Sifting though the pieces of the broken prize

The key to getting ahead in the 21st century is to just follow the horror. We may or may not have already passed Peak Oil but there's certainly no shortage of massive disasters waiting to be exploited by the enterprising self-starter. Everywhere you look during these uncertain times, if there are people suffering, there is also money to be made in bullshitting about or just near that suffering.

Wait. All those links I put in the last sentence and I still need this one in order to fit in an Ed Blakely reference. I like this one.

Anyway, if Blakely taught us anything, it's that disaster bullshitting doesn't have to be a one shot get rich quick scheme. If you've got real talent (and just enough chutzpah) you should be able to stretch the thing into a sustained career. This guy, for instance, appears to have been at it for some thirty years now.

Since 1996, courts in Virginia, Washington, D.C., and Florida have issued at least 16 judgments against him or his now defunct company, Equity International. They total more than $210,000 and include unpaid bills as large as $16,000 to a hotel in Washington. Nearly half of that debt, $100,000, is owed by Loiry personally to the Internal Revenue Service for unpaid income taxes.

Complaints about Loiry’s business practices have followed him in the three decades since he left his family’s Florida book-publishing business for a career in disaster-zone event production that has taken him from post-war Bosnia to hurricane-devastated Central America to Iraq to Afghanistan.

Most recently, he has been focusing his energies on New Orleans, where, on the first anniversary of the BP oil spill, he held the Gulf Coast Leadership Summit.

Obviously, it's also a great way to see the world, not unlike the way we used to think of military service or maybe a stint in the peace corps. Except without all that icky pretense of altruistic duty and, of course, with a much bigger payoff.

The only thing I can think of that would be better than this is if we eventually move into an industry of bullshitting about bullshitting where guys like Loiry and Blakely start putting out self-help books and DVDs explaining how to get rich doing what they do. Like The Secret but with death and destruction everywhere. Somebody want to help me make a catchy title out of that? Anybody?

Update: Does anybody else remember the surreal moment when Ethan Brown interviewed Ray Nagin for Details magazine?

The writer Naomi Klein, in her book The Shock Doctrine, describes actions like those as “disaster capitalism”: profiteering and privatization in the wake of shocks such as 9/11 or Katrina. So when I spot Alan Greenspan’s memoir, The Age of Turbulence, on Nagin’s desk and ask him about it, I’m surprised to learn that he’s not reading it but The Shock Doctrine, which he pulls from his briefcase.

“I understand exactly the premise that they’re presenting,” Nagin says, holding the book aloft, “that’s for sure. Look, man, after this disaster there is big money! The shock-and-awe piece of what they’re talking about is absolutely correct.” I ask if he’s read the chapter in which Klein laments that the public sphere in New Orleans is “being erased, with the storm used as the excuse.” Nagin replies cheerily, “I haven’t gotten that far! I just picked it up.”

Really was using it as a how-to manual.