, drawing on his roots as a theater critic, goes back today to the perennially American "Our Town" to remind us of what has been lost in our national life since it emerged in another Depression seven decades ago.
"Once again," he writes of the play's continuing revivals, "its astringent distillation of life and death in the fictional early-20th-century town of Grover’s Corners, N.H., is desperately needed to help strip away 'layers and layers of nonsense' so Americans can remember who we are-- and how lost we got in the boom before our bust."
This week Bernard Madoff will step out on the stage to explain how he created the nonsense that took away billions from his fellow citizens, including the Holocaust humanitarian, Elie Wiesel, who now says, "We gave him everything. We thought he was God."
In the background is a crowd scene of lesser crooks--"Sir" Allen Stanford of the Bahamas, who hustled greedy innocents and built himself a castle, complete with moat; Paul Greenwood and Stephen Walsh, "money managers whose alleged $667 million fraud looted the endowments at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon"; and the Noel family of Fairfield County, Connecticut, who "took in at least $500 million in fees (since 2003 alone) for delivering sheep to the Madoff slaughterhouse" and posed for Town and Country in their numerous homes.
Since colonial days, there have always been con men and swindlers among the American dreamers striving for success in the world's most open society, but as Rich reminds us, we have come a long way from the kind of people in "Our Town, whose narrator could say at the town cemetery:
“New Hampshire boys had a notion that the Union ought to be kept together, though they’d never seen more than 50 miles of it themselves. All they knew was the name, friends--the United States of America. The United States of America. And they went and died about it.”
In this century, small town boys are still doing that in distant parts of the world but those of us they are leaving behind had damned well better clean up the Union they are dying about.
"Once again," he writes of the play's continuing revivals, "its astringent distillation of life and death in the fictional early-20th-century town of Grover’s Corners, N.H., is desperately needed to help strip away 'layers and layers of nonsense' so Americans can remember who we are-- and how lost we got in the boom before our bust."
This week Bernard Madoff will step out on the stage to explain how he created the nonsense that took away billions from his fellow citizens, including the Holocaust humanitarian, Elie Wiesel, who now says, "We gave him everything. We thought he was God."
In the background is a crowd scene of lesser crooks--"Sir" Allen Stanford of the Bahamas, who hustled greedy innocents and built himself a castle, complete with moat; Paul Greenwood and Stephen Walsh, "money managers whose alleged $667 million fraud looted the endowments at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon"; and the Noel family of Fairfield County, Connecticut, who "took in at least $500 million in fees (since 2003 alone) for delivering sheep to the Madoff slaughterhouse" and posed for Town and Country in their numerous homes.
Since colonial days, there have always been con men and swindlers among the American dreamers striving for success in the world's most open society, but as Rich reminds us, we have come a long way from the kind of people in "Our Town, whose narrator could say at the town cemetery:
“New Hampshire boys had a notion that the Union ought to be kept together, though they’d never seen more than 50 miles of it themselves. All they knew was the name, friends--the United States of America. The United States of America. And they went and died about it.”
In this century, small town boys are still doing that in distant parts of the world but those of us they are leaving behind had damned well better clean up the Union they are dying about.
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