Forgotten Beatitudes

Oddly enough for a person who’s writing tends to ramble more than a drunken singing cowboy with heat stroke, I’ve always had a secret hatred for Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables.  It’s long, it’s dense, I believe at one point he spends an entire chapter describing a wave or an ocean or something that is utterly tangential to the actual story.  Sure, in high school I, along with all sorts of other theater geeks, creamed my jeans over the musical.  One can only hear “On My Own” belted out by painfully earnest high school girls auditioning for the school musical so many times, though, before one begins to realize, “This song sucks and all who sing it suck as well.”  So I tend to sort of chalk this up to peer pressure and a perverse desire to be liked by and fit into all sorts of social groups.  I mean, I also smoked, performed in a Renaissance Festival and had a three way with two girls.

Everyone makes mistakes.

For me, Hugo is like Ayn Rand:  Interesting ideas wrapped in prose that was obviously paid for by the word.  In Rand’s case, I find it doubly hilarious that her prose is so bad since she’s all about people being good at their jobs.  In Hugo’s case, though, I just feel tired and used.

With that said, I have to admit that I’ve always found the central question of Les Miserables fascinating.   How criminal is too criminal and can the mistakes of the past ever be washed away by good deeds in the present.  It’s also why I like Thomas Hardy’s…well, pretty much anything he wrote, but specifically The Mayor of Casterbridge.  Incidentally, if you’re looking for an excellent movie adaptation of Hardy’s Casterbridge, I can’t recommend The Claim highly enough.

See, I ramble, like those I despise.

Anywho, I think I like Hardy’s take more than Hugo’s in terms of exciting moral questioning.  Hugo’s Jean Valjean’s moral journey is really pretty flat.  He starts out a reasonably good man who breaks the law not because of a fault in his character but because of his family’s hunger and spends the rest of his life willfully atoning for his “mistake”.  In contrast, Hardy’s Michael Henchard starts out a drunk and things just get better from there as he sells his wife and daughter to a sailor in a fit of drunken rage.  Stealing bread or human trafficking?  Yeah, give me the one with a receipt any day of the week.

Hardy goes on, though, to show Henchard not as a perfect man making an imperfect choice under duress, unlike Hugo’s insufferable do-gooder.  Instead, Henchard is firmly in the sights of his Nemesis and his downfall comes from his own choices and not from a cruel or unjust world.  In a way, I’ve always considered this a far more noble portrayal of humanity; sure, Henchard becomes his own worst enemy, but at least he’s exerting some sort of control on his life and not playing the stoically suffering victim at the whim of an unjust legal system.  Seriously, Valjean needs to just grow a damn pair already.

What makes the question of forgiveness most interesting to me, though, is not when you have such obvious examples of moral situations.  What about when you have someone who’s neither particularly good nor bad but then does something that’s sort of bad, gets away with it and prospers for a number of years, only to come out as a morally-ambiguous leader?  Real life is more gray than black and white, more James Joyce than either Hugo or Hardy.

Which is probably why I find the case of Tony Krvaric both so chuckle-worthy and ponderable, all at the same time.  Back in the dawn of the cyberage (late 80s or so), there was a group of crackers who went by the name Fairlight.  For those who don’t know, Fairlight specialized in “warez”, or illegal, pirated software.  Fairlight was big on the scene in terms of breaking the copy protection of games for the Commodore 64 (oh, my old, gentle friend, how I miss thee) and distributing them for free.  Just about everyone I knew from my Commodore 64 users group had one or more games so cracked and mostly from Fairlight.

I, of course, would never indulge in anything so nefarious and you can’t prove otherwise so let’s just leave it at that.

Needless to say, Fairlight’s activities, while a boon to gamers everywhere, cost developing software companies mucho dinero.  Indeed, back in 2004, many members got busted in an international sting, codenamed Operation Fastlink, that supposedly netted the group’s archive server and some 65,000 pirated titles.

For non-gamers out there, that’s a shitload of money.

So where does Tony Krvaric come into all this?  How can the current  chair of the San Diego Republican Party be involved in any of this?  Well, it turns out that Mr. Krvaric may be Strider, the codename for one of the original founders of Fairlight.

I beg of you to resist the temptation to make jokes along the lines of, “A pirate chairman in the Republican party?  Figures.”  I know, it’s hard.  It was hard for me as well, but I overcame and I challenge you to do so as well.

What’s more, as the article points out, this possible revelation comes hot on the heels of another cracker getting 30 months in jail and 3 years of probation for his cracking activities between 2003 and 2005.

Now, I do understand statute of limitations, although I have no idea how they would apply in a case like this.  Ostensibly, after founding Fairlight in the late 80s (and after being a part of another notorious cracker ring, the West Coast Crackers), Krvaric left the group in the early 90s, roughly the same time when he emigrated to the US from Sweden.   Supposedly lured to the US by Reagan, it’s terribly amusing to think that someone who so desperately wanted to save the US from the scourge of Socialism was at the same time busy working hard to undermine Capitalism.

The central question here, though, to my mind is: Is Krvaric Valjean, Henchard or just a no-holds-barred, ultimate Capitalist?  Morally speaking, could he have changed enough from lawless cracking to be in charge of the finances and direction of a large metropolitan city’s Republican Party and, even if he can, is it a good idea for the GOP to associate itself with him?

If it’s all about “gotcha” politics, this is a pretty big gotcha, all things considered.