Finneran: Lee Siegel, Groper
Friday, June 12, 2015
Lee Siegel
Most gropers have enough of a sense of right and wrong to try to be sneaky about their groping and grabbing. Not Lee Siegel however. He justifies it with a self-pitying op-ed in the Sunday New York Times.
You probably ask “who is Lee Siegel”? A Google search tells us that he has three degrees from Columbia University and that he has authored five books. Apparently he has written for the New York Times, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications, thus giving every indication of professional achievement and success.
His “groping” is of a different sort than the pervert on the subway who so loves a crowded train. But his groping caresses you even when you are hundreds of miles away. You see, Lee Siegel likes to put his hands in to the pockets of every American taxpayer as he happily and proudly walks away from his student loans. Adding insult to injury, Mr. Siegel adopts the pose of a Rosa Parks, striking a long-overdue claim to justice and suggesting that others follow his heroic lead.
The long and the short of Mr. Siegel’s tortured justification for stiffing the American taxpayers is that he was apparently born into modest circumstances, that his parents encountered financial difficulty, that he had to take out student loans to finance his college education, and that a career in journalism gave him such mental fulfillment that he would not consider taking other jobs which might have helped him pay back the money he has now taken from you. O’ cry me a river Lee. Poor persecuted Mr. Siegel. His parents were not millionaires. And those streets were such mean streets.
By the way, on behalf of those poor taxpayers you have chosen to stiff, now that you’ve had professional success, why wouldn’t you pay the loans back today? Perhaps those early years which followed your multiple college degrees were lean and mean years where subsistence came from bread and water alone. But surely book sales, and the Times and Harper’s pay stipends and fees which allow you today to celebrate and feast on peanut butter and jelly, maybe even canned tuna.
Have you considered the many millions of young Americans whose family circumstances mirror your family’s financial circumstances and who depend upon an “honor system” of repayment so that others might follow in your footsteps to college? Beyond the honor system, have you considered the contracts you so gratefully signed which legally bind you to repay the money given to you by your neighbors and fellow citizens? Do you feel “fulfilled” by a behavior which mocks both honor and the law?
This whole episode makes clear the confusion of modern America where an embarrassing behavior is now celebrated as a moral choice. Thus Mr. Siegel, in his own words of justification—“I chose life.” And further on, he encourages millions of young people today to “consider my example”, as if he is the champion of a noble cause. He is not. He is the champion of a selfish cause. His example is a curse upon the law, upon citizenship, and upon an obvious moral code. Is this not theft?
Perhaps I’m too old to understand the sophistication Mr. Siegel brings to the table. Perhaps all the rest of us who borrow money for education and cars and homes are such simpletons that we cannot grasp the higher concepts of his conceits.
Such is America today where theft and braggadocio are celebrated in the New York Times. Bring back Harry Truman.
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