Bob Crespo

Well? That mouse ain’t gonna click itself. Get busy!

Puppets make poor companions. On the other hand, they don’t complain much.

There was a bunch of guys in North America on a hot Fourth of July 233 years ago who did something crazy. They declared independence from the most powerful empire on earth and announced that the new nation they would form would have no king but would instead be run by the people by popular vote. That hadn’t occurred to anybody since 500 B.C. when the Greeks invented democracy. Theirs didn’t last all that long and in the 2,226 intervening years kings and emperors ruled the world, generally making a bloody mess of things. Government of the people, by the people and for the people was a notion that had been mentioned only in hypothetical terms, usually pretty quietly too until those crazy English colonists had the balls to say the hell with it, we’re doing it. Fuck the king! Before that, nobody said fuck the king, at least not out loud.

Of course the king sent in the Marines, who tried to rain down holy hell on the rebels and the War For Independence lasted 8 long years with the English racking up most of the victories. Except the final one, which shocked the world that these colonists had actually defeated the British Empire with a ragtag army of farmers, merchants, craftsmen and clerks led by a hemp farmer from Virginia. That farmer, a fellow named Washington, was elected President of America and before long the stunningly beautiful words in the Declaration of Independence were fleshed out into The United States Constitution, those two documents still remaining the gold standard for political manifestos and declarations of universal human rights. That said, just let me conclude with this:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY AMERICA, THE COOLEST, MOST FUN, MOST FREE AND MOST BADASS PLACE ON EARTH! HAPPY 4TH OF JULY!

When bagpipes keen, the handmaiden weeps. That means absolutely nothing but it sure sounds like ancient Celtic wisdom. Beware the impenetrable and obscure. Listen instead to things that make sense.

Do more guys than the average who smoke cigars all the time have a big fat lower lip? Has anybody else noticed this, or is it just me? And what came first, the big fat lower lip or the constant cigar smoking?

Do all operas end when the fat lady sings? In case I ever go to one, I’d like to be sure that’s my cue to leave. Wouldn’t want to commit a faux pas at the opera house and embarrass the lovely wife. And if that is the case, doesn’t that sort of put a lot of pressure on opera composers to tailor their stories so that they are always summed up by the fat lady? Seems like an odd choice of a narrative device. Or is it just me?

Is it just me or does anyone else notice that the bigger the SUV, the more “Support The Troops” and “God Bless America” stickers it has plastered on its rear end. Could it be that drivers of extra-large vehicles love our nation more than the rest of us?

Speaking of cars, there’s the other extreme, a teeny tiny little one called the “Smart Car” plying the nation’s highways, just a tad bigger than a bread box and just about as sturdy looking. It looks like you could store it in your hall closet when you’re done driving for the day. When you see one in heavy traffic you can’t help but wonder how smart it is to rub elbows with all the giant SUV’s and their patriotic bumper stickers wrapped in only a couple of hundred pounds of plastic and light steel. Doesn’t seem all that smart, or safe. Or is is just me?

Does anybody ever win anything playing all those video games that are eating up billions of man hours per year? Are there valuable prizes at stake? Big dough, maybe? A quick glance at the objects of the games and the complete foolishness of the whole enterprise seems to indicate that no one would  willingly waste their valuable lives in such a manner unless there was some worthwhile reward involved. Is that what’s going on, or is it just me who doesn’t get it?

Is it just me, or am I the only one on the planet who doesn’t care who gets custody of Michael Jackson’s children? Seems like there’s no shortage of family members and genetically related donors and surrogates who can step in and do the right thing. They are, after all, just 3 kids out of billions and billions of them on this earth, with nothing especially interesting about them except their eccentric genius of a father, who’s gone now. So now they are just 3 fabulously wealthy kids looking for someone to give them a home. Line forms to the left.

Then there’s the people in this world who’s reaction to Michael Jackson’s death was to worry about the animals in his private zoo. Is it just me, or is that sort the very last thing you’d worry about when a family suffers a tragic loss?  Custody of Bubbles the Chimp just doesn’t seem like much of passion-stirring cause. Who gets the ape’s expensive jewelry might be interesting, though.

Is it just me or do a lot of the Cable TV commentators seem like they are about to burst a blood vessel? Life seems pretty much the same as it’s always been, give or take a few changes here and that’s just part of life, the usual ups and downs and comings and goings. Why are these guys so angry all the time? Did someone key the side of their limos or something? Hide their sedatives? When you’re angry at everything, how can you tell what’s important to them? Is there some sort of secret meter I don’t know about that lets viewers know what’s really important to these people and what’s just regular stuff, maybe a forehead vein color chart or something?

Winter is for work and endurance, Spring is for rebirth and renewal, Summer is for sweet abandon and Autumn is for change and preparation. There is joy and beauty in all our seasons. Life is good and the world is our friend and teacher.

Here at The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious (DOPOTO), we notice that our efforts at pointing out the 800 pound gorilla in the room are being appreciated, if by appreciated you can include being copied. It is often said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so today’s report is a salute to those people and organizations who have joined DOPOTO in noticing the nose on their faces.

First up is former United States Supreme Leader Shotgun Dick Cheney, who just pointed out that the Iraq war may have been a waste. Coming on the heels of his admission that he authorized the invasion of Iraq for no particular reason at all, The Department is wondering if he applying for a job here. For a man who said precious little for public consumption during his 8 years in charge of America, he’s become absolutely chatty of late, appearing on television almost as much as Donald Trump and actually being candid about his zeal for torture, conquest and tyranny. His passionate defense of these causes he worked so hard for is refreshing, or at least as refreshing as a sneering little ex-tyrant with more man-made parts than human flesh can possibly be.

Also joining the movement of pointing out the forest for the trees is the world’s press corp. When Michael Jackson died they wasted no time pointing out that the man was somewhat bizarre. All we can say is - well done, Einstein! While DOPOTO’s official position on Mr. Jackson is that he was a pop music genius who’s music will long outlast his eccentricities, the world’s media outlets have outdone themselves in ghoulish vampire reporting. There is no aspect of the man’s life, death or family that is sacred to news hounds who feel it is in the best interests of the world to read about what he ate for breakfast the day he died (turns out it was a heaping bowl of pills). It appears that the American and British practice of claiming complete public ownership of the lives of famous people has spread throughout the world. More’s the pity. Dignity, already an endangered species among the living, is now being stripped from the dead.

Of all people, paleontologists have jumped on the pointing-out-the-obvious bandwagon. Science, more of a quest for elusive truths than a venue for observing the readily apparent, is welcome into the fold. What brought this on was a visit by paleontologists (basically dinosaur bone scientists) to something called The Creationist Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. On display were dinosaur bones from  various prehistoric epochs, correctly labeled by the period in which they lived; Jurassic, Cretaceous, etc. Pretty surprising for Creationists. Not so shocking, however, is their assertion of when all these dinosaurs died out, the exact same year: 2348, B.C. Must have been quite the tumultuous year, that one.

The only problem being, the scientists pointed out, is that carbon dating exists, dating these bones at many millions of years old. Also, early human records are available for those times, sketchy though they are, yet none of them remarked on the sudden disappearance of giant lizards from the neighborhood. One would think that would be a fairly memorable occurrence, no? And in none of the accurate and startlingly vivid cave drawings made by early humans are any giant lizards portrayed, instead depicting wooly mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, giant bears and caribou. None of which moves Creationists from backing off their assertion that the earth is just over 6,000 years old instead of the generally accepted 4.5 billion years old. Which is just fine, since none of them are in a position of any authority in scientific circles, their beliefs being nothing more than a curious amusement for others.

So much for our imitators. Now for an original DOPOTO report on evolution: Humans are rapidly evolving into a completely interdependent species, with no one human being able to live and function without the interaction and input of other human beings, more like a hive than a group of independent individuals. While barely a hundred years and fifty ago many humans mastered whatever technology was required to carve out and live a successful life on their own, today’s technological knowledge is so vast that it has become compartmentalized into countless specialties, with no one man or woman having the full knowledge of what it takes to function as everyone else does. And it goes far beyond the fact that few people can drive a stick-shift anymore. In our relatively recent past, men and women could build homes, make clothing, attend to births, domesticate animals, hunt, trap, raise crops, dig wells, travel, build boats, preserve food, communicate and trade with others.

While life was simpler, harder and shorter back then, it was possible to exist without the benefit of a greater society and still enjoy a comparable lifestyle. No more. While specialization was always a trend for social creatures like ourselves, the Industrial Revolution put it into high gear, with the knowledge available growing exponentially year by year. Now with the nearly overwhelming explosion of data that has come cascading down on all of us in this Information Age, knowledge and specialization becomes even more compartmentalized. Few of us can build a boat or a car or a communication device of any sort. There are other people who do that, usually a great many of them working together, with none of them possessing all the knowledge necessary to complete the task. Only as a team can these things be built. We can no more figure out how to receive a satellite transmission on our own than we can singlehandedly pave our own street. The whole point being, is that human evolution is occurring before our eyes and we’re missing it.

We look for extra appendages or increased brain size and function or some new internal organ, all the while missing the irrefutable fact that mankind is changing rapidly with what we already have: our brains and our supreme adaptability. Our youngest generation is coming of age as comfortable with computers and high technology as they are with puppies, and are learning to think and process information differently from previous generations. Maybe the coming millennia will bring physical changes, maybe not. Already our senses of sight, smell and hearing are less sharp than they once were since we’re not ducking predators all the time. As always, life goes on. Different, challenging, confusing and new, but human life  in all its glory, evolving right here, right now. This has been a report from The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious.

No one can explain love, or why anybody loves anyone or anything. Which is fine. Why ruin a beautiful thing with some dry scholarly explanation?

So, Bernie Madoff gets the max, 150 years in jail and forfeiture of every penny he has, and then some. He was ordered by the judge to cough up $171 billion smackeroos in restitution, a sum even Bill Gates can’t cover. Everybody knows the thousands of victims of his Ponzi scheme will never recover anything but pennies on the dollar and that Bernie won’t live for all that much of his sentence, what with him being in his 70’s and all, but the judge felt that a message had to be sent. Not the message that people with tens of millions of dollars to invest definitely know better than to hand their dough to a guy promising gangster loan shark interest rate numbers as a return on their investments and when they do so they are knowingly aiding and abetting a crime.

No, no that message. The message is; don’t mess with rich people’s dough! That’s why bank robbers get sentenced to 30 years while those who rob grocery stores get maybe 8 or 10 years, tops, as long as no bloodshed is involved. While Bernie Madoff wasn’t at all violent and even had the enthusiastic cooperation of a great many of his victims, he chose to rip off the very wealthy. None of them will be prosecuted for knowingly investing in a pyramid scheme. They will suffer a horrible fate nonetheless: most of them will be just regular rich instead of fabulously rich. One lady even looked for sympathy because she had to sell her $48,000 fur coat. Get out the hankies and violins.

Take his lovely wife Ruth Madoff, for example. She just cut a deal with prosecutors allowing her to keep “only” $2.5 million dollars. Most of the world (my hand is raised, thank you) would jump at that deal, but Mrs. Madoff acts like she has been sentenced to live in a corrugated tin shack with no plumbing and eat cold gruel for the rest of her life. Not exactly. While she won’t be living in a Manhattan penthouse worth tens of millions of dollars anymore, getting two and a half million won’t exactly place her in the position of having to get on line at the next government cheese handout. Even putting that dough in the bank at the paltry interest rate of 2 and a quarter percent would yield her an annual income of $62,500 before taxes, well above the national average. Add her social security to that and she’ll be just fine; well fed, properly housed, medically insured and quite comfortable. No tragedy there.

The tragedy is the non-fabulously wealthy people Madoff ripped off, honest workers who scrimped and saved and trusted their nest egg to a thief and are now near destitute as they face old age. Then there’s the people who trusted other financial planners with their fortunes, people you expect to actively manage your money prudently and not hand it over to a guy they had to know was running a scam. Are any of these finance professionals facing criminal charges, or at the very least industry sanctions for abandoning their responsibilities to their clients for a fast buck? While many of them are being sued for malfeasance and corruption or scamming or whatever the legal term is for stealing a whole lot of money as opposed to stealing a more modest amount, so far prosecutors are acting like they cracked the case completely with the sentencing of Madoff.

But who knows? Maybe the District Attorney’s office has more indictments up its sleeve. It’s hard to believe that Madoff pulled this off with no accomplices other than his greedy rich clients trying to earn double the going rate on their money. There had to be a lot of high ranking people in his office who were in on the scam. What about his secretary? Secretaries know everything about the businesses where they work. You’d hate to see a low paid working stiff go to jail, but what if that low paid working stiff aided and abetted a huge crime? Then there would be the other executives in Madoff’s firm, really rich guys like himself who may or may not be claiming they were as surprised as the rest of the world that the company they helped run was a neatly wrapped box of air. The DA is playing followup indictments and charges close to the vest.

But the bottom line is that the rich really, really hate giving up any of their dough. Every dollar they spend makes them a dollar less rich. That’s the mindset that led Wall Street to become an entire culture of Bernie Madoffs, as greedy and unscrupulous a bunch of louts as Ebenezer Scrooge. They ruined the good names and the very existence of respected companies that had been doing honest business for many decades, some of them for over a century. These were companies and individuals who made great fortunes playing it straight, following the rules and reaping the rewards of being at the highest levels of the one of the most rewarding businesses on earth.

All they were asked to do was not fuck it up. This was the golden goose that would provide them and their descendants with fabulous livings forever. Just don’t fuck it up! Not a lot to ask. But greed is a powerful force, one all human beings have to one degree or another, even though we know it’s wrong. Half the laws we have on the books are aimed at curbing greed. “Thou shalt not steal” is a prominent early example. But in recent years, beginning with Ronald Reagan de-clawing the regulatory agencies overseeing the people who handle everybody’s money, greed became fashionable. Fast forward twenty two years to Bush the Younger and Shotgun Dick Cheney getting elected, and they ratcheted up greed to official government policy.

They actively gutted the financial regulatory agencies by underfunding them and not hiring replacement personnel when people retired. Then they implemented the most massive peacetime transfer of wealth from the working classes to the super wealthy in human history in the form of tax cuts. It got to the point of having less than 1% of the population owning the majority of the nation’s wealth. Then of course it all blew up in everybody’s face and the government was forced to bail out these greedy pricks to the tune of trillions of tax dollars, which they then proceeded to blow on hookers and Picassos until a few of them got their asses fired.

And the rest of them still don’t really get it, they just toe the line to avoid jail. Neither does Madoff get it, who thought 12 years in the slammer and a hundred dollar fine sounded okay to him. The judge disagreed and gave him 150 years, only because he wasn’t allowed to give him a thousand. Bernie needs some company in the form of Wall Street felons in prison, his fellow greed heads, people who were in essence handed America on a silver platter and asked only that they not fuck it up. They weren’t handed a seedy currency exchange booth in an open air bazaar in some desert nation, but the gleaming towers of Wall street, private jets, mansions, exotic vacation homes and trophy wives. They were modern day princes and nicknamed themselves “Masters of The Universe.”

And yet this was not enough. They wanted Bill Gates money, all of  them, even though they had invented nothing, and they lied, cheated and stole to make it happen, very nearly taking the entire country down with them when their house of cards collapsed. Mr. Madoff was merely the most audacious and conspicuous of the thieves. And just maybe Madoff did the country a favor for being so public a greedy asshole. The credit card companies and banks have been quietly ripping off poor and working class people for decades with usurious rates and hidden fees, but Bernie mostly targeted the very wealthy, and when you go after rich people’s money, the shit hits the fan big time. The whole world watched this tawdry saga unfold. And now Madoff gets the max, waiting for some his colleagues to join him.

Maybe they can form a new prison gang, selling cigarettes, drugs and shivs to their fellow inmates at outrageously high prices. Call themselves the Ex-Billionaires or  Masters of The Universe or something catchy like that. That will probably go over with the tattooed and muscular lifers about as well as a 3 day lock down and before long these bankers and CEOs will be doing the laundry and cleaning the cells of guys named Big Jamal, One-Eyed Freddy and Vinny The Neck. Then perhaps the rest of the financial services community will get it though their heads that greed isn’t good.

Maybe they’ll figure they’ll just have to eke out a living somehow on their million dollar salaries and pay their taxes like everyone else. It’s either that or One Eyed Freddy. From a lot of us who have a hard time working up any hatred for a guy who never did anything to us since we didn’t have enough dough for him to steal, thanks Bernie! You’ve done your nation a service. In a pretty shitty way, but a service just the same. You’ve brought the world’s attention to the biggest ring of thieves that ever lived. Let’s make Bernie just the first of many members of the Ex-Billionaires prison gang.

If you are an idiot, don’t complain about other idiots. With any luck, they’re even dopier than you and you’re the one who comes up smelling like a rose.