A Brume of One's OwnBy Bruce Barry
In the waning weeks of M1K, at the dawn of a new year before the millennium [but everyone’s pretending it’s the new millennium for some reason I can’t quite fathom], one’s holiday brume is penetrated by the near simultaneous appearance of three news items that have nothing (or perhaps everything) to do with one another:
• Dateline Wall Street – A front page New York Times story charts this heartwarming trend: Young practitioners of the arts of high finance and investment banking are uneasy that it will take them a good bit longer to become fabulously wealthy than the Internet entrepreneurs whose work they finance. "Banking has become prosaic," the story reads, "with the heavy demands no longer producing unrivaled rewards." A fellow named Thomas Case, who gave up a senior position at Merrill Lynch for an Internet startup, offered up the deeply altruistic view that "on Wall Street, you are not going to be so rich that your children and grandchildren would never have to work again." I’m not sure which is the more astonishing thing here: that he would frame his life with such rapacity, or that he would say so to a national newspaper for attribution.
• Dateline Des Moines – In a minimalist test of intellect and introspection, the passel of loons who make up the GOP field for president is collectively stumped when asked to identify an influential political philosopher. George W. offers up Jesus Christ – a reasonable object of ecclesiastical esteem, I suppose, but hardly an answer to the question. Pressed to explain, W. can do little more than suggest that if you have to ask then you probably wouldn’t get it anyway. At least as smarmy as this preview of the Bush-Christ ticket was the ensuing verbal stampede by other candidates to declare their own commitment to J.C. as a running mate. Perhaps the questioner should have told them he doesn’t care who was influenced by whom; can any of you just name a philosopher, any philosopher? Just one?
• Dateline Nashville – Mayor Bill Purcell’s Finance Director and Prime Budget Dude David Manning surprises virtually no one when he breaks the news to Metro Council that the city’s fiscal picture is near-term grim. The legacy of Phil Bredesen is hurled (spewed?) back on the front pages – an arena, a stadium, a cash-burning thermal plant, a deficit. In the year seven of robust national economic expansion, experienced locally as high growth and low unemployment, the city’s own financial house has cracks in its foundation. Purcell and Manning couch the bad news in euphemisms like "overhang" and "shortfall" and "unfunded priorities," but the truth for all to see is a reduction in city services, stagnant wages for underpaid Metro employees, and a pessimistic outlook for all the great metropolitan initiatives the Wizard of Phil assured us we could tackle if we could just first bring him the broom of the wicked witch of Houston. This just in: Bredesen continues to insist that his corporate welfare approach to urban prosperity – debunked by most economists and stiffly challenged by recent events – merits no qualms.
The first of these three stories is a tale of greed, the second a celebration of ignorance, and the third a case study in denial. But greed, ignorance, and denial are more than just labels for these stories individually; they are the ties that bind them together – indeed, the sober watchwords of American politics and economics at the threshold of Y2K.
Wall Street bankers who ponder their own prodigious wealth by judging it harshly in relation to others’ greater grotesquerie of riches are truly a study in greed for its own sake. With it comes a blissfully blind eye to how the unabashed pursuit of financial self worth undermines one’s surrounding community. It’s leftish old hat to conjure images of tycoons riding limos through ghettos en route from leafy mansions to gleaming office towers. But if the image is shopworn, the sociological reality that lies beneath is undiminished. At the turn of the century (for millennial purists, a year in advance of the turn), macroeconomic prosperity and real-life economic inequality are both at all-time highs. This tragic contradiction will fascinate the next century’s economic historians far more than it seems to concern today’s economic elite.
The public display of ignorance carried off so elegantly by the candidate Bush and his fellow podium grabbers is a natural product of the high regard accorded to public displays of wealth. Bush and company may have thought they were tapping into the soul of Iowa by playing what columnists far cleverer than I have called The Jesus Card, but let’s face it – the national religion is capitalism, not Christianity. A political system that is fundamentally bought and paid for looks for passive stewardship from the George W.s and Al Gores of the world, not leadership. And so the system dwells on whether W. was strategically adept at fronting his shallowness, avoiding entirely the issue of whether dim bulbs should direct the affairs of state in the first place.
Self-absorbed greed in the markets and self-righteous bilge in politics are the building blocks of fiscal malpractice here in Nashville. The city’s troubled budget follows directly from political and business leaders’ unshakable faith in subsidized private sector investment as local government’s primary responsibility – at any cost. Solid evidence that such investments rarely pay off is dismissed without scrutiny. It is an overstatement to call the city’s financial circumstance dire, but reckless to think it trivial or cyclical or routine. Greed plus ignorance got us here; denial will lock it in for a long time to come.
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