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"  Originally published in the February 2009 issue Jim Cramer was nine years old when he found God lurking in the stock tables in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, and he has talked in tongues ever since, riptides of words \u2014 on TV and radio, online and in print \u2014 thousands and thousands and thousands of words daily, foaming so fast that often all you hear is the roar as Wall Street glossolalia merges with a hustler&amp;#039;s logorrhea and swamps all sense.  As a lad, he kept a ledger book of stocks; now, at the age of fifty-three, he worships on his laptop. Constantly. &amp;quot;Two thousand stocks in my head,&amp;quot; he yips in the shout-over that kicks off Mad Money, his weekday CNBC show \u2014 and to see the sweat shining his rutted brow and his eyes popping, to hear the ragged flutter of his voice, you can imagine chain gangs of ticker symbols elbowing one another hard, fighting for room in the cell block of his noisy, naked skull.  Manifold are the aspects of Cramer. This is a man who starred at Harvard and Harvard Law, has worked for more than thirty years as a journalist, learned to sell at Goldman Sachs, and then left to start a hedge fund of his own. He cofounded TheStreet.com in 1996, began churning out books in 2002, and is now a franchise at CNBC, where he has a five-year deal to keep pumping away five days a week at Mad Money while popping up around the clock and dial, from Morning Joe and Today to Conan, Colbert, and Iron Man. Spewing dispatches like magma from disclosed locations in a land he has named the &amp;quot;sovereign state of Cramerica,&amp;quot; he dwells thick upon the air we breathe. He is the foghorn and the fog.  Which is why the best way \u2014 maybe the only way \u2014 to know Jim Cramer, to glean his human essence, is to mute the goddamned sound. Watching Mad Money silent is a revelation. In tie and dress shirt, sleeves rolled up, Cramer stalks, lupine, dancing a pas de deux with a Steadicam that nearly crawls up his flaring nostrils. He&amp;#039;ll turn his back all of a sudden and slink off, then, turning back full-faced \u2014 arms aflail, fists clenched, eyes white and wide, grinning a grin far more feral than friendly \u2014 he seems as though he might burst into flame or, like the pastor of some Tennessee snake-handling sect, reach down and snatch a copperhead.  More than a witness and a true believer: Shorn of his robe of din, lightning-crackling sky on the screen behind him, the prophet storms and stomps, revealed in all the fervor of his love. But his love object is not the Lord, nor money: Cramer craves the action, loves the juice \u2014 and like every salesman worth his salt, he&amp;#039;s shilling shares in Cramer first of all.  He&amp;#039;s shy. Or scared. Something&amp;#039;s off. There are ground rules: No questions about his domestic affairs, first of all. I don&amp;#039;t care; I&amp;#039;ve come seeking Isaiah or Ezekiel in a time of awful strife. Two weeks before, with the Dow still north of 10,000 and my son&amp;#039;s 529 worth more than we&amp;#039;d put in it, Cramer had shown up on Today the Monday morning after Congress passed the $700 billion bailout and warned us all to sell. In a dark gray undertaker&amp;#039;s suit, standing still on TV for the first time in living memory, Jim Cramer slowly said, &amp;quot;Whatever money you may need for the next five years, please take it out of the stock market right now, this week.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;I do not care where stocks have been,&amp;quot; he went on after Ann Curry asked him about swallowing big losses by selling out. &amp;quot;I care where they&amp;#039;re going. And I don&amp;#039;t want people to get hurt in this market.&amp;quot; And a few moments later, his eyes closed and his voice pleading, he said, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve thought about this all weekend. I did not want to say these things on TV.&amp;quot; And then, hushed and hesitant, he predicted a 20 percent decline.  The Dow sank nearly 400 points that very day, October 6. By week&amp;#039;s end, it had dropped 18 percent. Anyone heeding his advice \u2014 I didn&amp;#039;t, by the way \u2014 avoided a severe haircut. Some folks pointed at Cramer, historically bullish, as a cause of the stampede; others noted, rightly, that investors ought never \u2014 no matter the trend \u2014 buy stocks with money they might need over a five-year time horizon. But for all of that, it was no less a gorgeous call. Cramer nailed it, and even as Wall Street gurgled down the crapper, Mad Money&amp;#039;s ratings shot higher.  Oddly, though, folks close to Cramer at CNBC seem wary, worried. His executive producer and the public-relations VP both tell me, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m fiercely protective of Jim&amp;quot; \u2014 word for word \u2014 as if they speak of a bear cub or baby seal, not the fearless wampum warrior who, in the network&amp;#039;s own ad, ranks with Orwell as a truth-teller. The guy&amp;#039;s famous and wealthy, riding high: How much protection does he need? Don&amp;#039;t worry, I assure the executive producer. I&amp;#039;m a huge Cramer fan. Gospel truth. I swear. She flinches visibly, as though I&amp;#039;d just pulled out a pistol. &amp;quot;Please don&amp;#039;t say that,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;Every writer says that. And then they go ahead and rip him to shreds.&amp;quot; What&amp;#039;s left of Cramer is more or less intact. He&amp;#039;s sitting in his CNBC office, facing a couple of computer screens on his desk, drinking a cup of tea at 3:30 P.M., a half hour before taping his show. He&amp;#039;s round-shouldered and hollow-eyed \u2014 no surprise when you consider that he gets up at 4:00 A.M. to study the Asian markets. I take one chair, the PR VP sits in the other. The executive producer ducks in and out.  &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m nervous about the Series,&amp;quot; Cramer says. He means the World Series, which starts in a couple of days. The Phillies \u2014 still his hometown heroes, although he has made his home in suburban northern New Jersey for many years \u2014 are in it for the first time since 1993. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m nervous about the Series,&amp;quot; he says again. &amp;quot;Oh, my God.&amp;quot; I can see a row of bar charts on his laptop screen bouncing up and down. &amp;quot;Oil service companies,&amp;quot; he says, eyes darting. &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;re all going nuts.&amp;quot; You must be a quick study, I say. &amp;quot;Oh, I&amp;#039;m a freak of nature,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m just a freak. I&amp;#039;m just a freak.&amp;quot; Hmmm. Something, like I said, is off. Is off. I&amp;#039;ve seen Mad Money enough to know that Cramer often repeats himself, but I assumed it was a pacing device, a trick to slow himself down, not a ghost-in-the-machine tic. Echolalia. Glossolalia. What the hell?  &amp;quot;Look,&amp;quot; he says, pointing to a TV monitor I hadn&amp;#039;t noticed, fastened high on the wall behind me. &amp;quot;This is classic \u2014 see? We just jumped 100 points. Now, if you&amp;#039;re watching at home, you&amp;#039;re sitting there and you&amp;#039;re thinking, Who did that?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;d rather it jump up than down,&amp;quot; the PR VP says. &amp;quot;Yeah,&amp;quot; Cramer snaps. &amp;quot;But the problem is, if you can go up 200 in a minute, you can go down 200 in a minute.&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s what seems to be happening every day \u2014 huge swings up or down in the last few minutes just before the closing bell. So I ask Cramer if he can spot the reason for it. &amp;quot;None whatsoever \u2014 that&amp;#039;s where we&amp;#039;ve gotten. I was glad to see that the government&amp;#039;s going to investigate the last fifteen minutes of trading, because we sit here and we say, &amp;#039;The whole darn thing&amp;#039;s phony.&amp;#039; Fixed \u2014 that&amp;#039;s how it feels. I am beginning myself to believe that the fix is in, and it&amp;#039;s just not good for the sport.&amp;quot;  Maybe that&amp;#039;s what&amp;#039;s bugging Cramer: If the fix is in, if the playing field isn&amp;#039;t on the level and the game is rigged, then what&amp;#039;s he supposed to tell all the callers shouting &amp;quot;booyah&amp;quot; when they phone Mad Money to ask him about their favorite stock plays \u2014 not to bother? That all of it \u2014 the homework, the strategies, the books and columns and sea of words of broadcast wisdom \u2014 amounts now to nothing? &amp;quot;Every day I come in,&amp;quot; Cramer says, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve got to steel myself. I&amp;#039;ve got to steel myself.&amp;quot; The VP says, &amp;quot;As scary as it was for Lehman to go under....&amp;quot; &amp;quot;That was unbelievable,&amp;quot; Cramer hisses. &amp;quot;...it&amp;#039;s that much scarier for Goldman.&amp;quot; Suddenly, Cramer&amp;#039;s shouting: &amp;quot;Lehman was too big to fail \u2014 look what&amp;#039;s happened ever since. The tentacles of Lehman. How could you, if you were the New York Fed \u2014 which was Tim Geithner, the genius \u2014 how could you not know? How could you not know that they were involved in every aspect of world finance?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;People say Geithner&amp;#039;s going to be the next treasury secretary,&amp;quot; says the VP. &amp;quot;Oh, God,&amp;quot; Cramer moans. &amp;quot;I must stop that. TV host says, &amp;#039;Must not happen.&amp;#039; I think he&amp;#039;s just way over his head, okay? Way over his head. If he&amp;#039;s gonna be the treasury secretary, we&amp;#039;re in a big, big jam. &amp;quot;In the last few months, I said the fix was in. The fix was in. Save Goldman. Let Lehman go. It is so capricious how they made the decision to let Lehman go and then save Goldman three days later. How did they do that? How did they feel like they could get away with that? &amp;quot;I have a sneaking suspicion why they can: Because there&amp;#039;s this guy on TV \u2014 Cramer \u2014 and he says it, and he just gets pilloried. So don&amp;#039;t do it. Don&amp;#039;t do it \u2014 because you see what happens when Cramer goes out there. They take him apart.&amp;quot; Cramer sighs. &amp;quot;Look, I&amp;#039;m a TV guy. And it is just hysterical how much and how little power I have. I have a seventeen-year-old girl, and she&amp;#039;s playing field hockey at a pretty good level at Summit High. And she has a trainer \u2014 she plays on this club team that&amp;#039;s going to go to the national finals. My daughter said, &amp;#039;Please ask the athletic director whether he can be the trainer for the [high school] team.&amp;#039; So I call the AD, and he says, &amp;#039;He can be on the sideline, but you have to pay for him. You have to get the parents to pay.&amp;#039; I said I&amp;#039;d commit that the parents would pay. &amp;quot;So the coach from a rival high school team has been after me ever since. She has just attacked me, and the e-mails are horrible. She&amp;#039;s going to sue me. At one point I sent her an e-mail: &amp;#039;Look, I have to try to figure out whether I should go after Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson and Chris Cox or should I go after you. And you know what? I&amp;#039;m going after you, because those other guys I can&amp;#039;t do a thing about. I&amp;#039;m out there every night trying to save this thing, and I&amp;#039;m failing, and you&amp;#039;re attacking me and you know what? I am going to concentrate on you, because I cannot win the other stuff.&amp;#039; &amp;quot;  Wow. &amp;quot;And she comes back \u2014 she says, &amp;#039;Bring it on.&amp;#039; And I am completely embroiled in this thing, and I can&amp;#039;t even win there. She says, &amp;#039;Bring it on,&amp;#039; so now I&amp;#039;m scrambling. I&amp;#039;m getting a lawyer \u2014 she says I broke the law by asking this guy to be the trainer. The whole thing is just crazy. I can&amp;#039;t stop Coach Linda. So I&amp;#039;m a nothing. I&amp;#039;m nothing.&amp;quot;  Whoa. &amp;quot;I am in a schizophrenic world where I am allegedly powerful, and the reality is I cannot even stop some coach who&amp;#039;s trying to defeat my daughter&amp;#039;s team. I find myself in a bizarre vortex where I&amp;#039;m not that powerful anywhere, but there are people who think that I have a hold on things.&amp;quot; Huh. Cramer cackles. The VP unfreezes: &amp;quot;Let me take Scott away,&amp;quot; he says, adding, &amp;quot;just because I know you need to prepare a little bit.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Yeah,&amp;quot; says Cramer. &amp;quot;I got to finish writing this. Now I got an up-300 day. I got to juice it again. Oh, God.&amp;quot;  Cramer is clearly a man of exquisite sensitivity, not to say paranoia, yet he&amp;#039;s not delusional. Not even close. He has a toothache, for one thing, and that can be enough to throw anyone off his game. I know he has a toothache because he tells me so as he dashes out of the studio right after taping Mad Money and into the BMW 760 where his driver awaits. As for being pilloried, Cramer&amp;#039;s no stranger to suffering humiliation in the town square. The Fox Business Network has been running a thirty-second ad \u2014 it&amp;#039;s even bought time for it on CNBC \u2014 featuring Cramer&amp;#039;s face, haggard and openmouthed, black and white and so huge that most of it won&amp;#039;t fit the frame. &amp;quot;The last thing you need is bad advice,&amp;quot; says an off-screen voice. &amp;quot;The last thing you need is CNBC&amp;#039;s Jim Cramer.&amp;quot; The Fox ad campaign has done nothing to blunt Cramer&amp;#039;s numbers or help FBN&amp;#039;s, but it has torn the scab off an old wound: Cramer used to work for Roger Ailes, Fox&amp;#039;s chairman and right-wing wizard since the days of Richard Nixon \u2014 &amp;quot;A great teacher,&amp;quot; Cramer says now. &amp;quot;But he made the mistake of teaching me&amp;quot; \u2014 and their working relationship ended with Ailes filing a lawsuit against Cramer, long since settled. But it&amp;#039;s hard to tell which enrages Cramer more: being blamed in the Fox ad for the stock-market plunge (&amp;quot;When things got rough, Cramer said, &amp;#039;Dump your stocks and hide your money&amp;#039; &amp;quot;) or being ignored as a factor in it. &amp;quot;I go on the Today show and I say this thing, and everybody says I&amp;#039;m the guy. So I go back and I look at what Bloomberg said, the Associated Press said, USA Today said, Wall Street Journal, The New York Times \u2014 I&amp;#039;m never mentioned as having any impact. Nothing. Not one news organization attributed that decline to me. Except for Fox. Except for Fox.&amp;quot; The internal contradiction in this \u2014 that &amp;quot;everybody&amp;quot; blamed Cramer, but no major business-news organization even dropped his name \u2014 matters less than his frustration. Because Cramer, like Isaiah, saw it coming, all of it \u2014 flood, fire, famine, and pestilence \u2014 from a long way off. In truth, his Today call was small potatoes next to his visionary howl of August 3, 2007, back in that golden age when the Dow sat at 13,000 plus and a tarp was what kept the rain off.  I was watching that day \u2014 not Mad Money but another CNBC show, an afternoon affair hosted by a bedimpled young brunette, Erin Burnett, who, like Cramer, once worked at Goldman Sachs and who, unlike him, is both serene and easy on the eyes. With her, Cramer is nearly always on his best behavior, and this time out begins no differently. She asks him about Bear Stearns, whose CFO has just gone public about its bond-market woes. Cramer advises Bear to suck it up, stop whining, and buy back a chunk of its own shares to bolster its stock price. But as Burnett tries to get a word in, Cramer grows agitated. &amp;quot;This is about Bernanke,&amp;quot; Cramer snarls, then repeats the phrase, and, voice rising and arms waving, he proceeds to lay bare the truth about the millstone of mortgage-debt securities that would pulverize not just Bear Stearns but the planet. &amp;quot;He has no idea how bad it is out there \u2014 he has no idea!&amp;quot; Cramer isn&amp;#039;t hollering now; he&amp;#039;s screaming. And, hands on his hips, he bends forward and screams it again. &amp;quot;Cramer,&amp;quot; says Burnett, sounding stern and a little scared. But it&amp;#039;s too late. Cramer&amp;#039;s just getting started. &amp;quot;I have talked to the heads of almost every single one of these firms,&amp;quot; Cramer shouts, slamming the Plexiglas counter in front of him. &amp;quot;My people have been in this game for twenty-five years, and they&amp;#039;re losing their jobs, and these firms are going to go out of business, and he&amp;#039;s nuts. They&amp;#039;re nuts! They know nothing!&amp;quot; Then, as Burnett tries to move on \u2014 not to defend Bernanke but to parse a point about the possible dangers of lowering the Fed&amp;#039;s discount rate \u2014 she utters the word Armageddon. This, finally, quiets Cramer, which only serves to make what he has to say next more disquieting. &amp;quot;We have Armageddon. In the fixed-income markets, we have Armageddon. We have Armageddon.&amp;quot; Not merely prophecy, it was also the most riveting bit of live television since Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald, in large part because I wasn&amp;#039;t sure Jim Cramer&amp;#039;s head wouldn&amp;#039;t explode. Neither, it turns out, was Erin Burnett. &amp;quot;Honestly,&amp;quot; Burnett tells me, &amp;quot;I was worried about Jim. Because Jim is manic. Jim talks about that. Sometimes you think, Omigosh, did he just not get to sleep last night? So I was worried. What I&amp;#039;m thinking is, Okay, thank God we don&amp;#039;t have hard blocks, meaning I can toss to commercial whenever I need to. I can hold it long enough for viewers to not know that I did that to protect Jim.&amp;quot; Protect him?  &amp;quot;If he was going to have a fainting attack or something, I would protect Jim to make sure he didn&amp;#039;t embarrass himself on television. I&amp;#039;m protective of Jim.&amp;quot; As the next couple of weeks go by \u2014 as the market continues gyrating wildly on its way down and down and down, and as the men nominally in charge of keeping the economy on this side of doomsday look ever more inept, and as the Phillies win the World Series and America puts Barack Obama into the White House \u2014 I&amp;#039;m watching Mad Money and waiting for Jim Cramer to unprotect himself.  The PR VP says maybe I can see him for breakfast in the city \u2014 Cramer&amp;#039;s chauffeur carts him down to Wall Street early each morning to TheStreet.com after his daily session with his fitness trainer \u2014 but breakfast never comes to pass. No breakfast. No lunch. No dinner. How about this, I ask the VP: Jim and I watch Wall Street on DVD \u2014 we can do it here, in your office, with you protecting him \u2014 and Jim annotates it for me with tales of his time as a balls-out hedge-fund honcho. &amp;quot;But if you&amp;#039;re watching the movie,&amp;quot; the VP asks, &amp;quot;how will you be able to interview him?&amp;quot; What I&amp;#039;ll do, I tell him, is I&amp;#039;ll pause the DVD. Then, once I&amp;#039;ve paused it, Jim and I can talk.  &amp;quot;Doing that,&amp;quot; the VP says, &amp;quot;that&amp;#039;s not Jim. Just lay back \u2014 keep coming around to watch him tape the show.&amp;quot;  Once or twice a week, I drive to CNBC to watch him tape the show. On October 30, he eats cat food on-air and \u2014 after the segment ends \u2014 almost vomits. On November 5, he scarfs a piece of Kentucky Fried Chicken with no ill effect \u2014 except that the market loses another 500 points.  &amp;quot;The recession&amp;#039;s beginning right now,&amp;quot; he tells an assistant producer that day off-camera.  It&amp;#039;s yet another prescient call: Within a week, the Dow has tanked a further 900 points. And Cramer has taken to waving a copy of John Kenneth Galbraith&amp;#039;s The Great Crash, 1929 at the camera. Even as he&amp;#039;s still talking stocks, he&amp;#039;s warning of what he&amp;#039;s calling the &amp;quot;second Great Depression scenario&amp;quot; if the housing market doesn&amp;#039;t bottom and if unemployment rises above 10 percent.  So I buy and read the Galbraith book and almost wish I hadn&amp;#039;t. It&amp;#039;s all in there \u2014 every freaking thing that&amp;#039;s going on right in front of my eyes, from the death plunge of overleveraged brokerage juggernauts to the assurances by the leaders of government and business that we&amp;#039;ve turned the corner and aren&amp;#039;t really speeding our way to the poorhouse. The final paragraph \u2014 first published in 1955 \u2014 about how ignorance, self-interest, and complacency may someday, as in those years of fiscal carnage, enable a new group of free-market purists &amp;quot;who know that things are going quite wrong to say that things are fundamentally sound,&amp;quot; spooks me bad enough that I start to stockpile daily ATM withdrawals from our credit-union savings account just in case.  Worse: Bambi&amp;#039;s not opening up. Oh, he&amp;#039;ll stop on his way out the door and nuzzle the lump of sugar in my hand, but when he sees the pulsing red light on my tape recorder, he turns tail. I go home and watch the Mad Money rerun at 11:00 P.M. and see the Cramer ad with the Orwell line \u2014 &amp;quot;In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act&amp;quot; \u2014 and it dawns on me that maybe my guy isn&amp;#039;t Orwell or Isaiah, after all. Maybe he&amp;#039;s just Judy Garland on the skids, Garbo with a goatee. No juice. No action. Nothing.  &amp;quot;Come to Iowa City,&amp;quot; the VP says. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re doing Mad Money there next Wednesday. Jim&amp;#039;ll be more relaxed there. He loves doing the show at colleges. It&amp;#039;ll be great.&amp;quot; Not until I plow through hundreds of pages of old Jim Cramer profiles do I grasp the truth about why protecting him is a cottage industry, the precise name and nature of his enemy, the threat to all his well-being and success: Jim Cramer. It should&amp;#039;ve been plain from the get-go. The young Jim Cramer I&amp;#039;m reading about, the guy who went from running The Harvard Crimson to covering crime for the Tallahassee Democrat and the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, who taught himself how to handicap the horses and handle his whiskey and hustle his Harvard connections \u2014 that guy, that Cramer, would&amp;#039;ve seen clean through this Cramer from the start.  In fact, he always has. By all accounts, Cramer is four parts mensch \u2014 devoted father, loyal friend, tireless worker, solid citizen. And then? And then there&amp;#039;s the other Cramer \u2014 the fury-driven fascist who found public humiliation of his hedge-fund underlings a useful management tool. The young punk who gambled himself into desperate debt. A loud, abrasive know-it-all and serial feuder who couldn&amp;#039;t figure out why so many people hated him. An oafish braggart teetering on the razor wire between journalism and Wall Street who managed to make a lot of money and noise and also to get himself in public trouble over and over and over and always, always, always because the guilt-riddled and angst-filled mensch of a Cramer won&amp;#039;t \u2014 can&amp;#039;t \u2014 stop endlessly confessing his sins.  Until now.  Funny thing, though: His sins aren&amp;#039;t all that sinful or even interesting. He didn&amp;#039;t destroy pensions or put people on the street; he made his investors and employees rich. He repaid all his debts. Whatever his failings as a family man, he takes his daddy with him to watch the Phillies and the Eagles play, and he&amp;#039;s dedicated to the point of obsession to making sure his field-hockey daughter and her high school team enjoy an edge over their rivals. He patched up all his spats. And when he has toppled off the razor wire and found himself accused of \u2014 and investigated for \u2014 violations of securities laws and codes of professional ethics, each time he has been deemed innocent of any such behavior.  And all of this \u2014 and much, much more, right down to the name of his antidepressant \u2014 has been thoroughly reported and documented, thanks to one man: Cramer. Because the only subject more fascinating to Jim Cramer than the stock market is, naturally, Jim Cramer.  The main lounge  of the Iowa Memorial Union is packed so full that when the Mad Money crew tries to bring in some of the overflow crowd \u2014 dozens of sad sacks in a nearby room watching a TV monitor \u2014 the IMU manager orders them back out again. And even as the city-britches CNBCers protest \u2014 heaven forbid an empty span of bleachers finds its way into a TV shot \u2014 the overflows dutifully shuffle off, back to their exile, still smiling. Ah, Iowa. Folks hereabouts play strictly by the rules \u2014 except, of course, for the athletic department. I know this because I used to live here. And work here. For seven years \u2014 seven years that felt like seven hundred. This lounge, with eleven hundred full-throated Cramericans roaring, jumping to their feet on cue, pumping their black-and-gold pom-poms, glowing with love, pride, joy, and sheer relief that somebody has come, even for one day, to relieve the soulless boredom of living in Iowa City \u2014 here, twenty-odd years ago, I sat and wept, in this very room, as Elie Wiesel, death-camp survivor and Nobel laureate, spoke of literature and hope.  That was a much quieter crowd. I can&amp;#039;t hear a goddamned word today. Which is okay: I&amp;#039;ll watch it later, at the hotel. I can see Cramer fine, though. He&amp;#039;s having a ball. He&amp;#039;s on fire. The taping runs for more than three hours, and CNBC has hired a stand-up comic to warm up the crowd and give Jim a breather between segments, but Cramer comes out to warm up for the warm-up comic, and he&amp;#039;s so amped by the fans that he never takes a break, so the comic spends three hours hanging in the wings holding a dead mic while Cramer basks in the people&amp;#039;s love. His grin never fades. But the truly amazing thing is that this marathon lounge act is actually Cramer&amp;#039;s second show of the day. He did a solid hour for a business-school class earlier in the day. And it wasn&amp;#039;t Cramer lite, either, although there were no pom-poms; it was Cramer preaching to the devout, including an acolyte who had shaved his head and grown a goatee and rolled up his dress-shirt sleeves, all in homage to the master. He even gave Cramer a black-and-gold tie to don for the Mad Money taping later. During the class, Cramer&amp;#039;s asked twice about his sell call on Today. The second time he says, &amp;quot;Let me tell you how that came about,&amp;quot; and he talks about riding to Philly on the day before to watch the Eagles play in a limo with some friends, guys whose daughters play field hockey with his daughter. &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;re either retired and manage their own investments,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;or run major firms \u2014 seasoned players. We&amp;#039;ve all been around for years. We have made and lost fortunes in the market and hopefully made them back. And each one said to me, &amp;#039;Why are you so complacent? Why aren&amp;#039;t you telling it the way you know it to be?&amp;#039; &amp;quot; When Cramer pauses, it&amp;#039;s so quiet, you can hear the corn growing between here and Ottumwa. Not all these kids are from small-town Iowa \u2014 the UI has long had a soft spot for underachieving Chicagoland suburbanites whose parents are happy to fork over the out-of-state tuition \u2014 but this is something special. You can feel them feeling it. Cramer, too. He&amp;#039;s not clowning, not banging on his Mad Money soundboard or leering into the Steadicam. They&amp;#039;re not hungry for entertainment; they&amp;#039;re starved for wisdom.  &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re parents of kids of similar ages,&amp;quot; Cramer says. &amp;quot;And they all had 529 plans and Uniform Gifts to Minors, and they were all taking it out. And I&amp;#039;m taking it out. I&amp;#039;m not risking it anymore, because I have a daughter who&amp;#039;s seventeen and is going to college that I need that money to pay for. And what was I doing? I&amp;#039;m taking it out of the Fidelity Blue Chip and Contrafund, and I would just be another talking-head charlatan if I told people everything was fine, just let it ride, and don&amp;#039;t worry, when I&amp;#039;m calling Roger from Fidelity. &amp;quot;I think that everybody who&amp;#039;s publicly speaking about the market has to measure their fraudulence. I have the luxury of telling the truth, and I&amp;#039;m going to use that luxury even if it hurts my ratings, even if it hurts my standing, because in the end I&amp;#039;m the guy who took the money out to pay for Cece Cramer&amp;#039;s college tuition. I did not want to be the one who, when they write the Great Crash book for this period, was telling people that the fundamentals are sound and stay the course, when I was frantically pulling money out for my daughter. &amp;quot;Believe me, I have thought about this endlessly since I made the call. It became that I had yelled &amp;#039;fire&amp;#039; in a crowded theater \u2014 but what if there is a fire? What if I know there&amp;#039;s a fire, and there&amp;#039;s a lot of people in the theater? Don&amp;#039;t you want to try to get a lot of them out before they burn to death? And I have been reviled for that \u2014 and that tells me I&amp;#039;m right.&amp;quot;  Isaiah never won a popularity contest, which is par for the course if your gig includes mouthing lines like, &amp;quot;The land will be completely laid waste and totally plundered.&amp;quot; Something about doom and denunciations just rubs people wrong. And the Hebrew prophets never had to do TV, either, much less suffer opprobrium via e-mail. But it&amp;#039;s all good tonight, because Jim Cramer&amp;#039;s on such a high after knocking them dead in the main lounge that he has granted me an audience \u2014 just me, the PR VP, and the Mad Money executive producer \u2014 at the hotel bar.  Oh, plus a friend of Cramer&amp;#039;s \u2014 Johnnie Walker. And I&amp;#039;ll tell you what: Pour some whiskey into an exhausted Jim Cramer and he&amp;#039;s a farking delight. Not easy to follow, mind you, but no less a delight for that. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m not clairvoyant. Nobody&amp;#039;s clairvoyant. But the odds favored what I said&amp;quot; \u2014 I think he&amp;#039;s talking about his rant in August 2007 or maybe Lehman Brothers having the DNR tag hung on its toe \u2014 &amp;quot;and all of the people in the thick of things knew it. All of &amp;#039;em. So it&amp;#039;s amazing that Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke really didn&amp;#039;t know at all. They really didn&amp;#039;t know at all. Just this incredible combustible combination of ideology and idiocy layered over no homework has made it so that the country&amp;#039;s on the brink. &amp;quot;I knew the guy who led the conference call at Bear. He had given me a tremendous briefing on the CDO market, and it was either 100 percent lies, or he was an idiot. And I went in to see Fuld&amp;quot; \u2014 that&amp;#039;d be Dick Fuld, Lehman&amp;#039;s CEO \u2014 &amp;quot;and his briefing was either 100 percent lies, or he was an idiot. There&amp;#039;s no middle ground, no maybe he was just mistaken. No. He&amp;#039;s either just brain-dead, or he was just lying to me.&amp;quot; Hard to believe these guys are idiots, I say. &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;re not idiots. They lied.&amp;quot; Wow. &amp;quot;Remember \u2014 I have no subpoena power. I can&amp;#039;t indict. There&amp;#039;s no Cramer grand jury. But there is Mad Money.&amp;quot; You see yourself as a crusader? &amp;quot;Not at all. I think of myself as an entertainer who has sharp points of view.&amp;quot; So if I called you a clown act, that&amp;#039;d be fine by you? &amp;quot;Well, I have some pride. I don&amp;#039;t say that I&amp;#039;m an entertainer to denigrate myself. I think it&amp;#039;s a higher calling to be an entertainer about business than to be a journalist-columnist about business because I&amp;#039;m making it come alive. You gotta put everything in, and if it comes into your head, you say it. I feel like a lot of what we do on the show would seemingly be, in a rigorous world, gratuitous. Except for the fact that it&amp;#039;s irrepressibly gratuitous. I would love to be able to slaughter that pearl, but my mind, obviously it races. I&amp;#039;ve tried my best to slow it down, but it races.&amp;quot; You can hear him on the tape getting tipsy and talking about his favorite Harvard classes \u2014 art history and a Shakespeare course \u2014 and you can hear the PR VP urging him to go, to join the rest of the Mad Money bunch at their wrap-up party, but Cramer&amp;#039;s not going nowhere, not yet. He wants to finish this drink, for one thing, and he&amp;#039;s also on a roll about the art class, Fine Arts 173, and about C\u00E9zanne, Matisse, and Frank Stella. &amp;quot;These guys disdained the medium,&amp;quot; he says, rapping the table. &amp;quot;They had open contempt for the medium. And it&amp;#039;s like Cramer disdains the medium.&amp;quot; Here his knuckles rap the table; you can hear the ice rattle in his glass.  &amp;quot;I want to be in that pantheon. I keep thinking, God, I can disdain the medium, because those guys did, and they were great men. They were great men.&amp;quot; And lunatics. &amp;quot;Totally. But they really got it, and I think about them and I think about that class a lot. How do you go beyond the four walls? Picasso was plagued by the four walls, but then how do you have the hubris to even think you should be in the room with Picasso and Matisse? No! No \u2014 because those are great men. But you want to aspire to it \u2014 so rather than be constrained by the four walls of TV, why not try to be like these heroes, even if it&amp;#039;s hubris to try. Why not try?&amp;quot; He finishes his last drink. &amp;quot;And I&amp;#039;m tryin&amp;#039; it. And I try it every night. I try it every night. But in the end, remember, I am a deeply flawed guy who comes out every night to try to do a show \u2014 and obviously completely tortured.&amp;quot;  Then Cramer does what no prophet should ever do. He starts giggling.  &amp;quot;Completely tortured.&amp;quot;  Jim Cramer couldn&amp;#039;t stop Obama from appointing Tim Geithner to head the Treasury Department, but that hasn&amp;#039;t kept him from campaigning on Mad Money to run the Fed. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m obviously not the guy they would want,&amp;quot; he admits. &amp;quot;But I think I could do a better job. A guy like me \u2014 I&amp;#039;m an entertainer \u2014 is not someone you would listen to if you&amp;#039;re in power. But I was right. And it&amp;#039;s too late.&amp;quot; We&amp;#039;re in his CNBC office; he&amp;#039;s scarfing a salad from the commissary. This is the last time I&amp;#039;m going to see Cramer \u2014 or the PR VP, who&amp;#039;s at his usual guard post next to the desk \u2014 and I thank him. Not for being right \u2014 any monkey tossing darts at the stock tables can hit .500 \u2014 but for being willing to be wrong. For not finessing, and for not ducking.  &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m just goddamn out there, man,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I am just all out there.&amp;quot; Well, there&amp;#039;s something heroic about that, I tell him. &amp;quot;What I learned is, I&amp;#039;m never telling the damn truth again. I&amp;#039;m out of that game. I&amp;#039;m out of the truth game. It&amp;#039;s just too painful.&amp;quot; Poor baby. There&amp;#039;s plenty crowding Jim Cramer&amp;#039;s brain besides those two thousand stocks, which just might be why he keeps all the sound and drama turned up so loud in there. And while it&amp;#039;s hard to tell which matters more to him, truth or simply getting folks to pay attention, in the end, it makes no difference. In a few minutes he&amp;#039;ll be back in front of a camera \u2014 preaching to Cramerica, arms pumping, sweat pouring, and all that noise zooming out of his mouth \u2014 back out there in the one and only place Jim Cramer feels safe. RELATED STORIES: KEN KURSON: Why I&amp;#039;m Happy the Stock Market Crashed RICHARD MEDLEY: The End of America&amp;#039;s Capitalist Fantasy and the Shape of Banks to Come SECRETS OF THE RICH: Wisdom from Successful Men "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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