It was a week of rage!  After Jon Stewart's Jim Cramer smackdown (essentially a supercilious, impotent, and facile flogging of a sitting target that was hee-hawed in the alternative press and blogosphere as a momentous act of righteous wrath) gabbing about rage is suddenly all the rage. 

It's good to remember: wherever there's rage, you're sure to find impotence under its surface.  And there were near-infinite shades of impotence in the Stewart-Cramer bout.  Personally I find Stewart hard to take when he gets on his high horse. He often seems too preoccupied with showing his mastery of the issues to conduct a proper pillorying.  And no one seriously blames Cramer, who is a clown, for the economic meltdown.  So the Stewart-Cramer spectacle was obviously symbolic, right? 

Likewise, some argue, the outrage over AIG bonuses.  At one-tenth of a percent of the bailout package, it's obviously not about the math, is it?  It is an acknowledgment, however fleeting and dim, that you can't gang-face-rape the nation right in front of everyone and not only get away with it, but then send the rapee a bill for services rendered.  Can you? 

That old Obama mantra is coming back to haunt us: Yes, you can! 

Even Obama's frenemies in the media aren't taking this sitting down.  Frank Rich, in the New York Times today let loose with some righteous wrath of his own:

To get ahead of the anger, Obama must do what he has repeatedly promised but not always done: make everything about his economic policies transparent and hold every player accountable. His administration must start actually answering the questions that officials like Geithner and Summers routinely duck.

Inquiring Americans have the right to know why it took six months for us to learn (some of) what A.I.G. did with our money. We need to understand why some of that money was used to bail out foreign banks. And why Goldman, which declared that its potential losses with A.I.G. were “immaterial,” nonetheless got the largest-known A.I.G. handout of taxpayers’ cash ($12.9 billion) while also receiving a TARP bailout. We need to be told why retention bonuses went to some 50 bankers who not only were in the toxic A.I.G. unit but who left despite the “retention” jackpots. We must be told why taxpayers have so little control of the bailed-out financial institutions that we now own some or most of. And where are the M.R.I.’s from those “stress tests” the Treasury Department is giving those banks?

That’s just a short list.

You go, girl!

Like the Stewart-Cramer thing, the AIG bonuses are something we can grasp, simple math we can all understand.  Like Charles Blow notes in his column in the Times, too: 

Credit-default swaps, derivative products, securitized mortgages. Say what? It feels as though I’ve stumbled into a Mensa meeting.... Then came the opprobrium of the A.I.G. bonus imbroglio. Employees in the division of the American International Group that caused much of the problem were paid $165 million in bonuses. This I fully understand. And me no likey.

Yeah, me no likey neither!

Look, I've got a life, a job, mouths to feed (I'm speaking figuratively here).  I don't have time to understand what the fuck's going on.  Just stop futzing around and fix it! 

But I gather part of the problem is that, supposedly, according to experts, the only people who do understand it — who can, in other words, fix it — are the ones who broke it.  And who are they? The CEO of AIG, in testimony before Congress, refused to voluntarily release names of bonus recipients, presumably the best and the brightest — our salvation! — out of fear for their safety. 

He mentioned calls for AIG executives and their families to "be executed with piano wire around their necks." And threats along the lines of: "if the government can't do this properly, we the people will take it in our hands and see that justice is done. I'm looking for all the CEO's names, kids, where they live, etc."

Stupid lynch mobs want to string up the only ones who can save us!  But come on. It's highly unlikely America's malcontents will coagulate into any sort of real mob any time soon.  Forget the piano wire.  All people really want are crimes and punishments they can understand, and a few names, for chrissakes.  Is that too much to ask? 

You don't need to lynch the guys who wrecked the economy and are still reaping rewards for it to give the rest of us a little satisfaction.  A simple pillorying would work just fine. 

It's cheap (you can get a pillory for $175 at Foxy Furniture), easy, and fun for the whole family!  Rig up a row of 'em on the Washington Mall, and give the people something worth raging at. Before reality TV came along, the pillory was probably the most humiliating spectacle devised by man.  And just like American Idol, "the crowd was effectively both judge and jury, and their decisions were absolute." 

From the wikipedia entry on pillorying...

It forced the malfeasant to remain standing and exposed.... With hands trapped, he or she could not avoid thrown objects, either mostly harmless items like rotten food or injurious ones such as heavy stones where blinding, permanent maiming or death could be the consequence. Sometimes a criminal's ears would be nailed to the pillory so that any movement of the head to avoid thrown objects would result in further injury. The criminal could also be sentenced to further punishments while in the pillory: humiliation by shaving of some or all hair or regular corporal punishment(s), notably flagellation (the pillory serving as the whipping post), birching, caning or even permanent mutilation such as branding or having an ear cut off.

For all that, the "malfeasants" usually survived, albeit exiting stage left sans an ear, covered in mud, rotten eggs and vegetables, blood from the slaughterhouse, offal, and dung.  Dead cats and rotten fish were often used as missiles, too.

Better than Dancing With The Stars!

Still unconvinced?  Check out this description from 1810 of a pillorying at The Old Bailey:

Such was the degree of popular indignation excited against these wretches, and such the general eagerness to witness their punishment, that, by ten in the morning, the chief avenues from Clerkenwell Prison and Newgate to the place of punishment were crowded with people; and the multitude assembled in the Haymarket, and all its immediate vicinity, was so great as to render the streets impassable. All the windows and even the very roofs of the houses were crowded with persons of both sexes; and every coach, wagon, hay-cart, dray, and other vehicles which blocked up great part of the street, were crowded with spectators.

The Sheriffs, attended by two City Marshals, with an immense number of constables, accompanied the procession of the Prisoners from Newgate, whence they set out in the transport caravan, and proceeded through Fleet-street and the Strand; and the Prisoners were hooted and pelted the whole way by the populace. At one o- clock four of the culprits were fixed in the pillory, erected for and accommodated to the occasion, with two additional wings, one being allotted for each criminal; and immediately a new torrent of popular vengeance poured upon them from all sides.

The day being fine, the streets were dry and free from mud, but the defect was speedily and amply supplied by the butchers of St. James's- market. Numerous escorts of whom constantly supplied the party of attack, chiefly consisting of women, with tubs of blood, garbage, and ordure from their slaughter-houses, and with this ammunition, plentifully diversified with dead cats, turnips, potatoes, addled eggs, and other missiles, the criminals were incessantly pelted to the last moment. They walked perpetually round during their hour [the pillory swivelled on a fixed axis]; and although from the four wings of the machine they had some shelter, they were completely encrusted with filth.

Two wings of the Pillory were then taken off to place Cooke and Amos in the two remaining ones, and although they came in only for the second course, they had no reason to complain of short allowance, for they received even a more severe discipline than their predecessors. On their being taken down and replaced in the caravan, they lay flat in the vehicle; but the vengeance of the crowd still pursued them back to Newgate, and the caravan was so filled with mud and ordure as completely to cover them.

No interference from the Sheriffs and Police officers could refrain the popular rage; but notwithstanding the immensity of the multitude, no accident of any note occurred.

Love that last line.  "No accident of any note occurred."  Like I said: fun — and, more importantly: SAFE — for the whole family!

Well, maybe not the WHOLE family.  you might want to leave the homosexuals at home.  It so happens that the men being punished at the Old Bailey weren't being punished for abusing the public trust, robbing the treasury, or any other such high crime worht actually punishing someone for, but for consensual gay sex at a so-called molly house — essentially a gay brothel — on Vere Street in London.  The Vere Street Coterie, they were called. 

Society's come a long way in dealing with sex between (or amongst) consenting adults, but when it comes to crime and punishment we mustn't throw the baby out with the bath water (or the bath water out with the baby, as the case may be).  Sometimes it takes a while for a punishment to find its proper crime.  I think the pillory may finally have found the class of criminals it was meant for all along!

So put away the piano wire, grab a dead cat, some addled eggs or a bucketful of offal, and let's get back to business, America!