Horrific Days Are Here Again
FERGUSON, ANDREW
Horrific Days Are Here Again Get ready to hear about greed, homelessness, and the gap between rich and poor. BY ANDREW FERGUSON THERE'S A STORE in the wealthy Washington suburb of Bethesda,...
...Three Dog Bakery," in other words, is a perfect symbol of what everyone has come to call "Clinton-era decadence," that delirium of tawdry excess that has gripped our nation's winners in the nineties and beyond, as their stock market portfolios ballooned and their paychecks swelled beyond all reason...
...Hunger and homelessness—scan-dalous though they will suddenly be—will be mere symptoms of what will be understood as the defining problem of the Bush era: the gap between rich and poor...
...It costs a considerable amount of money...
...This is yet another affliction that almost vanished in the last decade...
...Greed, in fact, is a word that has scarcely been uttered in the Clinton era, despite the piling up of fortunes far beyond the reach of a Mellon or a Carnegie...
...Only a few left-wingers, consigned to the margins of the political conversation, were rude enough to note that the gap remained obdurately large...
...Clerks prepare cake and goodie bags for the canine partiers...
...And she'll be right...
...There will be something suspect—something gross and declasse—about the first fortunes to be made in the era just beginning...
...As it happens, the number of people living on steam grates has remained pretty much constant from the middle 1980s, when they filled the airwaves and graced the cover of countless magazines, to the present day, when they are all but forgotten...
...They were wise, they were visionary, they struggled admirably under the mighty weight of their social consciences...
...The billions wasted in the Clinton years on the dot-com delusion, for example, were surely as misdirected as the billions sunk into "junk bonds" in the 1980s...
...Twinned with homelessness, hunger will quickly become intolerable in the United States—which is, as we are doomed to be often reminded, the richest country in the history of humankind...
...Having gone unremarked for so long, it is about to become unendurable...
...In place of the adversary culture a small army of courtier journalists arose, panting to celebrate the newly rich, to sing hymns to their taste and sensitivity, to their compassion, their self-knowledge, their spirituality, their dynamism, their willingness to "think outside the box," their egali-tarianism, their refusal to wear ties to work—all the admirable traits that earlier rich guys, from John D. Rockefeller to Michael Milken, had somehow lacked...
...BY ANDREW FERGUSON THERE'S A STORE in the wealthy Washington suburb of Bethesda, Maryland, that calls itself "Three Dog Bakery...
...The statistic will also appear high up in stories about "deindustri-alization...
...The actual facts of the situation are irrelevant...
...Liberals pile up wealth much more tastefully than right-wingers...
...All of this is about to end...
...In time our unhappy social critics will look to a leader—a politician, a governor, perhaps a United States senator—who will reluctantly come forward to offer a means of rescue, who will argue that the decline doesn't have to continue forever, who will boldly assert that America's greatest days are still ahead...
...Readers who survived the Reagan nightmare will recall the trade deficit and shudder...
...Avarice is on the comeback trail...
...For much of the 1980s the savings rate was around 2 percent, and it was a national disgrace: A population besotted by materialism had thrown off the virtue of thrift in a mad desire for instant gratification...
...For psychological reasons that I am not qualified to diagnose, it is difficult for the verbal class to criticize the accumulation of wealth when the country is being presided over by a liberal Democrat—and, more importantly, when it is liberals who are piling up the wealth...
...While bejeweled women in sequined gowns and tuxedo-clad fat cats sip Dom Perignon and box-step their way through George W. Bush's America, swollen-bellied children will be discovered queueing up for slices of American cheese at our nation's soup kitchens, which will be "stretched to the limit...
...It may take a couple of years...
...Just this morning I got a flier for the new Ritz Carlton hotel here in Washington, which offers guests "300-thread-count Frette Egyptian cotton sheets," "butler-drawn baths," and "a choice of Mount Harmony herbal soaps, hand-cut to order...
...Avarice and selfishness are just the beginning...
...Little wonder, then, that newsmagazines, network TV anchors, PBS documentarians, and sociologists of all stripes have come to describe our present period as the "Decade of Greed," an orgy of elitist extravagance unseen since . . . Wait a minute...
...It will be now, though, starting January 20...
...It has done so under a cloak of silence, however...
...yet one was daring and bold (if overenthusiastic), while the other was intolerable, wasteful, even immoral...
...They sing "Happy Birthday" to the guest-of-honor dog...
...They will point out that X percent of the population (the figure will vary, depending on whether you're reading the cover story in Business Week, the six-part series in the N^-w York Times, or the special pull-out report in Newsweek...
...It was caused by Asians (Chinese or Japanese or Koreans— who can remember anymore...
...Their ridicule had greeted the parvenues and get-rich-quick schemers of the 1880s, the 1920s, the 1950s, and of course (and how) the 1980s...
...They are about to be remembered...
...For the first time in history, an economic boom proceeded without the catcalls and sneering of an adversary culture...
...The explosion of wealth in the nineties was similar to previous such explosions in every crucial respect but one: the way in which it was mythologized on the airwaves and in the public prints...
...Their day, too, has finally come...
...You would scan the op-ed pages in vain for the cigar-chomping capitalist familiar from the caricatures of earlier generations...
...In addition to offering "pooch pretzels," "mini beagles," and other "all-natural pet pastries," it throws birthday parties for dogs...
...Meanwhile, of course, not more than a half mile away, rain pours through the splintered roofs of inner-city schools, abandoned children sleep in rat-infested alleyways, senior citizens cry themselves to sleep from hunger...
...And at last their cries will be heard...
...Throughout the nineties the savings rate continued to fall, until today it is actually negative, if you can imagine...
...Plus they had pots and pots of money...
...Tough, brawny old industries began to wither away in the 1980s, causing much human anguish and inspiring several Pulitzer Prizes for feature writing...
...It is poised to resume, as once-proud breadwinners are pressed into jobs flipping hamburgers...
...We will find ourselves in a divided nation, torn between a decadent and meretricious elite and a lower class struggling just to get by, afflicted with homelessness and rampant hunger, preyed upon by corporate raiders at home and sinister forces from abroad, while a heartless government in Washington obsesses over imagined threats...
...Paul Kennedy and maybe even Kevin Phillips (authors, respectively, of the Reagan-era classics The Rise and Fall of the Great Pow^^s and The Pol^t^cs of Rich and Poor) will be coaxed from retirement...
...this is a matter of how the national life is presented and interpreted...
...With the new President Bush in the White House, we're going to see the reemergence of all kinds of things we haven't seen since—well, since the old President Bush was in the White House...
...Say hello to homelessness, for instance: We are about to see a horrifying deterioration in the plight of our nation's street people...
...It makes your skin crawl, doesn't it...
...We haven't heard much—anything, really—about the homeless since, oh, roughly January 20, 1993...
...in the nineties (a term I use, by the way, to include the year 2000 and the first three weeks of 2001) cigar chomping was actually a mark of refinement, so long as the cigar cost more than, say, a set of encyclopedias...
...moire silk" and commanding underpaid persons of color to serve elaborate desserts to her and her wealthy guests...
...I read about it the other day...
...The signs of this heedless self-indulgence are everywhere...
...The trade deficit continued to rise during the 1990s...
...In this it resembles something called "the savings rate...
...who were on the verge of purchasing the entire United States...
...Did I mention that the Pentagon is about to start wasting money again...
...The process of deindustrialization was then put on hold for eight years...
...Artists, bel-letrists, journalists, social theorists, muckrakers, academics—all the traditional party-pooping critics of materialism fell oddly silent...
...Soon, though, they'll find work in privately financed organizations with names like the Emergency Coalition for Feeding the Children...
...But gradually a picture will emerge, and the newly revitalized adversary culture will paint it in the most lurid colors...
...The picture will be one of a nation in decline, and without much prodding Prof...
...in fact, it just reached a new record a few months ago...
...And down the street from the Ritz is the White House itself, where the first lady, in a new, lushly illustrated, overpriced coffee-table book, boasts of redecorating her mansion in "ruby damask" and Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Rich dog owners (I mean, rich owners of dogs, not owners of rich dogs) bring in their pets and up to 12 of their pets' pet friends, and the revels begin...
...Nobody calls this the Decade of Greed...
...Journalists, you can be sure, are about to rediscover greed...
...And not merely because of the weary stock market and the slowly deflating economy...
...There are balloons and party favors and gift certificates...
...Baby boomer rich people, we learned, were "dynamists" operating in the realm of "pure possibility...
...Then again, the Bush era may not begin so quickly...
...The central cause of deindustrial-ization will be the trade deficit...
...For the last decade we have been without a Mark Twain or Upton Sinclair, a Mencken or Sinclair Lewis or Dos Passos, without even a Christopher Lasch or some other jowly Jeremiah worrying aloud about the debilitations of affluence...
...But it hasn't been an emblem of much of anything for many years...
...What am I saying...
...A bit too much like ancient Rome for comfort, is it not...
...And it will be getting worse...
...The difference lay not in the facts but in the attitude of the people who presented them...
...but the number will be teeny-tiny) owns XX percent of the nation's wealth (again the figure will vary, but it will be surprisingly close to 100 percent...
...Curiously, and greatly to their credit, the only public figures in the past decade who have tried to draw attention to hunger in Bill Clinton's America have been functionaries of Bill Clinton's Department of Housing and Urban Development...
...They were ignored...
...But not now—not in the 1990s...
Vol. 6 • January 2001 • No. 18
