From Brockway to North Haverbrook

I have a question for you that sounds like a joke but isn’t really at all. It sounds rhetorical too, but also really isn’t. It’s a question I desperately want an answer to. In fact, if we can arrive at an answer to it, many of our current problems could be solved, though it will admittedly take some time. Here is my question:

How many executives in American corporations and financial institutions are stupid? And, since it appears to be a reasonable amount, why have we entrusted them with our economic well-being? Has our entire global financial system been constructed by people who attended the Fyre Festival? 

I do not have an MBA nor a degree in economics. I hate accounting. If you put a company ledger in front of me, I would have a CPA on the phone within seconds, and not just because I think businesses still keep track of their finances in ledgers.

I am, however, a sentient human who is able to form judgements about other human beings based on things they say to me and actions they take. These judgements are not always spot-on, of course, but I’d say I get it right about 75% of the time. I feel like most people I know are the same. At this point in life, we’ve kinda figured out who the good guys and bad guys are. 

Like, Charles Manson. Not a good guy. We all agree on that, correct? He ordered people to carve words on the corpse of a dead pregnant woman. Everyone still thinks that’s bad, right? 

Thing is, Charles Manson was an incredibly persuasive guy. For a while, before the carving times, he hung out with celebrities and wrote catchy tunes and came real damn close to landing a record deal. He managed to convince a slew of educated young women to etch swastikas in their foreheads and stab people to death. Manson was a bad guy—but before that, he was a guy a hell of a lot of people liked and listened to.

Every time I see this headline, my blood boils. Any person capable of putting one foot in front of the other, much less calculating complex market calculations, knows the sum of Donald Trump’s character the minute they first hear him speak: He is a racist. He is a misogynist. And he has severe mental health issues. Not one person on the entire planet listens to him speak and says, “He’s an enigma, that one!”

What you do with this information is of course the rub. A vast ocean of Wall Street executives decided it didn’t matter, that decades of documented bad business practices wouldn’t transpose onto our economy, and voted for him anyway. Very Smart Men in Silicon Valley, who built the infrastructure on which all of humanity now interacts, did too. They presumed their book smarts were the only thing that mattered; that IQ and paper degrees beat out emotional intelligence every day. Who cares if he’s incapable of constructing a coherent sentence? Money solves all the things. 

At the end of day, though, money is an inanimate object that cannot manipulate itself. It requires humans to engage with it, and humans are messy. They have childhood traumas they never worked through in therapy, and revenge fantasies against abusive fathers they’ll exact on any available person. They have rich friends they want to make richer, the rest of the world be damned. They have women to punish.

So spare me your pearl-clutching, Wall Street. As America crumbles into the sea and the rest of the world moves on without us, I hope your ledgers keep you warm at night. At least you can use them for kindling.

I normally write weekly movie and book reviews, but sometimes I gotta yell. If you want frivolity on the regular, subscribe to Three Things.