This is, after all, a man who installed solid gold fixtures in his bathroom. His bathroom. It boggles the common mind. Fixtures paid for with the sweat of numerous employees of Enron who worked long hours and loyal years for a company that systematically stripped them of their life savings and promise of a comfortable retirement so they could have gold fixtures in the bathroom, among other examples of wretched excess. It is sick making.

Ken Lay did not deserve an easy death. Easy deaths should be reserved for those who have done good things with their lives, or at least caused no harm. An easy death is what we all want for ourselves and for those we love. While there is an elegant grace bestowed upon those who take months or years to draw their final breath, still those months are not pretty and they are not painless. A massive heart attack may be painful for a brief moment in time, but Ken Lay should have died in a manner commensurate with the way he lived—some spectacular jailhouse beating down by dozens of skinheads would have been my preference.

In my conspiracy theory moments—of which I’ve had more than a few these last days—I’m not sure the son of a bitch is even really dead. He’s had months and months and plenty of money to set something up which would keep law enforcement from paying him any mind. He’d been found guilty, but was on vacation? What’s up with that?

With money, it wouldn’t be hard to pay someone to have plastic surgery to look like you, preferably someone already with a fatal disease, then giving them a shot of air which causes a massive heart attack. What are the chances the authorities are going to make sure he is dead? Lazy federal bureaucrats are unlikely to do any extra work. If a wife says he’s dead, a doctor says he’s dead and a box is put in the ground, most would think he was dead.

While the victim was getting plastic surgery to look like Ken, old Ken is now looking like somebody else and looking at retirement villas in Italy. This is an oily guy who has skirted and flirted with the rules all his life. Why should we believe he didn’t cheat his way out of prison time and the public consciousness?

The ways in which those who have no feeling for their fellow man flourish are too many to count. We have giant corporations making obscene profit from no-bid contracts in a place where many Americans feel we have no place being in the first place. Adding insult to the body bags, spilled blood, and lost limbs of thousands, we have a few companies with friends in high places making ridiculous profit. War has always been profitable, it is undeniable, but seldom has the profit been so huge and for so few. And Americans will be paying the tab for generations to come.

One of the things you learn if you live long enough and prefer laughing to crying, is that it doesn’t cost any more to be positive than to be negative. Even the most daunting of negative events usually presents a thin glimmer of sunshine, but I’m hard pressed to find much to smile at lately. It’s too damned hot, we’ve had no rain, our elected leaders seem to think global warming is a ploy by the other political party, medical costs are obscene by any standard, real estate sales are flat, gas prices are out of line with general income, movies with a message don’t come here, local housing costs are out of the reach of even those well paid, health insurance for the self-employed is impossible to procure for a reasonable sum, and I feel like I might explode—which is OK by me, as long as I can in one quick burst.

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