Subprime

To the subprime lenders -

I have just one thing to say: you knew what you were doing.

It doesn't matter that it was company policy. It doesn't matter that incentives to sell higher interest loans directly impacted your take-home pay. It doesn't matter that the relatively simple algorithms for calculating the fitness of a prospective borrower are buried behind pastel GUIs, such that you, dear agent, do not have to crunch the numbers yourself.

You knew what you were doing.

It doesn't matter that you would have lost your job, or been denied promotion had you questioned company policy, or that your boss' boss' boss would have illustrated to you the time-tested truth that shit does roll downhill, and that, by god, it could become a brown avalanche by the time it landed on your desk if you failed to do your job.

You knew what you were doing.

And because you knew, you must now know that in the final account, you bear responsibility.

I don't really care if you hide behind Ricardian economics to explain why all the good, easy money has already been made, resulting in the need for complex debt instruments in order for you and your firm to make a buck. I don't really care if you in fact helped some customers buy homes that they would not have otherwise been able to purchase. And I especially don't care that caveat emptor is a logical result of evolutionary biology, and that dog eat dog is simply the nature of things.

I don't even care that, rightly, a lot of people were damn stupid to think that citizenship entitled them to ownership, and that a house defined who they were so badly that they were willing to ignore basic arithmetic, and that I, like you, are pissed as hell that we're going to chip in to pay for some shithead dealings.

You knew what you were doing, and no rationalization will hide that. No matter how small the part you played, you were directly responsible.

I don't claim moral superiority over you - through my incompetence, I am in my own way defrauding the taxpayer. I am reneging upon two generations of admirable ancestry by failing, at the critical moment, to take command of myself, responsibility and ownership of myself, to do what must be done. God knows I've enough sins to send me straight to the hot seat, among which are possession of investments which, directly or indirectly, contribute to the credit crunch.

But I want to know that I'll save you a seat on the bus, the Good Intentions Express, right next to me.

America is what it is, good, bad, or indifferent, because of the ability for most of us to push aside personal responsibility, to be led admirably by those who embrace it and honor, tyrannized by those who embrace it and selfishness. But ownership of one's actions, thoughts, and words is the prerequisite for leadership, perhaps the prerequisite for humanity.

So you have a choice, friends. Admit that you are no more than cogs of an elaborate, magnificent, and fundamentally unhealthy clockwork piece of questionable but not decisively negative value to humanity's progress. Or, admit your failure to commit to the principles of honor, integrity, and good faith that are the bedrock of the American enterprise, in idea if not in fact.

Either way, i, and others like me, will not permit you the complacence of ambiguity, the somnambulant reprieve from the blistering attempts to reconcile who you think you are, to get at the core of who you really are. Vivisect your false self, yo.

Welcome to my hell.


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