Scandal and Outrage: The Inescapable March of Power and Corruption

Ah yes, the inescapable march of scandal and outrage. Those insipid hashtags - #Mafia, #Fury, #TiffanyStratton - harbor tales more redolent of Shakespeare than the dross of social media. Look past the emojis and one finds a throbbing artery of power, criminality and the eternal human bargain with corruption.

The mafia, that dread Sicilian pathogen, has once again oozed its tentacles into the world’s arteries. Pizzerias that tickled the presidential palate, their crimson sauce now exposed as the blood money of extortion. Even that vaunted cicerone of democracy - Bill Clinton himself - has been an unwitting dupe to the dons. One can envision the portly ghouls of the Contini clan, cheeks stuffed with ‘zza, chuckling at the great man’s naivete.

Outrage may crest the Twitter waves, but in truth this reeks of nothing new. The mafia’s invisible hand has ever manipulated the visible, from judges to politicians to that great American idolatry - the squared circle. Enter the lumbering embodiment of crass pugilism: Tyson Fury. This puffed peacock who’ll gorge on $81 million while indulging the corrupt House of Saud displays the molten hypocrisy of it all.

What revenues await those savvy enough to ride such wretched tides? The remorseless House of Saud, awash in petrodollars, sees boxing’s grubby glamor as sport’s ultimate idolatry. Why not stage their bloody sacraments in Riyadh’s desert oven? As for Fury, a man of towering fists and caveman beliefs, his anti-Semitic and misogynistic slurs are quickly brushed aside for a payout any death cult could admire.

Not even the cartoonish realm of the WWE can escape our drama’s grim orbit. The nubile and ill-fated Tiffany Stratton has her opening salvo of scandal - rumors and innuendo aimed at this rookie enchantress. An opening ouverture one suspects, with the promise of sordid encore after encore.

I’d wager the only beings eyeing these trends with utter detachment are the sociopathic hedge funders - those emotionless algorithms scraping the zeitgeist for any numerical edge. To them, the #Mafia hashtag is but a signal amid noise, a 1 or 0 pointing towards an opportunity to cash in on moral putrescence. Perhaps they’ll short the ethics ETF while going long on the vice fund.

In the end, we are all captive to the same grotesque digital carnival - a masque of oligarchs and grifters ever cloaking their grim taxidermy behind the maskara of celebrity and distraction. Small wonder we watch on, our pious indignation ever replenished, as we await the next seedy tableau. Ethics, like virginity, makes the rapacious laugh. The only advisable investment is in revulsion.