![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
God's away on business.
Dec. 22nd, 2006 08:34 pmI've got a list of films, and three days of empty calendar ahead of me, and I'm determined to see as many of them as I can before I return to real life. And tonight I watched the first on the list. Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room. And God, I'm glad it was first; now I've still got days to wash the taste out of my mouth before I get back to work, and I'll need them.
All of it was simply sickening. Obscene. The arrogance, the smugness, the cronyism, the greed, the complicity -- I just sat through all of it thinking if there's anything bigger or more destructive wrong with America, I can't think what it is. A bunch of rich men getting richer at the expense of people who trust them, then disingenuously denying knowledge of any wrongdoing. It's always happened, of course, but the stakes are bigger now. More people steamrolled. More lives ruined.
You know the worst part of it? Knowing that those guys, the guys who ran Enron, the guys who profited, they're still out there. Yeah, Ken Lay's dead and Jeff Skilling and Andy Fastow are doing time. But what about the traders whose quotes are peppered through the film? Or the ones who weren't working at Enron at all -- but don't see anything wrong with what went down at Enron? Who only wish they'd been a part of it all? Because they're out there. They're running businesses and political systems and they're waiting for their chance, or they'll forget themselves and get caught up in the moment. And it will happen again.
There's an old Enron commercial that the film showcases: in it, Jeff Skilling claims, "we want to change the world." You know what my impossible dream is? That Enron does change the world. That next time this starts to happen, someone remembers Enron and its aftermath and stops it all from happening again. That one day, everyone will be appalled by stories like this.
:::
Next on the list: something fictional and frothy. I'm thinking Casino Royale.
All of it was simply sickening. Obscene. The arrogance, the smugness, the cronyism, the greed, the complicity -- I just sat through all of it thinking if there's anything bigger or more destructive wrong with America, I can't think what it is. A bunch of rich men getting richer at the expense of people who trust them, then disingenuously denying knowledge of any wrongdoing. It's always happened, of course, but the stakes are bigger now. More people steamrolled. More lives ruined.
You know the worst part of it? Knowing that those guys, the guys who ran Enron, the guys who profited, they're still out there. Yeah, Ken Lay's dead and Jeff Skilling and Andy Fastow are doing time. But what about the traders whose quotes are peppered through the film? Or the ones who weren't working at Enron at all -- but don't see anything wrong with what went down at Enron? Who only wish they'd been a part of it all? Because they're out there. They're running businesses and political systems and they're waiting for their chance, or they'll forget themselves and get caught up in the moment. And it will happen again.
There's an old Enron commercial that the film showcases: in it, Jeff Skilling claims, "we want to change the world." You know what my impossible dream is? That Enron does change the world. That next time this starts to happen, someone remembers Enron and its aftermath and stops it all from happening again. That one day, everyone will be appalled by stories like this.
:::
Next on the list: something fictional and frothy. I'm thinking Casino Royale.
