The ultimate "How Come?"

In 1995, my father started writing weekly on a site he called "How Come?". It's what I like to think of as (optimistically) one of the first blogs. Even back then, I remember thinking how cool he was for that.

It struck me recently, that if he were still writing "How Come?", he'd have certainly written about slithering Bernie Madoff. In fact, he'd have a whole series on that... and for different reasons than the simple, raw disgust the whole story raises. No, it would be for a much more personal reason than that. It would be driven by the kind of shivery feeling you only see in movies when the main character looks a murderer in the eye. It would be motivated by the same sort of nausea you get when you see tapes of September 11th. It would be about how he had such proximity to this seemingly normal Far Rockaway High School kid, and member of his swim team, who turned out to be so evil that it's practically impossible to accept. It would have sickened my dad deeply to know that he probably treated someone so evil with the natural respect and friendliness he treated everyone he knew. And it would have sickened him even more perhaps to re-read the words written in his high-school yearbook by someone who would prove to be so inconceivably unethical and bad. It gives some measure of relief to know that this criminal never became anything more than a High School acquaintance in the following 51 years... but so unfortunate that others who knew him back then probably became his victims.

On this day, when loathsome Madoff is imprisoned for the rest of his life - and the life of anyone who ever knew him - if my dad were here to write his blog post, he would have certainly quoted one if his favorite albums:

"In all my years of judging, I have never heard before of someone more deserving the full penalty of the law" - Pink Floyd, The Wall.

...and he, of course, would have ended the whole story of this horrible deception with:

"How come?"