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| date | 2001-03-14:14:17 |
| SelfConciousness | I've been thinking about changing the colors of these pages, and even got so far as looking at the config file that'll let me do it, but having looked at them again, I like the look as it is. I might change it in time, but not now. |
| Humans |
There's something about fraud that's fascinating. I've just finished reading Andreas Schroeder's Fakes, Frauds, and Flimflammery, as I'm at home trying to throw off a flu-like bug and needed something undemanding to focus on. It's a companion volume to Schroeder's earlier Scams, Scandals, and Skulduggery and Cheats, Charlatans, and Chicanery. All three books are positively delightful, full of remarkable characters engaged in even more remarkable exploits, all of them immoral and many quite criminal. What's the attraction? A big part of it, I think, is the belief that frauds are profiting from other people's stupidity. Elmyr de Hory, for instance, forged the paintings of well-known post-impressionist painters, selling literally thousands of the damned things over almost two decades after the war, when it was relatively easy to come up with plausible but unverifiable provenances for "newly discovered" work by lately dead artists. One can't help thinking that either one of two things was going on: either his "victims" were paying fair prices for the beautiful paintings they were buying, or idiots were paying inflated prices for the sake of owning a work by a "name" rather than a thing of beauty. It's clear that at least some of de Hory's victims fell into the former category, as they refused to return demonstrably forged work to dealers because they found the esthetic experience of the work rewarding. Several tales of military madness are equally suggestive--if people are so impressed by uniforms that they will let anyone wearing one get away with outrageous things, one can't help wonder who is more morally flawed, the scam artist who assumes a military identity for the relatively harmless goal of personal gain, or the patriot who wilfully kills his fellow-humans whilst "only following orders." Tales of perpetual motion machines and engines that run on water are still current to this very day, as are a variety of financial scams. But the audacity of Schroeder's people is really quite something. The woman who raised herself from near-poverty to profound wealth certainly had many admirable qualities of character that, had she been a man, would have probably not required her to stoop to fraud. Reading theses accounts, a few characteristics of these extravagant scams become apparent.
The failing of Schroeder's subjects is almost always on the middle point--they tend not to realize that they can't fake reality forever. Ten years, yes. Twenty, perhaps. More than that, almost never. Most of them took in millions over the first few years of their scams, and if they'd had the sense to quietly fold up their shop and go home they'd have been able to live well for the rest of their days. But they don't, most of them being inveterate spendthrifts. These are, of course, the ones who get caught. One has to wonder about the ones who don't, and about the ones who commit their frauds legally and in the open. The world is full of organizations who sell entertainment under false auspices that are openly false. Gambling casinos, for instance, are certain to win your money if you play long enough. Psychic hotlines are openly advertised, in this country at least, as "for entertainment purposes only", albeit in fine print. But people still flock to them, expecting not just entertainment but wealth or insight into the future or what-have-you. The trick is to find a way to entertain people that's both honest and lucrative. Then one can have both wealth and the deep happiness that comes from living honestly and well. |
| Reading |
I seem to be on a roll with Churchill, I'm part way into the last volume of his History of the English-Speaking Peoples and putting a little more flesh on my skeletal understanding of early Victorian times. Oddly, the whole series is now out of print, which may be arguable from the point of view of scholarship, but the books serve as an important source of Churchill's own thinking. Given the recent publication of his personal letters, I'd think there'd still be enough interest in this work to warrant it's publication. As he approaches his own time, Churchill becomes noticeably more selective in his use of material. The "Crisis of the Bedchamber", for instance, is passed over by Churchill so lightly that it's both unclear why Melbourne resigned and why the young Queen's childish behavior made that impossible. His treatment of the Chartists as a bunch of disorganized boobies, while probably not unrealistic, doesn't do justice to how they must have looked to the conservatives--always in the majority--of the time. But there are interesting facts to be had as well. After the first reform bill the franchise was extended to around 700,000 men, which Churchill says was about one in six. Prior to that, the figure was not much more than one in ten. History often gets portrayed as a field of downtrodden women and oppressive men, and there's some justice to this portrayal. But it's worth keeping in mind that while 100% of women were denied the vote in Victoria's England, so were more than 80% of the men, who also had the privilege of dying by the thousands in places like Afghanistan and the Crimean Peninsula. This is perhaps the most important thing we can learn from history: a keen appreciation of how lucky we all are to not be in it. And perhaps that appreciation will help us work together to overcome the inequalities and injustices that remain with us to this day. Who knows, maybe one day men will even live as long as women. |