Author’s Note: People ask me fairly routinely, “What the hell do you think about?” I don’t know why they do that. And I’m not at all sure they really want to know. In any case, this is what I was thinking about after I read a recent headline in a local business journal. Read it at your own peril.
If you want to know how long the financial-services industry has been around — and if you want to know how long women have been involved in that industry — check out this headline from the Hartford Business Journal (HBJ): “First woman becomes head of Northwest Community Bank”.
The first woman. Wow! I’d have thought something like that would be momentous enough to warrant major coverage (or at least a mention) in the Book of Genesis.
To be fair, Moses probably never went to journalism school. Plus, he was just part of the Abrahamic patriarchy. And we know how oppressive those things are. I’d also have thought HBJ would have been all over the fact that Eve broke the glass ceiling in the 14th or 13th century BC. But as was the case with Moses, I have no idea how many people at HBJ went to journalism school, either. So, I’d have been inclined to read the HBJ story and let things go.
Adam, however, ever the loyal spouse, took exception to the short shrift given to his mostly faithful wife (except for one minor incident having to do with the tree of the knowledge of good and evil). The Scripture says, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at glass houses and prove an apple a day keeps the doctor away.” And Adam believed his wife was close enough to being without sin that he ought to defend her honor. So, he texted King Solomon the following:
Not for nothin’, but in case you haven’t been keeping up with the news lately, two things have happened: (1) My wife picked the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But she didn’t eat it or anything. (2) She was named head of Northwest Community Bank. For her picking the fruit, both of us were banished from the Garden, and it was front-page news. For her being named head of the bank? Bupkis. Isn’t it bad enough we got booted from the Garden and she had to go to work? Not giving her credit for the fact that she was named head of the bank seems like putting hyssop in the wound, doesn’t it?
As was his wont, Solomon gave young Adam’s text message considerable deliberation. Then he carefully composed his reply, reading it over several times before hitting send:
I feel your pain. And I commend you for supporting your wife, even after she defied a standing order from The Big Guy. Be that as it may, the absence of publicity over Eve’s promotion at the bank is a blessing in disguise. A few thousand years from now, a dude in the car business, Henry Ford, is going to say this: “It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.” A few decades later, when the economy collapses, a journalist, Matt Taibbi, is going to write this: “People aren’t pissed just to be pissed. They’re mad because a tiny group of crooks on Wall Street built themselves beach houses in the Hamptons through a crude fraud scheme that decimated their retirement funds, caused property values in their neighborhoods to collapse, and caused over four million people to be put in foreclosure.” So, quit while you’re ahead, kid. When it comes to this bank thing, you and Eve are better off out of the headlines than in ‘em.
Notwithstanding the fact that divorce rates in Biblical times were nowhere near as high as they are today, Adam had to have felt pretty good about a commendation from Moses for standing by his wife. And since Bitcoin hadn’t been invented yet, Eve dodged a chronological cannonball, whether she knew it or not.
With all of that behind us, the best we can hope for at this point is that Moses and the folks at HBR are more judicious in the coverage they give Eve from now on. And if I were them, I’d pay more attention to the way my headlines are worded. But what do I know?
I’m just me. I think stuff. And what I thought this time was all about Eve.
