It is funny what you remember, the little bits of information that can last for years, seemingly without purpose. I had always remembered seeing the Enron collapse on television from Washington DC. But what I didn’t realize, until today, that it was the same day that Mike Spann, a CIA officer, was killed in Afghanistan. I remember that supremely well. I was at my boyfriend’s house and he was cooking dinner. I was lying on the sofa, still in the September 11 haze when you could not look away from the tv or you’d feel un-American. I remember hearing that a CIA officer had been found, and being shocked because I knew that the CIA was very media-shy. Why were we hearing about this?
I began to pay attention. I remember seeing the Enron story after the Mike Spann story. I remember the images of the blue towers, and I remember they showed Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling. I remember feeling a weird sense of displacement. Was I in Houston? No, wait, I’m in Northern Virginia. So why was Enron on tv?
I can honestly say that from the first moment – from the first second I saw the Enron story on television on this day ten years ago – I thought it was total bullshit. I was prepared to be found wrong. But there was something about the way it was being reported that bothered me a great deal. I knew Enron. I knew that company like the back of my hand. I knew the people on television. And they were not criminals. Yet they were being portrayed that way, and there was no room for dissent in those reports. Not on that day. Not for a long time.
I remember walking away from the television and telling my boyfriend about Enron. I remember he was making spaghetti puttanesca, and I watched him chop garlic while I spoke. I remember feeling a knot in my tummy, a sense that something very bad was happening, over and above the mourning of the previous month and a half. A new level of badness had descended, just when we thought it could not get any worse.
I remember telling him about how it felt to walk inside the building. How it felt to talk to people who were so smart, so charming. How it felt to be part of that. And to see it collapse right in front of your eyes.
That was the beginning for me. The day I became radicalized. The day I became passionate about Enron. That very night I began my Right Thinking Girl blog. I wanted to talk about Michael Spann, but I also wanted to discuss Enron – a subject I was assured that nobody would care about. Every blogger in the world told me to quit writing about Enron, telling me I’d get more traffic if I just wrote about politics.
But I couldn’t quit. People do care. I do not care about traffic; I care about telling the truth about Enron. Today is a day of coincidences and beginning and endings. If I stand back far enough I can see the little marker of fate.
