C-R-O-S-S is for CROoks, Saps, and Suckers

who comprise the sinners' universe, as the recent fall of Enron has proved all over again. Though CROSS is also for sinners who, bumping into the only God who deserves to be called God, are obliged by instinct and unshakable habit to be CRitical, Outraged, and when those fevers have passed Scared Silly. This too has been proved once more by Enron's fall. Starting with the facts, here's how.

In the spring of 2001 a fistful of shares in Enron, the Houston-based energy company, was the cat's meow of American investing. Over the previous few years Enron stock had risen dramatically, from about $25 per share in late 1997 to over $90 in January of '01. Financial wise ones were everywhere applauding. An MBA textbook published in 2000 held Enron up to future business leaders as the consummate example of how companies ought to be run. The heads of those same leaders-to-be doubtless swam with visions of owning a piece of Enron as soon as their school debts were sufficiently tamed. Enron meant promise. Enron was the future.

One year later Enron was dirt. You could buy a share of the company for half a cent. No one did. The tumble started, you'll recall, in September, 2001. In a quiet corner somewhere a bank loan came due. To the astonishment of all, Enron couldn't pay. Word leaked. Panic erupted. Shortly before the eruption, the company's top officers, recognizing that the jig was up, began selling bales of their personal shares of company stock, replacing them with bales of whatever else would keep their fortunes fat. Even as they did this they told their employees, now edgy with rumor, that the company was sound. They also forbade those employees to sell the Enron shares on which some 20,000 sets of retirement plans were resting. When the collapse came and the dust settled those employees' IRA's were like the lean cows of Joseph's dream, devouring the future -- $1 billion worth according to one estimate.

A big piece of the present had been gobbled as well. 4,500 Enron employees were jobless. So were stunned crews of accountants all over the world whose only error had been to ply their craft under the formerly majestic banner of Arthur Anderson. More pervasively still, a vast pool of ordinary shareholders was also stepping into a new day suddenly and markedly poorer than they'd been the day before. Meanwhile 144 senior Enron managers were collectively $744 million richer than they'd been in September of 2000. Not for long, however. Legal vultures started to circle. The air throbbed with a lust to reduce fat cats to feline carcasses, to be quickly and thoroughly picked.

Jerome Bruce, licensed broker of KOH, Inc. at Messiah Lutheran Church, Fairview Park, Ohio

One year later Andrew Fastow, former high honcho, was sitting in jail. Where Fastow sits, Ken Lay will surely follow -- or so we all hope, don't we?

"They cheated," said an attorney when asked this past spring what the Enron mess was all about. A theologian, habituated to different categories, would want to put it like this: "They acted in bad faith." "They," of course, would be the front-line muckety mucks, the ones who brokered the deals and concealed the losses and failed to blow whistles. They thought -- more to the point, they believed -- that they could bend old rules or even break them, and get away with it. Their own glossy literature betrays this. Like Tom Wolfe's masters of the prior decade's universe, they fancied themselves shapers of a new order, one that would leave them fat and sassy. In this they trusted.

Cheats and lawbreakers almost always trust like this.

To be sure, everyone else involved in this mess or touched by it was acting on faith as well. Human beings are bound to do this. Permit me in passing to grind an ax. It is long past time that we dispensed with the ludicrous habit of referring to only some people, the religiously inclined, as persons of faith. All persons are persons of faith -- faith in something, in someone, or, more accurately, in countless things and countless ones. Every human moment expects a next human moment. Every action, every decision whether large or small, considered or instinctive, arises from a belief about the future to which that action or decision will lead. For example, from my pocket I fish a rectangular piece of paper bearing a greeny-gray portrait of George Washington. I hand this to the shopkeeper in the unquestioned belief that she in turn will allow me to leave her store with the can of Coke I plucked from her shelves. For her part she takes that piece of paper in the belief, again unwavering, that it will help her secure from a vendor another can to replace the one I took, with a few pennies left over to help fund her next vacation. I acted on faith in that transactional moment. So did she.

Potential Enron employees acted on faith when they swarmed to be hired. They believed an Enron job was a job that would last. Investors acted on faith when they fought to outdo each other in the amount they'd hand over for a share of Enron stock. They believed that $90 this year would fetch them $120 next year. But they were wrong. Their faith was misplaced. More bluntly, it was bad. It drove them to choose poorly, to their present woeful detriment.

This detriment, lest we forget, is both deeper and darker than it appears on the surface, as a loss of present income, let's say, or of future retirement prospects. In the case of Enron executives, it's worse even than stratospheric lawyers fees. Think of bad faith as a two-tailed scorpion. As in its first appearance in a certain garden in a time before time, it manages always, in every instance, to hammer its practitioners with a double dose of poison. The first dose is unpleasant, the second fatal. The first is shame, the wretched taste of another person's contempt or pity, which is contempt decked out in good manners. The second is an out and out critic's war, I against God no less, God against me. I lose.

Enron's fall has unleashed a flood tide of shame on anyone connected to it by whatever species of bad faith. The rule-breaking fat cats, once celebrated, are now derided. Echoing the lawyer, we all call them crooks and always will. We want them in jail. Much more, we want them poor. Where employees and investors are concerned the shame is subtler, though still palpable. On the surface we hold them innocent and call them victims. In quiet corners of our minds we unearth judgments and labels that human beings have always affixed to those who get flattened by the wickedness of others. I took you blindly at your word and your word was false. I'm a sap. You held out a promise and like a fish I bit, greedily. I'm a sucker. What ex-employee, seeking a new job, will not wonder if the person reading the Enron-tainted resume is thinking poorly of her judgment or her honesty? What ex-investor, badly burned, has not made solemn vows to himself and his spouse never ever again to be so massively taken in?

More grimly still: which of these has not at some (or many) points in the bitter fallout been moved to shake a very angry fist at The System and Whoever It Is that happens to be in charge of the thing? One hears from every quarter the old adamic whine: "The boss, the broker, the CFO you gave me. His fault or hers it is, to be sure. But even more it's you I hold accountable, if only because you failed to intervene before the dam broke."

With respect to Enron and, yes, the slew of other mega-scandals that have surfaced since, all America is caught right now in a thicket of criticism and outrage. How soon now before angry fingers start wagging in earnest at the powers that be -- the SEC, the Congress, the President, those authors and keepers of order-enforcing rules who ought to have held the rascals in check only they didn't. Powers that be, St. Paul observes, are God's functionaries (Ro. 13:4). Guess, then, where the buck stops.

But to know this -- worse, to feel it as an answer welling up from my belly -- is to know and understand that the woes described by the Augsburg Confession, Article II, apply vividly to me. I do not fear God. I do not trust God. I am and remain a sinner. Sinners, bound and determined to scream at God for his present shortcomings in the realm of economic management, are bound also to expect that God in turn will one day scream at them. It is a fearful thing, says a nameless apostle, to fall into the hands of the living God (Heb. 10:31). Hence the wretched fate of all the Enron-tainted host: the crooks, the saps, the suckers, the outraged critics. The day lurks when every last one of us will be scared silly. That's silly as in witless. That's witless as in dead.