Facadomy - the worst crime – and the perpetrators don’t look or act like criminals while they destroy thousands of lives, impair or damage the lives of hundreds of thousands or millions more around the world, all the while living high off the hog.  Facadomists’ lives are like surfing championships: how long can they ride the wave, gaining acclaim, before they fall, and, how much can they stash before they are caught, if they’re caught, and before their phalanx of willing, well-paid lawyers has done its best to obfuscate truth and justice.

Dictators and demagogues are also evil, but at least you know it and can try to stay out of their way, or, if brave enough, try to undermine their power or expose their ruthlessness.  Street punks are scary and you hope not to run into them.  But a facadomist specializes in reeling people in, gathering trust, and, most importantly, remaining invisible as to his or her true nature for as long as possible.

We appear to be a culture hooked on appearances that specializes in judging books by their covers.  Half the shows on TV appear to be, in one way or another, about becoming a better, more successful facadomist.  It doesn’t appear to matter what you are inside as long as you look and act like success.  Integrity may have gone out of style amongst the elite and the elite-wanna-bes.

Tom Petters and Bernard Madoff are the latest examples of outstanding facadomy.  Their greed was outrageous and the majority of those left holding the bag were completely taken in, truly trusted and admired these men.  The $700 billion bailout appears to have more than a touch of facadomy woven into its advertised role as a solution to economic (what’s evidence for this – refusing to account for how it is spent, rewarding themselves) woes.  President Bush originated the bailout as a bold move to save the economy, but more and more it appears that the bailout has only encouraged more greed and generated little accountability.  Even those who string themselves out on credit cards are often aspiring facadomists – trading away their futures to look more valuable, more accomplished today, to assuage their sense of insignificance.

One could further argue that democracy, as practiced in the United States, has become a façade, stripped down to little more than the right to vote, and even then, voters are manipulated in as many ways as possible in order to guarantee a favorable outcome.  Major political parties do not appear to be interested in representing truly informed voters but would rather shape or deform what the voters know or don’t know to form a base of power.  Under these conditions, voters become facades – looking like knowing, informed people, but not doing their homework to be truly informed and not demanding a higher quality of politician.

When I was a child, my parents and grandparents warned me about the gypsy caravabs that would come through our rural community once or twice a year.  The gypsies would set up tents, read fortunes, and who knows what else.  One of their favorite cons was to go into a store and pick out large items they wanted, then return later and get into a vocal argument with a store employee.  In a small town this was unheard of, and soon anyone in the store was gathered around the argument with mouths open.  Meanwhile, the confederates entered the store, picked up the earlier targeted items, and walked out without being noticed.

Then there was the Norwegian bachelor farmer who lived across the road from my grandparents - Teddy.  He went to get his fortune read.  What I gather from the old stories is that the buxom woman reading his fortune dangled more than promises in front of him.   Teddy ended up inviting her out to his farm.  Once at his house, the gypsy woman led Teddy into the bedroom, and, after getting Teddy all lathered up, excused herself to use the outdoor toilet, saying she’d be right back.  A full three hours later, shy virginal Teddy finally got tired of waiting and crept out of the bedroom only to find his house stripped bare – furniture, pots and pans, clothes, rugs all gone. 

Those sumptuous gypsy breasts are little different than visions of huge returns from financial investments – they blind you to reality, obscure the workings of the facadomist.  The argument in the store could just as well be public arguments about sodomy or gay marriage determining the outcome of an election, masking thousands of professionals busily looting the economy while politicians and overseers turn a blind eye, perhaps taking their share of the loot in one form or another.

It leaves me to ask, “Who’s really more evil, more noxious in the eyes of God?”  Is it people’s sexual behavior or is it people who willfully destroys the hope, life savings, and charitable resources of thousands while pretending to be an amazing and generous person?   And why don’t we know how to see these people at work?  Why are we such “not sees,” so blinded?  Perhaps it is because facadomy is like cancer.  It gets inside and grows to the size of a malignant tumor before one even suspects there’s a problem.  By the time you know for sure, there is no chance of recovery.

We need an outcry against facadomy, maybe even widespread arrests and detention camps (with outdoor toilets).  We need to learn to detect facadomy before it’s too late.  We need to tattoo sayings on our arms like “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.”  We need societal accountability from top to bottom and the forfeiture of ill-gotten gains.  But to do that, we’d have to shed our façade of being a beacon of freedom to the world and get down to the work of making it a daily reality for everyone, whether inside or outside our national borders.   We’d also have to quit worshiping facadomists and their amazing appearances.  But if we don’t, we will ultimately undermine everything we claim to stand for and will, on a practical, everyday level, drastically reduce the quality of life for all but the most privileged.