Ken Lay’s last evasion

There were also the electricity customers swindled, along the lines of Mr and Mrs Front Porch USA, who wanted to leave a night light on without sending Enron their whole Social Security checks for the privilege.

Many people had looked forward to knowing more about Ken Lay, especially how he liked prison.

But now that he’s died of a heart attack in the luxury of his Colorado getaway while awaiting sentencing for his crimes, none of his victims will be able to contemplate that he’s locked away in a place that makes the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel look like Hawaii; that he might be spending long nights locked in a cell with a panting tattooed monster named Sumo, a man of strange and constant demands; and long days in the prison laundry or jute mill or license plate factory, gibbering with anguish as fire-eyed psychopaths stare at him for unblinking hours while they sharpen spoons into jailhouse stilettos.

Actually, some folks who got the news, the particularly enlightened and civilized ones, are glad they won’t have to know that Kenneth Lay is going through these agonies. They may even reflect that if they’d known him personally, they would have known a wonderful father, husband and friend. Isn’t that what people always say about people like Ken Lay? And shouldn’t people always try to think the best of everyone?

Yes, they should, but so many people may well have responded to the news of Lay’s untimely death by feeling cheated, by saying that death wasn’t good enough for him, by sensing a frustrated craving for revenge burning in their backbrains like a fire in a tire dump.

... contd.