Books & Arts

Want to send this page or a link to a friend? Click on mail at the top of this window.

More Books and Arts

Posted December 21, 2008

CRITICS NOTEBOOK

Scandals to Warm To

MATT DORFMAN

By ALESSANDRA STANLEY

I miss the sex. 

The nation is engrossed in an orgy of scandal, a 24-hour cable news burlesque of greed, graft, cronyism and corruption, with appointed villains so lurid and over-the-top they could be characters in “Bleak House.” (Even their names, Madoff and Blagojevich, have a Dickensian ring, like Skimpole or Pardiggle.)

The most salacious news stories pivot on money, not mistresses, prostitutes or toe taps in an airport men’s room. It’s the 10th anniversary of Monicagate and the impeachment of President Clinton, and even the Fox News Channel cannot summon the energy to dwell on Linda Tripp or the semen-stained dress. (At the moment, muckrakers are studying Clinton donors, not doxies.)

The recession has many victims, but one of the least heralded is the collapse of the juicy sex scandal. It seems like ages since anyone cared about John Edwards’s extramarital folderol. Madonna’s divorce settlement is a footnote. Eliot Spitzer is so pre-Fannie Mae.

JUSTIN LANE/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY

Man of the Hour Bernard Madoff is accused of squandering billions in investments

In normal times, sex and celebrity misconduct are the go-to distraction, NC-17 alternatives to grim news developments and natural disasters. Economists have many ways of defining an economic slump, including rising unemployment, falling growth rates and a seesawing stock market. But perhaps the clearest indicator is the scandal factor: when greed trumps lust, and fraud is more fascinating than infidelity, it’s safe to say that the recession has arrived.

Credit is frozen, the stock market looks perilously close to flatlining, and neither politicians nor economists can begin to predict the short- or long-term consequences of $700 billion government bailouts and a national debt topping $10 trillion. The root causes — an impenetrable tangle of derivative securities, heedless lending and binge corporate buyouts — are too vast and uncharted to examine for long. The solutions are insoluble.

It’s easier, and oddly enough, more reassuring, to focus on familiar, old-fashioned swindles and bribes. However grotesque and outsize, Ponzi schemes and Chicago machine shakedowns are comfort scandals — they are suitably horrifying, but not so alien and unprecedented that ordinary taxpayers are afraid to even take a peek. And those lurid misdeeds have all but shoved Internet porn rings, starlet sex tapes and Hollywood breakups off the screen.

Put it this way: on “Dateline” on NBC, Chris Hansen, the star of the “To Catch a Predator” segments, is once again tracking down predators, only this time, Mr. Hansen is not confronting his usual prey — pedophiles who lure children over the Internet. He is after predatory lenders who enticed gullible homebuyers into taking on mortgages they couldn’t afford.

Bernard L. Madoff and Gov. Rod Blagojevich of Illinois, even before their days in court, are twin symbols of crisis-era thievery and corruption, but they cannot be considered scapegoats. Mostly they serve as sexual surrogates: the shady transactions they’re accused of — stamped with a scarlet letterhead — titillate the public the way the naughty escapades of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton once did. But there are plenty of other pecuniary trespasses for viewers to leer at, notably a report on MSNBC news on Thursday, based on a gossip item posted on the Web site The Daily Beast, that told of a recent Hermès shopping spree by Kathleen Fuld, the wife of Richard S. Fuld, the disgraced chief executive of the now defunct Lehman Brothers. (The report said her purchases included three $2,225 cashmere throws.)

The MSNBC story suggested that Mrs. Fuld and her ilk have taken to asking store clerks to place their luxury items in plain, unmarked shopping bags to avoid the sneers of passers-by. And, if true, for good reason: in today’s sans-culottes climate, names like Hermès and Prada are so sinful that even news personalities feel compelled to disavow them. After the “secret shopper” story was shown, the MSNBC anchor Tamron Hall corrected the reporter’s pronunciation of Hermès (“air-mess”), then quickly denied any firsthand knowledge of the shop.

“I only learned it on ‘Oprah,’ ” Ms. Hall said hurriedly. “That is the store that wouldn’t let Oprah Winfrey in, in Paris; that’s my sole exposure to Hermès.”

Class resentment is all the rage. Drug abuse and divorce were until recently the usual focus points for gossip about the Kennedys. Now, Caroline Kennedy is under tabloid attack, but the charge is presumption: even on TV, commentators openly scoff at her brief, somewhat stilted tour of upstate New York and complain that she is seeking appointment to public office with a queenly sense of entitlement. (And it’s not unfair to note that her request for a Senate seat, on the heels of her crucial endorsement of Barack Obama, carries a whiff of Chicago quid pro quo — Blagojevichism with better manners.)

It won’t last forever, of course. Exposés of financial chicanery will lose their novelty, less colorful chiselers will take the stage (or the tumbril), and someday soon enough, sex scandals will be back (ideally, with a Wall Street C.E.O. canoodling with call girls on his soon-to-be repo-ed company jet on his way to an about-to-go-bankrupt luxury resort in St. Barts).

At the moment, however, taxpayers are full of wrath at slothful S.E.C. regulators; they envy bosses of bailed-out companies who are taking home bonuses. Ordinary folks are revolted by the gluttony of high-flying A.I.G. executives wining and dining their way through bankruptcy, and offended by prideful car industry executives who take private jets to beg Congress for alms.

The seventh deadly sin has fallen by the wayside.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company. Reprinted from The New York Times, Week in Review, of Sunday, December 21, 2008. 

Wehaitians.com, the scholarly journal of democracy and human rights

More from wehaitians.com

Main / Columns / Books And Arts / Miscellaneous