Who put the empty milk carton in the fridge? Hitler!

What could be more natural than blame-storming? You notice something is wrong and you try to figure out who is to blame. Someone put an empty milk carton in the fridge and here I am with a bowl of cereal and no milk: Who did it? When you find who did the wrong thing, you can correct it.

Simple. But now that the gossip around the tribal campfire has gone worldwide and digital, the information overload has left us a bit confused as to who did what.

The economy crashed, income is flying upward into the hands of a few, wars break out and rumors of wars abound. Something is wrong! Who is to blame? What we want is one villain and we want him to be a real villain, a black-hearted devil who drinks the blood of innocents while standing in the center of a penatgram calling on Lord Baphomet.

We don’t want a coalition of elite technocrats operating in circles within circles of plausible deniability. Bor-ing. What we want to know is: who is to blame? Ah, that question will keep Alex Jones a millionaire for years to come.

Putin. Obama. Bin Laden. Al Baghdadi. You know, a person. One person. Alas, the world has become more complex and interconnected since the days we sat around the campfire trying to determine who stole the best hunk of meat and snuck off into the woods to gobble it by himself.

Just to show how complicated it has become, here is a true story about real people; just a thin slice off the end of the Loaf of Complexity.

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The lovely and gifted Jennie Jerome was born in 1854 to a wealthy American financier. It was said she “had the look of a panther about her.” By this time, some Americans had become fantastically rich, but they had no aristocratic titles. Fortunately, there were British aristocrats with titles but no money and so marriages were duly arranged to balance this out.

Jennie married Lord Randolph Churchill and produced two sons, John and Winston. Yes, THAT Winston Churchill.

Winston had a son named Randolph who became an alcoholic and Randolph’s wife, Pamela Digby had a long-running affair with the American politician, businessman, and diplomat Averill Harriman, the son of a railroad robber baron. They later married.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Averill Harriman had started Brown Brothers Harriman in 1931, apparently unaffected by the Great Depression. One of the partners in the firm was Prescott Bush, father of George H.W. Bush, who is father of George W. Bush. Yes, THAT George W. Bush.

Brown Brothers Harriman’s assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemies Act, the enemy, in this case, being Adolph Hitler.

Ah, Hitler! Thank God, a real villain. One person to banish from the tribe and then everything will be fine again. Because the true story of all those cross-Atlantic, Anglo-Saxon interlocking, interbreeding treasonous aristocrats…is just too hard to follow.