Sympathy for a conman

 

March 12, 2009

 

The wind is up today, blowing plastic bags across the street as I walk back to the office carrying my coffee.

March always confuses me, especially early on, because I forget the first half is still technically winter, and I expect warmth.

I remember when I moved into my Passaic apartment in 1978, and stayed over night without a blanket, forgetting the March 1 isn’t May 1, and I nearly froze.

Being on the cusp always puts me in a strange mood – not quite nostalgic, though I feel some of that, too, remembering other years and how I felt, always anticipating some great change of life to come with the change of season.

Yesterday, I heard Neil Diamond’s “Song sung blue” for the first time in years.

Hank and I always believed it was the harbinger of great change, seemingly negative at first, but always significant and eventually an important change.

I’ve stopped believing in omens.

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The news is hot with reports of Madoff heading off the court.

These minute by minute broadcasts are as bad as those associated with OJ Simpson.

But it is always slight of hand.

While media keeps us focused on crooks like Madoff, we get Verizon and Citibank picking our pockets.

Earl Morgan bemoaned the loss of daily newspapers when I spoke with him the other day, but the truth is, news has ceased to function as a watch dog, and so we have corporations adopting practices that would make the Mafia blush.

But as my one time accountant pointed out, the mafia is pure capitalism, including its ruthlessness.

And Americans carry this concept farther than anybody, mistaking greed and selfishness for freedom.

Madoff like most conmen show up greedy people for what they are, and there is a perverted justice in seeing him outwit the most greedy people on the planet.

But there is a price to pay for this. In America, you can steal all you want from the very poor, but never the very rich.

The rich have the power to get even when the poor do not.

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I spent hours yesterday listening to old tapes of the band.

I have a remarkable collection that covers more than 30 years of live performance, and I figure – since I’m such a terrible musician – I’ll use some of these as the sound track to my videos.

But if anything made me nostalgia, the tapes did, since I can hear myself and the voices of people no longer on the stage of life talking in the background, people I once cared about, and care about again – such as Hank and Rob, voices haunting me now like ghosts, as if saying from those times that there will come a time when we shall meet once more, to rehash past lives, and perhaps if the Buddhists are right, we shall live again.