Last week’s hot news bite was that thirty-three Security & Exchange Commission employees were caught surfing and downloading porn in 2008 while they were supposed to be policing financial markets. Seventeen of the SEC surfers were supervisors and executives making between $99,000 and $222,000 per year.

One of the executives was spending his entire eight hour shift working on porn downloads. This single federal employee downloaded so much internet porn that he eventually filled up his hard drive and he had to start storing it on DVDs that he kept in cardboard boxes stacked around his office.

Never let it be said that our government can’t get anything done.

I bet you think I’m going to go all nuclear-angry now about how outrageous it is that SEC executives were downloading porn while Bernie Maddof ripped off Florida widows, Bear Stearns collapsed for want of overnight shortterm loans in the millions, unemployed Lehman employees punched Dick Fuld in the face (yes it really happened at Fuld’s gym), AIG and Henry Paulson held up the U.S. government for trillions of gazillions of taxpayer dollars, 14 million Americans lost their jobs, and the U.S. economy approached total financial meltdown.

Au contraire, Sugar Bear!

I don’t judge. I’m not a hater.

Far be it from me to take these guys’ inventories until I’ve walked a mile in their Fruit of the Looms.

Let’s Take Stock

Two years after the crash/pornfest, Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein is now being summoned before Congress to roll his eyes and look at his Rolex while some Eurotrash London Goldman employee named Fabrice the Fabulous Ultra-Douchebag brags about knocking over little old ladies at the airport, having three girlfriends, and being, well, fabulous-fabulous.

Even though Wall Street nearly wrecked the entire world while the SEC was porn surfing, nothing has changed at all in the two intervening years, nothing has been done to reign them in, and in fact, Congress just spent three full days talking about whether they even want to start talking about it.

And yet, who are we all really, really mad at? Not Fabrice the Fabulous Goldman Douchebag. Not Lloyd ‘I-Own-You-Morons’ Blankfein.

No, we’re mad at the SEC porn guys. .

I contend that they were just doing their jobs. I should know too, because I used to be a philosopher-in-training. A persuasive argument can (and should) be made that these SEC guys were doing cutting-edge academic research on epistemological boundaries and limits, (and doing it hard and fast too), all in a serious attempt to get some deep insight into the weirdly parallel goings-on in the world of high finance.

The Philosophy of Porn

Much has been written academically about porn and about what it signifies philosophically. I’m not kidding. Of course, no one reads that crap, because 99 out of 100 people who are interested in porn are interested in looking at it, not reading about what it means. How big of a nerd do you have to be, anyway, to choose to read academic philosophy papers about the epistemological implications of porn instead of just going online and checking out the real deal live and in person?

You have to be either 1) a loser, or 2) female, or 3) Pam.

(Guess which one I am?)

Since I know for sure that none of you have actually read any of these papers, I’ll summarize:

(You’re welcome.)

What these papers say in a nutshell is that the thrill in porn isn’t in the sexual pleasure so much as in the exhiliration that comes with trespassing known boundaries and flagrantly disregarding the artificial limits that society places on human behavior.

Sex is certainly thrilling enough for its own sake. (If it wasn’t, we would die out instantly as a species. Ask any mother of any two-year-old.) But forbidden sex is even more thrilling.

It’s the breaking of hard and fast rules, that sense of getting away with something nasty and illicit, that delivers the ‘hit’ in porn. That sense of pushing desire right past social constraint is much, much more invigorating for men (and some women) than the sex act itself.

Thus, in Victorian times, a mere glimpse of a naked female ankle could send a respectable businessman running for a cold shower, prayer book in hand, because men were not supposed to see women’s ankles. Today, that same high requires a pair of identical twins in lesbian bondage, two shaved marmosets, a stick of butter, Donald Trump, and an obese dwarf.

And that’s only true if  the respectable businessman hasn’t already visited shavedbimbomarmosets.com.

The academic argument for porn is that porn shows us where cultural boundaries are located by shocking us when they are crossed. Porn by its very nature draws us a pretty accurate map of the forbidden world, the place where no man has gone before, and where most men better not boldly go while their wives are looking. Of course, that forbidden world instantly becomes the only world worth exploring, at least for guys—at least until the next forbidden world pops up. And on and on, in a sort of addictive spiral. 

But how do you begin to map a world in which nothing is off limits?

Porn is in the Eye of the Beholder

That pretty much describes the world of Wall Street today—the world of derivatives trading, CDOs, CFOS, billion dollar bonuses, Goldman, AIG, John Paulson, Fabrice the Greasy, Antonio Mozilo, et al.

Heaven knows, anything goes.

How do you regulate an industry whose guiding caveat is free markets regulate themselves?

In the years leading up to the crash, banks and investment firms hired their own regulators.

Each financial institution went shopping for its own regulator, and then picked the regulatory agency that gave them the best deal and the least oversight.

In this Orwellian post-Reagan reality, the brave new role of the SEC was to rigorously not regulate.

This anti-regulation regulation was no secret. The unraveling of financial regulation took a little more than a decade, was legislated by Democrats and Republicans alike, and was applauded across sectors.

For awhile everybody—the government, Wall Street, Main Street—EVERYBODY thought financial deregulation was a pretty good idea. In fact, there’s a famous photo floating around the internet of federal regulators and bankers happily taking a chainsaw, pre-crash, to a big pile of banking regulations. (See above.) During those heady first years of deregulatory bliss, this photo was released to the press with not even a twinge of shame. Throwing out the rules and the oversight was naievely seen as a celebratory event.

But not even Adam Smith envisioned a world in which the SEC would spend hours watching penguins blow baby monkeys while the captains of Wall Street knocked down orphans and stole their lunch money (simultaneously hedging their bets with insurance against the possibility that some kids might not be carrying lunch money).

I’m pretty sure Adam Smith wasn’t talking about any of that.

So I think these SEC execs were just doing their very difficult job—just feeling around for the boundaries, trying to draw a map, trying to locate a ship that had strayed so far beyond the edge of the known world that it might well be in the belly of a monster, and how do you peer into the belly of a monster? If you own a computer and pay for internet service, you know. They didn’t have time to read a bunch of crappy academic papers to get to the answer, they had to go straight to the source—to the deep wisdom of Mother Porn.

What, oh what, is not allowed, oh Great Goddess? Tell us, show us, that we might regulate, that we might bring order out of this sticky licky icky deregulated abomination. The child of the unholy union of government and money has five heads and six anuses. What should we feed it? Where can we buy diapers?

Now what?

I don’t think they have the answers yet, because all of them are still employed at the SEC.

Turns out some of the porn surfers were sent to short term counseling. Some said they felt really bad about it all and that was mea culpa enough for the SEC. One guy is said to have resigned in shame and embarrassment but now it’s unclear whether he really did resign or didn’t. Some felt like, “Hey. I’m working here. Back off, Geraldo.”

In the paranormal world; sex, death, and money are always intertwined in any big narrative. We’ve got the money angle covered pretty well at this point. Now we’ve got the sex too. I think we all know what’s coming next.

That’s why I am off to Kentucky Fried Chicken to pick up one of those new sandwiches they just came out with. I’m doing it today, before we are smote or smited or struck down or whatever, before DC catches fire and someone starts playing a violin in front of the Lincoln monument.

(Does Obama play any stringed instruments? Maybe Rahm does.)

The sandwich consists of two deep fried boneless battered chicken breasts (used in place of bread) with bacon and jack cheese melted between them.

It’s appropriately called “The Double Down.”

I’m going to eat me one of those risky new gambling sandwiches, wash it down with a litre of generic malt liquor (yes they do make that now, I saw it on the news last week), then head off to the local vomitorium.

I hope I run into Fabrice and Lloyd while I’m there.

By the time I finish that sandwich, I’ll finally have something to invest.