Category Archives: Review

True Crime – Columbine

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It’s been ten years since Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris stormed Columbine High School in Jefferson County, Colorado, and killed thirteen people. Dave Cullen has just published the definitive book on the crime titled simply "Columbine". I read through it in less than a day.

Ten years after an event the key part of any retelling of a story is often a reevaluation of facts that we thought we knew: that Harris and Klebold were outsiders, that they targeted jocks and popular kids, that they were part of the trenchcoat mafia, that Cassie Bernall said she believed in God before being shot. Cullen’s task is to deconstruct those myths, most of which were planted by the instant media that surrounded the event, and try to triangulate toward the truth.

Cullen argues forcefully for the thesis that Harris was a psychopath and Klebold was mostly a follower when it came to the actual planning and killing. Klebold was definitely disturbed and depressive but he was more confused by life than actively hating everyone. Klebold’s journals show a painfully shy young man trying to find understanding and love in the world, being rejected and then fatally falling into the orbit of Harris who truly did want to destroy as many people as he could. All of this is supported by the journals and diaries Cullen reviewed.

I already had some inkling that Harris and Klebold were disturbed but I was surprised by the initial plans Harris had made to explode two large bombs in the cafeteria commons in the hope of killing the maximum number of people and then setting two more bombs to explode in the parking lot after the police and paramedics had arrived to kill another wave of victims. Harris was seriously disturbed.

There are some who see the hand of Satan at work in the Columbine killings. Colorado was, and continues to be a hotbed of evangelical Christianity, where the story of Cassie Bernall affirming her faith before death was just too good to pass up. To others it is a case of a psychopath and his companion going on a rampage of death. I think the latter explanation is a bit more comforting, but it still leaves a hole.

Turning YA

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I just finished reading a wonderful short novel "The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy " by Jeanne Birdsall

It is about the summer vacation of a family of four, very independent sisters and their widowed father. They rent a cabin on a large estate in the Berkshire Mountains. During their stay they meet a young boy who lives on the neighboring estate. The boy keeps trying to tell his domineering mother that he wants to study music instead of going to a military academy, but the rambunctious adventures of the four girls keep getting in the way and convince his mother to send him to military school a year early. The boy finally gets his mother to pay attention thanks to the help of the girls and their father. There are strong overtones of Little Women and Madeline L’Engle.

The interesting thing about this choice in novels was how I discovered it. I found it by looking through a list of award winning young adult novels. Over the past six months almost all of my leisure fiction reading has come from the shelves of the young adult section. First there was Philip Pullman’s brilliant Sally Lockhart novels about the steely adventures of a young woman trying to get ahead on her own in Victorian London, then it was Pete Hautman’s Invisible, No Limit, and Godless. I’ve read a few young adult novels on and off over the past 15 years but the bulk of my leisure fiction has been science fiction and fantasy. So what prompted the change?

Whenever I walk into a second hand bookstore, especially one with a good sf/f section that goes back a few decades I’m struck by the slimness of the mass-market paperbacks published during the 1970s and into the early 1980s. Authors like Samuel Delany, Joanna Russ, John Brunner, Barry Malzberg, and Phil Dick churned out short novels on an annual basis. As with all things the quality varied but the time it took to discover the quality of a piece of work was smaller than it is today.

A few months ago I tried to wade through Pandora’s Star by Peter Hamilton, which is over 1000 pages long in paperback and is the first part of a two book series. This is insane. Granted there were some good passages in the book but most of it was endless transporting of characters from one planet to the next in order to setup another confrontation or scene. But the confrontations never amounted to anything, everything was build up. At least until I gave up about 400 pages in. I wasn’t going to spend the hours needed to read 2000 pages for a conclusion that may on may not justify the buildup.

So I’ve left mainstream SF behind and delved into the YA world where I can read a book in a single evening and still get a thrill out of well-crafted characters and interesting plots. Philip Pullman is especially good; his plots in the Sally Lockheart series are easily as baroque as those by Peter Hamilton but they take place in less than half the total verbiage. See John Clute on Hamilton’s latest, The Dreaming Void.

A is for August and Allergies

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Things have been quiet here at EcEc for the last few days. Preparations for the upcoming semester are gearing up. Ragweed pollen is high, my eyes are itchy and swollen, and I haven’t been reading much online or elsewhere. Instead I’ve been watching movies and television episodes on DVD. I watched Heat again because I was curious to see if it was as annoying as I remembered. I enjoyed Miami Vice when it came out earlier this summer, and liked Collateral on DVD. Michael Mann is very interesting to watch visually. But what is it with the shower scenes in Heat and Miami Vice? Is this some kind of code for baptism, cleanliness, vulnerability? An academic paper probably lurks somewhere in the symbolism of water in Mann’s films. It’s doubtful that I’ll ever write it.

On television I’ve been obsessing over Joss Whedon’s Firefly. I’m late to the party by several years but the shows are worthy. The obsessive annotations made about the show on Wikipedia are amusing and instructive in a way that I don’t feel like detailing today. I took a detour into Miami Vice, based on the Michael Mann curiosity, and discovered that TV shows in the 1980s had about five more minutes of run time than today’s shows, 48 versus 43 minutes. So, ipso facto, I must conclude that commercialism is running rampant in America. It’s proven by anecdote if not statistic.

I saw Cars and the Devil Wears Prada at the theater. Big screens are much more enjoyable than small televisions or computer monitors. Cars was so-so. The animation is really the only reason I go to see Pixar movies, sometimes the story is surprisingly good others not so much. Devil Wears Prada was a fun little romp through the world of New York publishing. As MaryAnn Johanson says it’s too true to be fiction.

An Academic Utopia

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Last weekend I was in need of some silly summer movie fun. Coincidentally, I was thinking about academia and the institutions of higher education. On a lark I went to see Accepted. I read the plot synopsis – rejected high school student creates his own ‘fake’ college to convince his parents that he is really going to amount to something – and thought it’d be a mild summer diversion. To my surprise it was a revolutionary reaction to current academia. I admit that I may be reading too much into this modest summer comedy. But in comedy there is often a large grain of truth as Lance Mannion so eloquently described. Comedy often shows us what we don’t want to hear. Mannion writes about a review of Ann Coulter at the New Republic.

The outrageous lies, vulgarity, and plain, open hatred that define Coulter’s schtick are ok in Reeve’s book because everything Coulter says is “kind of true.”

That’s why Liberals can’t stand her, Reeve thinks, because we’re uncomfortable with that little bit she says that’s “kind of” true. Reeve is accepting a definition of humor and satire that would have it that a joke is funny because it’s kind of true.

But the mark of great humor and satire and a good joke is that they are wholly true, true through and through. Swift, and Hogarth, Dickens, Mark Twain, Walt Kelly, and company didn’t draw and write stuff that’s “kind of” true.

The reviews I’ve read have been mediocre. Ethan Alter at Premier magazine.

Perhaps the most disappointing thing about the film is its attitude towards higher education. While it’s true that the idea of a core curriculum can seem outmoded, the “do-whatever-the-hell-you-want” model praised by Accepted is both impractical and a little frightening. Whether intentionally or not, the filmmakers wind up reinforcing the stereotype of Americans as selfish me-firsters who want the world to conform to our desires.

MaryAnn Johanson at FlickPhilosopher comes closest to my own reaction to the movie.

This is almost like a lost movie from my teenhood, a forgotten relic of the late 70s, early 80s, when even summer comedies came with a touch of social commentary and a bit of class consciousness — when they ate the rich instead of aspiring to be one of them. If Accepted is part Caddyshack, part Breakfast Club, then its star, Justin Long — the “I’m a Mac” guy from the computer commercials and the best thing in The Break-Up and Herbie: Fully Loaded — is Bill Murray and Dan Ackroyd and Emilio Estevez rolled into one charming package. With his dash of snark and his off-kilter good looks and his appealingly huggable vulnerability, his Bartleby Gaines is an anti-everyman hero, a literal freedom fighter railing against the chains of societal expectations that can drive even the best of us to succumb to one-note conventionality. And though so many movies pretend to be about unusual or oddball characters, this one really feels like it is — it feels like it doesn’t give a crap if you agree with it or not, because it knows it’s in the right. There’s a commanding confidence to Accepted that is entirely unlike anything many mainstream films are able to pull off. It doesn’t have to beg you to like it, as it grooves along from one funny moment to the next, self-assured and totally self-possessed — it believes in your ability to see that what it’s saying makes sense, and if you don’t see it, that’s your loss, man.

So can a college where students create their own curriculum really be an academic utopia? Most film critics seem to think this is a silly idea, just another formula that we’ve seen so many times before. My question is why then do we keep seeing this formula so often? Surely if it’s so easy to lampoon the college establishment it must be because we hope for something better, something different.

Accepted is telling us that there is a great big gap between the educational aspirations of college and the reality of learning. I don’t think anyone who has been to college to learn would disagree with this. Just read academic blogs or Inside Higher Education. There’s a great deal of doubt about the effectiveness of college education. A recent article in the New York Times proves this.

Over the weekend more evidence came from an interview with Ken Robinson. You can see him speaking at a recent TED conference about the same ideas.

His basic argument is that education stifles creativity and creativity is what we will need more than ever to solve the problems of the present and the future. Other people have made the same argument before but we still don’t seem to be getting the message. I know changing large institutions is difficult but come on. Let’s get started.

Lords of War

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Even the movies I’ve been watching, not to mention the news I’ve been reading, have been about violence lately. This weekend it was two approaches to the same problem: the industry of killing.

First up was Lord of War, a recent Nicholas Cage flick about a young Ukrainian man who emigrates to the United States and becomes an arms dealer. What better way to make money, huh? America is, indeed, the land of opportunity. Yuri starts his business with his brother, but his brother becomes a drug addict and also starts to feel pangs of conscience about the job. Yuri just keeps on plugging away. To add dramatic tension Yuri is being chased by an Interpol agent, played by Ethan Hawke. There’s a love interest too, a beauty pageant winner from Queens.

So is the movie any good? Kinda. On the bad side is the constant narration. Yuri spells everything out for the audience in voice over. It got annoying very quickly. On the good side there are some wonderful scenes, especially the one where Yuri is forced to kill his competitor by African dictator Andre Baptiste. In fact Baptiste gets one of the best exchanges of dialogue in the movie.

Andre Baptiste Sr.: They say that I am the lord of war, but perhaps it is you.

Yuri Orlov: I believe it’s “warlord.”

Andre Baptiste Sr.: Thank you, but I prefer it my way.

Two different ways of saying the same thing. But one, ‘warlord’, feels so banal and the other much richer. The warlord is just another petty dictator, ensconced in some third world country, far from America. But the lord of war, what a rich title; a title that even Americans could be proud of, and a title that cuts so much closer to the truth of the modern American defense industry.

Our next film was Why We Fight, a documentary by Eugene Jarecki. He starts the picture with Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell speech as president, the famous military-industrial complex. The speech is brilliant. But as Gore Vidal says, we live in the United States of Amnesia, so its commentary is long forgotten.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence-economic, political, even spiritual-is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

From this Jarecki builds a reminder to all of us that America has been running an empire for a long time and military interventions have been the norm rather than the exception. The movie is very well done, I encourage everyone to see it.

I’ve personally seen a small part of this complex at my summer job. I’ve been working on collecting information related to ITAR, the International Traffic in Arms Regulations. I’ve collected terms related to weapons systems and other technologies covered by the law. For a real walk on the depressing side of the human condition I suggest reading a few documents at Wikipedia about chemical weapons.

All of the imagination, ingenuity, and effort that has gone into better ways to kill our fellow human beings is staggering. For more on this I suggest you start here. We have wasted so many lives.

Rhetorics of Choice and Rhetorics of Freedom

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I recently watched two documentaries, Hell House and Revolution OS, back-to-back and want to offer some insights I noticed about the different notions of choice and freedom that both of these films reveal.

Hell House is about a Halloween display put on by a church in Texas. The display is modeled on a haunted house, but instead of ghosts and goblins, the villain is sin. Of course, sin comes in a very conservative Christianist wrapper. Abortion, homosexuality, the ‘occult’, raves, suicide, and other detritus of contemporary American culture are read through a fundamentalist Biblical lens. The upshot of all this is to convince the visitors to Hell House to repent their sins, accept the glory of Jesus Christ as their personal savior, and become converts to evangelical Christianity. I think the movie is pretty evenhanded. There is no editorial voice that supports or condemns the work of these true believers. Instead their actions and words pretty much fill the whole movie.

There is one moment when the voice of a few critics is allowed in. A few of the teenagers who visit Hell House complain to the logistics manager about the stereotype portrayal of homosexuals and other groups. The response to this criticism is fascinating.

The manager appeals to one of the basic American argument frames, choice. One of his critics complains that raves aren’t anything like the portrayal at Hell House, which shows raves as places where young women are given date-rape drugs and then kill themselves afterwards because they can’t remember who raped them. A young woman in the film says that she has been to many raves and nothing like that has ever happened to her. The manager says “Good for you..you see it’s really all about choice..you made the right choice.” The dialogue continues for a few more moments and then the manager returns to his point about choice, “It’s all about choice”, he says, “if you make the correct choices you’ll be saved.” And in that moment, he contradicts his own argument. When he says the situations are about choice he’s lying. To him there is no choice, there is just the truth. And that truth is his truth. It is not about choice; it is about fear and punishment

When this church member says it’s about choice he’s appealing to the liberal belief that people are free to choose their destiny. But everything about Hell Houses implies the opposite. People are not free to choose, some things are punished and some things are allowed. It is Pascal’s wager filtered through Disney; a theme park ride with the message that you are going to hell unless you change your lifestyle.

But the sins/choices presented are very selective. There’s no depiction of people refusing to give shelter to the poor, no depiction of people turning the other cheek. The forgiveness of the New Testament is gone, conveniently forgotten for the expediency of making a political point.

I cringed at the final scene of the Hell House tour. After the audience has seen all of these ‘sins’ and watched the sinners writhe in the fake ‘hell’, a door is opened and a member of the church leads them into the debriefing room. He starts his speech with an apology about how much it hurts him to show the audience all these horrors, but there is a way for them to be safe. “Through this door,” he says, “you can find salvation. We are ready to pray with you if only you are willing to go through this door. I’m going to open this door and count to six. You can choose to go through it or not.” The door is opened and a light (the light of heaven, no doubt) shines into the darkened room. He counts, some people go through the door, others don’t. The manipulation is palpable. Everything is a setup, like some giant spiritual Rube Goldberg machine, to take away the choice of the audience.

Of course this message of damnation is nothing new. Jonathan Edwards made the same point during the First Great Awakening and he did with much better rhetoric. What’s different now is the cloak of choice. I say to these people: make your arguments, but stop pretending it’s about choice. The other movie, Revolution OS, is about Linux and free software. It starts with Richard Stallman creating the Free Software Foundation in the 1985. Then goes onto Linus Torvalds creating Linux in the early 1990s, and on through the dot.com bubble of the late 1990s. The argument is that something truly novel is going on with Linux and other open source projects. A new form of production is being created that is based on freedom and sharing instead of the market. Stallman summarizes this in the phrase “free as in freedom, not beer.”

Here the argument for choice is completely different. Stallman clearly believes, deep down, that freedom to tinker with the source code for software is important. Eric Raymond, Bruce Perens, and others make the same point. It is all about the freedom to choose what you do with your computer and software. Read the ‘Right to Read.’

In both of these movies choice is a pivotal concept. For Hell House choice is used defensively. It is a rhetorical shield to hide behind. For Revolution OS choice is about changing the world, giving people freedom they might never have realized they lost before. In one everything is supernatural – the world is a symbolic veil that is read easily into the metaphors of the Bible. It is completely, and utterly Manichaean. Good versus evil. In the other it is decidedly mundane, but still spiritual. Computer code is the expression of our very human dreams for choice and free will.

The final irony is this: I can admire the believers in Hell House. They are arguing passionately for their personal beliefs. But the converse is impossible. The people of Hell House will never admire my beliefs, because to them my beliefs are anathema. This is why the separation of church and state is so important. I don’t want to purge the United States of these religious reactionaries. But the more I listen to what they say, the more convinced I become that they want to purge America of me.

Three Films the Curse

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I saw Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest over the last weekend and I was disappointed. Three hours of setup for the sequel, with nice special effects along the way. Ultimately disappointing.

But seeing it reminded me of a problem that I’ve detected in at least two different artistic endeavors: movie making and genre writing. It’s the problem of trilogies or series that just can’t bear the weight of three parts. They really should be pared down to one or maybe two parts because there’s just not enough story to sustain them any longer. Examples that come to mind: the Matrix, Pirates, X-Men, Spider-Man, Robin Hobb, Robert Jordan, George R.R. Martin, Thomas Harlan. All of these works were created by artists with a grand vision but the exigencies of the marketplace seem to have done them in.

The prevalence of trilogies in fantasy and science fiction is especially noxious. I recently went looking for used copies of work by Joanna Russ, who wrote most of her novels during the 1960s and 1970s. Every one of them stands as an independent work and is usually only 100-200 pages long. Compared to the doorstoppers that currently grace the shelves of SF/F it’s parsimony to an extreme degree.

My speculations for the general increase in the number of multi book series and multi part Hollywood movies is economic. I think publishers and movie makers have taken the idea of selling a guaranteed product and extended it as far as it will go. I’m neither an expert in publishing or movie making, but it seems like the marketing is beginning to overwhelm the art.

No doubt this complaint about the market submerging the art is an old one. It’s nothing new to observe that art is affected by the market. What’s different seems to be the form of this control. For some reason three has become the magical number for book and movie contracts.

X-Men 3 was criticized because it crammed too many plot threads (read the comments) into a single movie. But this is the logic of selling your projects in lots of three. The cast was only signed for three movies so every storyline must be dumped into the pot. Pirates of the Caribbean 2 was one long commercial for next summer’s blockbuster.

It may be just coincidence but I think a lot of these trends began in the 1970s and 1980s. The studio system in Hollywood never seemed to be as sequel happy as modern day cineastes. Nor did the publishing industry of earlier in the century. I suspect that this was caused by the decline of the old publishing and movie making systems and their replacement by the corporate conglomerates. The industries of culture have long since sold themselves out.

There are exceptions to all of these cases. Music seems to be an endeavor that avoids the linked series of albums or CDs. Although the same marketing pressures are applied to ensure that radio singles are prominently placed and the audience is not too surprised by unexpected artistic surprise. Stephen King seems to be an author who has a defined brand but is less likely to be forced into the straightjacket of serial work.

Genre does have a purpose. So does repetition and consistency. I just sometimes wish that the logic of moneymaking wasn’t quite so blatantly foregrounded.

Gross Comedy and the Origin of Slapstick

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I was watching a few of my favorite episodes from Ren and Stimpy on DVD last night and I started thinking about comedy and taste.

Commedia dell’Arte is a form of improvisational comedy theater which flourished in Italy from the 16th to the 18th century. It consisted of stock plots, and characters, which were often adapted to fit the local audience. I was reading up on this subject for last Tuesday’s book club, The Innamorati by Midori Snyder. Commedia is one of the major themes in the novel.

During my research I stumbled upon the origin of the term ‘slapstick comedy‘. Commedia was a very physical form of theater with a lot of tumbling and use of the battacchio, “a club-like object composed of two wooden slats which, when struck, produced a loud smacking noise; little force, however, is transferred from the object–called the ‘slap stick’ in English–to the person being struck, allowing actors to strike each other repeatedly with great audio effect while causing very little actual damage.”

When I think of modern slapstick comedy I think of the Three Stooges. And to tell you the truth I don’t much care for the Stooges. So what’s the difference between Ren and Stimpy and the Stooges? RenStimpy.jpg

A big part of it is animation. I like the visual capabilities of animation much more than real-life comedy acting. It will be interesting to see how the recent developments in CGI animation that have changed the comic book movie industry will be used by future comics. So far I don’t think anyone has really begun to tap this possibility. Adam Sandler or Jim Carey movies may be close. But animation can still go further, at least so far. You only have to look at some of the backgrounds used in Ren and Stimpy to see the potential.

Animation also abstracts the violence. I dislike America’s Home Videos even more than the Stooges because most of it is violence. There’s no sympathy involved. In a cartoon the violence is so absurd it becomes unreal. Think of the gravity defying flights of Wile E. Coyote, or Tom and Jerry. They’re inspired by slapstick but convert it into a different form.

When it comes to Ren and Stimpy in particular I have to praise the writing and the audio design as well. The stories are often full of allusions, to Macbeth’s wife, or Julius Caesar. I personally love “Stimpy’s Fan Club” when Ren starts talking about “These hands”

[plotting Stimpy's death]

Ren: I was nice today. NICE to those STUPID people and their STUPID fan club. My hands… DIRTY! THE DIRT WON’T COME OFF!

[screams]

Ren: President… Ha! What a joke. President of what? His fan club! How they love him! They think he’s a god, but I know he’s as mortal as we. The idol of millions is a fool! Lying there sleeping. sing-song Lying there sleeping. How easily I end all the madness… with these hands! AND WITH THESE HANDS I HOLD THE FATE OF MILLIONS! Just one squeeze… then it’s over.

[moving toward Stimpy]

Ren: Just… one… squeeze… AAAAH! MY BRAIN!

[falls unconscious]

And the musical cues, The Nutcracker Ballet and Night on Bald Mountain, remind me of Disney animation, not to mention being kick-ass pieces of music. And the screams, with their insane echo, are perfect. I concluded my internet browsing last night by reading two reviews of the DVD edition. Both of them mention the groundbreaking style of Ren and Stimpy.

The importance of Ren & Stimpy, both in terms of animation and in terms of culture, cannot be overstated. The amount of variety there is in television animation today is often taken for granted; yet, had it not been for Ren & Stimpy, animation on TV would still be limited to dreck like The Smurfs and He-Man. In short, Ren & Stimpy made it acceptable for cartoons to be cartoony. The show has spawned a whole slew of imitators, many of which are very good, although most have the habit of taking only the gross and bizarre elements and ignoring all the subtext. This is unsurprising, since most viewers only seem to view Ren & Stimpy as a sick and wacky cartoon, without realising what goes on beneath the surface. The show has been described by more than a couple of critics as a statement about the rise of AIDS in the US, and it is no secret that Ren and Stimpy are a gay couple in a sadomasochistic relationship (Ren beats Stimpy, and Stimpy enjoys it). Such subtleties are, of course, lost on the average viewer, but it is a testament to the quality of the show that it can be enjoyed by people of all walks of life: the Rens as well as the Stimpys, so to speak.

The ‘Externality Machine’

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I recently watched the documentary film The Corporation which stitches together an argument about the many ways the modern corporation is sociopathic. It condemns corporations for failing to be concerned with others, is amoral, etc.

The operational principles of the corporation give it a highly anti-social “personality”: It is self-interested, inherently amoral, callous and deceitful; it breaches social and legal standards to get its way; it does not suffer from guilt, yet it can mimic the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism.

One of the great phrases from the film is ‘externality machine.’ An externality is an effect of an economic transaction on non-participants, according to economists. Pollution is a classic case of a negative externality. Dumping waste into a river causes no harm to the corporation, in fact it usually saves them money. But it does grievous harm to anyone who lives down river.

The criticism leveled by The Corporation is that companies routinely externalize their costs onto others and then reap the rewards of profits. So Walmart doesn’t provide it’s workers with health insurance, relying on Medicaid, and the taxpayers, to pay the costs.

This idea of externalizing costs and internalizing profits reminded me of an essay in the current New Left Review by Robin Blackburn. The essay is called “Finance and the Fourth Dimension.”

During the past two decades the financial and banking industry has developed an ever-growing number of financial vehicles to manipulate risk, such as derivatives, private equity and hedge funds. The result has been lucrative. “As a percentage of total US corporate profits, financial-sector profits rose from 14 percent in 1981 to 39 percent in 2001.” But where have the costs gone?

Blackburn lays out some of the scandals that have hit the industry, including the mutual fund scandal, LTCM, and others. The costs/risks have disproportionately fallen on pension plans, which then get bailed out by the government.

The foregoing sketch suggests that financial profits over the last decade have mainly taken the form of the cancellation of promises made to employees — exploitation over time — the erosion of small capital holdings by large and unscrupulous money managers and the swallowing of shoals of tiny fish by the shark-like financial services industry. Few of the gains from the reallocation of capital through superior risk assessment have been channelled to production. Financial profits have instead prompted a surge in upscale real-estate prices and the turnover of the luxury goods sector. The mass of employees and consumers have sunk deeper into debt. Yawning domestic inequalities have been compounded by escalating international imbalances, with an inflow of foreign capital covering a deficit on the US current account. With a sagging dollar, an oil price shock and rising interest rates, American households — the consumers of first and last resort — are likely to find the strain of carrying the world on their shoulders even more difficult. Financialization promotes such a skewed distribution of income that it ends by undermining its own credit-driven momentum.

The latest crisis is the backdating of stock options. Through statistical analysis Eric Lie, an economist, discovered the following odds.

Statistical analysis revealed that the odds of the favorable timing of 12 options granted to William W. McGuire, CEO of health insurance giant United Health Group (nyse: UNH – news – people ), from 1995 to 2002 was 1 in 200 million.

Similarly, for Jeff Rich, former CEO of Affiliated Computer Services (nyse: ACS – news – people ), the probability for the wonderful timing of his six grants was 1 in 300 billion on a random basis. And Louis R. Tomasetta, the CEO of Vitesse Semiconductor (nasdaq: VTSS – news – people ), got nine grants, with a 1 in 26 billion probability of their lucky dates of issue being picked by chance. Tomasetta was fired in May because of his role in the company’s options grants process.

Who wouldn’t want to be so lucky? It’s proof that being a CEO is like winning the lottery. There’s no link between performance and pay for these people.