BLESSED BE EXECUTIVE GREED

I wrote on 3 April about executive greed at the not-for-profit retirement fund TIAA-CREF. Roger Ferguson, the CEO at TIAA-CREF for the past year, takes $11,200,000 of retired teachers' savings as his annual pay. This amount includes $5,000,000 (from his first year on the job) as "performance compensation." I complained to Mr. Ferguson that his greed was offensive and thoroughly immoral.

TIAA-CREF has a new motto, by the way: "Financial Services for the Greater Good."

Today I received an answer to my letter from Dan Lindner, the Senior Customer Resolution Manager. (I am the customer to be "resolved," I assume.)

Mr. Lindner doesn't apologise for Roger Ferguson's greed. Rather, he tells me that "IN LIGHT OF OVERALL MARKET CONDITIONS, MR. FERGUSON HAS VOLUNTARILY AGREED TO FOREGO 25 PERCENT OF THE PERFORMANCE COMPENSATION TO WHICH HE IS ENTITLED IN HIS EMPLOYMENT AGREEMENT FOR 2008." That's 25 percent of $5,000,000, which leaves him--poor man!--with only $3,750,000 of his "performance compensation," and another $6,2000,000 untouched to go along with that. I am supposed to be impressed, I think, with Mr. Ferguson's generosity.

I am not impressed with his generosity. Rather, I am disgusted at his greed. He is still taking nearly $10,000,000 this year of retired teachers' savings. Most of the retired teachers who have invested in TIAA-CREF earned no more that the $1,250,000 which Mr. Ferguson has "agreed to forego" in their entire working lives! Even if he gave back all of his "performance compensation," that wouldn't be enough. He is a greedy bastard, an offensive and thoroughly immoral man.

Greedy people like Roger Ferguson make it all the more obvious that the world's wealth needs to be redistributed by force of law. Greedy people aren't generous; we can't depend on them to be socially responsible or decent.

My letter from Mr. Lindner advises that his communication with me "is protected by law," and that "any disclosure, copying, or distribution of this message, or the taking of any action based on it, is strictly prohibited."

GRADUAL JUSTICE, PART 8

America, as a nation, has never understood the idea of right and wrong. "All men are created equal" didn't mean what it said. "All men" didn't include black people, or women; it meant "all white men." After the Civil War, when slavery was abolished, that didn't free black people. And when women were given a constitutional right to vote, that didn't make them equal citizens along with white men.

"Oh, it takes time."

How many generations of black people were told that? How many generations of women?

And homosexuals.

A nation in which the comfort of the citizens in power can override the rights of those without power is a tyranny, not a free country, not a just or honorable state.

The U. S. military's discrimination against gays and lesbians will continue--despite the president's acknowledgement that it is discrimination, and thus unlawful. Secretary Gates tells us that "it will take time."

We could also say that to serial killers, I suppose, and to bank robbers: "Slow down. Don't kill so many people next time. Don't steal so much money next time."

We mock the idea of justice every chance we get.

PIRATES

The U.S. has captured a Somali pirate, and will bring him to trial in a federal court in Manhattan.

This news comes the day after the Obama announcement that members of the CIA who engaged in piracy--who stole people, not just property, cannot be tried for their crimes, because a president of the U.S. authorised those crimes.

So U.S. governmental piracy--stealing humans, kidnapping--is legal, but private stealing of U.S. material possessions by unauthorised Somalis is not.

I don't want piracy to be ignored, but I want HIGHER crimes--much more serious crimes--to be taken as seriously, and prosecuted.

Until I get a chance to feel sorry for George W. Bush and his thugs, under indictment, I will feel sorry for Abdul Wal-i-Musi, facing U.S. justice.

DOES THE U.S. HAVE THE RIGHT TO EXCUSE TORTURE?

President Obama has decided that because an American president authorised torture, no crime was committed by the torturers--and the president who authorised torture is free as well.

I don't think the world accepted such logic at Nuremburg, nor would the World Court at the Hague accept such today. When the guilty get to excuse the guilty, then there is no law.

Does President Obama expect the world to honor his absurd edict? Does he expect the world to excuse and forget torture because a criminal U. S. President authorised it? Does he expect the civilised world to respect such ruthless, selfish, arrogant proclamations?

"We have more nuclear weapons than anybody else, and we aren't afraid to use them to defend our criminals." Is that Obama's idea? Is that going to be his policy? Does he expect anybody in the world to respect this country of his?

No doubt he does. And unless enough Americans have the courage to denounce such arrogant stupidity, he will get continue to mock justice with this stupid policy. But the rest of the world will hate--as well as fear--the hypocrites whom Obama leads. And when they try to set foot anywhere in the civilised world, they will get arrested by the honest people who believe in and are brave enought to defend justice.

Stand up, Americans! Don't be cowards, like Obama. Don't let this happen! Insist on justice. Start at the top--with the president who authorised torture. No president--no leader of any country, no human being--has the right to "authorise" torture. Everybody but Obama knows that.

Obama is absurd. And he makes all of us who keep quiet absurd with him. And guilty with him. Guilty of obstruction of justice. And that makes us as guilty of torture as the original criminals are. And we, too, can be arrested--all of us--if we step outside this blighted, benighted country.

HYPOCRISY

The Roman Catholic pope doesn't want Caroline Kennedy as the United States Ambassador to the Vatican. And he doesn't want the University of Notre Dame to let President Obama speak at the university. The reason? Both Kennedy and Obama are opposed to criminalising abortion, and are supporters of stem-cell medical research.

Jesus, of course, never said anything about abortion or stem-cell medical research. He did say a lot about hypocrisy, however. He condemned hypocrites and hypocrisy five hundred times for every time he mentioned all other evils put together.

It seems strange that the pope doesn't want Caroline Kennedy in Rome, and doesn't want Barack Obama at Notre Dame; after all, he invited the conservative English bishop Williamson back into Rome, though Williamson insisted that the Nazi holocaust didn't happen--and holocaust denial is a serious crime in the pope's native Germany. And though the pope doesn't want Kennedy in Rome, or Obama speaking at Notre Dame, he has Bernard Cardinal Law in Rome, in charge of the basilica of Sta. Maria Maggiore, a major church whose pastor serves directly under the pope, and reports only to the pope.

Pope Benedict's predecessor installed Cardinal Law at Sta. Maria Maggiore to get him out of Boston, where he was an indictable co-conspiritor and accessory after the fact in a number of child abuse cases against priests in his diocese. These priests were long-time molestors of little boys. For years, Cardinal Law had moved known pederasts from Catholic parish to Catholic parish, and from Catholic school to Catholic school, as their crimes had been uncovered. And when the scandal broke, ten years ago, Cardinal Law blocked or tried to block the prosecution of his priests for their serious and repeated sexual crimes against little boys.

So Cardinal Law was whisked away to Rome. He is safe there.

Of course the Roman Catholic Church hates homosexuality--except among the clergy.

"Oh, ye HYPOCRITES," Jesus would have said.

The Catholic Church has a long history of priests and bishops abusing little boys--and not just by seducing and raping them. Every time one listens to beautiful old Church music, one should remember that the soprano parts were all written for little boys--and castrati: men who were castrated (for the glory of god) as pre-pubescent boys, so they wouldn't lose their beautiful soprano voices. The Catholic Church didn't allow women in its choirs--and if you watched any of the Easter celebrations on television this year, you would have noticed that the Vatican choirs are still all male. But presumably there are no castrati among them.

And Easter: who among the Roman Catholic heirarchy remembers that Jesus was born in a stable, not in a palace? Do they remember Jesus saying how hard it will be for rich men to enter heaven, or his telling a would-be follower "give up all you have if you would follow me." Did Jesus wear gold shoes, as the pope does? Did Jesus sit on a gold throne, as the pope does, with people bowing to him, while he blesses the poor? Is ostentatious wealth Christian?

"Oh, ye HYPOCRITES!" Jesus would have said.

WATCH WITH ME

WATCH WITH ME

Hamlet is hard to read. I’m not sure why that is so, but it must be: otherwise, why would it have been read and played as a revenge “tragedy” for four hundred years?

Let’s start with revenge—which will let me introduce the parallel I want to draw with Hamlet, from Christian literature. This is not to say that I want to consider Hamlet as a Christian play; the tradition to which both the story of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemani and Hamlet belong antecedes Christianity by hundreds of years.

Revenge is called “an eye for an eye”—or, in modern slang, “getting even.” We pretend that to hit somebody back for hitting you makes up for the hurt, or that killing party A because party A has killed my friend party B will make the death of party B any less terrible. As Socrates argued, it is worse to do evil than to have evil done to you.

I learned about revenge, accidentally, when I was four years old. My father used to bring home stacks of used mimeograph paper from his office; I could use the blank sides to draw on. One afternoon I somehow got my little hands on a pair of scissors. I figured out—made up as a formula or a moral law—that if I cut a piece of paper in one direction, and then cut it again, at a ninety degree angle (I had no idea that than perpendicular was ninety degrees of course) the second cut would heal the first one. I tried out my idea, and a corner of the piece of paper fell off. So I tried again: whack, then a second whack at a right angle across the first. The corner fell out again.

But my logic was sound—or so I thought. I kept repeating the experiment, and getting more and more frustrated. Finally I had a tantrum, and attracted my mother’s attention. She came in and took the scissors away from me.

I had learned that revenge doesn’t work.

We pretend that revenge makes up for something bad. But it doesn’t. Rather, it produces a second bad something. Stupidly, revenge brings more evil into the world.

But we want Hamlet to be a revenge play. Revenge plays are simple: the first domino knocks down the second domino and the second knocks down the third. Etc. Shakespeare’s contemporaries wrote dozens of such plays. If Shakespeare had wanted to write one, he could probably have done so in two or three days. But he didn’t want to write a revenge play; he wanted to write a tragedy.

“Tragedy”—despite what journalists and literary critics say—is not something bad happening. If a man killed at a railroad crossing happens to be the hard-working father of ten children his death is not necessarily a tragedy. His being the father of all those children may make his death more pathetic, but it doesn’t make his death tragic. If five hundred people are killed in an explosion, that there were five hundred of them—or that they were all children, or pregnant women, or priests—doesn’t make the accident a tragedy. It’s simply sad. And we should respond with sympathy.

The ancient Greeks invented what we call tragedy, though there were tragedies in human history preceding the Greeks. Our mythologies contain many tragic stories; the Greeks, however, made up the word, and used it to dsescribe certain kinds of plays. Curiously, the Greek word TRAGODIA means “goat song.” It has been suggested that the name comes from the prize given to the winning tragedian at the Dionysian festival each spring in Athens—but there is no evidence to support this, or for that matter any other theory about where the word comes from.

So let me suggest another origin, propose another theory.

Goats are not the most musical of animals. So it’s odd that something as serious and culturally or morally important as a TRAGODIA was called a “goat song” by the Greeks. In the zodiac, the goat is Capricorn: and his time is the beginning of the year. The twenty-second of December—the winter solstice—is the first day of Capricorn. It is also, of course, New Year’s day and Christmas day, except that we didn’t get the calendar right. The winter solstice is also integral to Hannukah, the “festival of light.”

The shortest day of the year is the day that requires the most faith: the most faith that the world will be reborn. And that faith is rewarded on the twenty-third of December, when the future is born, the earth rejuvenated, life renewed. But that rebirth requires the death of the old year.

Tragedy occurs at the bottom: when only hope can save us, when we give up what is, in order to learn and to have what will be. Tragedy is not despair: despair is the failure of hope, DE+SPERO. Faced with chaos or extinction, we can only save ourselves through hope: for Shelley, we must “hope till Hope creates/From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.” William Butler Yeats defines tragedy as “Heaven blazing into the head": it is the understanding that will save us.

Tragedy is what we find at the end of Oedipus the King. Oedipus understands what he has done, and accepts responsibility, not for murdering his father and marrying his mother, but for his ignorance: the ignorance that let him do so. And it is this that makes him, for Sophocles, a great hero. Oedipus was a good king; he cared for his Thebes more than he cared for himself. He was not selfish, like Teiresias. In the end, when he exiles himself from Thebes to save his people and his land, he is a great king, a tragic hero.

I want to argue that Hamlet is a tragedy, the most seriously such of any of Shakesperare’s plays. But I want to argue something else as well: I want to argue that Hamlet is very much like the scene in the Christian gospels which takes place in the garden at Gethsemani on the evening before Jesus’s trial and death.

Let me begin with Gethsemani. Jesus goes there after his Last Supper. He takes some of his apostles with him. “Watch with me,” he asks them. They fall asleep. He asks again, “Can you not watch with me?” And they fall asleep. When the soldiers come to take him, Peter draws his sword and cuts off a soldier’s ear. Jesus admonishes him: put away the sword. “He who lives by the sword will die by the sword,” he tells Peter. Revenge accomplishes nothing.

Those who were with him at Gethsemani weren’t very attentive to Jesus. He was lucky, however, to have four gospellers who were true to him, and who understood what he taught. They recorded his condemnation of revenge, and violence in general. They recorded his kindness and his love. And according to their gospels, for every time he condemned any vice, he condemned hypocrisy fifty times. But look what that got him: “Onward Christian Soldiers,” crusades, and a grossly hypocritical church.

Hamlet’s chosen gospeller is Horatio. “Watch with me,” Hamlet might have said. But Horatio isn’t a good watcher, and his understanding of the world—his “philosophy”—is very limited. As Hamlet dies, lamenting his “wounded name,” he commissions Horatio: “tell my story.” And almost immediately, Horatio does: “. . . let me speak to the yet unknowing world / How these things came about.” He tells Fortinbras,

you shall hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause,
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fall'n on the inventors' heads: all this can I
Truly deliver.


A recital of "carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts" and "casual slaughters"is not the “story” Hamlet wanted from Horatio. Hamlet’s “wounded name” will not be saved by what Horatio will tell—or by the scholars, actors, and directors who read Hamlet as a revenge play, a revenge “tragedy.”

When Hamlet realises what has happened—that both Claudius and Laertes have plotted to murder him, and that by accident he has now killed Laertes with the poison intended for himself—Hamlet, who had abhorred the idea of revenge throughout the play, now understands that he is free. Laertes has killed himself, as with a boomerang, and now Claudius will do so as well. Hamlet “stabs King Claudius,” then gives him the poisoned cup to drink.

If we see Hamlet charge madly at Claudius with his sword, we may think “revenge.” But Hamlet—wounded, dying—knows he doesn’t need to kill Claudius with the sword; all he has to do is touch him, scratch him, make him bleed. The tip is murderously poisoned—but not by Hamlet.

Claudius seems not aware that Hamlet has the poisoned foil, and Hamlet’s “stab” has not been itself a murderous, mortal wound. After Hamlet stabs Claudius, the king says, “O, yet defend me, friends; I am but hurt.” Then Hamlet gives him the poisoned cup: and doubly, then, Claudius kills himself:

Here, thou incestuous, murderous, damned Dane,
Drink off this potion.

Hamlet asked Horatio to “tell [his] story,” to “report [him] and [his] cause aright.” Horatio fails Hamlet. He will “speak to the yet unknowing world / How these things came about,” but what he plans to say—what he can “truly deliver”—is not about Hamlet’s heroism, not about his tragic understanding and his accomplishment. It is up to us, then, taking the play home with us, to understand Hamlet’s story, and when we talk about it—or put it on stage—to “report [him] and [his] cause aright”: not as the enactment of revenge, but as an accomplishment of justice.

If we can learn to be so responsible in reading Hamlet, perhaps someday we will learn to read Jesus’s story as well: as a gospel of love, not violence, a gospel of truth and honor, not hypocrisy.

Bert Hornback
Easter 2009

TORTURE AND THE LEGAL, MORAL OBLIGATION TO INVESTIGATE

Now that even in the United States the news media are talking openly and directly about the Bush administration's torture programs, isn't it time President Obama quits hiding and orders thorough and open investigations of this outrageous, illegal, immoral chapter in United States history? And isn't it soon going to be time to charge everyone involved, from George W. Bush down to the medical personnel who cooperated, with criminal acts of torture?

The Nuremburg War Crimes trials were organised by the winners of World War II. The winners this time must be the free people of the world--including United States citizens. And we must all act to bring the criminals to justice. Not to act is, in legal terms, to be accessories after the fact: and we, then, become guilty of the same offenses the Bush criminals committed.

Everyone in the Bush adnministration who had anything to do with torture, everyone who knew it was going on and kept quiet with that knowledge, should be prosecuted. And if our present president refuses to act, he too is an accessory--and he must also be charged with obstruction of justice. His oath of office must still be fresh in his mouth; he should recall what he said about upholding law and defending our constitution.

The justice system in Peru works; Alberto Fujimori was been convicted and sentenced. Does the United States justice system work, or are we cowards, afraid to bring our criminals to justice, afraid to admit in any official way that the United States has been acting as a rogue state?