Forget the Birds
The straw man has been replaced by a false dichotomy: birds or banks. You give your life to those less fortunate, or you throw in your lot with the greedy capitalists. I mean, you put your money in these institutions, and they lend it out to build things like bridges and railroads. No one needs those things or anything. They don’t benefit society and spur growth and such. At the end of the day, by leaving it in the bank you end up with a little more than you had to begin with. Oh, but for that to happen the banks have to act…responsibly. There’s the rub. Too bad the guys running them in 2008 probably saw Mary Poppins. You demonize a profession that is the engine fueling capitalism and have people watch it at an impressionable age, and weird things will start to happen. How ‘bout tossing a fraction of the tuppence to the bird lady and then bringing the rest to the bank? Wasn’t an option.
After Banks departs, unburdened from a sense of duty to his company, we see Dawes. He gets the joke. He starts tittering until he flies up to the ceiling, eventually succumbing to a fit of unbridled hilarity. How many all-night coke binges in gilded hotel rooms have been fueled by this one scene? Young investment bankers tricked into senselessness, having banished a model portrayed as “uptight.” The upturned collars of their polo shirts deflecting all pleas of common sense. As if some lotus-eating euphoria was the logical end of their endeavors. Starting up hedge funds whose punchline ended up even flatter than Banks’. They just simply went bust.
Finally, that proverbial kite. Banks, with newly together family in tow, is enjoying a moment of happiness, breadwinning be damned. Who should happen to be in the park? Why, it’s all of Banks’ colleagues who have a curious corporate-familial arrangement, which requires that they spend all their time together. Get this—Banks is getting the position of partner. That whole bank run thing all a simple misunderstanding. A flock of bankers flying kites. No lightning in sight. A pastime where the kiter holds on to a piece of string and watches fabric stretched over a frame as it shifts aimlessly in the wind. And come the next business day, when they return to Fidelity Fiduciary, is there any wonder how they’ll approach running that institution? I think we know how that turns out.
Poppins drifts back into the clouds, her handiwork done. The paradigm has been set, the first domino tilted over. As the credit-default swaps mounted, and the sub-prime loans formed great piles of pigeon droppings, where were the people who were supposed to protect the integrity of the institutions for which they worked? I’m afraid they took a cue from old Dawes, floating into oblivion, with the world gripped in a financial panic all the sugar in the world couldn’t help us swallow.
