In the same way that the 50’s ended and the 60’s began when John Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, the 1990’s ended on September 11, 2001. --But what of the decade that followed – the decade with no easy nickname. The aughts? The O’s? Whatever it is or will be called, the first decade of the twenty-first century ended prematurely this past autumn with the fall of Lehman Brothers and the threat posed by AIG’s possible collapse. Perhaps it will be known as the Decade of the Scam. Not all the scams that have been discovered have had the enormity of the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme, nor had Allen Stanford’s cache, but a week barely goes by without a new scam being revealed. They are epidemic.
If we expand the definition of “scam” a bit, it will be impossible to paint the past decade as anything but a fertile ground that nurtured a valley of scams. It has been a decade of calling a spade a diamond. If the media agrees that the spade is a diamond, then it becomes, in fact, a diamond. Bill Moyers (www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/btw/watch.html) made that abundantly clear in his television show explaining how the weapons of mass destruction allegations became facts in the buildup to the Iraqi war eight short years ago. Moyer’s show is must watch tv, even now, five years after the fact (and is still available on line, I believe). Perhaps the roots of manipulating perception can even be traced to Bill Clinton’s infamous, “It depends on what you mean by the word ‘is’” defense. There are no shortages of examples. The Bush administration’s legal argument about torture is possibly the final word on this phenomena. You know the argument by now. It went something very much like “the President of the United States does not condone torture. The President sanctions waterboarding. Therefore, waterboarding is not torture.”
Some might call it simply good “spin doctoring” but whatever you might call it, the result is The Decade of Scam. Anything goes, as long as you can call it something else. I want to put that phrase in the past tense, make it “everything went” instead of everything goes. But I’m not feeling quite that optimistic. At some point, a spade is a spade no matter what you call it. Perhaps in this next decade we will figure that out.
By Myron Gushlak
