Stuck in the middle

I suppose I could take my dirty socks and underwear and beat them on a rock at the Gowanus Canal, but the wash and fold place across the street seems a better alternative for 10 bucks.

We all rely on middle men. The bartender who pours our drink. The waitress who brings us our bacon and eggs. The newspaper boy who tosses our birdcage liner. The lawyer who pleads our case. The immigrant who sells us our roses for our darlings on Valentine’s Day. The layabout blogger who thinks great thoughts for mass consumption while dreaming up a new golf swing.

All deliver a service that we could surely do on our own but don’t have the time or inclination to undertake.

Bernie Madoff, however, is the ultimate middle man. He will sleep the sleep of the righteous in a tax-paid pad and probably live to 100 and be released from some iron-pumping federal penitentiary with a physique we 50-somethings on the outside would envy.

You can’t hang the guy. All he did was steal from the rich to give to the rich. Kind of a bizarro-world Robin Hood. In truth, he didn’t rob everyone. Lots of investors didn’t buy his pitch. But his phenomenal fraud does prove the theory that everything is connected to Kevin Bacon, a Madoff investor.

In the same sense, the Jim Cramer/Jon Stewart colloquy on Comedy Central, shows that middle men make for great theater if nothing else. We quench our thirst for truth, knowledge and dough with entertainers like Cramer and Stewart and Madoff because we have more fun things to do (at least I do).

Stewart, who I’m sure is paid handsomely for his self-righteous smirks, was much too glib, as, ahem, some of us are wont to be. Cramer, as much as he rubs a lot of folks the wrong way, made a simple point, though he didn't articulate it clearly enough, which is: it's not a crime to be wrong. If you don't like his opinion, don't take it. Stewart could have made the same argument about the complicity of the media in enabling the influence of the Israeli lobby or spreading the canard about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Each man is the steward of his own wealth. To think that CNBC talking heads were responsible for abetting the meltdown in the financial markets is as silly as the stab-in-the back idea that revanchists favor when they ascribe failure to some sinister cabal, not human imperfection, miscalculation and greed.

Advice is just that, not a gun to your head.