Ken Lay Was a Son of a Bitch

Former speechwriter for Reagan and GHWBush, Peggy Noonan, said today in the Wall Street Journal, “isn't it obvious that Ken Lay died of a broken heart?” The New York Times said, “Mr. Lay was fairly convicted of his crimes, but he was also a father and grandfather, whose family mourns his passing. He was headed for the penitentiary, but that did not have to be the end for him. He would have had an opportunity to use his personal skills to help other prisoners.” The NYT also said Lay had risen up by his bootstraps and that he was a Horatio Alger kind of guy. When Ken Lay was charged with his horrible crimes at Enron, he got on television and prated about what a fine Christian man he was. What crap and balderdash! Ken Lay was a greedy, avaricious, selfish, uncaring bastard and now he’s dead. How does death turn him into a saint? How does death make it impolitic and a social gaffe to remember him as the ugly person he was? Why are we not to speak ill of the dead? Death does not wipe out the devastation one has caused. If Ken Lay died of a broken heart, which he didn’t, who in the sane world cares? What about the broken hearts of the people he consigned to a poverty-stricken old age because he willfully and deliberately squandered their savings? By the time Ken Lay died, he had no heart to be broken. Horatio Alger must be spinning in his grave at being remembered in the same sentence with Ken Lay. Lay would have rehabilitated himself in prison? Not a chance. If the NYT wants to indulge in a fantasy about what Ken Lay would have done had he lived, I’m game. Ken Lay would have never stopped working on the fiction that he was innocent. He would have become a jailhouse lawyer who tried to help all the other criminals in his cellblock slither out of their righteous convictions. And he might well have become ordained by a born-again correspondence-school seminary--the better to deceive and defraud his fellow prisoners. The NYT likes far-out and unprovable conjecture? Okay. How about this? Knowing that his assets would be inheritable if he died, the Lay family suggested to their financial genius paterfamilias that he take a pill that would mimic a massive heart attack. Kind of like Frankie Pentangeli in The Godfather Part II. At least that would have shown a generosity of spirit. But even that probably didn’t happen because Ken Lay had no generosity of spirit.