Hoax, Fraud, Trickery, And Scams - The Marvelous, Magnificent Soap Opera Of America

Most Americans would like to think that their country, 'A Shining City On A Hill' as Ronald Reagan put it, is a place where exceptionalism is ordinary, where good faith is the currency of the land, and where the ancient Roman values of honesty, courage, respect, honor, justice, and compassion are universal. 

After all, we won WWII and freed the world from the perils of Nazism and Japanese imperialism and have stood tall before the world, unmatched as a model of democracy and free enterprise. 

America would be a bloody dull place if all that were true, 365 days of Sunday Mass, faithful husbands, dutiful wives, well-behaved children, consideration and compassion for the elderly, and tight, unbreakable family units. Ivan's Devil in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov says it well:

So against the grain I serve to produce events and do what's irrational because I am commanded to. For all their indisputable intelligence, men take this farce as something serious, and that is their tragedy. They suffer, of course ... but then they live, they live a real life, not a fantastic one, for suffering is life. Without suffering what would be the pleasure of it? It would be transformed into an endless church service; it would be holy, but tedious 

Dostoevsky’s Devil is a vaudevillian, a comedian who serves to spice things up.  What would life be without me? he asks. “It would be holy, but tedious”.

The Devil is abroad in America, for there is no end to the foul play, devilishly plotted murders, vice, corruption, jealousy, suspicion and endless con games.

The old caricature of the used car salesman is back as the adman who promises health, wealth, and good fortune, the butcher who keeps his thumb on the scale, the travel photographer who knows all the angles, light, and positioning to show the Tuscan dump as a Renaissance gem, the scammer who sneaks up on you and steals your files, your bank account, and your credit. 

Mackintosh Peters was a snake oil salesmen in the Arizona Territory in the 1870s, and made a good living selling worthless gum Arabic and corn syrup mixtures to the Piute and Navajo.  'Works like a charm', Mack told the Indians, 'take a swig in the morning and one in the evening, and it'll cure what ails you'. 

Which was arthritis, impotence, scabies, catarrh, and suppuration and anything else he could conjure up.  He was long gone before the Indians knew they had been had, but the placebo effect has been around for centuries, so many of his customers told their friend and families how good they felt after only a day's dosage.  If for some reason he found himself back in the same village and was accosted by the Indians he had duped, he had a ready reply. 'Ahh, of course', he said.  'I said two swigs in the morning and two at night, not one.'

'What's a swig?' asked an elder of the tribe. 

'Why, like this', Mack said, swilling a half-bottle down in one gulp. 'Ya see, ya wasn't takin' nearly half as much', and with that, he lit out of town, his racks of phials and bottles clinking and rattling in the back seat of the wagon as he drove. 

'There's a sucker born every minute', said the circus impresario, P.T. Barnum, and with that under his belt, he made millions off the rubes who wandered into his tents.  His freak show was the most popular - two headed babies, bearded dwarves, and half-man, half-woman giants.  The gawkers always came back, sometimes the same day to see the unbelievable creatures assembled in Barnum's side show. 

Along the trail with Mack Peters were scores of shell game wizards and con artists of every kind, fleecing unsuspecting rural folk out of their money.  There were get-rich-quick schemes, virility potions, games of 'chance', temptingly easy card games, and more inventive scams you can imagine.  It seemed that the business of rural America in the early years was the scam. 

At the same time as the nation industrialized, there was plenty of room for bamboozling. Real estate agents, mortgage lenders, horse traders, and used car salesmen all made a bonanza.  It was remarkably easy to bilk money out of consumers in those days, and even at the highest level of finance, trickery and chicanery was rife. Property owners inflated prices, hid structural defects, paid off inspectors and politicians and ran off with thousands.  When the buildings sold collapsed or rotted, they were long gone. 

'Let the buyer beware' was the meme of the times, and beware he certainly had to be in an environment of endemic corruption, fraud, and larceny.  It was a free-for-all where if you were canny and deftly underhanded, you could become wealthy. 

Evangelism was another classic American scam.  Itinerant preachers, following in the footsteps of Macintosh Peters and his lot, bilked thousands from naive farmers who filled their revival tents hoping to find Jesus.  These preachers were masters at oratory, drama, and duplicity; and since they were dealing with a product which could never be examined or returned, their job easy. 

'Prayer', shouted Isaiah Jones. 'Prayer is the answer'.  Here he paused, wiped his brow, looked to the' billowing folds of the tent, and went on.  'And Jesus will listen.  He, the magnificent, the forgiving, the loving, and the merciful will come to you only if you ask him.  Get down on your knees...go ahead, get down right now and ask his forgiveness, pray for his intercession, ask him to come down to this very place and save your souls...'

Hundreds of worshipers flocked in the aisles, raising their arms in supplication as they made their way forward to the Reverend Jones.  Some shouted that they had found Jesus, that he had come among them, and that they were saved.  Others simply cried and shouted thanks and welcome.  It was a jamboree, a parade, a marvelous event and when it was over, Jones counted his reward. 

Today is no different, nor why should it be?  Scamming is part of the American ethos, our way of life, the rough edges of our competitive free market.  Con men use the same entrepreneurial energy as the honest businessman, only with subterfuge and underhandedness. 

You've got to hand it to Bernie Madoff who bilked $17 billion out of wealthy investors, many of whom were his Jewish friends, in a Ponzi scheme the likes of which federal investigators had never seen. When he was finally caught, there was no money found at all. 

Madoff orchestrated the largest Ponzi scheme in history, operating it for over 17 years. His firm initially functioned as a legitimate brokerage but later became a front for his fraudulent activities. Madoff promised consistent annual returns of ten-twenty percent regardless of market conditions, which attracted a wide range of investors, including wealthy individuals, hedge funds, and charities.

Madoff claimed to use a 'split-strike' conversion strategy to generate steady returns.  However this was largely a facade.  In reality he was not making the trades he reported.  Instead he used the money from new investors to pay returns to existing investors - the classic Ponzi operation. 

To maintain an illusion of a successful investment operation, Madoff instructed his employees to create fake trading records and account statements.  These documents suggested that his firm was engaged in extensive trading activities when this was not the case at all. 

One of the finest conmen in recent memory was Rudy Kurniawan, a young man who bilked credulous wine investors out of millions, selling them dreck in fancy, falsely aged bottles and convincing them it was the finest of Baron de Rothschild's personal collection.

Rudy had one of the finest wine palates ever, and it was this special talent which gave him the credibility he needed to fool others.  He included some very fine wine in his offerings, and often a legitimately great bottle of wine for future investors - all as cover for the scam which prosecutors called the spawn of Bernie Madoff. 

There is one inalterable rule of corruption - the more government spends on infrastructure and social programs, the more that will be siphoned off.  Before any completion of roads and bridges or before any brick in child welfare centers has been laid, contractors, municipal employees, program managers have taken their cut. 

The city council, Office Of Public Works, of major metropolitan city, authorized a $725 million contract to rebuilt perfectly good sidewalks in certain residential areas of the city.  These sidewalks were torn up and replaced with new ones of no better quality, and both contractor and city officials.  They followed it up with a Make Our Neighborhoods Safe program to tear up the city's alleys - the crisscrossing back ways that had characterized the residential neighborhoods since they were built - and made millions in kickbacks from it. 

The fraud recently discovered in Minnesota where Somali organizations took millions in federal COVID-era monies earmarked for childcare centers, and sent it back to Mogadishu.  The Biden Administration, so ineptly and venally interested in showing its sensitive response to the epidemic, poured non-accountable millions into municipal coffers monthly.  There was no oversight, no well-established record-keeping procedures.  All was done as a matter of faith; and only now is the extent of the fraud being unearthed. 

 

The Justice Department, waking up to the fact that if this happened in Minnesota, it probably happened in other states as well and has begun investigations in California which was a recipient of some of the largest federal grants. 

Now, every scam has a scammer and a scammee - it takes two to tango, and the network of corruption starts with an administration which is only looking for political returns and cares little for accountability. It only mattered that Joe Biden looked presidential and caring, treating his electoral base to millions in walkin' around money.  Such administered largesse is by nature corrupt, facilitating corruption on the other end. 

Washington DC Mayor Marion Barry was renowned for his municipal largesse - billions of white taxpayer money poured into the all-black wards of the city in return for their votes.  'Get over it', he told the voters of wealthy, white Ward 3 after he won an election hands down despite zero votes from it. 

Government is the only agency of a free market system which is never held financially accountable for its actions.   Billions go out the door and little is ever shown for it.  Worse, nothing by way of performance is asked.  If the principle of the thing was good, no questions about results need to be asked.  They are assumed. 

Is America a more corrupt country than others? Probably not although few countries have such an inbred, native tendency to scam, con, and trick.  What started in the Wild West, matured in the East, went up and down the socio-economic scale, and became endemic. 

If scamming is not quite the ethos of America, it comes close; and to look on the bright side, what would a life of universal honesty, fidelity, dignity, and compassion be like?  A thudding bore, that's what.  Politics without Mark Sanford who claimed he was hiking the Appalachian Trail while courting his Argentine mistress in Buenos Aires? Or without John Edwards who had an illegitimate child by his mistress and then asked his Chief of Staff to be the fall guy?  Or without Newt Gingrich who brought flowers to his dying wife in the hospital then hailed a cab to the Mayflower where he met his mistress for their weekly tryst?

Presidents from Washington to Trump have been caught napping in the crib of illicit lovers.  Sex is the ultimate aphrodisiac, said Henry Kissinger, and every politician takes advantage of it. 

Black Lives Matter, at the forefront of protests against white police murder of innocent black men, the organization which spawned lawn signs in every liberal neighborhood, which raised millions in donations, turned out to be one of the most venal, corrupt, and rotten items in Washington, a bigger than life channeling of the President of the DC Teachers' Union who bilked thousands out of the members' till to buy wigs and high heels. 

We live a marvelous, magical soap opera here in America. There is no place like it, no big top, no freak show, no vaudevillian act, no Borscht Belt tummler can possibly match the reality of what goes on.  We are the Devil's unwitting handmaidens, doing his tricky business every waking hour of the day. 

A Jamboree Of The Deaf, Black, Gay, And Latino - A University Professor Makes The Rounds Of The Oppressed

Vicki Marshall although white was a professor at a historically black university where she taught literature - a syllabus which reflected not only the black man's struggle from slavery, but a literary history of the oppressed.  Oppression was a big tent, and all those who had suffered at the hands of the white man were welcome; so Prof. Marshall's course dealt with the extermination of the Native American, the backbreaking farm labor of the Latino, the decades of Jim Crow and segregation, and the homophobic brutality faced by gays, lesbians, and transgenders. 

Colored Girl, by Nora Prentiss Baker, told the story of a Mississippi slave taken as a mistress by the grandee of Equinox Plantation, sexually abused by the overseer and his son, and treated no better than a scullery maid.  'White man give no respect', said Sarah, the main character in the novel. 'He just born of the devil'. 

From Closet To Boudoir - A Tale Of Buggery, written by T. Randall Phipps told the story of a young Iowa farmer boy, taunted and abused because he was different, but whose marginal life led him to San Francisco and then as the top boy in Mrs. Longworth's Washington brothel known for its high profile clients, utter secrecy, and beautiful young men and women. 

I Can't Hear You! was the story of a boy caught between the hysteria of the radical deaf culture and a commiserating, compassionate but vilified doctor who performed cochlear implants.  'A story of today', read the book jacket. 'Would you die for deafness?'

And so on.  The reading list was long and relevant. Vicki knew that these books were topical at best, illustrative of the fight for identity and respect but no Shakespeare, the subject of her senior thesis at Wellesley. There in the heady days of the New Criticism, text was what mattered, Deconstructionism had not yet appeared, and disaggregation, historicism, and exogeny were absent from the canon.  She was lauded for her work, and a doctorate at Northwestern was assured. 

Vicki over the years, like many academics, veered Left and then moved unhesitatingly to progressivism, and in so doing jettisoned her literary baggage and focused on making a difference.  Her liberal credentials honed and burnished at Duke and Haverford were enough for the all-black university to take a chance and hired the first white professor in its storied history.  The Board of Regents was convinced that the commitment, passion, and dedication of a white woman to the black cause would be just the energetic infusion the university needed. 

After a number of years at the university, Vicki began to feel restless.  Somehow it didn't seem enough to spend all her energies on just one item of the progressive canon.  She was far too intelligent, ambitious, and still young enough to reach out to other oppressed peoples. It was then that the idea struck - why not a moral hejira? 

She would form an academic association of universities which had dedicated themselves to the underserved minorities of America - HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities), the Schools for the Deaf, and the smaller colleges of South Texas who had welcomed Latino students and given them a both a solid history of their legacy in America and the strength of identity to attain full racial and social equality. 

We have many black students here', said Dean Murchison of Gallatin University in Washington, the nation's premier school for the deaf.  Dean Murchison, profoundly deaf himself had trouble articulating his thoughts with this, one of the few hearing colleagues to visit.  Yet, his moans and grimaces were decipherable and Vicki understood his diffidence. 

'But don't you see, Dean Murchison', she began in special English, carefully mouthing each word in a rounded, heavily lipped way, 'we should be together in this'. 

Murchison smiled, having gotten only a fraction of what Vicki said. 'I know I should have invited an interpreter', but too proud of what he thought was his inter-cultural ability, he had demurred.  In a groaning, moaning monologue he soldiered on about deaf identity primus inter pares and not to be confused with blackness or gayness.  A white woman pushing a black thing to deaf people just wouldn't cut it at Gallatin. 

She finished her tea and cookies, thanked the Dean for his hospitality and left disconsolate but unbowed.  Gallatin wasn't the only deaf place in the country. 

However, she got the same reception in St. Paul, Burlington, and Charlotte, the same inarticulate reception, and the same polite refusal.  Like at Gallatin, she offered her services.  She would teach a course on 'Intercultural Oppression' free of charge and pay the fee of the interpreter.  She was politely shown the door by the Dean who wanted no part of this edgy, pushy woman. 

'Deaf is a matter for the deaf', the Dean scrawled on the chalkboard behind him; but added, 'Thank you anyway' in his nasalized baritone.

There were no Latino schools per se in the country, only colleges that admitted a majority of Spanish-speaking students.  La Universidad del Rio in south Texas was one which had come to her attention because of its Southwest Curriculum, a course of study which featured both Mexican and American history and the 'fertile crescent', the bend in the Rio Grande which was a metaphor for intercultural exchange. 

Now, this visit to La Universidad was the first outside Vicki's comfort zone.  She was a Northeast liberal, born and bred into the traditions of Lafollette and Brandeis, FDR, and the patrician, noblesse oblige Bostonians who on the foundation of untold wealth from the Three Cornered slave trade, were at the forefront of civil rights. 'Senora...perdon, Profesora...' the Dean began, 'relationships between black and Hispanic down here are not luminary....luminescent...lumin--'. 

 Here he paused, looking for le mot juste but it escaped him. His English, as proud as he was of it, was still rather sticky.  'What I mean to say, Madam, is that the two communities have not yet come to an accord'. 

That was putting it mildly.  Blacks and Mexicans fought each other tooth and nail for territory, the drug trade, ferrying migrants across the river, and above-board jobs.  There was no more racial hatred, bitterness, and contention between communities as there was here.  'Our students think black people are...'

Again the Dean paused, looking for a way to frame the deep hostility between the communities.  The Dean heard every Spanish variation of the N-word, every black stereotype, every dunning, dismissive phrase, every epithet possible; and on the streets of the town he heard black boys calling his Mexican students every nastiness in the books.  

'They hate each other, Madam', the Dean said. 'I hear it is no different in Baltimore'. Why he picked Baltimore of all places she couldn't imagine, but he was right.  In the North the racial hatred was just as deep only kept under wraps, unspoken, unadmitted but just as ingrained and ineradicable as anywhere else. 

'What's a woman to do?', said Vicki back in her suburban Maryland home. She felt defeated, injured, insulted, and refused.  She had gone out in a missionary spirit of good well and good intentions, but had been rejected at every turn. No one wanted her intercultural dialogue, her blandishments, and her advice.  She had either misjudged her audience or sadly misjudged her own message. 

Well, at least I have my black students, she smiled; but of course her days at the university were numbered.  The Faculty Committee was meeting at that very moment to purify the staff, black only it was to be from here on in.  'Professor Marshall, you've earned your retirement', her Dean had not infrequently reminded her.  Handwriting on the wall, as unconscionable as it might be.  

'It the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?' rhetorically asks the Anton Shugur character in Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. 

'Indeed', said Vicki to her face in the mirror. 'Indeed'; and with that changed her trust, drew down on what was to have been her children's inheritance, and plunked down a big down payment on a condo in Florida. 

The Glories Of A Bi-Partisan Sexual Affair - Rutting Delight At The Follies Of Washington

Vicki Albright met Reed Ramlow on Dewey Beach, a more conservative, quieter resort than Rehoboth or Ocean City.  She was there with friends from Washington, all aides to one Congressman or another, all Democrat, all progressive in spirit and policy.  There was a heady enthusiasm among these young women. all of whom felt they were on God's side in the struggle against the evil in the White House, and all of whom shared a camaraderie that was based on political commitment but annealed by a youthful enthusiasm.  After all they were not just clerks in a five-and-dime but big deals, successful women who had come to Washington not to make their fortune but to make a difference. 

Reed was also a Congressional aide, but to a Senator and in a senior advisory position.  He had been in Washington since the first Trump administration, had served his master well during the penitential Biden years, and was now in the full flush of celebratory enthusiasm now that Trump was beginning his second, decisive term. 

Vicki and Reed met at Joe's Bar, a Dewey Beach hangout popular with the Washington crowd and absent day-trippers, casual tourists, and the curious from Baltimore.  Joe's could have been in downtown Washington but was perched on a pier over the Atlantic Ocean.  Dry martinis, crab cakes, insider talk and sidling up - the ironic term used by these up-and-comers for sexual interest. 

Joe's was the place to see and be seen and was distinctly bi-partisan. Somehow the beach, the ocean, and the summer did away with political allegiances and opened social commerce to both sides; and so it was that Vicki and Reed found each other side by side at the bar drinking oyster shooters, well on their way to the happy abandon for which they had driven three hours. 

They 'sidled' around workday affiliations - this being an eclectic, aisle-free, open season kind of place where it didn't pay to show one's colors or raise one's political flags - and found each other attractive, interesting, and available.  One thing led to another, and they went home together - or rather to The Rodney, a simple, rundown hotel on Airlie Avenue blocks from the beach but comfortable and anonymous. 

Their sex was surprisingly successful.  After all, Vicki, well-brought up in a strict Iowa farm family was not one to jump into bed with just anyone; but in these halcyon days of youthful adventure and independence, why not. AIDS was a thing of the past, contraceptives were state of the art, and abuse and discard were but feminist cant. 

It didn't take much pillow talk to out the obvious - not only were they partisans of opposing political parties, they were committed advocates for their policies.  Vicki was convinced that the black man represented America's best hope for sentient revival.  He, descendant of African tribes which resonated with the tribal energies of the forest, endowed with a primal intelligence which put white pretentious academicism to shame would soon rise to the top of the human pyramid. 

He, a frequent traveler to Africa, thanks to his Senator's place on the Foreign Relations Committee, found the continent a sinkhole of pestilence, corruption, misrule, and barely concealed jungle primitivism. 

How on earth would he and Vicki ever find each other?

They smoked a Bombay Black - the finest Moroccan hash mixed with Afghan opium - and found common ground.  In a marvelous riff Reed created a hilarious send-off of Africa, a cavalcade of intellectual dwarves dancing around cauldrons of white men, whipping up an appetite for human liver. 

He stood up, took off his shirt, blackened his face with burnt Moet Chandon cork and in a vaudevillian reprise of the strutting Stokely Carmichael, old Black Panther black revolutionary, channeled every black leader from Rap Brown to Black Lives Matter. 

Vicki howled with delight, charmed by the antics of her new lover with whom she had found a unique bi-partisan place.  One could be for the black man but not deny the outrageously hilarious caricatures of him.  

Her turn - a marvelous word salad, incomprehensible, ditzy rendition of Kamala Harris who had run for President on the I Am Black ticket and turned out to be a clown, the most insanely ridiculous cartoon character to ever show up on an American political stage. 

One could be for the progressive agenda incoherently proposed by this demented harridan and laugh behind her back. 

Sobriety, and particularly the hangover kind, can quash any budding relationship; but theirs - Vicki's and Reed's seemed to have staying power in the light of day.  Washed, showered, and dressed, they still found each other attractive and appealing. 

This was what was unusual in the sexual street games of Washington.  Political differences tend to divide at every level.  Bitter enemies on the House floor, antagonistic lovers in bed; but Vicki and Reed (she couldn't help thinking of a porn star stud whenever she heard his name) shared common ground  - idiocy. 

It was this - not only getting the vaudevillian hilarity of Washington, but loving it.  The  popular word is 'embrace' but it was really just a rolling, rollicking belly laugh. 

How could anyone take seriously uppity black Black Lives Matter welfare queens lecturing in ghetto-speak about George Floyd, a career criminal, doped up and stupid, as an icon of black American residency?  Or Joe Biden, shuffled to the podium like a rag doll, then left to his own demented meanderings. 

'When I was a boy', Biden said, I filled buckets of water for my sand castle.  Now, why did I do that?', and there he paused, befuddled by the lines in his prepared script about Indonesian democracy, seeing only images of tsunamis and rijsttafel. 'My mother' he said, looking up at the rafters, hoping to see her, an angel surely there to help him, 'was a saint'.  Hooked off the stage like a bad vaudevillian at Grossinger's, he managed a Nixon high wave 

Or The Haircut, Gavin Newsom, or dumb-as-a-sack-of-hammers AOC, 'the reason why instructions are put on shampoo bottles', or...God alone could have created such a menagerie. 

As she and Reed rolled around in bed, smoking dope and draining bottles of Cuervo and noshing on pizza crusts and old felafel, Vicki never wondered about rectitude - that sense of moral dignity which had always defined her. Was the progressive canon really that much of a B-movie sci-fi script?

Why was there nothing so ridiculous about her party?  No transgender, rainbow silked, gay float boys? No tough girl flannel and e-booted Bernal Heights dames? No callused lettuce pickers in serapes? No rainbow coalition of dwarves and cotton-pickers?

The parade down Pennsylvania Avenue was all white, tall, blonde, blue-eyed and normal.  The sounds of waltzes and Frank Sinatra came through the windows open to the Rose Garden.  There wasn't an oddity among them, not one creep or tart. 

They screwed till the lights went out, Vicki and Reed, and never let incidentals intrude. 'We are a dyad' said Reed, rolling over on his side to look at Vicki.  'Just look at us, ebony and ivory', proof that politics are not the barriers to sexual entry they once were. "

Easier said than done, of course, for once back in Washington, the rumors and innuendoes began.  The Vicki-Reed affair, far from the spotlight on a buggering, unfaithful Washington the tabloids were used to, made the rounds in lower-level, aspiring circles. 

'How could she?' was the question, for it was always the woman who was the victim; but by this time Vicki had become fully liberated and would fuck whomever she pleased, and when the affair with Reed Ramlow petered out as they all did, she was ready for the next, whichever wind brought it through the lace curtains to her.