The Big Blue Eyes & The Sexy Black Box: How Elizabeth Holmes Exposed America

Here is my confession right off the top: I am fascinated by Elizabeth Holmes, perhaps even to the point of obsession. But not for the reasons that so many American men of mature age, experience, and education are. We learned about a decade ago that the root causes for their fascination run so deep that they appraised at about ten billion dollars.

I am firmly in the minority. While I have nothing against women with blonde hair and blue eyes, I am entirely unmoved by them, notwithstanding the cultural norm of favoring such women at every imaginable turn. My capacities for discernment do not skeet out of my brain when I see big blue eyes gazing at me.

My fascination with the story of Elizabeth Holmes is based on the fact that it exposes so much of what is amiss in American social, political, media, and financial circles. Each one played a critical role in this debacle.

The incredible story of the now-defunct medical technology start-up company Theranos has been back in the news lately. Miss Holmes will finally stand trial on charges that she defrauded investors during her short and dramatic rise through Silicon Valley circles to international fame and fortune. We should all pay close attention to the details of how this trial plays out.

The 10-billion-dollar fraud that was Theranos is the best microcosm of American culture since the O.J. Simpson trials. Both of these irresistible flashpoints in contemporary American life exposed design defects in our culture that we love to pretend are not there but far too often rise up and bite us in the ass because we have failed to deal with them.

In the curious case of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, the problem literally started with blood. Not the droplets of blood that she collected from the pricked fingertips of hundreds of thousands of people and pretended to test for diseases with her invention that looked like a sexy little black box. The problem was the blood that runs through her veins.