Call it the backlash against the recoil against the collapse. Call it the completely natural response to the downward-spiraling times, though that seems a bit feeble and pansy-assed and not at all in alignment with the general attitude of raging seethingosity.
Call it, then, the death of all we once held dear, if what you held dear consisted of seven McMansions and three trophy wives and five revolving psychiatrists and four personal trainers and regular spa treatments for the Wheaten terriers, along with blatantly rubbing your aging genitalia against the stiff leather of your fleet of Porsche Cayenne Turbos after drunkenly nailing your mistress in your corner office at Goldman Sachs. Ahh yes, that's more like it.
Whatever you call it, there's a bitter tang in the air, a nasty streak of anti-Everythingism, a collective bullet of disgust and frustration that's most violently aimed at the most precious American commodity of all: the rich, the overly entitled, the uberwealthy, the manicured bankers and CEOs and Wall Street cash jockeys we used to cherish like royalty but who now smell vaguely of death and foreclosure and Bernie Madoff.
What a strange phenomenon. From the public outcry against giant investment firms daring to hold fancy Christmas parties, to the image of those bloated Big Auto CEOs driving themselves to Congress in cute little hatchbacks, to Obama himself decrying the obscenity that is the typical executive salary, it's like you can't swing a dead Gulfstream 450 these days without hitting a wall of anti-privilege outrage. Frugality might be the current national pastime, but it's also a mean sonofabitch.
Empathy, however, can be a difficult thing to muster. How many stories did I read in the NYT over the holidays about, say, those poor multimillionaire socialites who think nothing of strolling into the Hermes store and dropping five grand on a handful of pretty scarves to hand out as party favors, who then quietly asked the sales clerk for an unmarked shopping bag so as not to appear too out of place, too ugly an overspoiled diva amongst the hoi polloi?
Or what of those shrill, heavily processed 20-something women with names like Laney and Chandler and Becca who all thought they'd hit the yuppie mother lode by dating young hotshot New York bankers, but now find their boyfriends are more interested in getting drunk and commiserating with their laid-off buddies than treating them to dinner and buying them new Jimmy Choos at Bergdorf's?
Or finally, what about just how difficult it really is to live the good life in NYC on a paltry $500,000 per year, as Obama dared to suggest? Waves of pity are decidedly not rolling forth.
Then again, while some antipathy is understandable, it's often strangely misguided. Take the example of old Wells Fargo bank, recently forced by way of public outcry to cancel its annual Vegas junket, a moderately pricey parade of self-congratulatory silliness aimed at rewarding its top 1,000 employees with all-you-can-eat shrimp buffets and tickets to Danny Gans and free banana daiquiris at the swim-up bar at the Wynn.
Wells Fargo just sucked up $25 billion in federal bailout assistance. Cancel the frivolous corporate junkets? You're damned right they should.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2009/02/11/notes021109.DTL
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