Is There No Such Thing As Progress?

At the same time Hillary Rodham Clinton was testifying at her Senate confirmation hearings to become the next Secretary of State, after being the first viable woman candidate for the Democratic nomination for the presidency (not to belittle Shirley Chisholm's 1972 candidacy), the clerics in Saudi Arabia announced that girls at 10 and 12 are not too young to marry. To deny them those rights, according to these Saudi religious scholars, is unfair to the girls. Check this out!

The concept of progress is intellectual, mostly a progressive Western ideal, and has never equated with reality. Otherwise we wouldn't have had such things as the Third Reich, Rwanda, Northern Ireland, the Palestinian -Israeli wars, I think you get the picture.

More from this amazing book The Forger's Spell by Edward Dolnick, as it relates to the Bernard Madoff scandal. The Forger's Spell is about how a third rate artist fooled Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering into paying big, big bucks for obviously forged Vermeer paintings. Han Van Meegeren didn't even try to copy Vermeer paintings, but instead painted in the style of Vermeer, using Bakelite to set the paints to make they appear old.

Dolnick observes that a forger's success has scarcely anything to do with his skill as a painter. "Buyers want to believe they have found something extraordinary; the forger's task is to find ways to bolster that belief."

The same is true of Bernard Madoff. Like the purchaser of a forged painting, the victim of a ponzi scheme sorta knows that he is getting too good a deal. Insider trading, something not quite kosher, is behind the profits. Forgers often create such elaborate paper trails for paintings so that their pedigrees look much better than the actual work. So, too, the returns on the Madoff investments were too good to be true, but greed allowed the victims to pretend they didn't see.

A Perfect Storm--Of a Book

There is nothing more intriguing to me than the history of the Nazis, mostly because I came of age, meaning I was able to read Leon Uris's Exodus (1958) and Meyer Levin's Eva (1959) at the tender age of 10. That an entire society, Germany, could subordinate its history, culture, and morality to hatred and fear and stay in that state of hatred and fear, despite the awful starvation they, too, would suffer, fascinates me. One revolt, that was it: Sophie Scholl and the White Rose.

Now that there is literature coming out of Germany dealing with how ordinary Christian Germans dealt with World War II, the final solution, and the despair, my interest is sparked once again. Some examples: The Book Thief by Markus Zusek; The Nazi Officer's Wife by Edith H. Beer; Sophie Scholl and the White Rose by Judd Newborn and Annette Dunbach; and Let Me Go by Helga Schneider

Add to my fascination with Nazis, my love of art and the titillation of scandal and I'm engaged, fully engaged.

So "The Forger's Spell: The True Story of Vermeer, the Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century" (Harper's) by science writer Edward Dolnick is fulfilling all of my desires.

Han van Meegeren was a third-rate painter, extravagant and pompous, who lived in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, during World War II. He pocketed the equivalent of $30 million by forging Vermeer paintings, and not doing it very well. Rather than paint replicas of the 35-36 actual Vermeers that still existed then, van Meegeren painted images only vaguely reminiscent of Vermeer. Placing the originals next to the knock offs, one could immediately tell how poorly crafted the forgeries were.

How did he manage to sell these horrendously obvious fakes to the likes of Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering during World War II?

I suspect the same way that Bernard Madoff was able to sell his investment services: hype, hysteria, and the complicity between the perpetrator and the victim.

Who had the balls to make Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering into victims?

Read the book. It's fascinating, as is the magistrate's decision today not to revoke Bernie Madoff's bail after he mailed out several million dollars worth of heirloom jewelry and the likes to friends and family.

And if his skin weren't white?