On Corruption in America

1
 
Midas
 
When it comes to corruption, money is at the heart of the matter.
 
Money was on everyone’s lips, for example, when I asked about the state of American politics during the 2018 campaign.
 
The United States, by then, had gone the way of so many other countries: corruption had upended our politics. But what did that word even signify to Americans? I had asked Afghans and Egyptians and Serbs to give their definitions. I often got stories, not synonyms. But the core was always the same. Corruption was when people in positions of power used their power to capture the community’s sources of money—including by extorting ordinary people’s meager earnings in the form of bribes. Corruption was when those ordinary people had no recourse, no means of redress.
 
What about us? How do Americans understand corruption? Applying the methodology I used overseas meant I had to go out and ask.
 
One time I did so was canvassing alongside a candidate for the West Virginia House of Delegates, Lissa Lucas. We were in St. Marys, a tiny town strung out along the Ohio River, on a rainy afternoon that very rainy August. Did residents, I wanted to know, think our system is rigged? And if so, what did they mean?
 
“It’s all about that dollar,” one young man answered. He glanced away, his face in a grimace, as he tried to find words to describe his disgust for government.
 
“Whoever gives them the most money, they do what they say.” That was a young woman in a tie-dyed T-shirt. Like her pained neighbor, she does not vote.
 
“They’re all bought off. It just depends on who has more money.”
 
“Money washes hands.” Meaning: Do your dirt; if you have money, you’re purified, considered upstanding.
 
These are the answers I keep getting.
 
There seems no making sense of corruption today without stopping to consider what money has come to mean to us—the hold it has gained on our hearts.
 
It is a substance that has bedeviled humans since they first imagined it into being, roughly 2,600 years ago. Through the ages, money has inspired aphorisms and admonitions, philosophical treatises, great works of art, hit songs and movies, and myths—or sacred stories.
 
Myths are a type of wisdom that has gone out of fashion among most educated Westerners. The scientific method of experimentation, three centuries old, replaced them with a different way to explore and order reality. The knowledge thus gained is immeasurable. And I would hate to live without the scientific framework for sorting ungrounded declaration from demonstrable fact. But in the process, we have grown relentlessly literal, banishing poetry. “Myth” has become a word of contempt to describe something patently false but gullibly believed in. It is an epithet flung to disparage a thought and its thinker, both.
 
But it is myth that has helped humans understand and deal with ourselves for tens of thousands of years. The profound, often funny, sometimes frustrating tales we have told of gods and supernatural beings provide unparalleled teachings, precious insight into what we as a species have held to be of sacred importance. “Whenever [myth] . . . has been dismissed as a mere priestly fraud or a sign of inferior intelligence,” wrote Joseph Campbell, who spent his life studying such stories, “truth has slipped out the other door.”
 
So myth is part of my methodology, too. In Honduras, about a month after the McDonnell decision came down, I stood in a small earthen shelter on the flank of a mountain and faced in each of the cardinal directions with a clutch of villagers, as they opened our interview with a prayer. They thanked me for returning again and again to the spiritual dimension of their struggle against the corrupt Honduran government. They talked about their cosmovisión: their worldview. According to that vision, the river being dammed a five-hour scramble down their steep wooded slope was sacred. Not sacred to their specific clan or tribe, like some private household god. Sacred, period. Sacred to humanity, and in the absence of humanity. And the beings it nurtures, the fish and the orchids and the turtles and salamanders and the cackling birds, have just as much right to live in communion with it as we do.
 
Damming a river in that context, I realized, is not just an environmental crime. It is deicide. It’s nailing Christ to the cross.
 
In Nigeria, I watched as a priestess dressed in white drew designs in chalk on the beaten earth before her door. She was preparing for the annual ceremony in honor of Olokun, the god of the rivers and the sea. This androgynous fish-tailed being is the primary deity worshipped by those who have kept the old faiths where the Niger River and its acolytes reach out their fingers to the Atlantic. Olokun is also the god of wealth: wealth from the sea. “If you pray to Olokun for money or children,” another worshipper assured me, “whatever riches you want, Olokun will give it to you.”
 
I thought about that. Olokun had given southern Nigeria riches, all right. Olokun had given this land oil. Oil bubbled up right there in the Gulf of Guinea. And oil was destroying Nigeria. It was the crux of the country’s corruption.
 
Before that, Olokun had bestowed a different type of riches on this people. He had turned them and their neighbors into wealth. For the coast nearby is where the ships set to sea with their heartbroken cargoes of living gold.
 
My head swam. There was a question I had to ask. I was sipping schnapps with the priestess and a holy man who had taken part in her ceremony. We were seated in his sacred grove: a silent place in the cacophonous city, vaulted by giant trees that had never been touched by a metal blade. Bouquets of medicinal plants were tufted here and there. We were discussing Nigerians’ addiction to money, the damage the sickness was doing.
 
“But then,” I finally voiced it, “if that’s what you think, how can you worship Olokun, the god of wealth?”
 
“Don’t you know?” the two elders shot back, almost together. “Olokun gives money to people he hates. It destroys them.”
 
And there it was: the whole tortured paradox.
 
 
 
Now, as I set about grappling with the fraught and potent force that is money, another myth is beckoning. It comes from ancient Greece. It is the story of Midas.
 
Midas, goes the tale, was king in Phrygia, a land across the Aegean Sea from Greece (now a part of Turkey). A complicated god named Dionysus, who introduced the mixed blessings of wine and sacred sex to humans, was picnicking in nearby Lydia, his native land. With his band of satyrs—hairy, lustful woodland spirits—he was making merry. The Latin author Ovid tells the story best, threading his poetic tapestry with the ancient strands. One satyr, says Ovid, went missing. Lost and probably none too sober, he was discovered by locals, wobbling along beside a river. Braiding flowers into ropes, they bound him and conducted him to their king, Midas.
Midas treated the old satyr with honor, keeping “joyful festival . . . twice five days.” Then he escorted him back across the border to the god in Lydia. Grateful Dionysus “allowed the king to choose his own reward.”
 
Midas piped right up: “Cause everything I shall touch to turn at once to yellow gold.” Rueful, the god bestowed the Midas touch. The king rushed off to test it.
 
Here is where Ovid really sings:
 
He pulled a twig down from a holm-oak, growing on a low-hung branch. The twig was turned to gold. . . . He touched a clod and by his potent touch, the clod became a mass of shining gold. . . . He could now conceive his large hopes in his grasping mind, as he imagined everything of gold. And while he was rejoicing in great wealth, his servants set a table for his meal, with many dainties and with needful bread. But when he touched [the loaf] with his right hand, instantly [it] stiffened to gold; or if he tried to bite with hungry teeth a tender bit of meat, the dainty, as his teeth but touched it, shone at once with yellow shreds and flakes of gold. And wine . . . when he mixed it with pure water, can be seen in his astonished mouth as liquid gold.
 
Midas—“rich and wretched”—panics. “No food relieves his hunger; his throat is dry / With burning thirst; he is tortured, as he should be / By the hateful gold.”
 
The king lifts up his arms, beseeching Dionysus to save him from what he now understands is no gift, but a curse. The god forgives the foolish king and sends him to a river flowing by the Lydian capital, the city of Sardis. Midas follows the river up to its source and washes. And the golden touch leaves his body and enters the river.
 
This tale is usually told as a simple allegory of greed. But there is more to it than that. Literal-minded science adds a perspective.
 
Midas, it turns out, existed. And he was king in Phrygia. According to the great Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the mid-400s BC, Midas “dedicated the royal throne upon which he sat when giving judgment” to Delphi, one of the most important ancient Greek shrines. An analysis that compares this and other Greek sources with Roman and Assyrian texts, adjusting for their differing calendars, reckons this Midas lived and reigned about two hundred years before Herodotus wrote. He probably died around 677 BC.
 
Science—as so often—provides some basis for the myth.
 
But what about money? The topic here is not gold in general, or any of the other commodities that have been used as means of exchange: sheep and goats, wampum or cowrie shells. It is coined money. That’s the stuff that changed the world. So, what does science say about the origins of money?
 
Numismatists, including an economist at the Chicago Federal Reserve, have devoted their own meticulous work to that puzzle. A cache of fat, roundish metal globules, stamped with a rectangular mark and a paw print or the head of some noble animal, was discovered more than a century ago. They are the earliest known coins. To this day they are the subject of cutting-edge subatomic analysis and heated debate.
 
The ancient city of Ephesus, where they were unearthed, stood far from the centers of the great civilizations of the time—Babylon or China, for example. That’s where I expected to find the first traces of such a breakthrough. Ephesus was a backwater, on the Aegean coast of today’s Turkey, facing Greece. Not far, that is, from Midas’s little kingdom of Phrygia.
 
Scientists have assayed the metal these often tiny coins are made of. It is a natural alloy of gold and silver called electrum. That evidence, together with the names and script engraved upon them, indicate that many came from nearby Sardis. In fact, the historical rulers of Sardis were known for their wealth, because electrum was abundant in the river that flows by the city.
 
And that is precisely the river Dionysus told the mythical Midas to trace to its source and wash in to do away with his hated gift. According to scholarly consensus, in other words, money was born in Lydia, the land where Midas delivered the intoxicated old satyr to Dionysus and found and then lost his golden curse. By some accounts, in fact, Lydia was the successor state to Midas’s Phrygia. The two realms are interchangeable.
 
And the date of these first coins? As near as can be determined from the archaeological layers, the late seventh century BC, probably around 630 BC.
 
That number glinted on the page like a flake of gold in the erudite sand. Deep in the technical details, relentlessly literal as befits our age, the classicists and numismatists were not quite putting two and two together. The best estimates are a few decades off; the overlapping kingdoms have different names. But it’s close enough for poetry: Midas of the golden touch is the man who invented money.
 
And that gives the myth a whole new meaning.