Overman scoops Andrea "Lunch" Mitchell up from the next table, and slings her over his shoulder, lifting her skirt to show everyone what he's won. He carries her back to his tower lair at Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt, where he regales her with tales of how he and his troops have foregone their bonuses this year, in the interests of staying on the good side of the general populace. Lunch doesn't stop coming.
(For those of you who think this is sexist, you're right. But it's called writing, which you can ignore. If this crosses the line for this site, yes, we're testing the waters here, then i would have to exercise more discretion in the future. But then, what's truly obscene are the outlandish excesses detailed by some of the financial diaries here from the last few weeks, particularly as the bonus details of the bailout become known, and not a bit of economic sexual fantasy.
Finally, the image is taken from a real life event, when the Daimler CEO signed the takeover of Chrysler, flung his assistant over his shoulder, grabbed a bottle of Dom Perignon, and left.)
There's many other decent thoughts stimulated by Ted's diary, and i hope he doesn't mind my intrusion to his own fine juxtaposition here. But it's Sat eve, Anya's working, and i'm left to conjure.
Let me tell you that my blood boils the more i contemplate what's been done and is being done to our social system, and the planet where it lives. "Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin
Nietzsche's only (?) reference to the stock exchange expresses his loathing for what it represented even then, but has also been used to misrepresent him as an anti-semite - au contraire:
I feel obligated to correct a distortion suggested by `unraveler' below. It is popular to suggest Nietzsche was an anti-semite, but this is a rather lazy habit. Nietzsche's remark on `the youthful stock-exchange Jew' was mentioned. Here it is in its proper environment: . . . the entire problem of the Jews exists only within national states, inasmuch as it is here that their energy and higher intelligence, their capital in will and spirit accumulated from generation to generation in a long school of suffering, must come to preponderate to a degree calculated to arouse envy and and hatred, so that in almost every nation . . . there is gaining ground the literary indecency of leading the Jews to the sacrificial slaughter as scapegoats for every possible public or private misfortune. As soon as it is no longer a question of the conserving of nations but of the production of the strongest possible European mixed race, the Jew will be just as usable and desirable as an ingredient of it as any other national residue. Every nation, every man, possesses unpleasant, indeed dangerous qualities: it is cruel to demand that the Jew should constitute an exception. In him these qualities may even be dangerous and repellent to an exceptional degree; and perhaps the youthful stock-exchange Jew is the most repulsive invention of the entire human race. Nonetheless I should like to know how much must, in a total accounting, be forgiven a people who, not without us all being to blame, have had the most grief-laden history of any people and whom we have to thank for the noblest human being (Christ), the purest sage (Spinoza), the mightiest book and the most efficacious moral code in the world. http://www.amazon.com/review/R2RAHUDE1PPXTQ
I feel obligated to correct a distortion suggested by `unraveler' below. It is popular to suggest Nietzsche was an anti-semite, but this is a rather lazy habit. Nietzsche's remark on `the youthful stock-exchange Jew' was mentioned. Here it is in its proper environment:
. . . the entire problem of the Jews exists only within national states, inasmuch as it is here that their energy and higher intelligence, their capital in will and spirit accumulated from generation to generation in a long school of suffering, must come to preponderate to a degree calculated to arouse envy and and hatred, so that in almost every nation . . . there is gaining ground the literary indecency of leading the Jews to the sacrificial slaughter as scapegoats for every possible public or private misfortune. As soon as it is no longer a question of the conserving of nations but of the production of the strongest possible European mixed race, the Jew will be just as usable and desirable as an ingredient of it as any other national residue. Every nation, every man, possesses unpleasant, indeed dangerous qualities: it is cruel to demand that the Jew should constitute an exception. In him these qualities may even be dangerous and repellent to an exceptional degree; and perhaps the youthful stock-exchange Jew is the most repulsive invention of the entire human race. Nonetheless I should like to know how much must, in a total accounting, be forgiven a people who, not without us all being to blame, have had the most grief-laden history of any people and whom we have to thank for the noblest human being (Christ), the purest sage (Spinoza), the mightiest book and the most efficacious moral code in the world.
http://www.amazon.com/review/R2RAHUDE1PPXTQ
