Bernie Madoff
shoves a 60-year-old inmate in the prison yard and, as of this morning, it’s the top story on Newser. But a series of books about Madoff started coming out this summer and
not one of them has done any business to speak of.
Aside from the obvious point that books are long and Newser stories are short, how come we’re so fickle in our attentions to Bernie?
The book thing makes a certain sense: It would be hard to fashion a less sympathetic character than Madoff. He not only lacks any aspect of virtue or even pathos, his sort of evilness is, in the end, only accountant-like. More and more, books are keepsake artifacts. We give them as gifts. They’re meant to be positive and uplifting. That makes a book about Bernie a particularly hard sell.
Is that it, books are reverential items, ideally about noble characters, and the news is the tawdry stuff, the more gargoyle-like the character, the better? Certainly no story about Madoff goes unsung. The smallest detail makes a gleeful headline. We are, according to number of stories written and the votes of Newser readers, endlessly fascinated and perhaps encouraged by any bad thing that can happen to Bernie Madoff.
As it happens, his tussle in the prison yard was no story at all. No one was hurt. No one’s status was changed (indeed, the incident was not witnessed by anyone but a snitch for the
New York Post—so, in fact, it might not even have occurred at all). And, indeed, Bernie seems to have prevailed rather than suffered. The argument in the yard, according to the
Post, was about the stock market—the irony of it all could be driving the news.
It could be that the books, without Madoff’s cooperation, can’t really tell us what we want to know. That is, how he did it, how he got away with it, how he bore up under the weight of it. What was he thinking? How cold is he? How diabolical? In these books the author’s nose—and our nose, too—is just pressed to the glass. Whereas, the daily news reports, serving up the Madoff story detail by detail, can make it seem like we might be getting some useful nugget. And a prison sighting, at this point, is as close as we come to the real thing.
Still, I am not satisfied that we know what we want from Bernie Madoff. He is one of the central figures—and will be an enduring symbol—of this wholly unexpected and dramatic turn in our fortunes, and yet he remains deeply enigmatic. And he’s a boring enigma—nothing in Bernie’s life, save the heist itself, is compelling or worthy of attention.
We don’t even have a confession.
And he still seems so…unruffled.
That’s hard to swallow.
The Bernie Madoff story is still out there. And even if the
New York Post is making it up, we want it. It’s ours.
More of Newser founder Michael Wolff's articles and commentary can be found at VanityFair.com, where he writes a regular column. He can be emailed at michael@newser.com. You can also follow him on Twitter: www.twitter.com/NewserColumns.
