"The Golden Age of Cancer"
The Golden Age of Cancer
I have an interest in the stock market. A fascination, self-developed
in high school prompting a younger me to waltz unannounced into a small brokerage
office on Main Street, Ventura, California, at the age of 17 to ask the surprised
suit-wearing inhabitants about their business.
I remember them asking me if I
was doing a report for school. When I said, “No, I’m just curious,” they (three
middle aged white males) dropped their guard and invited me to have a seat
behind a desk and offered me a soda or coffee or ice water (they had an arsenal
of drinks and snacks). This was 1988, pre-internet boom by a few years, their prime
weapons of choice were telephones, lots of telephones, blinking lights and odd sounding
micro printers, a strange atmosphere of high energy stress and casual lazy
coffee drinking. I was duly impressed by the multiple clocks, showing key time
zones labeled neatly in black block lettering underneath, New York, London, etc…
strung across the undecorated office walls.
The place felt like a time capsule, something left over from
the sixties that couldn’t die. Powerful, effective methods of making money
resist change like oily duck feathers. Just three extremely similar men, working
in this cave, making calls in suits and polished leather shoes. They each had large,
heavy, hard wood desks. I saw signed golf balls displayed under clear plastic
cubes, complete with the obligatory kinetic steel balls, tiny bull statues and calenders
featuring aerial shots of Pebble Beach. I had to wonder about the suits. I
suppose if I had wandered off the street and saw people in Hawaiian shirts and
sweat pants, I would have kept on walking. I suppose I can see the logic behind
a funny costume.
One of these fellas was between calls, and was kind enough
to fill me in on the day to day operations of a real live stock trading outfit,
a real eye opener. I was impressed and left with a head full of entrepreneurial
thoughts, grown up thoughts of money and stuff.
A weird, California version of
the business, connected by physical wires across the country to Chicago and Wall
Street herself.
Trading stocks was one of the few vocations I could ever see
myself excelling at, I had something close to a real interest.
A brain at a desk
appealed to me, thoughts converted to cash with zero physical movement, air
conditioned magic.
Behind the obvious set design was something close to Palmistry
or reading chicken entrails on a stump… and possibly the promise of a BMW.
Yesterday morning (twenty years later), I was having coffee
and decided to have a look at the talking heads for shits and giggles.
The CNBC
gang of soapy affiliates were shiny and groomed like pure bred Dobermans
trotting the fake, green, grass of dog show hell. The stock ticker ran its usual cycle and
informed me of losses and gains (both imagined and real) while I simultaneously
checked my email messages and poured a second cup of french roast. The professional narcissists were talking, but
I wasn’t listening, I know better. They are reliably full of it. We all know
it.
Three cups and a ball is all grown up and swindling in shifts.
Some of my personal strategy hinges on deducing
fake smiles and reading uncomfortable micro expressions in order to turn them
to my advantage. The social aspect is interesting to me, a language I can
somehow traverse. A giant, mega media corporations awkward on-camera pause is a
leaf on the breeze and a botched segue leaking snarky unintended audio into the
world is an OPPORTUNITY large and tall, “The Cattleman’s Code.” But…
I’ve said all that to get to this.
The busy mumbling in the background came sharply into focus
on the last sentence, before the raging volume-boosted Cadillac commercial
assaulted my senses.
This is what I heard.
Mumble mumble mumble… something something something,
“The Golden Age of Cancer.” Smiles all around, swooping left to right boom
camera, out of body experience angle, cut to commercial.
“The golden age of cancer?”
You gotta be kidding me…I had
to focus a little to remember what I was just witness to.
They were talking “Big Pharma,” a fuzzy pet name they give
to their favorite auntie.
In spite of the overall country’s flat-lining economy, the nation’s
largest drug companies are having a good time.
Selling overpriced cancer treatments to dying people is the new gold rush,
has been for some time now I gather.
Psychopaths.
I’m still feeling ill from it. Those words I can’t throw up,
the message I’m unable to purge, the camaraderie and the smiles I can’t seem to
unsee… a monster with soundtrack and a graphics team.
Just another great success story crawling out of my television.
I guess that’s where we are now… Clubbed over the head when
we weren’t expecting it.
The whole country woke up chained to the Black Pearl, singing
songs and driving Cadillacs.
Whooping it up in the Golden Age of Cancer.
B.E.B. June 4, 2014
Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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