FOREST MONKEYS, STREET MONKEYS

As a sapient being and anciently practiced discerner of patterns amidst chaos, I can't help but perceive the similarities between the lowdown thieving conscienceless behavior of my local simians at one end of the Intelligence Spectrum, and the lowdown thieving conscienceless behavior of Wall Street simians at the other end. The forest monkeys in their basal integrity come and take a few onions, bite a radish or two, then are gone till they're again hungry in this neighborhood and there is nothing better around than my onions. They never get bonuses or flaunt the success of their scam, they never make off with more than they can carry.

The Street monkeys, in contrast, find that integrity gets in the way of their desires; they want more than just the onions of it all, they want the yachts and the golf courses, the 25 million dollar houses, they want the respect of folks like themselves, who can only envy. So they package a dozen actual onions and millions of promises of onions and trillions of onion IOUs into tranches that they get rated AAA 100% ONION by some bribed rating agency, then sell the Fully Onionized Derivatives at declared value to widows and pensioners, mayors and governments all over the world, who then believe they are rich in onions and will be even richer when they cash in their fat onion portfolios in 20 years.

Both parties of perpetrators know, somewhere in their "Heart," that they are committing dishonest acts, the main difference being that it's easier to perceive in the forest monkeys. You can see they feel guilty when stealing - which they know must be clandestine - and they look guilty when caught red-faced. The Street monkeys, in contrast, feel no guilt; in fact they reward themselves all the more handsomely the greater their dishonesty. What's more, they even flaunt their actions, lately praising themselves for so many brilliantly (and honestly impossible) profitable quarters in a row, achieved by further milking the biggest scam in the history of sapience.

Forest monkeys, with their ingrained integrity, would never stoop so low.

MONKEY POLITICS

I am pleased to announce that the monkeys - whom I haven't actually seen in my garden since they hired a shrewd new PR manager - came by some time during the last couple of days while I was at the office (the PR guy has my schedule on his Blueberry), sampled my radishes, went Ptah! Ptooey!, pulled up some more and threw them around to register their disgust and disappointment, as well as their puzzlement over why one of their generally reliable providers would purposely plant such a revolting item in blatant violation of our unspoken contract their ancestors drew up unilaterally about a million years ago, when we humans left the beastly path and began climbing the precipitous road to higher intelligence and its attendant burdens of honesty, integrity etc., qualities still too heavy for monkeys and politics.

When I went out this morning to get some radishes and saw the mini-chaos the disappointed absentee landlords had left, I noted with satisfaction that the token radishes they had pulled up and bitten bitterly to register their extreme disapproval of my gardening behavior were mostly small ones (strike one against the new manager), leaving the larger and ready-to-eat ones for me to harvest (strike two) and making room for the smaller ones to grow. They had helped thin out my radishes! (Strike three.) I think the axe is about to fall, and a new PR manager soon to be hired from among those who answer the ad in Monkey BusinessWatch. There are mental rumors that the ousted PR guy will go into politics.

Next year I'll plant some red peppers where this year's radishes were, see what happens to the new guy.