Culture in an Age of Money

...On Thursday a 1 4 million-watt series of laser beams shot across New York harbor to illuminate the relit statue for the first time...

...Two years after its installation, Maya Lin's elegiac, black granite Vietnam Memorial was sharing space in Constitution Gardens with Frederick Hart's bronze statues of three battle-weary infantrymen...

...Over the course of the 1980s, such thinking would apply to the arts as well...

...With a $30 million budget and no athletes to worry about, Wolper had few constraints...

...Businesses no longer just bought up other businesses...

...In the final year of the decade, it was no longer hubris to think that what the Founding Fathers really meant by the First Amendment needed to be spelled out with another amendment...

...The army would, nonetheless, give out 8,612 medals, and for the country there would be an enormous release of tension...

...In the 1980s it powered its way to health with the Nautilus machine, and when that didn't work, there was always liposuction...

...By 1989 even Playboy founder Hugh Hefner had remarried...

...The legal consequences of such thinking were immediately apparent in the willingness of the Reagan appointees to the Supreme Court to overturn precedents established a decade earlier in affirmative action and abortion rights...

...But in every other respect he was the dominant Olympic figure...

...When accused of being a liberal during the 1988 presidential debates, Michael Dukakis complained about being labeled, before declaring weeks later that he was a liberal in the tradition of Franldin Roosevelt and John Kennedy...

...As Secretary of Education William Bennett bragged to the Heritage Foundation in a 1986 address, "American conservatism now sets the terms of our debate...

...After Grenada it became easier to reimagine Vietnam as a war that America could have won...

...There he and 800 guests (flown from the United States on three jet airplanes) would be entertained by 600 acrobats, jugglers, and belly dancers, have an honor guard of 300 Berber horsemen, and consume 216 magnums of champagne in toasts...

...The demeaning humility of a Jimmy Carter, who allowed Iran to hold Americans hostage for 444 days and insisted he liked peanut butter sandwiches, was past...

...Nor would the changes stop here...

...The first inauguration with its $8 million price tag for four days of celebration set the tone for the extravaganzas that would follow...

...They could be challenged wherever they conflicted with the country's authentic past...

...It was the perfect Reagan moment, an occasion to match the politics of restoration with the restoration of a national monument...

...As novelist and style critic Alison Lurie observed, "The rich need to look secure now, and to look secure you need to look rich...

...Our new beginning is a continuation of that beginning created two centuries ago," the president declared in his second inaugural...

...The fighting itself was over in days...

...The Staten Island-born secretary of Working Girl proves herself lovable not by being helpless but by being a financial wiz...

...As music floods the soundtrack, we see the former secretary, now with an office and secretary of her own, starting her work day confident that she has at last arrived where she wants to be...

...But the most dramatic indication of what the historical absolutism of the culture of triumph meant for the 1980s would come with the Bush administration's response to a Supreme Court decision it did not expect: the 1989 ruling upholding flag burning as symbolic speech protected by the First Amendment...

...The same fascination with success and wealth would be more pronounced in the decade's personal fashion...

...There we had established our independence...

...He would not, however, rely on rhetoric or legislation alone to define the "Second American Revolution" he was after...

...America never was a sick society," Ronald Reagan declared...

...The peak in extravaganzas came two years later, on July 4, 1986, with the hundredth anniversary of the Statue of Liberty...

...Only a quarter of the voting age population felt the government could be trusted to do what was right most of the time...

...Nothing else so clearly dramatized what both were about or showed what the President meant when he said, "When I spoke about a new beginning, I was talking about much more than budget cuts and incentives for savings and investment...

...L the end the 1980s would have no antidote for the cult of success that the culture of triumph made its centerpiece...

...Later he would speak of his tax bill putting a smile on Liberty, but here, as at his inaugural, the president knew that the best way to be effective was to play a role...

...The article was about Oscar and Francoise de la Renta, but it was no less applicable to the Reagans...

...Or the poor, whom the Statue of Liberty welcomed but who were not welcome at Liberty Weekend...

...American culture in the 1980s would be a culture based on triumph—on the admiration of power and status—and nothing would be more important to that culture than its symbols...

...No longer did the Vietnam vet have to be a 1970s figure like the sensitive, crippled hero John Voight played in Coming Home...

...In the summer of 1989 Wall Street financier Saul Steinberg's $1 14 • DISSENT Culture in an Age of Money million fiftieth birthday party was not even the event of the season...

...Robes from the Met's "Costumes of China" exhibit were first shown to the public at Bloomingdale's along with the reproductions the store was selling...

...What dictated their layered look in the museum was what had dictated their look at Bloomingdale's: the illusion of fashionable luxury they could be made to convey...

...The invasion would come less than seventy-two hours after Lebanese terrorists killed 241 Marines in their Beirut barracks, and it would refocus attention on a part of the world that had been an American sore spot ever since the Nicaraguan revolution of 1979...

...In 1980 both turned their attention to aristocratic China and what the Bloomingdale ads called "forty centuries of opulence...

...Even romance would be unable to resist the success ethic of the culture of triumph...

...His language, his insistence that the fabric of the flag and the fabric of the country were the same, was pure Reaganism, as was the backdrop, the Iwo Jima Memorial, he chose for his speech...

...In even less time, Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA album, with its haunting portrait of a young vet trying to eke out a living in a declining industrial town, became the musical inspiration for Chrysler automobile's upbeat "Made in the USA" commercial...

...It began with an $800,000 fireworks display at the Lincoln Memorial, followed by two nights of show business performances presided over by the Reagans, and, finally, on the fourth day, nine inaugural balls that conjured up the image of an American Versailles...

...It was rooted in the kind of historical absolutism that prompted the president's favorite televangelist, Jerry Falwell, to call America "back to biblical morality, back to sensibility, and back to patriotism...

...But the yuppie was someone the 1980s culture quickly learned to love...

...Indeed, the kind of denial Reagan and Charles Murray had made respectable with regard to the poor was part of a much larger pattern of denial that was inseparable from the culture of triumph...

...I think greed is healthy...

...The essence of romance in the 1980s became the successful marriage...

...Most important, the liberal tradition that might have provided the counterculture of the 1980s with a political base collapsed...

...Now such thinking had a base in reality...

...Soho art dealer Mary Boone became as well known as the artists in her stable (among them David Salle and Julian Schnabel) for her ability to sell their work to the right collectors (those with museum connections), then promote it so that its secondary market (resale) value skyrocketed...

...The 1980s were not only the decade of the power lunch and the power tie, but the power physique...

...Even the act of charging (thanks to the $300 American Express platinum card) became a way of asserting status...

...There would, of course, be jokes about the materialism of yuppies and their passion for brand names...

...His 1960s baby-boom parents might not understand his ambitions, but they could not help being impressed (particularly when he was as likable as Michael J. Fox's Alex Keaton) with how good he was at looking out for number one...

...When her Wellesleyeducated boss gets hurt in a skiing accident, she substitutes for her and pulls off a takeover that wins the heart of her future husband, a Wall Street broker...

...The spectacle of Liberty Weekend, like that of the Olympics, was left to David Wolper to orchestrate...

...But the damage was done...

...The ultimate link between consumerism and high art would, however, be the Bloomingdale'sMetropolitan Museum alliance...

...The vet of the 1980s could be Sylvester Stallone's John Rambo, whose rage and muscularity argue that we did not lose Vietnam on the battlefield and who on going back to rescue his POW buddies asks the perfect Reagan question, "This time do we get to win...

...Wolper's plan to have an eagle take off from the west rim of the Coliseum and soar down onto the field during the playing of the national anthem was cancelled at the last minute...

...For Ronald Reagan the roots of an America in which patriotism and prosperity reigned supreme lay in the Revolution...

...Between 1980 and 1987 the military budget more than doubled, climbing to $282 billion annually...

...Even the low-cal Reaganism of George Bush could not escape its hold...

...Reagan made the denial of compassion respectable," New York governor Mario Cuomo would complain...

...I was 12 • DISSENT Culture in an Age of Money talking about a fundamental change . .. that honors the legacy of the Founding Fathers...

...WINTER • 1990 13 Culture In an AM of Money What about the homeless, whom Los Angeles police had continually swept off the streets during the Olympics...

...As the popular television sitcom, Family Ties, showed, the yuppie was the button-down kid who knew the path to the good life...

...Irangate, the stock market crash of 1987, the scandals at the Environmental Protection Agency, the influence-peddling trials of White House aides Michael Deaver and Lyn Nofziger might easily have changed the country politically...

...It was the yuppie lifestyle that the Reagan administration had in mind when it adopted the logic of the Laffer curve, which said that if tax rates, especially at the upper level, were lowered, the rich would try to get even richer and in so doing improve the economy and government revenues...

...As he knew from his Hollywood days, the essence of modern America was image...

...The country had lost the longest war in its history...

...The precedent set in 1980 when the mourning for John Lennon's Christmas-season assassination was quickly overshadowed by the first Reagan inaugural would continue throughout the decade...

...A plane wrote "WELCOME" across the sky, and a cast of nine thousand—including 125 trumpeters, three hundred placard bearers, and eighty-four pianists playing "Rhapsody in Blue"—performed on cue...

...Even the fine arts were not immune from the 1980s cult of success...

...Only a cynic or the special interests (a labor union, the civil rights movement) would oppose such a culture...

...But the crucial point was that such a safety net, like the safety net for the circus aerialist, was to be kept out of sight...

...The inaugural aesthetic would be repeated at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles...

...Like the candy makers who carved a fourteenfoot chocolate replica of Liberty or the caterer who molded her likeness out of sixty pounds of chopped liver, Wolper was free to let scale dictate choice...

...As the Calvin Klein Obsession for Men WINTER • 1990 • 15 Culture In an Ave of Money cologne ads—with their muscular male and female nude models — showed, the point of the new elegance was to make it clear that what lay below all the surface luxury was raw power...

...The president in his jodhpurs and Nancy Reagan in her $25,000 worth of inaugural gowns ($46,000 for the second inaugural) were once again paving the way for the culture of triumph...

...To be American was to be powerful and to be powerful was to be rich...

...q WINTER • 1990 • 17...

...By the end of the second presidential debate, the liberalism of Dukakis and the Democrats lay exposed as a narrow proceduralism— "scolding," Congressman Barney Frank would call it—that made upholding the law the remedy for everything from crime in the street to Irangate...

...From the Society of American Florists $13,000 worth of roses...

...The president's valediction was a perfect description of the way in which the culture of triumph that he championed throughout the 1980s managed to legitimize its aims and delegitimize those of its opponents...

...That honor would go to publisher Malcolm Forbes for a $2 million seventieth birthday party in Morocco...

...The extravaganzas of the 1980s, like the culture of triumph, would not be concerned with the work ethic of small-town America...

...The cynics were wrong...

...The Grenada invasion of 1983 would show how serious the President was when he insisted Vietnam "was, in truth, a noble cause...

...The problem, as critics were quick to point out, was that the Met mannequins were not dressed in accord with Chinese custom...

...The real economic hero of the culture of triumph would, however, be the dream consumer, the yuppie...

...Dynasty and Dallas would make family money wars the heart of weekly programming and pave the way for Robin Leach's Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, which would take viewers on shopping trips along Rodeo Drive and into the homes of the wealthy...

...A few years earlier, shortly before his conviction for insider trading, Wall Street arbitrager Ivan Boesky put the same sentiments in even blunter language...

...You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself," Boesky told the press...

...Church bells rang throughout the city...

...The president did not attend the games, instead contenting himself with urging the American team to "Do it for the Gipper...

...The president and his guests would eat off china that proclaimed, "The era of self-doubt is over...

...But the link would not end here...

...But everything else went like clockwork...

...In the president's words, "We've stopped looking at our warts and rediscovered how much there is to love in this blessed land...

...Ronald Reagan's version of Camelot was Disneyland, and what followed was a culture in which the "magic of the marketplace" replaced the Magic Kingdom...

...history (twenty tons of materials, 40,000 projectiles) computer coordinated to music played aboard the carrier John F. Kennedy by the Marine Corps band), and on Sunday the greatest spectacle of all at Meadowlands Stadium in New Jersey: a cast of 12,000, including two hundred Elvis Presley impersonators, three hundred Jazzercise dancers, and an eight-hundred-voice chorus, performing on a twenty-tier stage with five waterfalls...

...We were no longer a helpless giant...

...It does so because, without in the least abandoning its principles, it has succeeded in WINTER • 1990 • 11 Culture In an AN of Money identifying itself with the quintessential American appetite for new challenges and new opportunities...

...The 1980s became the decade in which the hostile takeover was made possible by the leveraged buyout and the junk bond, when greenmail was paid to avoid a takeover, when companies were attacked by raiders and saved by white knights, and fired executives floated into retirement on golden parachutes...

...When you've got to pay $2,000 for a limousine for four days, $7 to park, and $2.50 to check your coat at a time when most people in the country can't hack it, that's ostentation," Senator Barry Goldwater groused...

...A decade earlier the middle class had jogged its way to health...

...The extravaganza's message was again unmistakable...

...During his final year in office, Jimmy Carter had talked about the country's "malaise...

...Television rights for the weekend went to ABC for $10 million...

...But the nostalgia of the president and men like Meese and Bennett was another story...

...What Bloomingdale's was packaging as fashion the Met was packaging as art...

...The flag represents and reflects the fabric of our nation—our dreams, our destiny, our very fiber as a people," the new President declared angrily as he called for a constitutional amendment to make flag desecration illegal...

...It was now clear what the president meant when during the 1980 campaign he declared, "There is a lesson for us all in Vietnam . . . let us tell those who fought that war that we will never again ask young men to fight and possibly die in a war that our government is afraid to let them win...

...There was not need for the modem conservative to adopt traditional conservative restraint...

...In an even more obvious way, plutography would define television's hit series...

...Goldwater had missed the point...

...Federal welfare programs have created a massive social problem," he insisted...

...There, as he told the nation in a July 4th radio address, we "began with a tax revolt...

...As Mike Nichols's 1988 film, Working Girl, showed, even office romance was different...

...To make its flagship store in New York fit its clothes image, Ralph Lauren's gutted the inside of the 1898 Rhinelander mansion, changing it to look like a cross between an English country house and a gentleman's club...

...In foreign policy the most dramatic indication of the new culture of triumph was reflected in the revival of an imperial America committed to showing its power...

...His "new patriotism" was reflected in the crowds chanting "USA, USA" every time an American athlete competed...

...From Almaden Vineyards came 14,400 bottles of champagne...

...The economy was in shambles...

...Plutography would define novels like Wolfe's own best seller, The Bonfire of the Vanities, with its portrait of Sherman McCoy, a Wall Street broker who lives in a world where at forty you are either making a million a year or you're an incompetent...

...While the Met's Chinese costume exhibit was going on, the New York Times Magazine carried an article by Francesca Stanfill, "Living Well is the Best Revenge," that heralded the arrival of an era in which the successful "have no fear of ostentation, nor are they inhibited by the pressure of discretion that often characterizes those with old fortunes...

...The domestic equivalent of Rambo was the Wall Street buccaneer, the takeover artist that financier Asher Edelman sought to cultivate in his Columbia Business School course, "Corporate Raiding—The Art of War," when he offered a hundred-thousand-dollar bounty to any student who found a company he could acquire...

...There was no point in going through that again...

...The key was to go back to the future...

...On Friday, following the largest assembly of ships since the end of World War II, the evening concluded with the largest fireworks display in U.S...

...The country was, however, in no mood to listen to Cuomo or bother with figures showing that in the 1980s the living standard of the bottom fifth of the country dropped by 8 percent while that of the top fifth rose by 16 percent...

...Even the media found that they could gain new legitimacy by wrapping themselves in the past...

...But the moment was also one that summed up how much the culture of triumph, with its symbolism and claims on the past, had come to dominate American life in the 1980s...

...Most of all, the "resurgence of national pride" that the president wanted the country to feel was captured in the $6 million opening and closing ceremonies directed by Hollywood producer David Wolper...

...In the 1980s his America would not look or act like a weakling nation...

...The Lenox pattern with a raised gold presidential seal in the center that the president's wife chose came to $209,508 for 220–place settings...

...On opening night as the faces of the president and his wife were superimposed on the image of the relit statue, he took the tribute in stride, as if such a blending of iconography were only natural...

...Government created a poverty trap that wreaks havoc on the very support system the poor most need to lift themselves out of poverty—the family...

...Millions more came from sponsors paying to use the statue in their advertising...

...The social safety net for the elderly, the needy, the disabled, and the unemployed will be left intact," the president promised...

...The tone of the opening ceremony is going to be majesty," Wolper promised, and what followed were the most political Olympics since 1936...

...Trying to regain readers it had lost to the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Good Housekeeping magazine would appeal to a woman it called the "New Traditionalist...

...Secretary of Education William Bennett would oppose the liberalization of college curriculums on the grounds that it disregarded "the American common culture...

...When the public extravaganzas of the Reagan administration ended, the private extravaganzas of the superrich replaced them...

...But for the Reagans, triumph would be the watchword...

...Democrats rubbed their hands in glee...

...The problem with our concern for the poor, both the Reagan administration and the culture of triumph held, was that in the past it had crippled them...

...At the end of the film, there is no romantic talk about babies or housework...

...The philosophical groundwork for such interventionism had been laid in 1979 by Jeane Kirkpatrick (later Reagan's United Nations ambassador) in an article entitled, "Dictatorships and Double Standards...

...In the age of AIDS, such a change made sexual sense, but nothing fueled the change so much as money and the vision of a home in which husband and wife were proven wage earners...

...But the real change was in the country's inner psychology, its abandonment of what Ronald Reagan called our "Vietnam syndrome...

...A powerful counterculture might have challenged such a selective approach to events, but even at its best the counterculture of the 1980s found itself checked by the culture of triumph...

...He can marry her with the assurance that rather than taking a financial risk he is forming a partnership that will leave him better off...

...Then, on being returned to the Met, the robes were displayed on mannequins dressed by Met curator and former Harper's Bazaar fashion editor Diana Vreeland...

...In his influential 1984 book, Losing Ground, conservative Charles Murray of the Manhattan Institute described how, as a result of relaxed welfare standards and liberal court rulings, the 1960s had made it easier for the poor to get along without jobs and get away with crimes...

...Before the decade was up, even the stores selling the new elegance would figure out ways to flaunt it...

...They were advertisements for America the Grand, and their aesthetic, as Reagan-era historian Sidney Blumenthal shrewdly observed, was one in which the beautiful was the expensive, the good was the costly...

...How do you defend it...

...From Ridgewell's caterers 400,000 hors d'oeuvres...

...Plutography," Tom Wolfe's neologism for "the graphic depiction of the acts of the rich," would become the decade's guiding aesthetic...

...They called it the Reagan Revolution, and I'll accept that, but for me it always seemed like the Great Rediscovery: a rediscovery of our values and our common sense," Ronald Reagan would declare in his farewell address...

...For Ronald Reagan, the Murray view of poverty offered the perfect reason to cut back on aiding the poor...

...What they failed to understand was that a new era was starting...

...I don't try to defend it," Forbes would say of his party...

...A president had resigned in disgrace...

...Especially at the start, they were what allowed the president to insist, "We have every right to dream heroic dreams," The America that the Reagan administration inherited was an America still in shock from a decade of humiliation...

...Two decades earlier, John Kennedy had made social commitment seem glamorous, and what followed was a counterculture in which civil rights, the antiwar movement, and Woodstock all had their place...

...What lay behind such calls to action was the belief that the foundations of contemporary precedent were shaky...

...For Reagan and the culture of triumph, the extravaganza thus became the crucial public event of the 1980s...

...He justified it by saying not only that the government wasted money, but also that poor people were somehow better off without government help in the first place...

...But the culture of triumph made dwelling on such negatives a repudiation of what was best in America...

...What dazzles him is that she is better in business than he...

...We had gotten ourselves into trouble during the 1970s by imagining we were weak when we were not...

...Attorney General Edwin Meese would justify his attacks on the Warren court by charging that it had violated the "original intention" of the Constitution...

...Far less gifted politicians than the president learned from his example that if the past could be Ansel Horn/IMPACT VISUALS 16 • DISSENT Culture in an Age of Money appropriated it was a powerful weapon...

...The casualties were light: nineteen killed, 115 wounded...

...At a time when her husband was talking about cutting welfare eligibility and the misery index (inflation plus unemployment) was over 20 percent, Nancy Reagan's desire for new china seemed like an idea borrowed from Marie Antoinette...

...The Good Housekeeping ads could be written off as self-promotion...

...She's a contemporary woman," the Good Housekeeping ads declared, "who has made a new commitment to the traditional values that some people thought were old fashioned...

...Yuppie, upscale, privatization: these were the key words for the 1980s, and they signaled a culture with an insatiable need to proclaim its triumphs...

...New White House china would not erase these past humiliations, but like the president's pledge "to make America proud again," new china would be a start in the right direction...