The gorilla in the room

As the U.S. economy seemed ready to go into full meltdown, there was all the usual speculation and debate about causes, reactions, solutions and, of course, blame.

But something has struck me as increasingly curious ever since this financial crisis began in earnest: The number of ways some have found to talk about this without ever mentioning pure, naked greed.



It’s the proverbial gorilla in the room, and yet some of our fellow Americans seem determined to come up with other explanations, any other explanations, except the silk-suited one dragging its hairy, ring-studded knuckles across the floor in front of us.

It’s a classic Occam’s razor issue: The simplest and most obvious explanation is probably the right one. Money was there and now it’s gone. Tens of millions of people have less, and a supernaturally lucky few somehow have way, way more.

It would be stupid to deny that plain bad judgment – some of it, surely, prompted by the best of intentions -- and simple economic bad luck are a big part of the problem.

It’s even stupider to argue that some plain old-fashioned robber barons at the center of all this haven’t known exactly what they were doing.

Like the drooling dimwits who claim people “blamed Bush for a hurricane” in deploring his clueless and callous incompetence after Katrina, there will be those who insist that holding boardroom thieves accountable for this economic disaster is mere scapegoating. The inevitable sanctimonious protests of “class warfare!” will come echoing down from penthouses where there are those who want you to believe class wars can be waged, and economies looted, only from the bottom up.

Wherever this economic crisis proves to be a matter of circumstance or of honest human misjudgment, let all thought of blame be dismissed as moot. Wherever human fingers have been gleefully dipped in the till of the American economy at our expense, let the owners of those fingers rot in prison and fry in hell.

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