"Attitude is Everything," Myron Magnet told the homeless guys at the soup Kitchen.

One of the homeless guys piped up, "Yeah, Ken Lay had good attitude. He had such good attitude, that he's not even going to jail, what a great guy. And me, I lost my 401(k) and ended up here because of his fucking attitude."

Magnet had prepared a wonderful and intelligent exploration of Dickensian underclasses representing the cultural fixation on exponental exaggeration of monetary motivations in Victorian Society and how they mirror contemporary cultural biases but stopped short of proceeding on account of this one asshole.

Instead, Magnet simply said, "Get a job, douchebag."

The homeless guy was nonplussed. "They say you were on the board of editors of Fortune Magazine. Well, what happened to Fortune magazine while Ken Lay was screwing over his investors? Hmmm?"

"Look," said Magnet, "I'm hear to talk you out of poverty. I'm not here to debate the journalistic failings of one of the most prestigious journals of business."

"Yeah, right," said the homeless guy. "Change the subject, go ahead."

"Me? Changing the subject? You're changing the subject. I happen to be the proponent of Bush's approach to poverty. You know, the president loves my book, The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties’ Legacy to the Underclass. Next to the bible, it's his favorite book. I'm here to tell you that it was the changes of the sixties that caused poverty, the Great Society, welfare. I came her today to talk you guys out of poverty."

"Talk us out of poverty?"

"That's right. The only way to stop being poor."

"Right." And then the entire coterie of homeless people threw Magnet onto the sidewalk.

It really wasn't anything personal. Magnet had the misfortune of working for the Manhattan Institute, whose chairman, Roger Hertog, also headed up Capital Alliance. As luck would have it, the entire homeless population at this particular shelter had been invested in Capital Alliance, whose stock purchases included great quantities of not only Enron, but of Tyco stock.

For whatever reason, they simply weren't in the mood for cultural explanations of why they were suddenly poor.

June 30, 2003