[Prestidigitweeze]

Since I live in a country that has been bilked out of billions by Wall Street over the past several years -- a country in which selling the bundled debt of people who are often forced into default now extends from home mortgages and bad stocks to college tuition fees and apartment rent -- I find it odd when people single out an exec who has had so little to do with our financial misfortunes. It begins to look like the bait and switch of the Roman arena.

Post-mortem, Jobs is becoming the Michael Jackson of the tech industry: Famous and quirky enough to channel celebrity stalkers' ire at the bitter realities of the world. (Or is he our hindsight's Boss Tweed?)

I've read Jobs's bio and I'm not about to deny he was dishonest and had -- especially before he was ousted from Apple -- certain traits we associate with nonviolent sociopaths (coldness, charm, impulsiveness, moral indifference, occasional sadism). He even has one of the classic prerequisites: adoptive parents. Add bedwetting and pyromania and you've got a profile.

Then again, so do many, many other CEOs at his level.

Because Jobs wasn't trained as a businessman, and because his style (in the beginning) was more difficult and abrasive than nearly everyone else's, he looks to us like the guiltiest person in the room. And I won't argue that some of Apple's less ethical practices were the legacy of his vision of himself as a hippie capitalist rebel.

In my experience, the most pernicious criminals (cf. those who are responsible for others' deaths) try to stay out of the spotlight. It's taken decades for people to know who the Koch Brothers are, but we've always known about Jobs.

If he were alive, I doubt he'd be in jail, though I also doubt he's never done anything deserving of jail time. But I'm more interested in fairer prosecution of the grotesquely wealthy as a whole than I am in berating the corpse of a man whose legacy is undeniable whether or not you think he was a creator, a thief or both.