[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Those Barbar-ians storming the gates of RJR Nabisco are not a threat to West-ern civilization as once the Adamses and Godkin perceived Van-derbilt and Gould and Russell Sage to be.Rather they menaceonly Wall Street s old guard, engaging in a battle between titanswhose moral significance is something less than titanic.And the Vanities Tom Wolfe skewers belong to masters of the uni-verse so fragile and unprepossessing as to call into question theirmastery of anything.It is difficult to see them as a serious moralthreat to anyone but themselves, even harder to imagine themwith Morgan s scary preternatural eyes looming up from somenonhuman abyss.To perceive eyes in that way, the observer needs to feel him- orherself in the presence of the uncanny, to live with the fear ofGod and the Devil, even if those deities have been stripped oftheir supernatural attributes.When earlier generations of scan-170 The Immoralistdalized writers, hellfire preachers, and outraged tribunes of popu-lar wrath peered into Wall Street and saw a whole bestiary ofmoral depravity, their eyesight underwent a kind of cultural mag-nification.These hedonists, idlers, parasites, and thieves appearednot only fascinating in their own right but players in a moreglobal moral melodrama.Beginning long ago and continuing through the New Deal,various forms of political opposition Jeffersonian and thenJacksonian democracy, populism, Progressive-era reform, social-ism, the antitrust movement, labor uprisings, the New Dealitself lent a gravitas to this cultural persuasion and its moralconfrontation with the Street.The withering away of these po-litical insurgencies in the more recent past helps account for theweightlessness of the liars and thieves and masters of the uni-verse of our own era.They survive as remnants, if that.After FDR the moral animus directed at Wall Street subsided.For several decades the Street receded and then virtually van-ished as a target of ethical anxiety.In one sense the disappearanceof the Street for a long generation marked the collective triumphof those earlier cultural indictments and political insurgencies.Arguably they died nobly and of natural causes, having managedto curtail and inhibit Wall Street s worst breaches of public andprivate morality (not to mention the Street s political and eco-nomic wrongdoings).But the wheel continued to turn.WhenKevin Phillips published The Politics of Rich and Poor in 1990 it171 The Immoralistcaused a stir.Here a Republican apostate, famous for his strate-gic discovery of Nixon s silent majority, denounced the Reaganrevolution as the triumph of upper class America. His cata-logue of its sins would have been familiar to any late-nineteenth-century populist.Indeed, Phillips thought he sensed a risingmovement against the oligarchy that would echo the thunder-ous anathemas of Bryan and other jeremiahs who proceeded andfollowed him.Phillips was convinced the 1990s would go downas a watershed decade. 27It was not to be.The new era of the dot.com worshiped atthe shrine of shareholder value. Wall Street, once everybody sfavorite immoralist, emerged instead as the paragon of economicvirtue a miraculous transformation if ever there was one.Evenafter the free-fall of the stock market and the cascade of financialscandals beginning with Enron, the temperature of public indig-nation remained low, hardly registering in the congressionalelections of 2002.On the one hand, it is probably true that theBush administration s failed attempt to privatize Social Securitydid indeed suffer as a result.A residual distrust of the Street andits moral imperfections remains and probably always will.None-theless, Wall Street the immoralist does not haunt the publicimagination as for generations it once did.Some way of dealing with Wall Street in our midst, an encom-passing moral temperament once deeply ingrained in Americanculture has grown frail and sickly.Why? Not because an interna-172 The Immoralisttional conspiracy ate away at the country s moral innards.HenryFord had it wrong, malignantly wrong.But the ethos of play andconsumerism he found so repugnant in the 1920s no doubt hasexercised in the decades since a sedative effect on the spiritualvigilance that once stigmatized the Street.For the moment atleast, Wall Street has escaped the gulag.173 Image not available EpilogueWall Street has been around for two centuries.(The street itselfgoes back to the founding days of Dutch colonial New York inthe early 1600s, when it included a wooden wall to ward off theBritish, but the financial center began in the era of the AmericanRevolution.) For most of those two hundred years there has beena great distance separating the Street from the American people.That gulf was political, social, and cultural all at once.The ap-paritions that attached themselves to Wall Street vividly cap-tured this sense that the Street was the habitat of the abnormal.Certainly the aristocrat, the confidence man, and the immoralistwere considered foreign matter, not native to the healthy Ameri-can organism and dangerous to its survival.Even the hero, how-ever much he was admired and endowed with a familial likeness175 Epilogueto the pathfinder, frontiersman, and cowboy, was still a rare fig-ure, towering over the mass of men like a Napoleon.During the past half century, and especially during the age ofRonald Reagan, that sense of estrangement has diminished.Wecan today talk about the democratization of Wall Street both as areality and as a set of shared expectations in ways our ancestorswould have found dubious.Can we add the image of Everymanto the gallery of Wall Street icons without seeming ludicrous?For some people, ordinary citizens, the answer to that ques-tion has always been an unproblematic yes [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
zanotowane.pl doc.pisz.pl pdf.pisz.pl matkasanepid.xlx.pl
.Those Barbar-ians storming the gates of RJR Nabisco are not a threat to West-ern civilization as once the Adamses and Godkin perceived Van-derbilt and Gould and Russell Sage to be.Rather they menaceonly Wall Street s old guard, engaging in a battle between titanswhose moral significance is something less than titanic.And the Vanities Tom Wolfe skewers belong to masters of the uni-verse so fragile and unprepossessing as to call into question theirmastery of anything.It is difficult to see them as a serious moralthreat to anyone but themselves, even harder to imagine themwith Morgan s scary preternatural eyes looming up from somenonhuman abyss.To perceive eyes in that way, the observer needs to feel him- orherself in the presence of the uncanny, to live with the fear ofGod and the Devil, even if those deities have been stripped oftheir supernatural attributes.When earlier generations of scan-170 The Immoralistdalized writers, hellfire preachers, and outraged tribunes of popu-lar wrath peered into Wall Street and saw a whole bestiary ofmoral depravity, their eyesight underwent a kind of cultural mag-nification.These hedonists, idlers, parasites, and thieves appearednot only fascinating in their own right but players in a moreglobal moral melodrama.Beginning long ago and continuing through the New Deal,various forms of political opposition Jeffersonian and thenJacksonian democracy, populism, Progressive-era reform, social-ism, the antitrust movement, labor uprisings, the New Dealitself lent a gravitas to this cultural persuasion and its moralconfrontation with the Street.The withering away of these po-litical insurgencies in the more recent past helps account for theweightlessness of the liars and thieves and masters of the uni-verse of our own era.They survive as remnants, if that.After FDR the moral animus directed at Wall Street subsided.For several decades the Street receded and then virtually van-ished as a target of ethical anxiety.In one sense the disappearanceof the Street for a long generation marked the collective triumphof those earlier cultural indictments and political insurgencies.Arguably they died nobly and of natural causes, having managedto curtail and inhibit Wall Street s worst breaches of public andprivate morality (not to mention the Street s political and eco-nomic wrongdoings).But the wheel continued to turn.WhenKevin Phillips published The Politics of Rich and Poor in 1990 it171 The Immoralistcaused a stir.Here a Republican apostate, famous for his strate-gic discovery of Nixon s silent majority, denounced the Reaganrevolution as the triumph of upper class America. His cata-logue of its sins would have been familiar to any late-nineteenth-century populist.Indeed, Phillips thought he sensed a risingmovement against the oligarchy that would echo the thunder-ous anathemas of Bryan and other jeremiahs who proceeded andfollowed him.Phillips was convinced the 1990s would go downas a watershed decade. 27It was not to be.The new era of the dot.com worshiped atthe shrine of shareholder value. Wall Street, once everybody sfavorite immoralist, emerged instead as the paragon of economicvirtue a miraculous transformation if ever there was one.Evenafter the free-fall of the stock market and the cascade of financialscandals beginning with Enron, the temperature of public indig-nation remained low, hardly registering in the congressionalelections of 2002.On the one hand, it is probably true that theBush administration s failed attempt to privatize Social Securitydid indeed suffer as a result.A residual distrust of the Street andits moral imperfections remains and probably always will.None-theless, Wall Street the immoralist does not haunt the publicimagination as for generations it once did.Some way of dealing with Wall Street in our midst, an encom-passing moral temperament once deeply ingrained in Americanculture has grown frail and sickly.Why? Not because an interna-172 The Immoralisttional conspiracy ate away at the country s moral innards.HenryFord had it wrong, malignantly wrong.But the ethos of play andconsumerism he found so repugnant in the 1920s no doubt hasexercised in the decades since a sedative effect on the spiritualvigilance that once stigmatized the Street.For the moment atleast, Wall Street has escaped the gulag.173 Image not available EpilogueWall Street has been around for two centuries.(The street itselfgoes back to the founding days of Dutch colonial New York inthe early 1600s, when it included a wooden wall to ward off theBritish, but the financial center began in the era of the AmericanRevolution.) For most of those two hundred years there has beena great distance separating the Street from the American people.That gulf was political, social, and cultural all at once.The ap-paritions that attached themselves to Wall Street vividly cap-tured this sense that the Street was the habitat of the abnormal.Certainly the aristocrat, the confidence man, and the immoralistwere considered foreign matter, not native to the healthy Ameri-can organism and dangerous to its survival.Even the hero, how-ever much he was admired and endowed with a familial likeness175 Epilogueto the pathfinder, frontiersman, and cowboy, was still a rare fig-ure, towering over the mass of men like a Napoleon.During the past half century, and especially during the age ofRonald Reagan, that sense of estrangement has diminished.Wecan today talk about the democratization of Wall Street both as areality and as a set of shared expectations in ways our ancestorswould have found dubious.Can we add the image of Everymanto the gallery of Wall Street icons without seeming ludicrous?For some people, ordinary citizens, the answer to that ques-tion has always been an unproblematic yes [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]