Cheating - It's In Our Genes, Everyone Does It, So Sit Back And Enjoy The Ride

You have to hand it to the Somalis. They went from pirating cargo ships in the Gulf of Aden - a tricky, dangerous affair, attacking huge Maersk container ships on an outboard over choppy seas - to pirating the public treasury of Minnesota.  It took savvy, opportunity, smarts, and the credulousness of a government in love with asylees; but the sheer chutzpah of it was marvelous. 

When reporter Nick Shirley decided to visit the now infamous Learing Centers, supposed pre-schools funded though generous grants by the state, he found them empty - not a child to be seen, doors locked, a few men hanging around chewing kat, but nothing even resembling a pre-school. 

The Somalis didn't even try to cover up their fraud - create some semblance of a working school, a few coloring books and toys on the floor, perhaps even one or two children whose parents were paid for their appearance.  Nothing, nada.  

The cheating - at this multi-million dollar level it is called fraud - but cheating is what it is, taking something from someone on false pretenses.  It was the gall of it, the sheer scale and scope of the affair that was impressive. 

Sven Carlson, born and raised on the Minnesota prairie, Sinclair Lewis country with some originalist American Midwestern values but still a windy, cultureless, ramshackle place surrounded by emptiness, had moved to St. Paul after business school and hung out his shingle, S.P. Carlson, Accountancy and Tax Preparation.  

He did well despite the incursions of the big Eastern accounting firms.  He knew Minnesota and federal law and how to avoid and in some instances evade it. He had been cheating the government for years, and so when he learned of the Somali escapade right in his backyard, he was delighted.  Not only would the government be occupied with the Learing Center debacle, but it showed how easy it was to take from the public trough. 

Not everyone was on the take in Minnesota, of course, but there was enough cheating going on everywhere to make one think that the state had a monopoly on it. Looked at another way, Minnesota was the land of opportunity - for what else to expect of a people who had survived the harsh winters of the prairie and made a home and a living there?  

Cheating was just the questionable edge of doing business.  Donald Trump, after all, made millions by inflating the value of his properties and counting on the credulousness of buyers looking for a good deal to fall for his his sleight of hand.  He did nothing wrong in a buyer beware New York real estate market.  No one took a number at face value in that heady environment. 

And what else would Sven’s father's friend Halve Swanson have done other than woo the wife of Henrik Olson, take her on the corncobs in the far shed in the dead of winter?  Halve's wife had frozen up on him years ago citing all manner of discomfort, desuetude, and disinterest, and any red-blooded man would naturally seek solace and sexual comfort elsewhere.  Yes, he cheated on his wife, but who wouldn't? Married to that woman was penance in and of itself. 

The Devil in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov tells Ivan that he is not such a bad guy, certainly not worthy of the calumny heaped on him since the Fall.  I am a vaudevillian, the Devil says, and without me life would be a bloody bore, three hundred and sixty five days of Sunday mass, penitence, good works, and vain hopes for an unattainable better life. At least with me around life can be fun. 

 

He is a trickster, a con artist, a carny barker, a snake oil salesman - anything to spice things up in what Hobbes would describe as a short, nasty, and brutish life.  'You should be thankful for me', the Devil tells Ivan. 

Talking about chutzpah, what about the two best con artists of recent years?  Bernie Madoff bilked his Jewish friends out of millions in a Ponzi scheme which when uncovered by the FBI had not one red cent of assets left.

Madoff was brilliant - suave, convincing, playing on his Jewishness, his natural financial wizardry, and his charm - and convinced hundreds of investors that his fund was the best way to double and triple their profits.  

 

Rudy Kurniawan was a young Indonesian who made millions selling dreck as high-quality vintage wine to investors who would never drink it but buy and sell it at enormous profit.  

Rudy bought up leftover French barrel wine, became a master at 'aging' bottles, corks, and labels, and claimed he had a wine cellar unmatched for sophistication and unrivaled quality.  On occasion he would buy an actual high-end wine (he was gifted with a remarkable palate), share it with investors, and con them into thinking this would be the wine they would be buying. 

'That's what I'm talking about!', Ivan's Devil would certainly have said had he known of Bernie and Rudy, 'my kind of guys’

Who in America could not have marveled at former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford who went on fugue, a long absence from the statehouse to be with his Argentine lover in Buenos Aires, and when questioned insisted that he had been hiking the Appalachian trail.  'I needed headspace', he said. 

Or John Edwards, another American politician who bribed a minion to take the fall for him and announce that Edwards' illegitimate child was his; or former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich who gave his dying wife a bouquet of flowers, an 'I love you', and then went off to the Bahamas with his lover.

 

Politics of course is an easy target.  'They all cheat', said a Washington Post Watergate era reporter; but religion is the motherlode.  Bible hucksters since the days of Billy Sunday and Amy Semple McPherson have been making millions off the spiritually bereft.  Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Tammy and Jim Bakker were brilliant at filling their personal treasuries with only the promise of prayer. 

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 friends 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 would say. ‘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. 

Nigerians are the kings of cyber trickery.  Snake oil salesmen on a grand scale.  Tens, hundreds of thousands of appeals go out at the click of a mouse and if only a fraction of one percent bears fruit, the Nigerian scammer is set up for life.  

After the genie was out of the bottle and the whole scamming landscape quickly evolved into a barely recognizable, untraceable universe, there was no limit to the money that could be made. Brilliant. 

Husbands cheat on their wives every day of the week, cheating on your taxes has become patriotic, keeping a thumb on the scale was the way Katz's Delicatessen turned a profit.  Cutting corners and reshaping them to look full is an American talent.  

Advertisers cheat with every seductive, persuasive ad, always keeping one step ahead of the FCC.  Politicians tell bald-faced lies, are found out, apologize, and are re-elected.  Televangelists who have an unaccountable product keep on praying and passing the basket.  

Looked at through the prim, censorious lens of the social and moral reformer, all this cheating is corrosive, destructive, and hurtful; but looked at through a more forgiving one, it is the only thing that keeps us awake. 

Without it there would be no television serials, no gossip, no kibbitzing by the water cooler, no locker room stories, no lawyers, no politicians, empty shelves in the supermarket.  Cheating, and its handmaidens lying and confabulation, are what make the world go round. 

War, A Love Affair - The Allure Of Fiery Destruction

Imagine Genghis Khan with an army of ten thousand men thundering out of the Steppes, slaying all in his wake, laying waste to village after village, and nothing but carnage and death in his wake from the Far East to Europe.  It must have been a grand and heroic  spectacle.

Khan was charismatic and fearsome; and he and his armies were known for their cruelty and barbarity, and the sight of them advancing across the battlefield in a storm of dust, the feel of the earth shaking with the thunder of 50,000 hooves were enough to send enemies into retreat; but the thought alone of this terrible, bloodthirsty, and mighty warrior would have been enough. 

Genghis Khan was a man of absolute will and power, a frightening figure of power and vengeance.  He was a horseman of the Apocalypse.

 

The Crusades were Christian but just as barbaric.  Pope Urban’s armies were sent out to destroy and annihilate the Muslim occupiers of Jerusalem, to rid the world of them and their godless, heathen, insidious religion.  The mayhem and slaughter wreaked by the crusading armies was little different from that of Genghis Khan.

The battles of wars past were exalting in their ferocity –  banners flying, swords flashing, and thickets of arrows flying them through the dust of battle.  Armed horsemen – mammoth, incredible figures to most enemies who had never seen horses – charged through the enemy lines, slashing all from their mounts until the battlefield was littered with dead.

There have been many successful armies in the world.  Julius Caesar, Scipio Africanus, Pompey the Great, and Marcus Agrippa were as brilliant generals as Genghis Khan, and brought Roman organization, discipline, and management to the battle.  They won because of superior ability, armaments, and military thinking while Genghis Khan added an almost untamed savagery to his victories.

The battles of the Aztecs were more like those of Genghis Khan, for in addition to classic military strategy, organization, and a half-civilized barbarism, they added a powerful spiritual element.  Soldiers dressed in the skins of animals whose spirits they possessed.  When they attacked the enemy, they killed like a panther would; or ripped and tore flesh like an eagle.

The army of Montezuma which pursued the enemy across the Mexican highlands was not just comprised of men, it was made up of powerful animal spirits. It was the panther which killed, the eagle which ripped enemy flesh, and the jaguar which tore at enemy throats. There could be no greater spectacle of battle than that of the great Aztec armies and the wild soldiers dressed in animal skins, talons, and feathers charging across the plains.

The armies of the European Crusades fought for their Christian God, and felt his spirit within as they attacked the Infidel.  Theirs was a military engagement with strategy, operations, and tactics; but it was also a holy war, inspired by a holy cause, and guided by God himself.

Early modern warfare was tame by comparison.  World War I was a war of mud, trenches, barbed wire perimeters, mortar fire and infantry charges.  It was a war without spectacle, fought without clear cause or purpose, and was responsible for the deaths of millions.

World War II was the first fully modern war, for it combined classic military tactics with a full complement of armaments – planes, tanks, artillery, riflery, rockets, mortars, and bombs. Soldiers had a cause – Hitler had invaded their countries and they were determined to drive him out – but they were part of a military machine, cogs in its wheels.  Battles were hard-fought, territory often gained by feet, not miles, and battle lines shifting by the week.  It was an ordinary war.

It was not until Vietnam when the spectacle of war again appeared.  F-16 jet fighters were once again Apocalyptic as they rained terror down from the skies.  The destruction was Biblical and epic.

Despite Hinduism’s image as one of shanti, Om, and peace, its mythology is based on endless cycles of destruction and rebirth.  The goddess Kali is the Destroyer and the god Siva dances for its rebirth.

Despite our intentions to end war and to progress towards a peaceful, accommodating, compassionate, and respectful Utopia, brutal, bloody, insensate conflicts will – as always – exist.   How can millennia of violent, aggressive, brutal, human history not be of relevance? Genghis Khan is more expressive of human nature than Jesus Christ ever was.

The Old Testament, of course, reads in parts like the chronicles of Genghis Khan.  Yahweh having seen how badly the Garden of Eden turned out, destroyed the world in the Flood.   When the world repopulated and returned to its evil ways, God sent a message to the sinful.  He destroyed the entire populations of Sodom and Gomorrah – men, women, children, and babies – in a vengeful, murderous purge.  That too did not work, and he sent Jesus to deal with a seemingly irremediable world.  His message of love, compassion, and brotherhood went unheeded, and the world now is no different than it ever was.  God anticipated this, of course, and vowed to destroy the entire universe in a fiery inferno.

So Genghis Khan, the Crusades, Sodom and Gomorrah, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the firebombing of Dresden, the napalming of Vietnam, and the nuclear intentions of rogue states are all part of the same, predictable scenario.  The comic books of the Fifties were not aberrations but prophetic.  It would not be aliens who would destroy the world, but ourselves.  The same inevitability, the same destiny.

A few years back American boys played with He-man figures and created out of imagination and popular lore their own existential battles.

Hindu philosophy teaches cycles of destruction and regeneration as the natural order, but the destruction is much more human than the regeneration.  Nietzsche believed that an expression of pure Will – one beyond morality, beyond good and evil – is the only thing that validates our humanity.  The F-16 fighter pilot raining terror from the skies, the panther man ripping the throat out of his enemy, or Genghis Khan, Nietzsche’s perfect Superman rampaging his way through the civilized world, are all very much like us all.

Although we may live in a quiet, orderly, predictable world, there is something violently primitive still in us all; and as much as we talk about peace, community, and diversity, we cannot ignore it.

Our religions have become tame and tepid compared to the animistic and supremely powerful religions of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, where the Zapotecs worshiped thunder, lightning, earthquakes, and violent storms and sacrificed their own to appease their gods. Our wars have become tame, remote, and surgical. Acts of human will and expressions of pure power are – for the time being – things of the past. 

This period of temperance, judicious political restraint cannot last,  Our lust for violence, our blood lust, sanctioned by acts of war must be satisfied and it soon will be. The New Age has tried to tame such lust, and boys are encouraged not to destroy things but to build them – trucks, cranes, and bulldozers are sought-after toys by concerned parents – but little boys find ways to engage the trucks in battle, to crash them, overturn them, and destroy them.  It’s in our genes.

Sex And The Liberal Woman - Hidden Desire For The Unfeminized Beast

Bettina Campbell thought she knew what's what until her neighbor flew an oversized American flag.  Putney Meadows, the leafy Washington neighborhood that had been solidly progressive for as long as she could remember, now had an apostate living right next door.  Or course he could simply be expressing his patriotism, his love of country, and solid Americanism, but in these days of Donald Trump and the miasma of right wing political infection, there could be no such thing.  Flying the American flag was nothing more than a Make America Great Again banner. 

Bettina had suspected as much when she met her neighbor taking out the trash and commiserated with him about 'the ballroom', the garish monstrosity that Donald Trump was planning to build in the White House, a travesty of history, an obtuse, bourgeois claim to faux culture, and a gross obscenity.  She was surprised when he did not rise to the occasion, but merely smiled, commented on the weather, and asked Bettina about her rose garden. 

'Silence is complicity' was the sign posted on her front lawn, and here was a clear case of it.  Her neighbor simply by deflecting the ballroom comment and turning to innocuousness, showed his true colors - a right wing zealot, an apostate, and a traitor right here in Putney Meadows. She had been right about the flag all along.

'I had a chat with our neighbor', Bettina mentioned to her husband over dinner that night.  'You know the one, the flag one', and without waiting for his response, she went into her now familiar screed about the idiocy of Donald Trump.  This time, however, there was something more to her usual fluid stream of hatred.  Never in a hundred years did she expect a Trump supporter to live in the neighborhood, let alone next door.  How was she expected to deal with such an intrusion?

Her husband said that he didn't know what the fuss was about. The neighbor parked courteously, was careful to recycle his trash, smiled, waved, and brought over fresh figs from his garden. His political beliefs were his affair. 

This of course did not satisfy Bettina who felt the presence of the neighbor was a blight, as bad as a crack house next door, an unwanted, uncivilized, brutish, brooding presence that destroyed the comity of the block and the neighborhood. 

From that moment onward she hovered, waiting for another chance to confront her neighbor.  She tried to be outside when he went to work and came home, looked out the back window on trash pickup day to catch him in the alley, tended her rose garden when she heard voices in the yard next door; but no dice. She was not up to full frontal confrontation - there was a certain sense of propriety in the neighborhood borne of good breeding and education - but was tempted when all her more surreptitious attempts at contact failed. 

Susie Brandon was the woman who knew everything - who lived where, what they did for a living, how the marriage was progressing, whether children were on the way, what schools they went to, what cars they drove etc.  She wasn't actually a busybody, just an interested, community minded neighbor to whom all went for gossip.  How did Judge Fuller die? Is that Marge Adams' second or third marriage, etc. 

So Bettina went to Susie about her neighbor.  What did she know about him?  Now, Bettina, mindful of the neighborhood ethos of goodwill, was tentative and careful in her questioning, but her intent was clear.  Was the neighbor a right wing Trump supporter or not?

Susie said she had no idea.  The flag and the Lexus parked out front were some indications of Republicanism, but beyond that she was unwilling to say. 'Invite them over', she suggested. 

Bettina had of course thought of that, but was afraid of what she might find out.  It was one thing to suspect or surmise one's political affiliation, another altogether to be faced undeniably with it.  No, invitations would not do. The truth would crack the polity of a well-constructed, politically solid neighborhood and better to let sleeping dogs lie than to rile them up. 

Now, it turned out that the neighbor was actually a charming, polite, and articulate man who clearly loved women.  Even in the first alley-trash encounter, Bettina felt his affection and personal interest.  After so long married to the same man and after years in the progressive trenches, she was surprised at her response to her neighbor's quite obvious sexual interest.  

This of course added to her confusion.  Sexual responsiveness towards a political traitor would be capitulation to the Devil, an insidious and unforgiveable lapse of integrity.  However once the flame had been lit, she couldn't deny that her political interest in outing an apostate was merely a cover for something far more pertinent although inexpressible. 

'Conservatives make good lovers' was the meme on the street, a happy-go-luck t-shirt logo worn on the tennis court or mowing the lawn but as in most hyperbole and fancy there is some truth.  Liberal men fall over themselves to respect, honor, and defer to women.  Lovemaking is progressive method acting: 'May I? Can I? Would it be OK if...' and all the rest of the mile markers set up by No Means No women.  There would be no male forwardness in the bedroom of sensitized women. Men would be brought to heel and kept there at women's beck and call. 

Of course most women were sick and tired of such sycophantism and faux demeanor.  They wanted to fucked royally not mollycoddled and deferred to like the Virgin Mary.  It was conservative men who had never bought into the feminist cant, gender inquiry, and pedestal thinking of their progressive colleagues, and who believed that women were to be had, no different from any other desirable item in the marketplace. 

Although women like Bettina publicly raged at such insensate, bullying, intimidating behavior, they privately wanted men like this....men like Bettina's neighbor. 

The cat-and-mouse game continued for a month or two.  Both parties knew the outcome but were willing to play dutiful suitor and coy maiden.  As they grew closer Bettina, began to see that her neighbor was 'not that bad' - his radical conservatism, under the soft lighting of the Jefferson Suite at the Fairfax, did not seem quite so noxious; and it was that joyous epiphany which changed her mind.  She was no longer a one-issue woman.  Not everyone had to pass muster, pass through her political filter, to be acceptable. Political anger was draining, debilitating, and counter-productive.  Politics described but did not define. 

It is hard to keep up let alone leave off a sexual liaison with a next door neighbor, but Bettina and her lover were civilized people; and when the affair was over, they still managed neighborliness and good will. 

Every so often, when she saw his wife leave for work in the morning, she was tempted to slip in the back door and rekindle the affair, but she demurred.  Better leave that one in the rearview mirror.  There would be others now that she had rid herself of the limiting political sieve through which men had had to pass.