Smoke, mirrors and snake-oil salesmen

Perhaps in the end, demographics is what keeps inept, incompetent and corrupt leadership in place. It seems that just about the time one generation of the public wises up, another group pushes their way onto center stage – clearing the debris and making way for the world's snake-oil salesmen to polish up their wares and resume the show.

For many of us, that picture conjures up images of government and its support industries: news organizations, think tanks, nonprofit foundations, political parties, political consultants, fund-raising consultants, media consultants, and spokespersons (today's professional
storytellers). But the snake oil salesmen's venue is far wider – and more dangerous – than government service alone. They affect the financial, social, and ethical health of our lives as well.

True to their original roots, we find them comfortably employed in banking, finance and on Wall Street. For eight years, they hawked their slick wares: a growing economy with low-to-no inflation, eternally rising stock prices and profits, and near-zero unemployment. Corporate America rose to the challenge – even if it meant springing for the cost of a few
new mirrors, hiring financial magicians, and cranking up the smudge pots in the accounting orchard to make it happen.

To paraphrase Simon and Garfunkel, "someone told them it's all happening
on the Web ..." and they did believe it was true. High-tech salaries and
house prices surrounding the dot-com orchards shot up dramatically –
even if there was no inflation. Sales continued to accumulate on the
books. Profits were reported like clockwork – and just slightly ahead of
analysts' expectations. It was a new economy, and as stock prices
penetrated the stratosphere, Wall Street analysts assured us that the old
rules no longer applied. Freed from the confines of stuffy old business
ideas that suggested you actually had to produce something people would
pay for – not just consume for free – investors rushed to clone dot-com
millionaires faster than electrons multiplied on the Internet.

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But now the cool wind of reality has blown away some of the smoke. Left
exposed are the mirrors, the smudge pots and the snake oil. McKinsey &
Company, a management consultancy, estimates that "vendor financing by
the five North American [largest telecom] companies ... equals 123% of their
pretax earnings in 1999," according to the June 25 Wall Street Journal.

I guess this must be the business equivalent of "no payments until after
the holidays" so popular with consumers. Dot-coms, flush with an influx
of investors' retirement funds, loaded up on equipment on generous credit
terms. Companies reported these sales as if cash had actually changed
hands. Unfortunately for them – it had not. Now many of these bills will
never be paid – and the equipment from bankrupt Internet firms is on the
market for 10 cents on the dollar, further depressing new equipment
sales orders.

Smoke, at least when it's heavy enough, does roll down hill. An
Associated Press story carried in the June 16 Seattle Times reported that 30 percent of the men living in one homeless shelter in San Jose,
California are former dot-com technical wizards. Now that they are out of
work, or in vastly lower-paying jobs, they can no longer afford their
rent, car payments, or house payments. Any guess where the prices of
these assets might be headed?

But financial reversals aren't the end of the story. And snake-oil
salesmen haven't contented themselves with merely transforming the
economic life of our nation. The telltale smell of their slick oil is
evident in other areas of our social life, too.

Biotechnology, genetic manipulation, cloning and stem-cell research advocates have all marched bravely ahead, moving in lock step where wise men fear to tread. And they
have stumbled straight into the smoke and mirrors cesspool underlying the
stage that abortion activists have inhabited since Roe v. Wade became the
law of the land. Trapped in their own dilapidated reasoning, willfully
ignorant of what the science they seek to advance says about the matter,
they repeat the established mantra, "It's not really a child," even when
"it" makes its way down the birth canal toward an abortion provider's
forceps. That being the case, they argue, there's really no problem with
experimenting with "it" before we discard it in the dumpsters behind
abortion clinics, for burial in mass landfill graves.

The only problem is – while medicine has advanced enough to give us a
map of the human genome, it has also left no doubt that "it" is human
from the time the first cell divides after conception. Which has made it
painfully clear that – despite all the high-tech, gee-whiz clothing we
dress it up in, and all the promised cures and wonder-drugs dragged like
sweet-smelling red herrings across the path we're headed down – today's
scientific community is agitating for the same rights the Nazi doctors in
the death camps had. "Sure," they'd like Ma and Pa America to say, "Go
ahead and experiment on it. After all, 'it' isn't really human."

Maybe it all depends on what the meaning of "it" is?

In "The Nazi Doctors: Medical killing and the psychology of genocide"
(Basic Books, 1986) Professor Robert Jay Lifton writes:

In Nazi mass murder, we can say that a barrier was removed, a boundary
crossed: that boundary between violent imagery and periodic killing of
victims (as of Jews in pogroms) on the one hand, and systematic genocide
in Auschwitz and elsewhere on the other. My argument in this study is
that the medicalization of killing – the imagery of killing in the name
of healing – was crucial to that terrible step. At the heart of the Nazi
enterprise, then, is the destruction of the boundary between healing and
killing.

Killing in the name of healing. Aborted fetus. Discarded embryo. Clone.
The legacy the German people leave to the world is that they are no
different than you and I, and that "it" can happen here. We are not more clever, more ethically upright, or any less prone to the often subtle
allure of evil dressed up in fine clothes. Indeed, if we persist in
listening to the snake-oil medical- and scientific-ethics salesmen, there
is every reason to believe that "it" will happen here. And once started
down that road, the allure of what's around the next corner will draw us
farther and farther along, until we no longer recognize the land we
inhabit.

One of the surviving Nazi physicians whom Lifton interviewed for his
book, said, "The professor would like to understand what is not
understandable. We ourselves who were there, and who have always asked
ourselves the question and will ask it until the end of our lives, we
will never understand it, because it cannot be understood."

Let me be clear: As a Christian, I am not advocating against scientific
research. Indeed, scientific inquiry is built upon the Judeo-Christian
bedrock of an unchanging God, a necessary prerequisite to researching His
laws in the physical universe (for if they were not unchanging, and our
experiments therefore repeatable, why bother?). Science is a tool that
humanity wields, just like the split atom and the naked human genome it
has given us. And as a tool, science must be used within the moral
confines that describe a society which you and I want to inhabit – both
today and tomorrow.

Killing the nameless and the faceless, regardless of whether they inhabit
the womb, the frozen test tube, or the concentration camp – is not the
definition of that society. It is wrong. It is wrong even when it is for
the real benefit of "real people" who have the real political power to
accomplish it, by simply defining what the words "it" and "is" actually
mean. Such a course of action is wrong because history has already shown
"you don't want to go there." But, first and foremost, such killing is
wrong because God says that it is wrong. Perhaps that's the real reason
the snake-oil salesmen don't want the Ten Commandments posted in our
public places?

The experience of previous generations tells us that the snake-oil
salesman is motivated by money; he had little concern for the welfare of
his customer. The same is true today, whether he wears the clothing of a
government bureaucrat, a Wall Street analyst, or the white robe of the
medical healer. The soul of a nation is no better or worse than the
collective souls of its citizens. Jesus framed the question very simply:
"What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world, but lose his own
soul?"

History suggests that God's answer has never changed – and that
the old rules still apply.