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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
January 31, 2010
Laughter & foresight
Hardly anyone likes banks. I have a sneaking contrarian regard for them, because I think of bankers as droll people, and enjoy bankerly dark humour, which looks at any human enterprise as a wild dance atop the cliff of bankruptcy. At least, this used to be the case, though I must admit the bankers I've known have been mostly French, Dutch, or British.I think of one blue-shirted gentleman named John, who presided over a little Barclay's branch in Covent Garden, London, a generation ago. He didn't even have to say anything to errant shopkeepers seeking short-term loans. They'd just look at him and change their minds. He was as generous as the day was long, but never with the bank's money. He told riches-to-rags stories, with the relish of a country vicar reciting the misfortunes of his parishioners: a rich, internalized, cello duet between sincere compassion and slapstick farce. Insurance underwriters I have also loved. One in particular, a gentleman I shall call Neville, for that was his name, I used to take walks with en route to some bar in a certain Asian city. He was a delight to walk with. As we would pass down a street, he would point to all the physical hazards. He could spot which roof tiles were likeliest to blow off; which walls might collapse from cumulative traffic vibrations; bolts on fire escapes waiting to rust through. He could explain the kind of ankle injury a pedestrian could sustain from an irregular sidewalk, that would leave him a lifelong cripple. How the cab driver idling between fares might die unaware of carbon monoxide, and the legal fallout on the ownership of his taxi licence. And then, at the bar, how a miscalculation by the brewmaster could by-produce formaldehyde enough to fill a hospital ward with customers suffering esophageal burning and cardiac arrhythmia. Neville made the world a brighter place. Doctors can also make fine companions, and I like neurologists the best. There's one named Jeremy who once put me in view, in a church basement, of the ways in which a slight bump to the head, of no apparent immediate consequence, could turn one into a human vegetable. Conversely, of shrapnel injuries that had been survived. How I wished to introduce him to Neville. There is some form of dark humour appropriate to persons of every rank and class. Among journalists it used to be de rigueur to joke about perfectly unreliable sources; about the stupidest lie one ever fell for. Not that malice has ever been required, for one might also recall how he was led, innocently and plausibly, from one misunderstanding to another, into writing a piece of reportage that would go down in the annals of journalism as the most embarrassingly mistaken scoop ever to appear on a front page. One might even embellish such stories, for the sake of warning one's younger colleagues. Nor can I pretend no such thing ever happened to me. I was once asked to fill in for an ulcerous movie reviewer, by an editor who could not be convinced that I knew nothing about the cinema. The plot summary I then provided for a rather complicated Italian movie began to go wrong about the beginning when I did not grasp the opening scene was a "flashback." My reader may perhaps be aware, from his own line of work, of immense fields of tragicomedic potentiality. God in his wisdom gave us dreams to cope with our secret forebodings; with the many slips between cups and lips. Even the sleeping birds seem to dream; and to compensate for our comparatively greater endowment of foresight, we have humour, including the very darkest kind, to get us through the daylight stretches. Indeed, I have long observed a disposition towards "black humour" is a reasonably accurate predictor of orthodoxy in religious belief, and soundness of political judgment. Add an indubitable propensity to self-deprecation, and you might even be able to trust the fellow. (Or the girl, as case may be.) Returning to bankers, who are now under the gun from legislators in both America and Europe -- for having crawled out on limbs of different sorts -- my sense is that they need more than merely adequate reserve requirements. They are made the scapegoats for a whole society that has been going out on limbs of credit, without sufficient reserves. They also have a better excuse, for American bankers in particular were put under legislative requirements to provide mortgages and other credit to customers they did not traditionally fancy, and they invented some of the wilder postmodern risk-management schemes directly in response to such political pressure. It is a cold, cruel world for politicians' scapegoats. It is made colder not only by the societal tendency towards rank irresponsible consumerism. For the visitation of grim, atheist "political correctness" on every aspect of human life has been taking its toll. It acts, for instance, as a poison to kill dark humour. The effect is bankers and others less and less able to see risk, because they less and less dare to joke about it. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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