By Jack B. Rochester, Managing Editor
The New York Times ran a cover story in its Sunday Styles section last week about what's happened to Ruth Madoff, 68-year-old wife of Bernie, and how she can't get a hairdo or a latte in her old haunts anymore. Nobody wants to be seen letting her in their establishment because she's viewed as complicit in her husband's Ponzi schemes.
I found this comment interesting: "Alexandra Lebenthal, who is a friend of one of the Madoff sons, Andrew, as well as a fixture in Manhattan financial and social circles, said that Mrs. Madoff has not taken any steps that might rehabilitate her image. 'In America, we love tearing people down and then bringing them back, but she hasn’t played the game,' she said."
Then there's Sasha Grey, the 21-year-old porn star who plays Chelsea in Stephen Soderbergh's new film, "The Girlfriend Experience." The IMDB synopsis remarks that she plays "a determined young woman that has managed to achieve success as an
upscale escort without any apparent loss of dignity, but clearly at the
expense of her ability to feel anything deeply, be it with her clients
or in her personal life. In an uncomplicated way, the film makes a
provocative point about the more subtle costs of switching off aspects
of our aliveness (i.e. our caring) to get ahead."
What do Ruth Madoff and Chelsea have in common? Greed. As the story in the New York Times points out, Ruth Madoff cares little, if at all, about the people who her husband killed, financially speaking.
Chelsea, the empty-headed young escort in Soderbergh's film, is a highly paid call girl who, thoroughout the film, seeks new ways to market herself at the expense of her personal sense of self and her relationships with others - in particular her boyfriend (who has issues of his own, needless to say).
In short, Chelsea portrays a woman - and Madoff is the embodiment of a real-life woman - who doesn't understand that to gain the world is to lose the soul.
That's the great lesson coming out of our great economic collapse: the danger of being immersed in a commercial and materialistic culture that has lost its sense of the human perspective. While there's nothing wrong with business or making money, let's be sure we understand its true purpose and realize wealth is not an ennobling end in itself.
Greed is karma: it always comes home to roost.
Jack
Jack B. Rochester is a professional writer and editor who has worked in nearly every aspect of publishing since 1974. He heads Joshua Tree Interactive, and is Managing Editor of The Business Insider blog.
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