Did you know that in Enron’s home town of Houston they regard the Enron collapse as a tragedy rather than an example of capitalist rascals at work?
A Democratic friend seemed surprised that this was so. After all, if you read the New York Times every day you likely think that the Enron fraud was hatched in the offices of Halliburton and signed off by then-Governor Bush in Austin.
Of course, Democrats don’t realize that Republicans feel just as angry as they do about Enron. And Republicans don’t just feel outraged by Enron’s frauds. We also feel betrayed, because we know that there are many Democrats just waiting to blame Republicans and the whole capitalist system when a corporation like Enron collapses. And also hurts because we know that Democrats will be trying to stampede some new regulatory burden on business.
No doubt Democrats have been wondering all along when the fix would be in on Enron. When were Enron’s corrupt Republican friends going to bail them out? Well, it looks like the Republicans’ God stepped in and did the dirty deed.
Columnist Peggy Noonan reminds us that there is another aspect to all this.
Ken Lay, Enron CEO and convicted felon died this week of a massive heart attack. But he also died of a broken heart.
His life was broken and would never be healed. Or if it was to be healed it would happen while he was imprisoned, for the rest of his life, with four walls to look at. All was wreckage around him.
Deserved as his conviction for fraud might be, he was also a human. And Noonan recalls a friend who remarked how hard we humans are on each other. How we are all little pirates, and how we are more breakable than we know.
Jennifer Roback Morse writes in Love and Economics how
[she] once had a priest tell [her] to kneel in front of the Blessed Sacrament... so that [she] could feel the love of God pour over her.
If you wonder what all the sin and redemption stuff is all about in Christianity think of it this way. It is a way for humans to save themselves when the little pirate in them is broken. When they are in danger of dying from a broken heart.
But Ken Lay is still a crook.
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