A Nation of Excesses Sorely Lacks What Counts
Someone gave me a copy of the Playboy magazine issue that featured the naked women of Enron on the same day that three executives of Adelphia were charged with looting their bankrupt company. I saw a connection.
Not that the executives were posing in the nude or that the Enron women had looted their bankrupt company. That had already been taken care of by others. The connection I made was in terms of excess. The photographs of the women are way over the top, and so is the greed of corporate America.
I’m beginning to feel that we’re in a state of cultural free fall.
Once upon a time, before Howard Stern and Larry Flynt, we were a nation of some subtlety, and managed to contain our lust within certain guidelines. Photographs of women’s breasts, for instance, appeared only in National Geographic, and that was because the women were considered primitive and not aware that they had breasts.
In America, we were, of course, smarter than anyone else and knew, tee-hee, that bust lines existed. But their depictions at first were mostly confined to calendars on the walls of automotive repair shops, until magazines discovered their marketing value.
Deep thinkers like Hugh Hefner came along, and breasts suddenly enjoyed a renaissance of exposure. This made a lot of people so much money that guys like Hustler publisher Flynt figured, hmmm, if boobs can make a million dollars each, the rest of a woman’s erogenous zones must be worth a fortune. And the crotch was born, so to speak.
Which brings us to other big and dirty business.
I don’t know that John Rigas and two of his sons actually did loot Adelphia of $2.3 billion, but the notion that they might have been using company money as a personal piggy bank mirrors a system that is beginning to spin on one word. The word, of course, is greed. And greed, by its very nature, is lust. And it’s littering both Wall Street and Main Street with its victims.
Corporate executives have raked in millions while watching their companies dissolve under them, leaving their employees with pennies by comparison.
A sobering example was an admission by Enron last month that before collapsing, the company paid out an average of $5.3 million to each of its 140 senior officers in bonuses and stock grants. The most collected by each of its 4,200 suddenly jobless employees was less than $10,000. You can make that much posing for Playboy.
When Global Crossing went down last year, its employees lost about $250 million in their pension plan because the money had been invested in Global stock, which melted from a high of $64 a share to a poverty-level 30 cents. But the company did manage to pay $15 million in lump-sum pension payments to its executives.
And WorldCom’s gradual disintegration and ultimate collapse a few days ago took with it $30 billion that large and small pension funds had invested in WorldCom bonds that are now almost worthless.
Dot-com communication and power companies, plus a lot of other American firms, have turned chicanery into a profit business, rewarding those who are members of an executive club, while throwing crumbs to the people who put them there.
I will admit to my own share of the excesses mentioned above. I like looking at photographs of delicately posed, unclothed women. And I like the idea of making enough money to allow our family luxuries we might not otherwise possess.
But the photographs I admire and even drool over occasionally are not those of women in the kind of spread-eagle poses that invite more mockery than lust. And the money I’m paid, to paraphrase that old commercial, is made the hard way: I earn it.
Both the photos in Playboy and the antics of those in corporate America who’ve been shafting the public are indicative of a society in trouble. It isn’t just today’s problem but a legacy we’re leaving our children.
We demand responsibility from our kids, but set no example for them. We ask for accountability from them while they read and hear stories of corporate thievery, shredded documents, company executives hiding behind the 5th Amendment, and blame directed everywhere but where it belongs. No one takes the rap. No one apologizes.
Sex and money are dominating a society that once functioned on trust and sharing. Our cravings have translated to public pornography and corporate larceny, to the extent that Congress is being forced to at least investigate the larceny.
But we’re talking about a political unit whose members and leaders may be part of the problem. Money talks, but what it demands is silence from others.
By any measure, night seems to be falling on a long day of excess. One shudders to think that Lenin could have been right when he predicted the downfall of America not by military force, but by internal greed. That’s beginning to scare me more now than it ever has before.
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Al Martinez’s columns appear Mondays and Thursdays. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.
