Crime -- United States; Criminals -- United States
Then we have natural nomads of this, that, or complex persuasion, who are
patly named "globe-trotters" in the parlance of the period; then given
over to pursuit of surface pleasures and the juggling of baubles, while
lending but casual weight to the kind of coinage they coin, and next to
none at all to custodial considerations that should obtain as between the
wealthy and the masses who make wealth. Humans so driven usually pay out
of tingling nerves, souls of unrest that fight a constantly emphasized
ennui, a conscience never four-squared to challenging duty, and a
juiceless old age, against which they have stored no pleasures of the
mind. Individuals of the stripe take naturally, as a rule, to such as
sporting pugs and parasites, since above all else they must be amused out
of the ordinary in order to forget for a spell.
Down grade a bit farther one meets up with the money-mad cheat. His
specialty is to roll a dollar and have it lap up unearned increment that
would have shamed Shakespeare's capital usurer, had he been ten times the
immovable counterfeit Bassanio proclaimed him. No matter that the rolling
must ultimately give going business a black eye through flattening out the
bulk of the nation's spenders, just so the comeback coincides with the
intent. The intent is to filch by financial legerdemain from a people that
of which their forebears were deprived from behind one or another form of
barricade. This slave of the gilded idol will likely smack of the
smattering of a cheap culture, loll about in exclusive clubs, feed on the
fawning of smaller fry of his markings who murder sleep, even supplicate
for shiftless souls; still, he is instinctively one of the meanest of
moral crooks whose kinks of character shut him out alike from the meaning
of life and death. However he may read mundane law, or have it read, he is
a spiritual dud. As such, he will pay when the Maker unmasks him; not here
below, since Baal has him thrown and roped.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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