‘The (curious case of the) Watson Intelligence’ (Merrick and the Bailout of Wall Street)

MERRICK: I mean look, we’ve all been lulled into a false sense of security, me included. I know how it is. You can go for years not really getting it, feeling like, I’m fine, I’m in this, sure, but I’m in it for a reason. Yeah I gave up a little bit of my liberty, yeah I maybe gave up a little bit of my autonomy, not to say my manhood, for the sake of this relationship, but it’s good for me in the long run why? Because they have my best interests at heart. They’re looking after me. They have smart notions of what will be a good use of my money, and really what do I know, I’m just an innocent little taxpayer who only has the experience of my own private life, how would I know what it might mean to put together something big and complicated like a government. Let them worry about appropriations, after they’ve slipped their clammy hand into my pants pocket every fifteenth of April and thieved forty percent of my annual dignity, annual salary I mean but that’s a funny slip. And then one day you wake up and boom, the “government,” that repository of your trust and fidelity and hard-earned f— cash pardon my French, is collapsing, is imploding before your very eyes. Deficits. Austerity measures. Cutbacks and shutdowns. Turns out they didn’t so much know what they were doing. Turns out their notion of what to do with your money was no more sophisticated than yours would have been, except that it included deception and corruption and shameless waste and mismanagement on a scale you never could have dreamed up on your own. Where’s your money now? Gone. Where’s your trust? Gone. Eaten away gradually at first, suspicion by suspicion, and finally gutted, throat to nuts, by a single sudden act of betrayal. (pause) I’m talking about the bailout of Wall Street.

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