We’ve all heard of “the old boys’ network,” and have counseled that “you get along by going along,” and that while "taking up arms against a sea of troubles and by thus opposing end them" has its adherents (though Macbeth wasn’t thrilled at his outcome) more often than not, “you can’t fight City Hall.”
You can call it grease, greed, graft-payola has a thousand names and a very long tradition, but no matter the rationalization, corruption is corruption and once you start down the road to perdition, your momentum propels you forward.
Just past the midway mark of the last century, John F. Kennedy, whom we elected President in 1960 and then murdered in the autumn of 1963, observed: “communism has never come to power in a country that was not disrupted by war or corruption or both.”
Considering the number of off-camera police actions into which we’ve injected our armed forces and the eye-roll shoulder shrug reaction when we hear of more institutional dysfunction in the public sector designed to do one thing that seemingly do so much of something else, maybe we can start practicing to call one another Comrade. My evil twin, Skippy, is not keen on the idea but will warm to it in time I’m sure.
I don’t think anyone gets up in the morning saying to her/himself, “I’m going to be the sneakiest, skullduggeriest, slimiest person seen on this planet since yesterday” but somehow it happens and then the next day it’s a little easier, and then in all the days that follow even easier until it’s second nature.
Money, drugs, drink, power, sex-everything under the sun and any variation of the Seven Deadly Sins you can imagine. We have to see it with our own eyes, and for what it is, evil, before we can start to repair and rebuild. It’s kind of a 12 step program of its own and it, too, starts by admitting there’s a problem. Kinda ballsy for someone living in a nation ranked only 16th least corrupt in the world, but, hey, at least, we’re in the Top 20. Gibts viel zu tun, packen wirs an.
-bill kenny
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