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Matthew Paris
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Fri Jan 30, 2004 8:11 pm - The Love Pitch
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Thanks for inviting me here as marketing genius of the year. I’m honored to be accept your applause, then go home with this award, which I must say looks a little chintzy.
I’m here not because I enjoy knowing I’m better than you at selling; it’s a snake oil art of at best, folks, a skein of tricks of a carnival barker that begins and end in the eyes of God at the back of a truck. I’ve been a little or a lot different of course. Some say I’ve made a quantum amble into the unknown like an imaginary astronaut. Other people just call me a lucky genius.
You say I’ve done for the business world what every corporate zealot dreams of doing yet rarely ever does. I’ve created and defined a market maundering in the shadows where nobody else saw it, I’ve been called by three trade magazines the Cortez of capital. Of course one of them is a business journal about selling curs run by my mother but what’s the difference? What if I’m not at all the Cortez of capital? I don’t think I am. I’m a soldier in a world in which banks make something out of nothing. Not even God can do that. Men and women make babies out of bits of cells. It’s not the same thing. Something is never quite nothing. Try it. You might be disappointed.
I like being called the Pizarro of capital better. Pizarro was more terrible than Cortez. Either one is a nice sobriquet; what do they mean? I’m better than Cortez and Pizarro; they were just pious murderers and thieves. I sold people what they wanted; I never sacked or colonized anybody; the only time I went to Mexico take in the new donkey acts. Even then I got Montezuma’s revenge from the salsa.
If they were both serial killers with a few employees, they were both braver than I was; all I did was combine a few ideas from two articles I had read on separate ages of in the Wall Street Journal. I made a fortune; so did they. Anybody could have done it with an army as they did. I did it with nothing.
Power in this world, folks, is always sitting in the gutter. It takes somebody with the eyes of a heron to see gold where other people star at the street and only see a little dog doody. I’m not a heron; I might know something about alchemy as well as magic. Making other people see gold when it’s feces from a dead mutt is harder than making gold out of nothing. Try both; see what happens.
One of these little bits of fortune that made me what I am, whatever that might be, was a little book review. It was called My Life And Loves In Prison by Doctor Fritz von Lebeskraut; it was the memoirs of your usual Nazi war criminal who began life anonymously enough as an ordinary Heidelberg proctologist, all the men and pigeons he slept with in and out of the slammer while he was incarcerated, not for killing a million Poles but running a posh male brothel in Dusseldorf next to a slaughterhouse owned by Hitler’s brother-in-law. Don’t ask me to explain. I don’t understand either women or justice.
The other review was the confessions of an Irish athlete, called Hon, It’s A Bloody Kick by Sergius Dockerty, the rogue soccer star from County Cork who talked about his love life with fourteen year old Dublin and Belfast groupies; his sex life by the way made him scrupulously religiously tolerant. Sometimes good comes out of evil, sometimes it’s evil winking at you out of good. Sometimes nobody including me and even God knows what’s going on.
It’s not worth talking about books which I’ve never read anymore than I saw the subsequent Hong Kong movies, the television series on PBS or the comic books based on this all too brainless erotica. I’ve often wondered whether the books they write about in the Wall Street Journal really have existed; does it matter? It seems much easier to me though I’ve never done either to write an article about what has no reality even as a delusion than to put together the whole book itself. What do I know? I’m not known as a book reviewer. I don’t think I want to be.
Some people like to work hard. What the hell do you need to write a damned book for when you can white a book review, get the whole thing over with? Imagine working on anything for more than a month? Whatever it was, even a new Creation itself, I’d get bored and set fire to it.
An ordinary person like you out there would have said: let’s put these Nazi ex-cons to work sleeping with women too; let’s get those little groupies onto the laps of everybody, not just sweaty Irish jock celebrities. That’s the difference between genius and a little talent and cunning, folks. I know how to take an astral leap.
Most people in our supposedly sophisticated time go to Mexico for the stray cheap women; Cortez went there to rob. How many of you would have thought of stealing from Mexicans? We think of eviscerating Fork Knox of its shiny metal, not Mexico. We’d all like to meet Rockefeller in an alley, not be run over by somebody on a bicycle delivering a pizza. If I met this legendary magnate I’d give him a penny. I’m always for charity for the rich.
I thought to myself as you do, hey, maybe I could get these horny ex-cons to make love to women too; God knows everybody living or dead needs it from somebody.
Like you I also knew the kind of wild hunger the groupies had, fevers which could be turned any way at all. It’s why some of them take up sex with dogs, though most in a while gravitate to marriage and divorce. I could of course make them carnally pious with desire of an erotic kind. Why not? Most people are cattle. It was another sort of alchemy that had occurred to me.
Next to both these articles in two separate spaces was an advertisement for Florida real estate nest to the shore line in a swampy area near Tampa that nobody but lunatics would ever hunger to buy. I wasn’t interested in that terminal pitch either. What the hell can even somebody like me one do with a drank and overly fetid swamp? Even if one were God, one could only sell it at a loss. It was the water in that brackish murk that stayed in the back of my mind like a dream of orbiting stars in the skull of Copernicus.
I had a very unimaginative brother-in-law who had sold real estate on land, I also had an uncle who sold bottled air too once he saw how other people made big money selling bottled water.
I never got to any of that. Maybe I did; I don’t remember it. I was stuck by that beach scene, not the pretty girl almost naked on it but the sea beyond the margins of the shore itself. Suddenly I wanted ordinary people to live underwater, to socialize underwater, even to make love beneath the surface of the lakes, to die expensively below the watery roof of the sea. I wanted it to be all that we could only function with a snorkel, artificial fins, rubber webs on our feet. I had figured, if the United States could become a nation where one couldn’t go anywhere without a car, why not set up a comparable world where one couldn’t function or even buy a container of milk without a snorkel and diving equipment?
I invested in Albanian snorkels, not the best, not thee worst either, the construction of durable plastic materials for impeccable underwater architecture, set up a stock company, claim in the media though synthetic celebrities whom I also slept with but never seriously and convince the rabble that the next frontier of humanity wasn’t the stars but the bottom of the ocean.
We all know what happened. I sold the stock easily enough to the rubes, mostly Patagonians and hinterlands human porkers who couldn’t compete with snails on the plains of Iowa, made five billion dollars selling short and took the cash to Zurich. Of course nobody wanted to live underwater, they’d be crazy to, wouldn’t they?
Nobody could have every wanted to, nutty as this species is. I made money from my stupidity as well as my brains. Tat’s hard to do. Try it sometime.
I siphoned off all the liquidity quietly, then walked away from the company. It went bankrupt a few weeks after. I took my famous chartered flight to Zurich with twenty big splashy yellow trunks, the government arrested my poor accountants and underwriters as if they were our own financial prophets and visionaries, I winked and walked free.
The big boys in Washington never took a look at me because I owned all the prosecutors and judges the way you purchase a classy bit of hamburger with pickles at a gourmet restaurant. In this life you have to know who is for sale. Sometimes it’s everybody including you.
I might even own you; if I do, believe me, you don’t know it. I probably don’t either. Maybe somebody owns me too; I might be just as ignorant of my masters. If they didn’t know me either, would it matter?
It’s no crime in this species not to have any kind of knowledge about anything. We’re lucky we’re charming.
It’s not wrong either on this planet to bribe people. Bribery is the basis of civilization. You force people to do something, you make visible and invisible enemies. You bribe them. You constantly make friends out of strangers. Everybody is a winner, even the house.
I love Switzerland. Some countries have a genius for murder; these fine people in Zurich make currency the way other people offer you their very colorful metaphysics. I’d rather have a buck or two in my pocket than a bizarre opinion about things nobody knows anything about. Wouldn’t you?
I’m of course free and clear; all these former employees of mine doing time in the slammer have learned a few things as we all do from our enemies when our friends smile as we go out naked to die. I hope to learn a little wisdom from being locked up somewhere by somebody like a wild animal someday. Not now, someday. If it takes a little quiet time in the cooler to have some understanding we ought to be grateful that it didn’t take death.
One last bit of advice: think about who you are, what you are. You are either somebody like me, bribed by somebody just like me, or maybe you are sitting in a cell somewhere. Maybe you aren’t flush enough to walk; maybe you’re just a frugal philosopher.
Don’t be. Don’t even try be the Cortez of capital either. That’s my game. That’s me. You have to know in this world when you are a general momentarily if ever, when you are a soldier. |
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