Roll Over, Al Stump! Make Way For Gilbert King!

Tyrus (Ty) Cobb sneered at major league baseball players prior to his death in 1961; the sole exception was the 5-tool center fielder playing for the San Francisco (and earlier, New York) Giants: Willie Mays. Ty Cobb opined that he would pay to watch Mays play the game. The proper follow-up would be to ask if Willie Mays would have paid to see Ty Cobb play. If this is a (fair & balanced) reconsideration of a misanthrope, so be it.

[x Smithsonian.com]
The Knife In Ty Cobb’s Back
By Gilbert King

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“In 1912—and you can write this down—I killed a man in Detroit.”

Al Stump, commissioned in 1960 to ghostwrite Ty Cobb’s autobiography, My Life in Baseball: The True Record, would say it was a boozy, pill-induced, off-the-record confession—a secret revealed by the Detroit Tigers great as he spent the last painful year of his life battling cancer. The confession never made its way into the book Stump was writing for Doubleday & Company. With Cobb insisting on editorial control, Stump claimed, his role was to help the ballplayer give his account of his legendary but controversial life and career, even if the effort might be self-serving. It was, after all, Cobb’s book, he said, so the sportswriter filed the murder confession away with the rest of his notes.

Instead, the autobiography offers an account of a comeuppance rather than a killing, an encounter more in line with the “Nobody can pull that stuff on me!” persona that the baseball legend still liked to project at age 73. In that version, Cobb was riding in his car with his wife, Charlie, to the railway station in Detroit to catch a train for a Tigers exhibition game in Syracuse, New York, when three men waved them down. Thinking they might be having some trouble, he stopped to help. Immediately, the men attacked Cobb, who slid out of the car and began to fight back. “One of the mugs I knocked down got up and slashed at me with a knife,” the book says. “I dodged, but he cut me in the back. I couldn’t tell how bad it was. But my arms were still working.”

Cobb says the men retreated as he chased one of them down, “leaving him in worse condition than he’d arrived in.” Another one returned and cornered Cobb in a blind passageway. “I had something in my hand, which I won’t describe [Cobb was known to carry a “big Belgian revolver” at the time], but which often came in handy in Detroit in the days when it was a fairly rough town. I used it on him at some length. If he still lives, he has the scars to show for it. Leaving him unconscious, I drove on to the depot.”

By 1912, Cobb had established himself as one of the baseball’s biggest stars, and he would eventually be recognized as one of the greatest to ever play the game. When the National Baseball Hall of Fame inducted its inaugural class in 1936, he received more votes than any other player, including Babe Ruth, Walter Johnson, Christy Matthewson and Honus Wagner. By all accounts, he was fiery, belligerent, mean-tempered and capable of violence. But did he kill a man?

Violent confrontations were a recurring theme in Cobb’s life. He broke into major league baseball with the Tigers in August 1905, just three weeks after his mother, Amanda Cobb, had been arrested on charges of voluntary manslaughter in the shooting death of Cobb’s father, William Herschel Cobb. Amanda Cobb said she thought her husband was an intruder trying to enter their house through the bedroom window when she shot him twice. But there had been rumors in town that William suspected his wife of infidelity and had unexpectedly returned home late that fateful evening, when she believed him to be out of town. During her trial the following year, prosecutors carefully questioned Amanda Cobb about ambiguities over the time that had lapsed between shots, but she was ultimately acquitted.

Stories of Cobb’s racial intolerance were well-documented. In 1907 during spring training in Augusta, Georgia, a black groundskeeper named Bungy, whom Cobb had known for years, attempted to shake Cobb’s hand or pat him on the shoulder. The overly familiar greeting infuriated Cobb, who slapped him and chased him from the clubhouse. When Bungy’s wife tried to intervene, Cobb turned around and choked her until teammates pried his hands off her neck. In 1908 in Detroit, a black laborer castigated him after he accidentally stepped into some freshly poured asphalt. Cobb assaulted the laborer on the spot, knocking him to the ground. The ballplayer was found guilty of battery, but a friendly judge suspended his sentence. Cobb paid the laborer $75 to avoid a civil suit.

Just three months before the three men attacked him in Detroit in 1912, Cobb assaulted a New York Highlanders fan at Hilltop Park in New York City. The fan, Claude Lueker, was missing all of one hand and three fingers on the other from a printing press accident, but he spent the entire game heckling the Detroit players. After enduring taunts that were “reflecting on my mother’s color and morals,” Cobb reported in his autobiography, the Georgia native had had enough. He jumped the rail along the third-base side of the field and climbed 12 rows of seats to get to Lueker, whom he slammed to the ground and beat senseless. Someone screamed for Cobb to stop, pointing out that the man had no hands. “I don’t care if he has no feet!” Cobb yelled back, stomping Lueker until park police pulled him off. American League president Ban Johnson, who was at the game, suspended Cobb for 10 days.

Ty Cobb died on July 17, 1961, at age 74, and Doubleday rushed to get his autobiography onto bookshelves two months later. The book sold well, but in December 1961, True magazine published a story by Al Stump, “Ty Cobb’s Wild 10-Month Fight to Live,” offering a lurid, behind-the-scenes and supposedly true portrait of the Georgia Peach. “The first book was a cover up,” Stump said later. “I felt very bad about it. I felt I wasn’t being a good newspaperman.” With Cobb dead, Stump had decided that it was time to release the ballplayer’s supposedly private confessions and utterances. In the True article, Stump recalled Cobb’s visiting the cemetery in Royston, Georgia, where his parents were buried. “My father had his head blown off with a shotgun when I was 18 years old—by a member of my own family,” Stump quoted Cobb as saying. “I didn’t get over that. I’ve never gotten over that.”

The article, published in three installments, depicted Cobb as feisty and ill-tempered as ever, downing painkillers and scotch, and living in his Atherton, California, mansion without electricity because of a minor billing dispute with Pacific Gas and Electric Company. “When I wouldn’t pay,” Stump quoted Cobb as saying, “they cut off my utilities. Okay—I’ll see them in court.” Carrying more than a million dollars in stock certificates and bonds in a paper bag (he’d gotten rich investing in Coca-Cola and General Motors stock), as well as a loaded Luger, Cobb checked into hospitals and berated doctors and staff for treatment, only to demand that Stump smuggle in liquor for him or sneak him out on late-night visits to bars and casinos. Stump said he complied with Cobb’s wishes because he feared for his own life.

As to the incident in Detroit in 1912, Stump quoted Cobb as saying he killed one of his attackers, beating the man with the butt of his Belgian pistol, then using the gun’s sight as a blade and “slash[ing] away until the man’s face was faceless.” The writer also quoted Cobb as saying: “Left him there, not breathing, in his own rotten blood.” In a later biography of Cobb, Stump added that a few days after the attack in Detroit, “a press report told of an unidentified body found off Trumbull Avenue in an alley.”

At the time, press reports did mention an attack on Ty Cobb. An Associated Press dispatch the following day described an attempted robbery of Cobb by three assailants who “were under the influence of liquor.” A “battle royal” followed, the report said, and one of his would-be robbers pulled a knife and slashed Cobb in the back, after which “all three men made their getaway.” The Syracuse Herald reported that on the day after the attack, Cobb got two hits in the exhibition game against the Syracuse Stars but did not exert himself because of “a severe knife wound in his back.” Other reports had blood seeping through Cobb’s uniform.

Police in Detroit, however, knew nothing of the attack. When Cobb later described the incident to reporters, he said he’d suffered only a scratch near his shoulder. And photographs of Cobb taken during the game in Syracuse show no signs on blood.

Doug Roberts, a lawyer and former prosecutor, had doubts about Stump’s account and did extensive research into the incident for a 1996 article for The National Pastime, a peer-reviewed journal published by the Society for American Baseball Research. After examining autopsy records at the Wayne County Medical Examiner’s office and after combing through all of the Detroit newspapers from the time, Roberts concluded that Stump’s claim that an unidentified body had been reported in the press was not true. Roberts also found no record of any deaths due to blunt force trauma in Detroit in August 1912.

Twenty years after Ty Cobb died, a large amount of Cobb memorabilia was being shopped around to collectors—from mundane personal items, such as his hats, pipes and dentures, to objects of historical importance, such as his diary. The man behind the sale of these items was none other than Al Stump, who was believed to have cleaned out Cobb’s mansion after the ballplayer died. Memorabilia mega-collector Barry Halper acquired a significant portion of the artifacts, and in 1999 Halper decided to sell his baseball collection through Sotheby’s, the auction house in New York, which printed catalogues with descriptions of the Cobb memorabilia. But collectors and historians began to suspect that Cobb’s diary had been forged (which the FBI later confirmed), along with hundreds of letters and documents that supposedly bore Cobb’s signature. Sotheby’s removed the items from auction. The sheer number of artifacts available led one memorabilia dealer to conclude, “Stump was buying this old stuff from flea markets, and then adding engravings and other personalizations to give the appearance of authenticity.” (Later, collectors and curators accused Halper of selling other fake or stolen memorabilia, leading one Boston collector to describe him as the “[Bernie] Madoff of memorabilia.” Halper died in 2005.)

One of the items on offer was a double-barreled shotgun Amanda Cobb had purportedly used to kill her husband. In Stump’s True magazine piece, the author quoted Cobb as saying that his father’s head was “blown off with a shotgun.” The shotgun, which Cobb had supposedly had engraved and used on many a duck hunt, was one of the big-ticket items included in the Sotheby’s catalogue. Ron Cobb (no relation to Ty), an adviser to the Ty Cobb Museum in Royston, Georgia, was shocked that such an artifact would suddenly surface after so many years. He began an investigation and discovered that during the inquest, Amanda Cobb had told the Franklin County coroner that she shot her husband with a pistol. The coroner ultimately concluded that William Herschel Cobb died of a wound from a pistol bullet. There was no mention of a shotgun in any of the records. Ron Cobb could only conclude that Al Stump had twisted history for personal gain.

Stump’s True magazine article won the Associated Press award for the best sports story of 1962 and went a long way in cementing the public’s memory of the baseball great. “From all of baseball, three men and three only appeared for his funeral,” Stump wrote at the end of his story, as if Cobb died a despised man who had alienated opponents and teammates alike. But the Sporting News reported that Cobb’s family had told friends and baseball officials that they wanted his funeral (held just 48 hours after he died) to be private and requested that they not attend, despite offers from several baseball greats to serve as pallbearers. Most of Cobb’s closest baseball friends were, in fact, already dead by 1961.

Doctors, nurses and hospital staff who attended to Cobb in his final months later came forward to say they never observed any of the rude or abusive behavior attributed to Cobb in Stump’s article. And a friendship-ending argument Stump described in a dramatic scene between Cobb and Ted Williams never happened, according to Williams. “He’s full of it,” he said of Stump.

In addition, it should be noted that Cobb’s views on race evolved after he retired from baseball. In 1952, when many whites from the Deep South were still opposed to blacks mixing with whites both in and out of baseball, Cobb was not one of them. “Certainly it is O.K. for them to play,” Cobb told a reporter. “I see no reason in the world why we shouldn’t compete with colored athletes as long as they conduct themselves with politeness and gentility. Let me say also that no white man has the right to be less of a gentleman than a colored man, in my book that goes not only for baseball but in all walks of life.” In his last year of life, Cobb may have shown a cantankerous side, but it seemed reserved for the state of baseball, which he saw as over-reliant on the home run and lacking in players of all-around skill. Willie “Mays is the only man in baseball I’d pay to see play,” he said not long before he died.

Baseball historians such as Doug Roberts and Ron Cobb point to Stump’s role in perpetuating the myths, exaggerations and untruths that taint the memory of Ty Cobb. Indeed, the 1994 Hollywood movie "Cobb," starring Tommy Lee Jones, was based on Stump’s account of the time he spent with Cobb in the last months of the ballplayer’s life. Asked why he wrote another book on Cobb, Stump told a reporter shortly before he died, in 1995: “I guess because I had all this leftover material and I thought, ‘What am I going to do with all this?’ I think I did it for the money.”

---

Sources

Books:

Charles C. Alexander. Ty Cobb (1984). Ty Cobb with Al Stump. My Life in Baseball—the True Record (1961). John D. McCallum. Ty Cobb (1975). Al Stump. Cobb: A Biography (1994).

Articles:

“Ty Cobb’s Wild 10 Month Fight to Live,” True: The Man’s Magazine; December, 1961, Al Stump. “Ty Cobb Did Not Commit Murder,” The National Pastime: A Review of Baseball History, the Society for American Baseball Research. 1996, Doug Roberts. “The Georgia Peach: Stumped by the Storyteller,” The National Pastime: A Review of Baseball History, The Society for American Baseball Research. 2010, William R. Cobb. “A Quest To Learn The Truth About Ty Cobb Author Al Stump Has Spent Much Of His Life Getting Close To The Baseball Legend,” Philadelphia Inquirer, January 1, 1995, Michael Bamberger. “Al Stump, 79, Sportswriter and Chronicler of Ty Cobb’s Life Dies,” The New York Times. December 18, 1995; The News-Palladium, Benton Harbor,MI, August 12, 1912. Syracuse Herald, Syracuse,NY, August 13, 1912. “How Racist Was Ty?” William M. Burgess III’s Ty Cobb Memorial Collection, BaseballGuru.com; “Hauls of Shame Releases FBI Report on Fake Ty Cobb Diary,” July 1, 2011, Peter J. Nash, Haulsofshame.com. Ω

[Gilbert King has written about Supreme Court history and the death penalty for the New York Times and the Washington Post, and he is a featured contributor to Smithsonian magazine’s history blog, Past Imperfect. His book, The Execution of Willie Francis was published in 2008. More recently, he has written Devil in the Grove (2012). Gilbert is also a photographer whose work has appeared in Glamour and New York Magazine, as well as international editions of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, and Elle.]

Copyright © 2012 The Smithsonian Institution

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Copyright © 2012 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

Roll Over, Cotton Mather! Make Way For Jenny McCarthy, Bill Maher, & Oprah!

Full Disclosure: This blogger has two grandchildren living in a suburb of Indianapolis — a potential ground zero of a measles pandemic. Charles P. Pierce ain't funny today. He writes about the mania that would confound Cotton Mather (promoter of smallpox innoculation in 1721). Not quite three centuries later, the fools and loons on both sides of the aisle (Right & Left) have joined the Anti-Vax movement. Foolishness and cant abound in our times. If this is (fair & balanced) dumbfoundedness, so be it.

[x Esquire]
The Politics Blog: The Intended Consequences Of Fake Science
By Charles P. Pierce

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The blog is fond of quoting the bard, Guy Clark, who once wrote, "Lord, you'd think there's less fools in this world."

Comes now this report that we nearly had a measles pandemic in Indiana, with the Super Bowl as Ground Zero, because of the traction that the anti-vaccination crowd has gained in the public at large. (The reason we didn't have a pandemic was that so many of the people at the Super Bowl had been vaccinated.) Old childhood plagues are making a comeback. It's also not promising, as the WaPo report points out, that pediatricians have started telling their anti-vaccination patients to go climb a tree.

This is a real-world consequence of our tendency to enable nonsense to the point that it actually has an effect on public policy. This is a real-world consequence of our current taste for non-science, or anti-science, to borrow a useful term from the history of Mother Church. This is the public-health face of climate-change denial, to name only the most obvious parallel. Create your own "science," sell it enthusiastically, get enough people to believe it so that the teenage bookers at cable news notice the dust you've kicked up, and you've got yourself a movement, regardless of what the people who actually know what they're talking about think.

The state health authorities in Indiana have released a list of possible places where the victims of the outbreak may have contracted the disease. Several of them, including the College Park Church in Indianapolis and a basketball tournament for homeschooled children, are intriguing because of the cross-pollination between fundamentalist Christianity and the anti-vaccination movement. In 2005, a young Indiana woman came home from a mission trip to Romania and kicked off another measles outbreak within the congregation of her church. According to the CDC report on that outbreak:

However, there was less agreement that children should receive all recommended vaccines and that childhood vaccines in general and the measles vaccine in particular are safe. Most believed that childhood vaccinations may cause serious side effects or learning disabilities. All believed in the right to refuse vaccines, but were open to alternatives such as quarantine or staying out of school or work during an outbreak. All reported that they had access to enough information on vaccination.

The reasons cited most often for not receiving measles-containing vaccine included: a preference for naturally acquired infection, advice from an alternative health-care provider, media, personal religious objections to vaccination, the belief that vaccines are unsafe or unnecessary, and a fear of getting the disease from the vaccine. The same reasons were cited most often when respondents were asked about vaccines in general.

Which brings us to the question of "religious exemptions," which seem to be all the rage today.

In 1985, across the border in Illinois, there was a measles outbreak at Principia College, a Christian Science institution. There were 112 confirmed cases and three deaths associated with that outbreak. Between that episode and 1994, there were four large-scale measles outbreaks at Christian Science institutions around St. Louis. By the way, Principia College still maintains a religious exemption from the requirements of Illinois law mandating proof of vaccination.Instead, Principia students can present an "accommodation form" stating their religious objections to vaccination.

A number of states are drafting bills that would allow parents to opt out of mandatory vaccination programs for "philosophical reasons," up to and including, one suspects, "Something I heard from Jenny McCarthy/Bill Maher/Oprah Winfrey/some radio paranoid." Or, "I read about it on the Intertoobz." This is extremely not promising. Ω

[Charles P. Pierce is a 1975 graduate of Marquette University, where he majored in journalism and brewery tours. He was delighted to combine his vocation and his avocation once again when he returned to Milwaukee to cover the trial of Jeffrey Dahmer.

He attended graduate school at Boston College for two days. He is a former forest ranger for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and still ponders the question of what possesses people to go into the woods and throw disposable diapers up into trees.

He began his journalism career writing bowling agate for the Milwaukee papers, and remains justly proud of his ability to spell multi-syllabic, vowel-free Eastern European names. He has written for the alternative press, including Worcester Magazine and the Boston Phoenix, and was a sports columnist for The Boston Herald. He was a feature writer and columnist for the late, lamented sports daily, The National. He has been a writer-at-large for a men's fashion magazine, and his work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the LA Times Magazine, the Nation, the Atlantic, and The Chicago Tribune, among others. Although he is no longer a contributor to Eric Alterman's Altercation, he remains a devoted reader. He is a frequent contributor to the American Prospect and Slate. Charlie appears weekly on National Public Radio's sports program "Only A Game" and is a regular panelist on NPR's game show, "Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me." Since July 1997 he has been a writer at large at Esquire, covering everything from John McCain to the Hubble telescope, with more than a few shooting stars thrown in between. In April 2002, he joined the staff of the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine.]

Copyright © 2012 Hearst Communications, Inc.

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Copyright © 2012 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

The Stooges Redux

The Three Stooges were a vaudeville and comedy act of the early to mid–20th century best known for their numerous short subject films. In their slapstick films, the Stooges were commonly known by their first names: "Moe, Larry, and Curly" and "Moe, Larry, and Shemp," among other lineups. Moe was Moe Howard, Larry was Larry Fine, and Curly was Jerome Howard; Shemp Howard replaced his brother, Curly, after Curly suffered a debilitating stroke. In all, there were 220 3 Stooges short films released between 1934 and 1967. While considering the Dumbo version of The Stooges, listen to the song that should precede any appearances by these clowns:

[x YouTube/CountMall]
Three Stooges Theme Song
By Columbia Pictures

If this is (fair & balanced) snark, so be it.

[x RS]
Arizona Debate: Conservative Chickens Come Home To Roost
By Matt Taibbi

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How about that race for the Republican nomination? Was last night's debate crazy, or what?

Throughout this entire process, the spectacle of these clowns thrashing each other and continually seizing and then fumbling frontrunner status has left me with an oddly reassuring feeling, one that I haven't quite been able to put my finger on. In my younger days I would have just assumed it was regular old Schadenfreude at the sight of people like Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich suffering, but this isn’t like that — it's something different than the pleasure of watching A-Rod strike out in the playoffs.

No, it was while watching the debates last night that it finally hit me: This is justice. What we have here are chickens coming home to roost. It's as if all of the American public's bad habits and perverse obsessions are all coming back to haunt Republican voters in this race: The lack of attention span, the constant demand for instant gratification, the abject hunger for negativity, the utter lack of backbone or constancy (we change our loyalties at the drop of a hat, all it takes is a clever TV ad): these things are all major factors in the spiraling Republican disaster.

Most importantly, though, the conservative passion for divisive, partisan, bomb-tossing politics is threatening to permanently cripple the Republican party. They long ago became more about pointing fingers than about ideology, and it's finally ruining them.

Oh, sure, your average conservative will insist his belief system is based upon a passion for the free market and limited government, but that's mostly a cover story. Instead, the vast team-building exercise that has driven the broadcasts of people like Rush and Hannity and the talking heads on Fox for decades now has really been a kind of ongoing Quest for Orthodoxy, in which the team members congregate in front of the TV and the radio and share in the warm feeling of pointing the finger at people who aren't as American as they are, who lack their family values, who don’t share their All-American work ethic.

The finger-pointing game is a fun one to play, but it’s a little like drugs — you have to keep taking bigger and bigger doses in order to get the same high.

So it starts with a bunch of these people huddling together and saying to themselves, "We’re the real good Americans; our problems are caused by all those other people out there who don’t share our values." At that stage the real turn-on for the followers is the recognition that there are other like-minded people out there, and they don’t need blood orgies and war cries to keep the faith strong — bake sales and church retreats will do.

So they form their local Moral Majority outfits, and they put Ronald Reagan in office, and they sit and wait for the world to revert to a world where there was one breadwinner in the family, and no teen pregnancy or crime or poor people, and immigrants worked hard and didn't ask for welfare and had the decency to speak English – a world that never existed in reality, of course, but they're waiting for a return to it nonetheless.

Think Ron Paul in the South Carolina debate, when he said that in the '60s, "there was nobody out in the street suffering with no medical care." Paul also recalled that after World War II, 10 million soldiers came home and prospered without any kind of government aid at all — all they needed was a massive cut to the federal budget, and those soldiers just surfed on the resultant wave of economic progress.

"You know what the government did? They cut the budget by 60 percent," he said. "And everybody went back to work again, you didn't need any special programs."

Right — it wasn’t like they needed a G.I. Bill or anything. After all, people were different back then: They didn’t want or need welfare, or a health care program, or any of those things. At least, that’s not the way Paul remembered it.

That's all the early conservative movement was. It was just a heartfelt request that we go back to the good old days of America as these people remembered or imagined it. Of course, the problem was, we couldn't go back, not just because more than half the population (particularly the nonwhite, non-straight, non-male segment of the population) desperately didn't want to go back, but also because that America never existed and was therefore impossible to recreate.

And when we didn’t go back to the good old days, this crowd got frustrated, and suddenly the message stopped being heartfelt and it got an edge to it.

The message went from, "We’re the real Americans; the others are the problem," to, "We’re the last line of defense; we hate those other people and they’re our enemies." Now it wasn’t just that the rest of us weren't getting with the program: Now we were also saboteurs, secretly or perhaps even openly conspiring with America’s enemies to prevent her return to the long-desired Days of Glory.

Now, why would us saboteurs do that? Out of jealousy (we resented their faith and their family closeness), out of spite, and because we have gonads instead of morals. In the Clinton years and the early Bush years we started to hear a lot of this stuff, that the people conservatives described as "liberals" were not, as we are in fact, normal people who believe in marriage and family and love their children just as much as conservatives do, but perverts who subscribe to a sort of religion of hedonism.

"Liberals' only remaining big issue is abortion because of their beloved sexual revolution," was the way Ann Coulter put it. "That's their cause — spreading anarchy and polymorphous perversity. Abortion permits that."

So they fought back, and a whole generation of more strident conservative politicians rose to fight the enemy at home, who conveniently during the '90s lived in the White House and occasionally practiced polymorphous perversity there.

Then conservatives managed to elect to the White House a man who was not only a fundamentalist Christian, but a confirmed anti-intellectual who never even thought about visiting Europe until, as president, he was forced to — the perfect champion of all Real Americans!

Surely, things would change now. But they didn’t. Life continued to move drearily into a new and scary future, Spanish-speaking people continued to roll over the border in droves, queers paraded around in public and even demanded the right to be married, and America not only didn't go back to the good old days of the single-breadwinner family, but jobs in general dried up and you were lucky if Mom and Dad weren’t both working two jobs.

During this time we went to war against the Islamic terrorists responsible for 9/11 by invading an unrelated secular Middle Eastern dictatorship. When people on the other side protested, the rhetoric became even more hysterical. Now those of us outside the circle of Real Americans were not just enemies, but in league with mass-murdering terrorists. In fact, that slowly became the definition of a "liberal" on a lot of these programs – a terrorist.

Sean Hannity’s bestseller during this time, for Christ’s sake, was subtitled, Defeating terrorism, despotism, and liberalism. "He is doing the work of what all people who want big government always do, and that is commit terrorist acts," said Glenn Beck years ago, comparing liberals to Norweigan mass murderer Anders Breivik.

And when the unthinkable happened, and a black American with a Muslim-sounding name assumed the throne in the White House, now, suddenly, we started to hear that liberals were not only in league with terrorists, but somehow worse than terrorists.

"Terrorism? Yes. That’s not the big battle," said Minnesota Republican congressional candidate Allan Quist a few years ago. "The big battle is in D.C. with the radicals. They aren’t liberals. They are radicals. Obama, Pelosi, Walz: They’re not liberals, they’re radicals. They are destroying our country."

In "Spinal Tap" terms, the rhetoric by the time Obama got elected already had gone well past eleven. It was at thirteen, fifteen, twenty…. Our tight little core of Real Americans by then had, over a series of decades, decided pretty much the entire rest of the world was shit. Europe we know about. The Middle East? Let’s "carpet bomb it until they can’t build a transitor radio," as Ann Coulter put it. Africa was full of black terrorists with AIDS, and Asia, too, was a good place to point a finger or two ("I want to go to war with China," is how Rick Santorum put it).

Here at home, all liberals, gays, Hispanic immigrants, atheists, Hollywood actors and/or musicians with political opinions, members of the media, members of congress, TSA officials, animal-lovers, union workers, state employees with pensions, Occupiers and other assorted unorthodox types had already long ago been rolled into the enemies list.

Given the continued troubles and the continued failure to return to good old American values, who else could possibly be to blame? Where else could they possibly point the finger?

There was only one possible answer, and we're seeing it playing out in this race: At themselves! And I don’t mean they pointed the finger "at themselves" in the psychologically healthy, self-examining, self-doubting sort of way. Instead, I mean they pointed "at themselves" in the sense of, "There are traitors in our ranks. They must be ferreted out and destroyed!"

This is the last stage in any paranoid illness. You start by suspecting that somebody out there is out to get you; in the end, you’re sure that even the people who love you the most under your own roof, your own doctors, your parents, your wife and your children, they’re in on the plot. To quote Matt Damon in the almost-underrated spy film "The Good Shepherd," they became convinced that there’s "a stranger in the house."

This is where the Republican Party is now. They’ve run out of foreign enemies to point fingers at. They’ve already maxed out the rhetoric against us orgiastic, anarchy-loving pansexual liberal terrorists. The only possible remaining explanation for their troubles is that their own leaders have failed them. There is a stranger in the house!

This current race for the presidential nomination has therefore devolved into a kind of Freudian Agatha Christie story, in which the disturbed and highly paranoid voter base by turns tests the orthodoxy of each candidate, trying to figure out which one is the spy, which one is really Barack Obama bin Laden-Marx under the candidate mask!

We expected this when Mitt Romney, a man who foolishly once created a functioning health care program in Massachusetts, was the front-runner. We knew he was going to have to defend his bona fides against the priesthood ("I’m not convinced," sneered the sideline-sitting conservative Mme. Defarge, Sarah Palin), that he would have a rough go of it at the CPAC conference, and so on.

But it’s gotten so ridiculous that even Santorum, as paranoid and hysterical a finger-pointing politician as this country has ever seen, a man who once insisted with a straight face that there is no such thing as a liberal Christian — he’s now being put through the Electric Conservative Paranoia Acid Test, and failing!

"He is a fake," Ron Paul said at the Michigan debate last night, to assorted hoots and cheers. And Santorum, instead of turning around and laying into Paul, immediately panicked and rubbed his arm as if to say, "See? I’m made of the right stuff," and said, "I’m real, Ron, I’m real." These candidates are behaving like Stalinist officials in the late thirties, each one afraid to be the first to stop applauding.

These people have run out of others to blame, run out of bystanders to suspect, run out of decent family people to dismiss as Godless, sex-crazed perverts. They’re turning the gun on themselves now. It might be justice, or it might just be sad. Whatever it is, it’s remarkable to watch. Ω

[As Rolling Stone’s chief political reporter, Matt Taibbi's predecessors include the likes of Hunter S. Thompson and P.J. O'Rourke. Taibbi has written Spanking the Donkey: On the Campaign Trail with the Democrats (2005); Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire (2007); The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics & Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire (2008); and Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History (2010). Taibbi graduated from Bard College in 1991.]

Copyright © 2012 Rolling Stone

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Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves by Neil Sapper is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at sapper.blogspot.com. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available here.



Copyright © 2012 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

A Case Study In "Unfortunate Business Decisions"

Full Disclosure: this blogger bailed on Netflix prior to the Netflix train wreck. Netflix didn't carry a series that is in its third season on the FX cable channel: "Justified." Amazon Instant Video loads the current episode the day after it runs on FX. Stay tuned for the best opening theme music since "The Sopranos."

[x YouTube/Fotokino Channel]
Long Hard Times To Come
By Gangstagrass & T.O.N.E.Z.

If this is a (fair & balanced) reason to leave Netflix for Amazon Instant Video, so be it.

[x Vanity Fair]
Seeing Red
By William D. Cohan

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Reed Hastings, 51, the C.E.O. of Netflix, is bloody but only slightly bowed. When his company was at the pinnacle of success, just last summer, he refused my repeated requests to discuss his apparent business prowess. He claimed to be reticent about being interviewed, disdaining the limelight and the attention it brings to him and his family. His low-key, unrehearsed manner—he is prone to gaffes involving hot tubs, among other things—makes it clear he is not having fun when he talks to the media. What little publicity he does is only to benefit Netflix. “It’s an appropriate and necessary sacrifice . . . but on a personal basis, it’s pure downside, because then you just get more recognized,” he says. “You lead a less normal life. I hate the photo shoots. I hate all that stuff.”

But after presiding over perhaps the worst self-inflicted corporate wound since Coca-Cola introduced New Coke, in 1985 (and then promised to continue making the old Coke after a tempest of consumer ire), he finally relented in early December and met me at a Midtown Manhattan hotel. He still had on the garish burgundy shirt and tan jacket he had worn earlier in the afternoon during a UBS investor conference. Despite his stratospheric Silicon Valley reputation and quasi-billionaire status, he comes across more as the preppy hockey player he once was than the high-tech mogul he has become.

As if working his way through some sort of corporate 12-step program, Hastings forthrightly admits that the events of the summer were not his or his company’s finest hour, but he believed it was “healthy” for leaders to have “a reservoir of self-doubt, because it’s how you create an internal dialogue and how you check your assumptions.” Still, despite the company’s rebound in early 2012 (share prices have nearly doubled since December), many Netflix investors wish Hastings had doubted his instincts a bit more than he did.

The son of a lawyer who once served in the Nixon administration, Hastings has degrees in mathematics, from Bowdoin College, and artificial intelligence, from Stanford University, but he was never a desk-bound geek. After stints with the Marines, the Peace Corps (teaching math in Swaziland), and various software start-ups during the initial Internet boom—when he made a first fortune of around $75 million after selling Pure Software, a debugging company—he co-founded Netflix, in 1997, with Marc Randolph.

The series of catastrophic missteps in question regarding Netflix started July 12, when—without a whole lot of preparation or warning—the company announced that if its customers wanted to continue receiving the movies and television shows on DVDs that arrive through the mail in Netflix’s signature red envelopes they would have to pay $7.99 a month for the privilege. If they wanted monthly access to streaming content over the Internet—no DVDs or mail involved, just instant gratification—the cost would also be $7.99. If they wanted access to both DVDs and streaming content, the price would be $15.98 a month ($7.99 plus $7.99), up from a combined monthly price of $9.99. “We think $7.99 is a terrific value for our unlimited streaming plan and $7.99 a terrific value for our unlimited DVD plan,” Jessie Becker, Netflix’s vice president of marketing, announced on the Netflix Blog with the typical corporate happy talk that often accompanies really bad news. “We hope one, or both, of these plans makes sense for our members and their entertainment needs.”

Since this was not rocket science, it took about a nano-second for Netflix’s 24 million or so customers to realize that they were being hit with a 60 percent price increase; what had once cost $10 a month would now cost $16. Even though the price to see a first-run movie in a theater on the nation’s two coasts averages around $13 per ticket, the social networks and the blogosphere lit up with such instant fury you might have thought Hastings had dropped a nuclear device on his customers. Greg Heitzmann, a University of Missouri graduate, was typical of the nearly 13,000 people who went on the Netflix Blog to express their anger: “To say the least, I am shocked and appalled at your recent behavior,” Heitzmann wrote. “Your nominal price increase, while unexpected, does not deter my loyalty. However, your mouthpiece Jessie Becker’s presentation of this upcharge—as an added choice for my own benefit—insults my intelligence and reveals the breadth of your arrogance. Had I been treated like an adult and informed of these changes in a straightforward, honest manner, perhaps we could rekindle our spark. Unfortunately, this course of action is no longer available; your condescending and manipulative tone has irreparably ruined our relationship.” Heitzmann canceled his subscription. He was not alone. More than 800,000 Netflix subscribers dropped the service within months of the July announcement.

As customers continued to flee, Hastings leapt into the fray to try to explain. “I messed up,” he wrote on the Netflix Blog on September 18. “I owe everyone an explanation. It is clear from the feedback over the past two months that many members felt we lacked respect and humility in the way we announced the separation of DVD and streaming, and the price changes. That was certainly not our intent, and I offer my sincere apology.”

“We weren’t doing the price change to raise profits or something,” he elaborated to me. “We were doing it because we were so focused on becoming the streaming company and the global streaming company that we always wanted to be, and always have wanted to be.” He said that he sees the future of Netflix similarly to how big telephone companies see their futures in wireless, rather than in landline, phones. “Most companies that are great at something—like AOL dialup or Borders bookstores—do not become great at new things people want (streaming for us) because they are afraid to hurt their initial business,” he wrote on the blog.

Hastings took the blame for the failure to communicate better with customers. “In hindsight, I slid into arrogance based upon past success,” he wrote. “But now I see that given the huge changes we have been recently making, I should have personally given a full justification to our members of why we are separating DVD and streaming, and charging for both. It wouldn’t have changed the price increase, but it would have been the right thing to do.”

But with the mea culpa behind him, he proceeded to make matters even worse, by announcing that the DVD-by-mail service would be split off from the streaming service and renamed Qwikster—“because it refers to quick delivery,” he explained—with its own Web site and its own C.E.O. The streaming service would still be called Netflix and be the focus of the company’s energy and its future growth. There would be no more price increases—“We’re done with that!”—but keeping both services would now be even more cumbersome, requiring two separate accounts, two separate monthly credit-card charges, and twice as much effort as before. “So if you subscribe to both services, and if you need to change your credit card or email address, you would need to do it in two places,” he announced. “Similarly, if you rate or review a movie on Qwikster, it doesn’t show up on Netflix, and vice versa.” With that, he said, he hoped to regain the trust of his customers.

Accompanying this surprising announcement was a lame video of Hastings along with Andy Rendich—the presumptive new C.E.O. of Qwikster. Hastings was rocking the casual look in a Gap T-shirt underneath some sort of flimsy, ill-fitting teal work shirt. His Oakley sunglasses rested in front of him on his IBM ThinkPad. At one point, he flubbed a line and repeated it—a homey touch that remained in the video. He observed correctly on the Netflix Blog, “You’ll probably say we should avoid going into moviemaking after watching it.”

Faster than you could say “Qwikster,” the amateur video became fodder for the late-night comics. Conan O’Brien spoofed it with a parody video that claimed returning a Netflix DVD was now as easy as just throwing the red envelope out of a moving-car window or putting it in a hedge or flushing it down the toilet. “Don’t worry, we’ll get it,” he cracked. "Saturday Night Live" recorded its own parody of the Hastings/Rendich video—replete with the goofy attire—and released it on the Internet. (Hastings believes it wasn’t funny enough for the actual show, although it was pretty darn funny.) Then a fake Hastings appeared in another "S.N.L." spoof, of a "Charlie Rose" show. After Rose asks Hastings if Netflix and Apple could be compared, Hastings says, “Comparing Apple to Netflix is like comparing apples to oranges, especially if the oranges made so many mistakes that people stopped eating oranges and just went back to Blockbuster.”

Hastings’s screwups were taking their toll not only on Netflix’s customer base but also on its financial prospects. Fewer customers meant less revenue and cash flow at the very moment Netflix’s ambitions required larger and more expensive deals with the Hollywood studios that provide the content to stream. For more than a year, Netflix’s stock had been a rocket ship as nearly every one of the company’s pronouncements had been met with dizzying investor approval. For instance, after the company announced on the morning of July 5, 2011, that it was set to offer its services in 43 Latin American and Caribbean countries—a potential new broadband customer base estimated at 45 million people—the stock jumped from $268 per share to an all-time high of $291 per share and a market capitalization of more than $15 billion. Shortly thereafter, the stock hit nearly $305 per share. A year earlier, it had been at $117; two years ago, it was at $40. That Netflix traded at a price-to-earnings ratio of more than 80 times its historical earnings seemed to be lost on most investors.

But after Hastings’s missteps, the stock went into free fall, dropping to $113 per share in early October, from $210 in the second week of September. It would hit a low of $62 a share in November. The few—but vocal—short investors (someone who bets a stock’s price will fall and then does what he can to make that happen) and research analysts who had long felt the stock was grossly overvalued and overhyped were wallowing in Schadenfreude.

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Finally, on October 10, Hastings pulled the plug on Qwikster. The explanatory blog post was short and sweet. “It is clear that for many of our members two websites would make things more difficult, so we are going to keep Netflix as one place to go for streaming and DVDs,” he wrote. “This means no change: one website, one account, one password . . . in other words, no Qwikster.”

And not a moment too soon. Some $12 billion of Netflix’s market capitalization had been wiped out, and some Hollywood suppliers to Netflix had begun to wonder if the company could continue to pay its bills on time. Wall Street’s faith in the company was shattered. People were calling for Hastings’s head. Things were looking so desperate that on November 22—after not having bothered to tap the capital markets when the stock was at or near its all-time high—Netflix raised a fresh $400 million in equity: $200 million from a longtime investor, Technology Crossover Ventures, and another $200 million from public investors at $70 a share. This was seen as a sign by some that the company was strapped for cash.

The question lingers how Hastings, who sits on the boards of both Microsoft and Facebook, could have made such spectacular blunders. Just a year earlier, Fortune had put him on its cover as its “Businessperson of the Year.” His three appearances on "Charlie Rose"—in 2005, 2006, and 2011—were treated as the Second Coming. Had Hastings come to believe in his own invincibility? Was this a case of pride going before the fall? Or a failure to listen to advice? Or was this a simple failure of public relations?

In an October 24 article in The New York Times, Hastings recalled that he had been soaking in a hot tub with a friend (Hastings lives in Santa Cruz with his wife and two teenage children, after all) when he shared with him the news that Netflix planned to separate the DVD business from the streaming business. “That is awful,” his friend responded. “I don’t want to deal with two accounts.” But Hastings “ignored the warning, believing that chief executives should generally discount what their friends say.” Now he admitted that he had been “guilty of overconfidence and of ‘moving too quickly,’” and “hubris,” even. The harsh reaction from his customers was due to the “angry mood of the country,” he said, citing both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street political movements. He again clarified that he did what had to be done. “We still need to move quickly in streaming,” he said.

That same day he told investors on Netflix’s third-quarter earnings call that the decision to create Qwikster was “hard to justify” and that after the price increase “Qwikster became the symbol of Netflix not listening.” He reiterated that “we quickly changed course on that. And we are going to stick with DVD as part of the Netflix brand. And going forward we will be very aggressive on promoting streaming Netflix and the benefits, and anyone who wants to also subscribe to DVDs will be very welcome, but we are going to be pushing and promoting streaming.”

If their critics are now legion, Hastings and Netflix retain the unequivocal support of many of the Hollywood studios, of which Netflix has become an increasingly important customer. “They continue to be a good partner for us,” says Philippe Dauman, the C.E.O. of Viacom. “Reed is a guy who’s smart, who takes calculated risks, and when something goes awry, he admits it, and he moves forward. The subscriber count is stabilized, and actually Reed mentioned that to me when I saw him recently. It’s still a great service. They keep acquiring more content, which makes it more valuable to their customers. In my mind they continue to have a good consumer proposition, and of course they raised some capital, so they’re on very solid ground.”

Explains Ron Meyer, the longtime head of Universal Studios, “When you have the resources they have and the reach that they have—we’re all looking for new revenue streams—they’re the newest and most exciting, and biggest.” How important a customer is Netflix to Universal? “On a scale of 1 to 10, they’re a 10,” Meyer says.

Les Moonves, the president and C.E.O. of the CBS Corporation, thinks Hastings and Ted Sarandos, 47, Netflix’s chief content officer, whose portfolio is dealing with Hollywood, are two of the smartest people in the industry. “Our goal as a content provider is to get paid in as many ways as we possibly can,” says Moonves. “And the reason we welcomed Netflix into the marketplace is they’re paying us in a brand-new way that opens up many horizons for the future.” And that future may include CBS-produced original content for Netflix, Moonves announced on a conference call this month.

Jeffrey Katzenberg, the C.E.O. of DreamWorks Animation, is perhaps Hastings’s biggest booster, claiming that Hastings is one of the few in Silicon Valley who truly deserves being called a visionary. “He has shown a great sense of being able to adapt to a rapidly changing world of how people want to see movies and how they value great movie and television content being brought to them, and how their habits are changing,” he says. Katzenberg thinks Hastings proved to be an effective leader during the summer: “He has shown two of the most exceptional qualities of a great C.E.O. and leader, which is first recognizing how his business is transforming and being very aggressive about innovating and adapting to those changes as they’re going on. It’s just he, I think, moved too far ahead of the transition from hard goods to digital. There’s no question whatsoever what he was pursuing is in fact what ultimately is going to prevail. And the fact that he did it a beat too soon I think is the only mistake.

“Quality number two,” Katzenberg says, “is that, having made a very bold and important and looking-into-the-future decision and then seeing that he got ahead of his customers, he did again what others find so difficult to do, which is acknowledge the mistake, fix it, and reset the business back. There may have been an awkwardness in the process of doing it, but those decisions were bold, smart, and imperative. What those short-term knocks are has just made him and the company smarter and stronger.”

All of this praise is simply too much for Rocco Pendola, one of the most outspoken “shorts” on Netflix’s stock, who unleashed a November 28 tirade against the company on the Seeking Alpha blog. Pendola had been reading Haruki Murakami’s latest book, 1Q84, and he concluded that, like Aomame, the main character in the novel, “I must be living my own reality separate from [Netflix] bulls.” He wrote that he could not understand why, despite the separation fiasco and the near collapse of the stock, any number of publications and research analysts were still trumpeting Netflix as an investment. “Simply put, these moves that Reed Hastings made represent nothing more than desperate reactions to a broken business model,” he wrote.

He then wondered why, if Netflix’s business fundamentals were so good, it had suddenly decided to raise $400 million in new equity—what another blogger called “a desperate cash grab” with absolutely horrible terms. Pendola called “comical” the explanation from Steve Swasey, Netflix’s V.P. of corporate communications, that, while the company had no “pressing need” for the cash, “it’s always nice to have more money than you need.” Concluded Pendola, “If you cannot clearly read the writing on the wall after everything that’s happened, you deserve to lose your money and average this dog down as it craters to below book value. Or, as Murakami stated so well: ‘If you can’t understand it without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation.’”

One of Pendola’s heroes is Tony Wible, who since 2008 has been the media-and-entertainment research analyst for Janney Montgomery Scott, a small Philadelphia-based brokerage that wouldn’t know a tarp loan if it were hit over the head with one. Wible could not be more different from Hastings. At 35 he is chunky and balding but with the irrepressible confidence of youth. Wible used to work for Citigroup—until that company almost went under during the financial crisis—and for years his cubicle was outside the office of Jack Grubman, the infamous telecom analyst who specialized in trading favorable research reports for hundreds of millions of dollars of investment-banking revenue. Grubman, who was paid more than $48 million between 1999 and 2001, pumped up the stock of WorldCom during the years before that telecom company imploded in an ocean of accounting shenanigans. “I vividly and painfully remember those days,” Wible says. “Having gone through seeing what happened with WorldCom, having seen what’s happened with other companies, I feel like you can’t fully trust management. You have to look at what the numbers tell you, and nobody’s going to tell you in advance if something’s not working. I’m sure the guys at Enron and WorldCom would have said everything’s fine. They’re never going to say they’re not fine. I don’t know of any management team that ever goes out proactively to say that things aren’t working or when they’re not going to work.”

When it comes to Netflix, Wible sees red flags everywhere. On June 14 he issued a rare “sell” rating on Netflix’s stock, when it was trading at around $257 per share. (Only 2 percent of Janney’s research reports carry a “sell” rating, and, unlike analysts at both Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, he knows his company won’t be doing investment banking with Netflix anytime soon.) Wible estimated that the true value of Netflix’s stock was then $170 per share, or one-third less than where it was trading.

Wible claimed the company was using two accounting gimmicks to prop up its profitability: not properly amortizing the cost of buying its streaming content (the value of which it was depreciating twice as slowly as that of its DVD content) and doubling the amount of time it took to pay its bills. Both of these, he claims, allowed Netflix to overstate the amount of cash flow it generated in 2010, when it reported $118 million in “free cash flow”; Wible figures the company really lost $12 million, and its cash flow has declined for three of the past four quarters that preceded 2012. The lower cash flow spells trouble, according to Wible, since Netflix is having to pay more and more for its content as well as for the increased broadband usage of its subscribers. The only way it can counter this double whammy is either to raise prices or to increase the number of its subscribers to 60 percent (from its current 30 percent) of homes with broadband by the first quarter of 2012, which it was unable to do. But higher prices were likely to result in fewer subscribers—he predicted correctly—not more.

Wible was also bothered by the sudden resignation of Netflix C.F.O. Barry McCarthy, in December 2010, who had spent the previous year selling his Netflix stock, worth $58 million. And, worse, he believes, Hastings had been continuously selling his stock for several years, some $81 million worth, according to S.E.C. filings—“although we are encouraged to see that he has stopped selling stock as of early October,” says Wible. In December 2011, Netflix announced that Hastings’s total compensation for 2012 would be $2 million, 43 percent below his 2011 compensation of $3.5 million.

The Netflix executives disagree with nearly every one of Wible’s arguments. According to them, Netflix is not stretching payables. It is not misleading anyone about its accounting. (Netflix’s Web site provides a clumsy explanation.) It will be able to continue to grow its subscriber base both in the United States and in foreign countries. The C.F.O. left because he wanted to pursue a C.E.O. role. (He now works for a venture-capital firm.) They don’t waste a moment worrying about the stock price; instead, they spend their time thinking about how to improve their business and how to serve their customers better. Yes, they will pay more for content in the future, but only in a way that makes financial sense for the company and for its subscribers. As for his ongoing stock sales, Hastings says, “I think the message that it sends is the C.E.O. is prudent. I think investors want companies to be led by prudent people, and I should have a stake in the company for sure. I have a huge stake, but you want it to be led by someone who’s also prudent.”

On November 22, with Netflix’s stock down to around $75 per share, Wible issued another “sell” rating with a new price target of $49 per share. He sums up the core problem with Netflix’s business model this way: “If they didn’t position it as a cheap rental service, they probably wouldn’t have gained as much market share, but by positioning it as a cheap rental service, they’re probably not able to take up pricing as much. And what I have maintained is that Reed is a smart guy, but I believe that he’s managing to the best of bad outcomes.”

In recent weeks, following a better-than-expected fourth-quarter 2011 earnings announcement (which saw 220,000 new streaming-only customers and a profit of $52 million in that segment), Netflix’s stock has rebounded to around $124 per share. The bears remain incredulous. “What we have here is a momentum stock divorced from its underlying company’s reality,” Pendola wrote January 27 on the Seeking Alpha blog. “It would not shock me in the least to see [Netflix] move on air back to $300 a share before its next earnings report. At some point, however, the same thing that happened in 2011—a full-on implosion—will take shape sooner, rather than later.” Added Wible, in a recent e-mail, “Seems like we are back to 2010 again.”

By the time Hastings made his first-ever appearance at UBS’s annual global-media-and-communications conference, in Manhattan on December 6, the room was packed with investors wondering what he would say next. “Last year, you couldn’t take a step without people asking about Netflix,” one investor remarked. “This year, everyone is here for the funeral.”

Seated at the front of the room, Hastings took his lumps and tried to move on. “Last year, you were the talk of the conference, I believe,” said Aryeh Bourkoff, the head of investment banking for the Americas at UBS, by way of introduction. “I think there was a combination of mystique and envy and fear—”

“Now it’s just pity,” Hastings quickly interjected.

During our interview, Hastings insisted on putting the whole mess into perspective. “When I look at the challenges that Gandhi had, or the various leaders through history, our challenges pale in comparison to this,” he said. “Over the last 10 years, I’ve read a ton about Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln. I’ve worked very hard, but my life’s always been fun. It’s not been the Civil War of 1862. That was dark, and how you hold things together at a time like that is completely different than what we experienced. When we had our stumble—in comparison to a health crisis—I slept well every night. I didn’t get all tense. Our issues were ones that were unfortunate business judgments, not of morality or ethics or scandal.” Ω

[William D. Cohan is a contributing editor at Fortune, and award-winning former investigative newspaper reporter based in Raleigh, North Carolina, who worked on Wall Street for seventeen years. He spent six years at Lazard Frères in New York and later became a managing director at JP Morgan Chase. Cohan is a graduate of Duke University. He has written The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co. (2007), House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street (2009), and Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World (2011).]

Copyright © 2012 Vanity Fair — Condé Nast Digital

Get the Google Reader at no cost from Google. Click on this link to go on a tour of the Google Reader. If you read a lot of blogs, load Reader with your regular sites, then check them all on one page. The Reader's share function lets you publicize your favorite posts.


Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves by Neil Sapper is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at sapper.blogspot.com. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available here.



Copyright © 2012 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves