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The Sun-Baked Speculator
Tom Ryan
10/22/2005
Everything You Read in the Newspapers Is Absolutely True, Except for that Rare Story of Which You
Happen to Have First-Hand Knowledge
The sentence of pillory is alive and well today except it takes the form of slanderous articles rather than stones.
In the Patrick O'Brian's novel Reverse of the Medal, Jack Aubrey, the greatest fighting captain in naval history, has been conned into taking the fall for an insider trading scandal involving his own father. Aubrey is tried; confident in the English judicial system, he attempts to mount his own defense and refuses to turn against his dad. He is sentenced to the pillory. He goes there and 10,000 midshipmen and officers, all at desperate peril to their careers, crowd the street. They refuse to allow the stone throwers to get near him. When the time comes for the stone-throwing the words ring out, "Off with the hats," and immense cheering fills the street.
Attempting to answer the question about the kind of mind that constantly focuses on the glass being half empty, I have found that people will always pay more for doomsday than optimism. This seems cynical -- but I would call it a relic of our hunter/gatherer past where daily survival was less assured than today. It is the kind of social status-leveling that tribal people often want to see -- a society where no one person stands out from any other, where second-hand distributors of information are king, and where anyone's insecurities can be assuaged by the view that if you don't get what you want, there is nothing to worry about as no one else will be allowed to get it either. -- Victor Niederhoffer
The media is the message. -- Marshall McLuhan
The advertisement is the most truthful part of a newspaper. -- Thomas Jefferson