Where's the indignation?

As I wrote the last post, I found myself pondering the fact that I haven't yet written something indignant blasting Bernie Madoff.  I'm spectacularly indignant about the fund managers who plowed their money into Madoff's hands without doing elementary checks on things like the auditing firm.  And I think that Madoff deserves to go to jail for a very long time.  So why no jeremiad?

I'm not the only one, either.  There's much more making fun of the money managers who invested with him than Madoff himself.  Journalists looking at Madoff are less inclined to sarcasm than to rest their chins on their hands and say "How?  Why?"

Perhaps it's because the end is so odd--a defeated man giving up on the scam he'd kept going for decades.  It doesn't fit into our models of what con men act like.  And Madoff has offered no sufficiently theatrical declarations onto which to hang our calumny.  He's--well, we don't know whether he's contrite.  But he's not denying anything, lashing out at others, or claiming that he was somehow justified.  He's taking all the blame, no excuses.

But mostly, I think, it's because the thing is so mind boggling that we can't identify with Madoff enough to get really, thoroughly, angrily indignant.  That what he did is wrong, that it cost a lot of needy people a lot of money along with Madoff's rich clients, is so universally agreed that it defies extensive comment.  But it's hard to imagine yourself, or any of the many people in your past life who still push your emotional buttons, getting into a position where they could run a decades-long Ponzi scheme that took investors for $50 billion.  It's not really like anything in our ordinary experience.  And so it's hard to relate to emotionally, while Nicola Horlick's self-serving attempts to pin all the blame on someone else are all too exactly like any number of bullying, blame-shifting weasels we have worked with.