Madoff made me do it
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
My friend Paul is playing Bernard Madoff in an upcoming movie.
He’s been interviewed by everybody because of the role, and the intense interest the world has in one of the great conmen of all time.
He’s very angry at the rip-off and has been quoted at saying nobody has done more damage to the Jewish community than Madoff since Hitler.
This is an uncomfortable metaphor for me because Madoff didn’t set out to extinguish a race of people, but to rip off those who trusted him most.
Madoff did not rob them at gunpoint the way the Nazis did the Jews in Eastern Europe or force the Jewish population into Ghettos, then into work camps, and then eventually into gas chambers.
As with all classic con games, Madoff allowed his victims to lure themselves into his web, promising them at first a moderate rate of return that gradually grew into something quite unreasonably high considering the economy. People flocked to him to get their piece of the action, other investors seeking to look good in the eyes of their own clients invested in him, too.
But somewhere someone along the line must have thought all this was just too good to be true.
I don’t mind greedy people getting taken. I do mind, however, that irresponsible investors for well-established charities dumped their funds into Madoff’s pockets.
The question remains who is the most responsible: Madoff, who set up the scam, or those who let their greed get the better of their common sense and plunged into the scheme with eyes wide open?
********
I walked through Hoboken yesterday just to check on the progress of the city.
I first worked in Hoboken in the mid-1970s as a truck driver when I had to carry a baseball bat to keep from being mugged.
Things are far less violent these days, although the real rip off is under the radar as contractors and developers prospect here for gold.
I suppose I should have seen the change coming in the early 1980s when I got involved with the arts scene here. But the city still had a raw enough edge to feel comfortable, and the pod-people (as I refer to college grads who have since moved in – based on the movie The Invasion of the Body Snatchers) hadn’t yet found Hoboken nice enough to live in.
People still feared cities enough to seek out suburbs to inhabit, leaving cheap rents for artists and other marginal people.
My mistake moving into Hoboken in 1992 was thinking this still the case, when in reality the world had changed, and the population shift that had spread out across Northern Jersey like the results of a big bang was contracting again, driving out the poor for all urban areas.
So I moved into Hoboken to find my neighbors had become insufferable snobs, people who saw me as a hillbilly or a hippie, and wanted nothing to do with me.
Now, everything I liked about Hoboken is gone, old buildings becoming new buildings, and poor people who weren’t murdered by convenient fires forced to flee because the wealthy developers got the ear of the federal government and altered welfare laws to expire in time to turn affordable housing into luxury tenements for new arrivals.
I suppose I missed another important indicator when I moved in and the classic coffee cup from Maxwell’s was demolished. Now, even the building is gone as if the culture of hard work that helped shape Hoboken and other industrial urban areas never existed.
While hard work and manual labor have never been respected among America’s elite, we no longer have that labor as the backbone of the American economy. Instead, we have a collection of college graduates each seeking to become a manager, a player, someone powerful on the world stage. It all reminds me of that old saying when I was a kid: “All chiefs no Indians.”
*********
I’ve been trying to put together recollections from my college days.
It scares me to think after 30 years I have finally gotten enough perspective to begin—whole chapters of people’s lives now laid before me like an open book – where we came from, where we went, and how most of us failed to live up to what we aspired to become when we were young and hopeful.