O Bakker, Wherefore Art Thou?

I could have told Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling that it was a bad idea to testify. It’s a twist on Mark Twain’s famous admonition, “It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”

In the case of Lay and Skilling, of course, opening their mouths removed all reasonable doubt the jury may have had about their guilt or innocence in defrauding millions of people and the government.

Skilling and Lay (which would be an awesome name for an escort service), in case you’ve been living under a rock or have been attended to by Rush Limbaugh’s personal cadre of doctors, are the nice men who guided Enron in much the same way that Joseph Hazelwood piloted the Exxon Valdez, which is to say disastrously, although it can be argued that Skilling and Lay were considerably more aware of what was going on than was Hazelwood. They are, in effect, the Michael Milkens of the 21^st Century.

A friend I’ll call Ursula once demonstrated with remarkable, if unintentional, efficiency the reason tactics like Skilling’s usually fail. When asked by a new acquaintance, an older man jonesing for a cigarette, if she smoked, Ursula unwisely answered with the question, “You mean cigarettes?” In other words, her response brought up more questions than it answered.

And so it evidently went with Skilling. At least one juror said, after the trial, that Skilling’s self-indulgent blather on the labyrinthine inner workings of Enron is what actually convinced him that the man was guilty. In an effort to show off, Skilling brought himself down. So it goes.

Lay, on the other hand, has been hiding behind the sanctimony of Scripture. Of course, as it turns out, he quotes the Bible in pretty much the same way he reported to his shareholders: By leaving out key elements. His version of Romans 8:28—“And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him”—omitted the last part of the passage: “who have been called for his purpose.” It’s hard to imagine what God would want with the billions of dollars that suddenly vanished into His ether.

Which reminds me: Has anyone else noticed that Ken Lay looks suspiciously like Jim Bakker?