If Johnny Cash went out searching for one good man he'd never find one.

Have you ever read The Money and the Power? Its a terribly depressing book.

Its about Las Vegas, but its really about America. Its about America because in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, much of America was laundered through Las Vegas. Politics, unions, corporations. The ugly side of it was laundered through Las Vegas.

What makes The Money and the Power depressing is not that there is an ugly side to America. There is an ugly side to everything. If we don't admit that, especially with ourselves, it will consume us.

What makes the book depressing is that when you look at the power in America, its all ugly side. There are no good guys. The good guys have been erased and marginalised or forced to compromise themselves to survive. The book explains how Kennedy won the 1960 election because his thugs were better at rigging the vote then Nixon's thugs. How organized crime was entangled with politics and with the unions. How Howard Hughes was controlled and destroyed by his money hungry, supposedly God abiding, bankers. How Edgar J was a real bastard even in a land of bastards. How so many if not all of the politicians were corrupt. How small and power hungry men willing to trample over the public good to satisfy their unquenchable thirst for fame and power will win out over those concerned with doing what's right. There's the drug running and the character assasinations and the real assasinations and the infidelity, and its just all so clear that nobody, just nobody, with power is honest and true and there just doesn't seem to be one good man.

Of course, you can choose not to believe it. You can decide that its all made up muckraking and that the people in power really are good and honest and looking after our best interests. If you go to Amazon and read the reviews, you see the dialectic pretty clearly. Those who believe, and those who refuse.

Unfortunately, I'm inclined to side with the believers.

- posted by Sigurd10/21/2004 11:19:00 PM