"There's No Such Thing As Money."

I remember the moment when I realized America had lost its collective mind.

Sarah Palin had just wrapped up her interview with Katie Couric, delivering quite possibly the most embarrassing interview performance in televised history. I mean, Jesus, even if you don’t like the lady—and I don’t—it was painful to watch. “Well, that’s it,” I thought. “If that’s what comes after John McCain’s coronary, we might as well make it unanimous for Barack.”

Katie Couric and Sarah Palin, from Sarah's historic interview--a moment in television history proving that two dunderheaded broads whose joint IQ doesn't equal my shoe size can still be fascinating, as long as they're hot. 

But that didn’t happen. Within seconds of the Couric/Palin interview, Fox News commentators began talking about how Mrs. Palin had done a “brilliant job fielding tough questions from a hard-as-nails interviewer.”

This is horseshit of a mindboggling level of audacity. Katie Couric lobs more softballs than a minivan full of lesbians. But tons of people chose to believe Fox News’ interpretation of the events. And I realized that a large chunk of the American public just flat out chooses to opt out of reality.

I don’t think it was always this way. I truly do believe that at earlier times in our history, we as a nation and as a people have been more engaged with reality. But for some reason, we just opt out of it now.

I’m not sure why, but I have a sneaking suspicion that television has a lot to do with it. I’m not saying there’s no place for escapism, but at least in the old days, when you went to see a movie, you entered the theater, a physical place distinct from the rest of the world. The lights went off; and when the movie was over, the lights came back on and you left. It was like waking up from a dream. There was a definite break between the fantasy world of the movie and reality—a distinct separation between fantasy and reality.

But television is in our homes (in many houses, in every room in the home), on our computer screens, on our phones. It surrounds us with a damn near inescapable cocoon of fantasy and unreality, integrating fantasy into the fabric of our daily lives. It’s warped our collective psychology and both facilitated and hastened our headlong retreat from the real world.

Resulting in huge chunks of America that willingly swallow the biggest, most baldfaced whoppers you can imagine and outright lunacy like,

• “Your child set fire to the shop teacher not because he’s a psychotic little asshole, but because he’s gifted.” 
• “Taking pills will help you safely lose weight.” 
• “Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11.” 
• “The Koch Brothers’ economic interests are your own.” 
• “Barack Obama was not born in the United States.” 
• “Lower taxes on billionaires will result in more jobs for all of us.”
• "People actually care about what you made for dinner/where you visited recently/how your health is when you post it on Facebook."

But perhaps the most glaring evidence of our retreat from reality was the economic meltdown of 2008.

I don’t get the Great Recession. I don’t. I mean, I do, sort of, maybe, in the sort of foggy way that most people get it... banks made a ton of bad loans to people who had no way of paying them back, and then somehow it all went to shit and now everyone’s scared for their jobs. I guess I get it, a little bit.

But on a much more fundamental level, I don’t fucking get it at all. We still have the ground. Stuff still grows out of it. We still pull metal and fuel out of it. People still need to eat and wear clothes and buy stuff made out of metal and drive cars and stay warm. It isn’t like we lost a big chunk of the ground. It isn’t like the western half of the U.S. fell into the ocean. The economic meltdown was not caused by a drought, a flood, a famine, a hurricane, or anything else that affected our ability to produce stuff that other people need.

In other words, nothing that happened in the real world actually affected either our needs or our ability to produce goods to meet those needs. Nothing physical, material, or based in reality happened to change the system. 

But we’ve succumbed, somehow, to some sort of worldwide mass psychosis. Modern capitalism is based on absolutely nothing at all. Nothing. Zip. Bubkes. Zlich. The entire “financial industry” based on a delusion—a perception of reality. But it’s all, essentially, one big bubbleful of nothing. We've opted for the fantasy that nothing actually amounts to something--and we've allowed it to ruin countless lives. 

Here’s how I understand it. A bunch of banks knowingly lent a bunch of nothing (okay, not nothing, some pieces of paper with some numbers on them, but for our purposes, it was still pretty much nothing) to people to buy houses with nothing. The banks then took this nothing that the people who bought the houses had promised to them, and packaged and re-packaged and re-re-repackaged this nothing into different and various other forms of nothing, which they then sold to other people, in exchange for more nothing. The other people then used this new nothing to finance their acquisition of more nothing, and with that nothing, they were able to leverage their ability to borrow more nothing, which they then SOMETIMES used to do some actual stuff, but mostly was just in exchange for more nothing.

Along the way, different chunks of this nothing were given interesting names like “stocks, “bonds,” “hedge funds,” “derivatives,” “money markets,” “options,” “futures,” “mutual funds,” “triple renooberated fiduciary allocatives,” and other terms which I don’t understand, and neither do you, and that’s precisely what the people who gave them those names intended. But at the end of the day, they were all just names to signify the transfer of nothing from one set of people to another set of people.

Didn’t matter, though. The nothingniks figured out ever more ingenious ways to make money off of nothing. They would bet nothing against nothing. You could buy a piece of the odds of those bets—which were nothing—and then resell that nothing for more nothing. And then you could shave little bits off that nothing and repackage those little shaved bits of nothing into other forms of nothing with new and even more opaque names.

And everything was going along swimmingly, until someone committed the financial equivalent of yelling “FIRE” in a crowded theater and said, “HEY! They’re not paying back their nothing! There’s nothing here!”  At which point, it all went to shit in a global cataclysm of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth and people started beating each other up in Athens and camping out in Zuccotti Park.

And somewhere along the line, we forgot that the whole goddamn thing was all about nothing.

This isn’t a new phenomenon. Our species seems prone to losing our collective shit in vast numbers. Charles Mackay’s 1841 Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds may well yet be the best book on the subject ever penned, with chapters on Tulipomania, the South Sea Bubble, the Mississippi Land Bubble, the Crusades, and other hullabaloos and to-dos over absolutely nothing. But in recent years, no one example, or person, better sums up what I’m talking about than Robert Maxwell, the British media baron who fell off his yacht and drowned in 1991.

This is Robert Maxwell, the biggest crook in Britain's history, and a virtuoso of the art of making nothing look like something. 

Maxwell, while alive, was one of the world’s wealthiest men—or so people thought. But after he died, it turned out that he was zillions of pounds sterling in debt, he’d looted his companies’ pension funds to pay off debts, and his empire, an intricate web of more than 300 different companies and entities, collapsed in flames. He’s still the biggest crook in Britain’s history.

I wouldn’t call him precisely a hero, but I am fascinated by him, and I’m not the only one. For some reason, this great, fat, replete, smiling bastard, this ubershnook, this super-criminal who could have stepped off the pages of a James Bond novel (in fact, he was the inspiration for Elliot Carver, the villain in the Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies), captivates a lot of people. He’s been used as a character in novels. There are tons of books about him (I’ve read five of them), two plays, and a full length BBC movie, Maxwell, starring David “Poirot” Suchet in the title role, and written by a guy named Craig Warner.

I mention the writer because, being of that persuasion myself, I like writers, and because this guy Warner is a bona fide genius. Two passages that he wrote illustrate, perfectly, the delusion I’m talking about.

In one scene, Maxwell, discussing the value of his companies with two of his bankers over dinner on the roof of his London skyscraper, waves his great fat flipper of a hand and says dismissively,

We talk about “tangibles” and “intangibles,” but do we really know what we mean? Cash is supposed to be tangible. But cash has no real value. It’s just paper. And on it is a promise of something, a promise of some sterling silver. But who goes to the Bank of England to demand their silver? No one. We just trade the promise.

Later on, Maxwell is dictating his plans for the next day into his little pocket tape recorder:

Buy as much MCC [Maxwell Communications Corporation, his flagship company] as you can. Support the price. Take the money from MCC itself and give it to Robert Maxwell Holdings for investment. And then to McMillan to buy their printing presses for half what they’re worth, and then buy them back at half price, which gives us a 300% profit on those assets, which we’ll record as trading profit. We shall go back to MCC and buy more shares and we can use their certificates to guarantee loans, which will then be funneled through Liechtenstein, and with that, we’ll buy more MCC shares. And, well, if anyone asks who controls Liechtenstein, we’ll say “who the FUCK knows. It’s a charitable trust. We’re not omniscient.”

He pauses, smiles, and then turns the recorder back on and says,

There’s no such thing as money.

See, Maxwell got it. He knew that the system was all based on nothing, and he figured out how to manipulate it, work it, and leverage all that nothing into a seat in Parliament. Yachts. Planes. Helicopters. Mansions the world over. Suits from Savile Row, shoes from John Lobb. Art and antiques. Invitations to the best parties, access to world leaders, dinners with the Queen, awe and admiration, women, Cuban cigars, and enough caviar, prime rib, and champagne to eventually swell him up to over 400 pounds.

He figured out how to turn fantasy into reality. Granted, it all came tumbling down, but he had a hell of a run at it while it lasted.

Amoral as all hell? Well, sure. But there’s something in me that admires the hell out of a guy who figures out that it’s all based on nothing and makes a hell of a livelihood at it. Especially while the rest of us continue, willfully, to believe in the fantasy that the gobbledygook and doubletalk slung at us by the bankers, stockbrokers, estate attorneys, financial planners, Federal Reserve, and President means or signifies anything more than a great, steaming, pile of nothing.

You can watch the entire movie "Maxwell" on YouTube. Well worth the time.