1. Given the expense of New York real estate, Amory could count himself lucky to be paying so low a price. He had inherited the apartment, ten rooms at East Seventy-sixth Street, from his mother. By 1985 comparable apartments cost at least $1 million to buy and between $2,000 and $3,000 a month to maintain.

2. An extremely modest sum, implying the absence of a cook, an inability to give dinner parties and a reliance on canned goods.

3. Again, a pittance. At his clubs in town Amory could have afforded to do little more than pay his dues and stand his friends to a quarterly round of drinks. At the beach club on Long Island his children would have had to be careful about signing food chits and losing golf balls.

4. $1,000 to each of his children’s schools, the minimum donation acceptable under the rules of what Thorstein Veblen, in The Theory of the Leisure Class, defined as “pecuniary decency”: $1,000 to Yale University and $2,000 meted out in small denominations to miscellaneous charities dear to Stephanie Amory’s friends.

5. Most of the women in Stephanie Amory’s set could draw on an annual clothes allowance of $30,000. Evening dresses designed by Givenchy or Bill Blass cost between $3,000 and $5,000.

6. In May 1987 the fashion tabloid W fixed the price of keeping a young mistress in New York City at $5,000 per month; the sum included rent, clothes, maid and exercise trainer, but not jewels, furs or weekends in Mexico.

7. None of the phrases commonly used to describe the holders of American wealth strike me as being sufficiently precise. The United States never has managed to put together an “establishment” in the British sense of the word; “upper class” implies a veneer of manners that doesn’t exist. Borrowed from the Roman usage, equestrian class comprises all those who can afford to ride rather than walk and who can buy any or all of the baubles that constitute the proofs of social status. As with the ancient Romans, the rank is for sale.

8. William K. Vanderbilt made the point in a newspaper interview in 1905. “Inherited wealth,” he said, “is a big handicap to happiness. It is as certain death to ambition as cocaine is to morality.”

9. The attitude doesn’t appear to have changed much over the last thirty years; if anything, the emphasis on money has become more pronounced. Tuition at an Ivy League college is now $17,000 a year, and the students apparently worry about preserving the assumptions of ease so expensively maintained by their parents.

In Campus Life, a study of undergraduate attitudes published in 1987, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz remarks on the virulent preoccupation with wealth now afflicting students everywhere in the country. She quotes a senior at Duke University. “It seems like all we talk about is money. I try to say that it’s not that important. But it’s really important to be comfortable, and you can’t be comfortable without money.”

10. A variation of this attitude accounted for the more refined Republican opposition to John F. Kennedy’s seeking of the presidency in 1960. Politics was an expensive form of social climbing, and the Kennedys conceivably could be forgiven their vulgarity on the ground that they had no other way of being admitted to the Bath and Tennis Club at Palm Beach.

11. From the point of view of the jeunesse dorée matriculating at the Hotchkiss School in the early 1950s the “bare necessities” would have included property equivalent in value to an apartment on Park Avenue, a house in Southampton or Newport, a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, substantial trust funds (both for oneself and one’s eventual wife), memberships in the Racquet, Brook and Piping Rock clubs, miscellaneous paintings and art objects falling due on the deaths of various relatives. Luxuries (i.e., those diversions that had to be ordered à la carte) included such items as a divorce, racing stable, third house, political office and art collection.

12. Much later in life I became a trustee of schools and universities, and I was sorry to see my earlier impressions so resoundingly confirmed. University presidents devoted their principal time and effort to the labor of raising money. Even if they had entered office with a fondness for literature or scholarship (as did A. Bartlett Giamatti at Yale in the late 1970s) they had no choice but to suppress their enthusiasms when flattering the alumni. Giamatti used to say that he couldn’t afford to speak plain English. He was obliged to translate his thought into the empty abstraction of a language that he called “the higher institutional.”

13. The humor implicit in the phrase “the best people” is plain enough even to the editors of journals recommending conservative lines of opinion. Apropos the Reagan administration’s practice of the arts of chicane, Thomas Fleming, editor of Chronicles, observed, in the winter of 1987, “Except in a few rare and fortunate cases, the powers that be, in this and any land, are a remarkably uniform set of real-estate swindlers, market manipulators and well-oiled office seekers.” The observation would not have surprised Tom Paine, Ambrose Bierce or Dorothy Parker.

14. It goes without saying that the attitudes of entitlement enjoy the fond endorsement of the federal government, which currently donates $400 billion a year (in Social Security, Medicare, military and civil service pensions) to the comfort of the middle and upper classes.

15. The nation’s consumer debt (i.e., the sum borrowed by individuals) now stands at $2 trillion, roughly equal to the national debt (another $2 trillion); at least in the opinion of a number of respectable economists, this consumer debt presents a far more dangerous threat to the world’s financial stability than the $1 trillion owed by the less developed nations of the Third World.

16. Few amenities in the modern world cost as much as a properly equipped military household. To present a decent naval appearance, the United States maintains a fleet of thirteen aircraft carriers, each of which costs $590,000 a day to operate. Each of the 500,000 American soldiers currently stationed abroad costs $88,000 to outfit in an impressively martial livery.

17. The arrest in February 1987 of Martin A. Siegel, a Wall Street Wunderkind, provoked his peers and confederates to exclamations of surprise. Siegel at the time was earning upwards of $1 million a year as a notable maker of deals for Kidder, Peabody. When it was discovered that he also was selling confidential tips for suitcases filled with cash, a broker said, “How many yachts can you ski behind at the same time?”

18. Within a week of being acquitted of the attempted murder of his wife, Claus von Bülow, in an interview with New York magazine, observed, “A gilded life may, in many ways, become a gilded cage.”

19. The statistical records show that in the United States in the twentieth century the incidence of crime has risen during periods of prosperity (before 1930 and during the 1960s and 1980s) and declined during the Depression, World War II and the decade of the 1970s.

20. Observing the urban poor in the streets of New York, the young Gouverneur Morris was moved to remark, in the spirit of the contemporary editorials published in The Wall Street Journal: “The mob begin to think and reason. Poor reptiles! . . . They bask in the sun, and ere noon they will bite, depend upon it. The gentry begin to fear this.”

21. Henry Adams, writing to his brother, Brooks, about the likely election of William McKinley in 1896, observed, “The monied interest can’t help winning and running the country. There is no other interest competent to run a hand cart.” Of McKinley, Adams said, “a creature of the trusts . . . appealing to the bosses because he’s a cheap article, like galvanized tin sheds.” The same could be said of most of the politicians for whom I’ve been invited to vote during the past thirty years.

22. Passing a bookshop on Madison Avenue in the middle 1980s I noticed that the window display had been as reverently composed as an ode to Mammon. Among the new titles arranged on red velvet, presumably to suggest their resemblance to jewelry, I counted the following: Hard Money; The Whims of Fortune, Guy de Rothschild’s autobiography; Funny Money; An Innocent Millionaire; The Dreams That Money Can Buy; Old Money; and Very Old Money.

Among the prices of luxury fixed by the tabloid W in May 1987, I was particularly drawn to the following:

— $300,000 to hold a wedding reception in Manhattan for 300 people.

— $23,000 a month to rent a two-bedroom suite at the Carlyle Hotel.

— $350 per week for a New York maid who “can’t cook, won’t walk the dog and wants weekends off.”

— $1,000 for Glorious Food to cater dinner for four at home.

23. Money’s arrival is always exciting, which is why all three television networks have traditionally devoted the first half hour of their evening prime time (i.e., the proverbial children’s hour) to imbecile game shows. Money’s departure is always as sobering as the news of a death in the family, which is why an awful silence falls on the table when the waiter presents the bill.

24. The media’s long-standing alliance with the monied interests should surprise nobody except the youngest student at the Columbia School of Journalism. Among the 400 richest Americans memorialized in 1986 by Forbes magazine, 83 of them derived their fortunes from newspaper, television and publishing properties. Only the oil industry, which contributed 48 names to the list, could make even a modest claim to such pecuniary glory.

25. John Coltrane, the late jazz saxophonist, understood the convention as follows: “If you’re bourgeois, money is it. It’s all the questions and all the answers. Ain’t no E flat or color blue, only $12.98 or $1,000. If it isn’t money, it isn’t nothing.”

26. Proxmire’s point was confirmed by Stephen Hess in The Ultimate Insiders, a study published in 1986 of the way in which the national media follow events in the U.S. Senate. Hess noticed that the press pays attention to only a few obvious figures, primarily the chairmen of the prominent committees. The rest of the Senate goes about its business in the anonymous dark.

27. In the spring and summer of 1986 the abrupt rise in insurance rates provided an exemplary proof of the operative principle. Believing themselves suddenly poor the insurance companies doubled, tripled and quadrupled the premium payments required of amusement parks, county fairs, restaurants, Little League baseball fields, campgrounds and fireworks displays. It was decreed that a possible loss of money was a far more serious and important matter than the expressions of simple human pleasure.

28. In California during the state elections of 1986 a political consultant employed to rearrange the administration of justice in a small town said. “Give me $17,000, and I can defeat any sitting judge.”

29. In 1986 in The New York Times a prominent Washington lobbyist named Kenneth Schlossberg, remarking on the trouble that lately had befallen Michael Deaver, said, “The truth is that money has replaced brains and hard work as the way for a lobbyist to get something done for his client.” The observation has become a commonplace of the nation’s editorial pages.

30. During a revision of Harper’s Magazine in the winter of 1981 somebody suggested an advertising campaign, and one of the magazine’s directors, formerly a publisher of Life, remarked that it cost “a minimum of $750,000 a year” to make even the smallest impression on any sort of significant public.

31. A variation of precisely this fear haunted John C. Calhoun, who perceived in the Northern tariffs of the 1830s the end of Southern political supremacy based on the economy of cotton. His cry to Congress was the cry of every dowager, every established class protesting the onslaught of the parvenu rich, of George Amory and the apostles of the Age of Scarcity, of the militant environmentalists and the authors of American foreign policy since the middle 1960s: “What! Acknowledge inferiority? The surrender of life is nothing to sinking down into acknowledged inferiority!” The firing on Fort Sumter turned out to be a proof of salvation that the South couldn’t afford.

32. Of all the subversive doctrines likely to wreck the American dream of paradise (more subversive than all the manifestos published by all the Marxist professors who ever graduated from Harvard), the most subversive is the one that the ancient Greeks expressed as the Golden Mean and the early Christians as the virtue of temperance. Were a majority of Americans suddenly to say, “I have enough . . . . No, I don’t think I’ll buy anything more this week,” the country soon would fall into ruin.

33. The phenomenon is not new. William Dean Howells in 1866 observed that “inequality is as dear to the American heart as liberty itself.”

34. The acquisitions can become fairly refined. In 1985 Saul P. Steinberg, an adept in the art of financial legerdemain, paid for the installation of the Metropolitan Museum’s Christmas tree and créche. He also paid the losses of the literary evenings sponsored by PEN. Not enough acolytes showed up to listen, at $1,000 a ticket, to the musings of authors as renowned as William Styron and Norman Mailer. Steinberg’s money allowed PEN to paper the house with a becoming crowd of penniless students.

35. The market for specialty foods in the United States now amounts to between $3 billion and $10 billion a year; the refinements of the table rank as high among the pleasures of the American equestrian classes as they did among their peers and namesakes in Imperial Rome. A farm in New Jersey last year offered, at $2.40 the dozen, nest eggs from “uncaged hens fed roasted whole grains.”

36. The protocols of wealth require the naming of almost every object worth more than $500. The authors dress up a sum of money in a label, and by so doing excuse themselves, like the reporters on the San Francisco Examiner, and The New York Times, from any further effort of the imagination. The bookshops report brisk sales of what is known to the trade as “designer fiction” dealing not so much with romance, or even lust, but with the headier fantasies of unlimited credit.

37. I don’t mean to single out the Times for special mention. The paper’s cultural reporting is no better or worse than that in most of the nation’s larger newspapers and magazines. Much of what can be said about the Times also can be said about Newsweek. Time, Inc., the networks and The Washington Post. I cite the Times because it is so earnest and so solemn, almost German in its obedience to the protocols of wealth. The paper’s Sunday magazine consistently publishes long and fulsome profiles of individuals who, no matter what their other accomplishments, share the distinction of having made a lot of money. The magazine obviously cannot address itself to poor individuals because poor individuals lack expensive houses in Connecticut that provide the obligatory backdrops for the obligatory photographs.

38. Better than anyone else, Warhol had understood that the art market in the 1960s answered the medieval alchemist’s prayer for a philosopher’s stone that could change lead into gold. Suddenly there were more millionaires in suburban Omaha than there were paintings by Manet or Titian. The gentlemen needed symbols of their economic triumph—something to place on the wall as a marker buoy attesting to the presence of a sunken treasure. The trendier museums acquired enough of the new art to establish a kind of Federal Reserve System for the canvas equivalents of junk bonds. Within a year of Warhol’s death, Sotheby’s auctioned his collection of cookie jars (most of them made of cheap pottery) for $247,830. Lead had turned to gold, and art was anything with Andy’s name on it.

39. In the New York of the 1980s Rhoda Gilbert’s mantle of newfound magnificence apparently has descended upon Mrs. John Gutfreund, formerly an airline stewardess in Texas who married one of the city’s richest men. Wishing to give a genuinely impressive party for her new friends, Mrs. Gutfreund two years ago hired Blenheim Palace in England and sent cards of engraved invitation stating, simply, “Mr. and Mrs. John Gutfreund, At Home, Blenheim.”

40. Before too long I expect to see one of the networks, probably ABC, mount a weekly broadcast entitled Tuesday Night Dinner Party. The correspondents in the booth—demimondaines beyond the charm of their youth—might provide a chattering commentary on the value of the names in attendance, the age of the wine and the freshness of the flowers.

41. Elsie de Wolfe stated the fundamental principle in 1935, in her autobiography After All: “If one wishes to be in society, one must have money and spend it . . . let society feed on it, drink on it and gamble on it. Then one can be anything, go anywhere and do most anything one wants.” Aileen Miehle, a gossip columnist known to readers of the New York Post as “Suzy,” reformulated the proposition last year in the pages of Andy Warhol’s Interview: “Money doesn’t talk anymore,” she said, “it shrieks.”

42. The New York repertory company has remained remarkably stable over the last quarter of a century, largely because the members of the company, like the actors in the Italian commedia dell’arte, wear masks of easily recognized personae—famous novelist, rising politician, this year’s richest Greek (or Arab, Japanese or Californian), the season’s bravest director, the current suffragette or enfant terrible, most enlightened swami, ingenue, young and happy couple blessed by fortune. The troupe divides the calendar into the sequences appropriate to children, and during the summer and winter holidays it pitches its tents in the resorts familiar to the readers of Town & Country. Although some of its members practice professions (usually as actors, dress designers or politicians) the company consists for the most part of people merely rich enough to pay for the son et lumière.

43. The entire canon of American autobiography can be read as a set of variations on the melancholy theme of not being able to go home again, of the family farm and the old neighborhood vanishing into the mouths of progress.

44. Michel Chevalier, an astute and observant traveler in nineteenth-century America, noticed that American society had the morale of an army on the march. Albert Jay Nock, in his Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, thought the country “had the morale of the looter, the plunderer.” Describing his boyhood in the 1870s. Nock remembered that the freebooters who had carried off the heaviest sacks of spoil “were held up in the schools, the press, and even the pulpit, as the prototypal of all that was making America great, and hence as par excellence the proper examples for well-ordered youth to follow. ‘Go and Get It!’ was the sum of the practical philosophy presented to America’s young manhood by all the voices of the age.” The current generation has abbreviated the same advice to the phrase, “Go for it.”

45. The chairman of the popular culture department at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, Ray Browne, provided the Times with additional social commentary. “Never before have Americans been so desirous of brushing up against the notorious and the wealthy,” he said. “We’re mad to be in the same room with them, to let a little of the danger they engaged in rub off on us. If they’re well-born, like Von Bülow or the Mayflower Madam, well, that makes it even more wonderful because we’re trading up.”

46. An executive speaking to this point in Fortune magazine (November 1985) said, “I’d say we have a mature, responsible attitude toward our major competitors. We’d like to see them dead.”

47. The New York Times in the autumn of 1986 endorsed the re-election to the U.S. Senate of Alfonse D’Amato despite its concession that the senator probably hadn’t told the truth to a committee investigating his ethical conduct. Senator D’Amato had said he didn’t know that the Republican political machine on Long Island—an organization with which he had been long associated—required its dependents to kick back one percent of their salaries to the cost of election campaigns. The Times deemed the senator’s testimony “incredible” but then went on to say that he was a wonderful fellow deserving the confidence of voters.

48. The use of the federal government as a factotum of the special interests is as traditional as it is nonpartisan. In 1873 an observer in Washington, complaining of the spoils system, compared the House of Representatives to “an auction room” in which everything that could be sold (land, water rights, tax exemptions, tariffs, etc.) “passed under the speaker’s hammer.” Between 1875 and 1885 the Central Pacific Railroad paid its political agents in Washington the sum of $500,000 a year.

49. At the University of Indiana some years ago a professor of modern history lectured her class for an hour on the rise and fall of Nazi Germany and then asked her students for their thoughts on the topic. A sophomore said he thought Hitler was a success, somebody who “had it all for twelve years at the top of the charts,” which was about as much and as long as even the biggest rock musicians had a right to expect.

50. The nation’s business schools teach similar tactics and strategies; in a handbook entitled Attacking the Competition the students of marketing are advised to “select the optimum combination of weapons and tactics for a specific battlefield.” The illustration on the pamphlet’s cover showed a fighter plane transfixed in a gunsight. In New York the expensive divorce lawyers welcome their new clients by telling them, “You are at war,” and advising them to cut off credit, hide assets, hire detectives and take sworn statements from the servants. The late Roy Cohn used to say, “What have we got on him?”

51. The American businessman has become prime-time television’s most popular villain, appearing as often as fourteen times a week in the role of murderer, bandit and cheat.

52. The quotation is from John Terrel’s Landgrab, but it is representative. D.H. Lawrence, in an essay on James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, observed of the American frontier that “men murdered themselves into this democracy.” The presidential commission appointed in 1869 by Ulysses S. Grant to look into the disappearance of the Plains Indians summarized its findings as follows: “The history of the border white man’s connection with the Indians is a sickening record of murder, outrage, robbery and wrongs committed by the former as a rule, occasional savage outbreaks and unspeakably barbarous deeds of retaliation by the latter is the exception.”

Contrary to the romantic encounters seen in the movies, most gunfighters in the Old West preferred to shoot their enemies in the back with a rifle.

53. Bess Myerson, the former Miss America and commissioner of cultural affairs for the city of New York, kept a diary during her second marriage to which she confided the thought that if her husband “would die I would have the safety and security of a house . . . and I would then reach out to new experiences.” Speaking of the same husband she also told her diary that he was “more like a thing I must manipulate.”

54. They continue to do so. Almost every week the newspapers publish reports of quarrels in which the heirs to the family fortunes succeed in murdering one another. In Fort Myers, Florida, a court convicted a young man of placing a bomb in his mother’s car, in a Chicago suburb another angry heir hired a Mafia thug to dynamite his brother.

55. On examining the list of the 400 richest people in America as published in 1987 by Forbes magazine, Lester Thurow, dean of MIT’s Sloan School of Management and a perceptive economist habitually curious about the arithmetic of social class, discovered that all of the 82 wealthiest families, and 241 of the wealthiest individuals, had inherited all or a major part of their fortunes. He also noticed that the $166 billion in business net worth held by the 482 families and individuals named in Forbes provided them with effective control over $2.2 billion in business assets—about 40 percent of all fixed, nonresidential private capital in the United States. The richest 10 percent of the American population (i.e., those families earning more than $218,000 a year) now hold roughly 68 percent of the nation’s wealth.

56. The American war in Vietnam, waged for almost no other reason than to sustain the heroic images of three presidents, resulted in 50,000 American dead and 300,000 American wounded. It also imposed on the economy a ruinous distortion from which it is yet to recover and destroyed a generation’s belief in the legitimacy of the American government.

57. The psychoanalysts have noticed that people brought up in rooms empty of feeling often turn their rage inward, directing it against their more human selves and imitating the forms of cruelty particular to the authority who did them the most harm. The observation pertains both to the Harlem slum child, borrowing the methods and sensibility of the police, and to the children of the rich indoctrinated in the techniques of withholding love. In 1986 American police departments reported 40,000 teenage suicides, most of them committed by children born into relatively comfortable circumstances.

58. The presumption is traditional. The earliest Americans believed they embodied what subsequent generations would call “the last, best hope of mankind.” In the words of a characteristic speech delivered at Covington, Kentucky, on July 4, 1850 by William Evans Arthur, apprentice congressman and judge, America was “the ark of safety, the anointed civilizer, the only visible source of light and heat and repose in the dark and discordant and troubled world.”

59. Ronald Reagan campaigned with the backing of the comfortably rich. Quite appropriately he rewarded them with profitable military expenditures, astringent monetary policies and reduced taxes. Gary Hart neglected to maintain the pose of blameless innocence, and within a matter of five days his presidential campaign vanished as abruptly as a traveling circus.

60. On being asked about the photograph of the Vietnamese girl several years after the Vietnam War had been lost, General William Westmoreland said he had been told, and always had thought, that the girl was burned by a hibachi stove.

61. Quite a few of Reagan’s California friends, among them Frank Sinatra and the late Alfred Bloomingdale, have proved themselves intimately acquainted with the moral underworld. Apparently they say nothing of their adventures to the president.

62. It is instructive to quote Mr. Carter’s toast at some length because it so nicely illustrates the somnambulism of American statesmen content to see whatever they wish to see. Mr. Carter explained that he decided to celebrate New Year’s Eve with the Shah because he had asked his wife, Rosalynn, whom she wanted to be with on that occasion, and Rosalynn had said, “Above all others, I think, with the Shah and the empress Farah.” The President then went on to say: “Iran, because of the great leadership of the Shah, is an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world. This is a great tribute to you, Your Majesty, and to your leadership, and to the respect and the admiration and love which your people give to you . . . . We have no other nation on earth who is closer to us in planning for our mutual military security. We have no other with whom we have closer consultations on regional problems that concern us both. And there is no leader with whom I have a deeper sense of personal gratitude and personal friendship.”

63. Precisely this line of reasoning informed the Reagan administration’s explanation of its illegal arms deal with Iran. The chronic lack of imagination of men who serve the interests of money leads them to think themselves incapable of evil intent. They cannot understand how they can be accused of employing illegitimate means to acquire what belongs to them by right.

64. Remarking on the pervasiveness of scientific gibberish as early as 1924, G.K. Chesterton observed, “Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover up the errors of the rich.”

The National Council of Teachers of English presented its Doublespeak Award for 1987 to NASA for the following account of the Challenger disaster:

“The normal process during the countdown is that the countdown proceeds, assuming we are in a go posture, and at various points during the countdown we tag up the operational loops and face to face in the firing room to ascertain the facts that project elements that are monitoring the data and that are understanding the situation as we proceed are still in the go direction.”

65. Both President Reagan and New York City Mayor Ed Koch employed this device in 1986 to great effect—Reagan on learning of the Iranian arms transfers, Koch on being told about corruption among his own appointed city officials.

66. They could cite as their authority Adam Smith, the political economist whose Wealth of Nations was published within a few months of the Declaration of Independence. Smith detested aristocrats, distrusted capitalists and grieved for the laboring poor. He was pressed into service by the apologists for Reagan’s triumphant plutocracy as an almost biblical spokesman for unlicensed greed. Anybody who takes the trouble to read Smith can marvel at the resulting travesties of his texts. For example, Smith on the plutocracy: “All for ourselves and nothing for other people seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” On the military-industrial complex: “The Sovereign, for example, with all the officers both of justice and war who serve under him, the whole army and navy, are unproductive workers.” On monopoly: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

67. Before his indictment for insider trading on Wall Street, Ivan Boesky, the arbitrageur known for his best-selling autobiography in praise of greed, was constantly in demand as a commencement speaker at the nation’s universities.

68. Among books of the first class, all of them derived from P.T. Barnum’s The Art of Money-Getting published in 1840, I think of Iacocca, In Search of Excellence and The Seven Minute Manager. Books of the second class include Wealth and Poverty, Losing Ground and Two Cheers for Capitalism.

69. Nor does the entrepreneurial temperament prosper within the institutional restraints of a gigantic corporation. Anybody who has any doubts on this score needs only to read the accounts of the disagreements between Roger Smith, chairman of General Motors, and H. Ross Perot, the Texas computer magnate who bought a large block of the company’s stock. Perot served for several months on the company’s board of directors and then quit in disgust, baffled by the company’s stupidity.

70. In 1986 the Defense Department estimated it had paid $50 billion for equipment that didn’t work.

71. As editor of a magazine that continues to publish informed writing, I’m happy to say that I still can find a good many exceptions to the general rule of narcissism. Among the writers whom I think especially good, I would list Evan Connell, Walker Percy, Robert Stone, Larry Heinemann and Joan Didion.

72. The advertisement quite properly omits any reference to the less flattering aspects of Affluence, America. The apologist doesn’t seek out statistics on the other side of the coin—for example, 2 of 5 in the hands of a psychoanalyst; 1 of 2 divorced; 8 of 10 estranged from their children; 3 of 4 complain of chronic depression; 4 of 8 addicted to cocaine; 1 of 5 under indictment for theft or fraud, etc., etc.

73. As of April 1986, the two residents of the Trump Tower who had been most in the news (i.e., titular heirs to the aura that once drifted around the heads of the Astors, the Whitneys and the Vanderbilts) were Johnny Carson and a notorious madam.

74. Magazines practice similar acts of exclusion when they prune their subscription lists of readers who inhabit the poorer zip codes. Advertisers pay higher rates for affluent audiences, and they don’t wish to associate their products with buyers of an inferior class. The Chubb Insurance Group places its advertisements only in those magazines that can claim readers with an average net worth of $500,000.

75. When Americans travel abroad they carry with them their passion for security. The oil company compounds in Saudi Arabia, like the military enclaves in South Vietnam and the expatriate colonies in Paris and Rome, replicate the safe houses of the American rich.

76. The citizens of California support 1,654 alarm companies, and in Miami a mechanic charges $50,000 to equip a Cadillac with gunports, floor armor and the capacity to release tear gas. When interviewed by The New York Times in the spring of 1983 the mechanic had so many orders on hand that he couldn’t promise delivery for six months.

77. When the late William Casey, formerly director of the CIA, played golf at Palm Beach, he ambled around the course in the company of two Secret Service agents armed with machine guns.

78. Testifying before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Shultz characterized American diplomats as “front-line troops” in the war against terrorism. “They are,” he said, “being shot at.” When traveling in Bogotá, Colombia, in 1985, Shultz was accompanied by 151 bodyguards.

79. In 1980 tariffs protected 20 percent of American goods; by 1987 the favor had been granted to 35 percent of American goods.

80. Among the rich the worst quarrels occur during the summer or Christmas holidays. Everybody is supposed to be having a good time, and it’s annoying to be interrupted at one’s games or be reminded of one’s mortality.

81. In his State of the Union address in 1987, President Reagan said, “The calendar can’t measure America because we were meant to be an endless experiment in freedom, with no limit to our reaches, no boundaries to what we can do, no end point to our hopes.” Some months earlier a New York City schoolteacher, explaining why it was pointless to teach history, said, “Our children don’t think they have anything to learn from dead people.”

82. President Reagan was elected on the promise to balance the budget. Within six years his administration had run up the national debt to $2 trillion.

83. Habits of the Heart, published in 1985 by the University of California Press, presents interviews with two hundred people who, despite their material comforts, professed themselves as mute as stones, utterly lacking a language in which they could express their longings, their moral purposes, the point of their lives.

84. Remarking on the stasis of celebrity, Whoopi Goldberg told Playboy magazine in 1987, “Stars don’t get to do anything. Stars only are. They’re a state of mind.”

85. Charles Francis Adams, reflecting in his autobiography on his life in the railroad business and his long acquaintance with such men as E.H. Harriman and J.P. Morgan, wrote: “A less interesting crowd I do not care to encounter. Not one that I have ever known would I care to meet again, either in this world or the next; nor is one of them associated in my mind with the idea of humor, thought or refinement.”

86. Ralph Nader encountered the preferred sensibility when, in the course of questioning corporate magnates for his book The Big Boys, he attempted to interview John Welch, chairman of General Electric: “I was making a final entreaty for an interview when suddenly Welch’s voice changed to a mixture of rapid pleading and a ‘lemme outta here’ tone. ‘I don’t need this,’ he cried. ‘I’m just a boy with knickers and a lollipop. I don’t want to be part of a book. I’m just a grungy, lousy manager . . . . You can have access to the company on any other basis . . . . I don’t want a high profile . . . . I’m just a grunt . . . . I’m just a man in a room.’ No combination of written words could capture the wonderfully off-the-cuff, ingenuous voice of this supercharged general of GE.”

87. Cornelia Guest, proclaimed deb of the year in 1983, informed a representative of The Washington Post, “Everything is going to stay exactly the same in New York. Nothing is going to change. The people aren’t going to change. The parties aren’t going to change.”

88. In most environmental tracts, as well as in a good many popular movies, the future is barely recognizable as human; it appears in the guise of something dark and unclean, as if it were a monstrous womb likely to give birth to mutant and crawling things. On seeing the first ascent of Montgolfier’s balloon from the palace of the Tuileries in 1783, the Maréchale de Villeroi, an ancient noblewoman of the ancien régime, fell back among the cushions of her carriage and sobbed, “Oh yes, now it’s certain! One day they’ll learn how to keep people alive forever, but 1 shall already be dead.”

89. Jonathan Kozol estimates that as many as 70 million Americans don’t have the skill to read the Bill of Rights.

90. When testifying before Congress, Robert F. Kennedy read cue cards held up by his assistants, laboriously mouthing the words that he hadn’t previously seen and barely understood.

91. I have heard this moment in time variously given as 1954, 1962, 1974, 1977, 1980, 1984.

92. That anybody continues to take seriously Henry Kissinger’s opinions, much less his comic opera visions of nineteenth-century realpolitik, strikes me as a wonderful testimony to the credulity of the age. Kissinger has been wrong, utterly and consistently, about every important realignment of international affairs over the last quarter of a century—wrong about the Russians, the Vietnamese, the American Congress, Nicaragua and the Shah of Iran; wrong about strategic bombing, oil prices, inflation, terrorism and the international currency markets.

93. The rules of the encampment prohibit the admission of women to the precincts of the Grove. Members seeking sexual diversion could go “over the wall” to one or another of the temporary bawdy houses in Guerneyville. During the encampment the San Francisco Police Department took over the management of these cabins to make sure that none of the young ladies, perhaps too much impressed by the wealth and celebrity of their clients, should give way to the extortionist temptations of higher capitalism.

94. The U.S. Army expects its officers to have heard “the sound of the guns,” which means that for an officer to receive promotion to the rank of general he must have commanded, at least once in his career, troops under fire. It doesn’t matter so much whether the officer lost half his men in a poorly calculated assault. What matters is that he was there, that he acquired the distinction of being present. When I first went to work in the newspaper business it was useful to have served, at least for a few months, as a police reporter; later it became important to have covered, no matter how inaccurately, the war in Vietnam.

95. At the age of thirty, still undecided as to what part he wished to play in the world, the retired gunfighter was still fool enough to think he had a choice. He once showed me passages from a journal he kept in the summer of 1965. In June he was considering a career as a poet. In July he remembered that his mother owned a large interest in Lehman Brothers, and it occurred to him to become an investment banker and accept his fate as an enemy of the common man. In September, remembering the example of his uncle, he was considering the vagabond life of a professional gambler.

96. Delighted with his success. Kaplan has since repeated his performance with symphony orchestras in Budapest, Tokyo and Rio de Janeiro. Presumably the maestro was thoughtful enough to bestow on the orchestras some sort of gratuity expressive of his sympathy and appreciation.

97. The 1986 variation on Cimino’s theme of egoism was the production of Ishtar, directed by Elaine May and starring both Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman. Columbia bought the names without seeing the script. Five months late and priced at $51 million ($28 million over budget), the film was pronounced dead on arrival at the box office.

Before traveling to the Venice summit conference in the spring of 1987, Nancy Reagan sent an equerry to adjust all the mirrors in the villa in which she would be spending three days. She wanted to be sure that the mirrors were hung to the height at which she was accustomed to seeing the most flattering reflection of herself.

98. While serving as secretary of state during the early years of the Reagan administration, General Alexander Haig refused to travel to Europe in an Air Force plane that lacked proper windows. Most journalists of any reputation insist on first-class airline accommodations when invited to make speeches about the inequities of the American distributions of wealth.

99. In early October 1986 the wisest counselors in the mass media believed (together with almost everybody else in the country) that what they called “the Reagan Era” would last until the end of the century. By Christmas, poking around in the wreckage of the Iranian arms scandal, they wondered if President Reagan could survive another week in office.

100. The media, of course, discovered that something was amiss only after the catastrophes had been made explicit. Intent upon preserving the illusions of America the Beautiful, the media cannot bring themselves to question the pomp and majesty of apparent success. They conduct inquests, not investigations.

101. Moynihan’s remark also echoed the even earlier observation of David Burnham who, recognizing the ritual nature of modern government, described the president as “the Pontifex Maximus of the American civil religion.”

102. Weightlessness was reflected in the marketing strategies of the last few years: lightness of things—beer, cars, diet, relations between people, shampoos, images, music, lack of attachment. There have been 352 lite or light products in supermarkets since 1982.

Stendhal noticed the peculiar gravitational effects as long ago as 1840. “When I lack money,” he said, “I’m bashful wherever I go. I must absolutely get over this. The best way would be to carry a hundred gold louis in my pocket every day for a year. The constant weight of the gold would destroy the root of evil.”

103. Possibly the stupidest of these spectacles pitted the Bendix Corporation against the Martin Marietta Corporation. Before the comedy was finished, Allied Corporation and United Technologies appeared onstage, with the result that four primary American defense contractors holding combined assets of several hundred billion dollars recruited a small army of lawyers and investment bankers to assuage the vanity of a few overpriced plutocrats worried about their place in the sun. It was never clear what Bendix wanted, just as it was never clear why Mobil acquired, at ruinous expense, Montgomery Ward, or why Carl Icahn, proclaiming he knew nothing of airlines, felt compelled to buy TWA and force the company to the edge of bankruptcy.

104. Of the 10,000 parties arranged by Ridgewell’s Caterers in Washington in 1986, at least 80 percent were paid for by a corporate patron. Similar ratios undoubtedly prevail in New York and Los Angeles. If the chairman wishes to say something important about trade or literature or geopolitics, learned public relations counsel provide a text suitably embossed with ancient quotations.

105. Among both men and women the incidence of marital infidelity rises in conjunction with increase in income. Of the married men earning $20,000 a year, only 31 percent conduct extracurricular love affairs; of the men earning more than $60,000, 70 percent.

106. The pagan instinct runs counter to the idea of civilization, which defines itself as an advance toward impersonality—toward a system of justice that doesn’t depend on the whim of a judge, toward a conception of art that rests on something other than applause for the signing of the emperor’s concubine. Albert Einstein once remarked that the beauty as well as the utility of science consists precisely in its impersonality. Of Sir Isaac Newton’s art it is impossible for critics to say that because they really don’t care much for Newton, the laws of motion deserve a bad review.

107. When one of the members fails to show up on the first tee of a truly exclusive golf club, his companions seldom bother to ask more than a perfunctory question as to his whereabouts. Walking down the fairway to the first green somebody might say, “I wonder what happened to Harry Brooks” in just about the same tone of voice that he might say, while walking down the second fairway, “I wonder what happened in Vietnam.” Neither question is serious because neither answer is important.

108. The repeated failures of American policy in Iran (in the Nixon, Carter and Reagan administrations) proceeded from the same sort of profound ignorance. Few of the intelligence agents sent to Iran bothered to learn the Persian language; Nixon and Kissinger understood nothing of the economics of oil; Carter thought the Shah invincible, and Reagan’s roadshow Machiavellians (Robert McFarlane, John Poindexter and Oliver North) couldn’t tell the difference between a terrorist, an arms merchant and a mullah.

109. Salvador Dali, at the age of eighty-two and embarked on the promotion of a new perfume, gave a press interview in 1986 in which he discussed his lifelong study of alchemy. “Liking money like I like it,” he said, “is nothing less than mysticism. Money is a glory.”

A year later Suzy Knickerbocker confided to the readers of her gossip column in the New York Post, “Perhaps it’s dreadful that money is God, but that’s the story.”

110. Precisely this superstition accounts for the continuing preoccupation with the sinking of the Titanic. Like the ship of which they were representative, the wealthy personages on board, among them an Astor and a Widener, were supposed to be invincible, gods of Henry Adams’s “bankers’ Olympus.” Two days later, on April 1912, the Empress of Ireland sunk in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, drowning 1,000 passengers. Nobody remembers the incident because the deceased belonged to an invisible and nonequestrian social class.

111. Within the not too distant future the wonders of biotechnology undoubtedly will allow the very rich to buy not only new hearts, lungs and kidneys but also new brain tissue exempting them from the sorrows of senility. As likely as not the market in human organs will be supplied by donors in the impoverished regions of the Third World, proving the truth of the Yiddish proverb: “If the rich could hire other people to die for them, the poor could make a wonderful living.”

112. Observing the timidity of the plutocracy in nineteenth century France, Jules and Edmond Goncourt composed for their cousin on the Bourse a rich man’s prayer: “Oh Lord, may my urine be less cloudy and my hemorrhoids less annoying. May I live long enough to make another 100,000 francs. May the Emperor stay in power so that my income will increase, and may Anzin coal continue to rise on the stock market.” The text and tone of the prayer admirably expresses the spirit not only of Ivan Boesky and Carl Icahn but also that of the presidents of most American banks and business corporations.

As further testimony to the American faith in money a poll conducted in 1985 discovered that more of the respondents were afraid of evil consequences implicit in a credit card than in a nuclear bomb.

113. We have almost as many transcendental definitions of money—“store of value,” “means of measurement,” “instrument of power,” “symbol economy,” “universal commodity,” etc.—as Muslims have names for Allah. The banking community in New York revered Paul Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, as the great shaman who rescued everybody from the flood and fire apt to accompany a repudiation of the Third World debt. The bankers clung to this belief despite the fact that the FDIC in 1987 possessed a fund of only $13 billion with which to pay depositors of failed banks.

114. Sir Walter Raleigh, promoter of the first American colony in Virginia, perfectly embodied the spirit of the new country. At the age of sixty-four, convinced he was going to find “The City of the Golden Man” on the upper reaches of the Orinoco River, he sold all of his own and his wife’s property to outfit the expedition. He envisioned a trail over a mountain of crystal to a high, cold city, its walls and roofs decorated with golden jackals and encrusted with precious stones. To a doubting investor he said he was as sure of finding the place as of “not missing the way from my dining room to my bedchamber.”

115. Asked to comment on the loss of jobs likely to result from the collapse of that bank, an impatient bank examiner, looking for trace elements of liquidity in the desert of the balance sheet, said, in an irritated tone of voice, “Excuse me, I only represent banks, not people.”

116. Toward the end of what had been a mercifully placid career, my uncle retired in some haste when his bank was driven to the ledge of bankruptcy by a convergence of bad loans Several unscrupulous debtors had falsified their credit statements, and my uncle went to Weston, Connecticut, believing that the country was doomed. He joined right-wing political organizations and devoted the last fifteen years of his life to writing sermons in the form of letters to newspaper editors.

117. Within the last two or three years all the admiring journalistic accounts about the “new breed of traders” on Wall Street (i.e., the young men earning upwards of $1 million a year at the First Boston Corporation or Goldman Sachs) mention the monkish habits of the brotherhood. Everybody rises at 5 a.m., to charter a Lear jet or make a call to London; hardly anybody sleeps more than a few hours a night or eats anything except bologna sandwiches. Speaking of their devotion to money, a psychiatrist quoted in The Wall Street Journal observed, “To these people business is God.”

118. Also by anybody who has had to listen to an after-dinner speech by Donald Trump or George Steinbrenner’s exposition of a baseball season.

119. By now, of course, Auden would have had to amend his observation to account for the descent of women into the pits of trade. Not only the proof of manhood but also the proof of womanhood rests on the capacity to make a fortune. “A poor American,” Auden said, “feels guilty at being poor, but less guilty than an American rentier who has inherited wealth but is doing nothing to increase it. What can the latter do but take to drink and psychoanalysis?”

120. To a biographer Rockefeller once said: “I know of nothing more despicable and pathetic than a man who devotes all the hours of the waking day to the making of money for money’s sake.”

121. Ivan Boesky attributed his crimes to his own too passionate love of money, “a sickness I have in the face of which I am helpless.”

122. American business cannot compete because it hasn’t been trained to compete, at least not in arenas that bear anything other than a metaphorical resemblance to a free market. At least one quarter, and perhaps one third, of the American economy provides goods and services to a federal government (a.k.a. “Uncle Sugar”) notorious for its corrupt purchasing practices. The larger American industries depend on the convenience of rigged prices and the protection of monopoly.

123. In the spring of 1986 a gentleman’s mistress sued his wife for “alienation of affection,” and a number of children in several states sued their parents for “wrongful upbringing.”

124. In Manhattan modest one-bedroom apartments sell for $250,000; larger apartments sell for as much as $5 million. Rents priced at $1,500 a month are considered cheap. Elsewhere in the country approximately 10 million people give up more than 35 percent of their income to the cost of housing. At those rates a lot of people cannot afford to move around much anymore, and they become, quite literally, immobile.

125. On being asked about his life in society, the husband of one of New York’s most well-known and often-photographed guests said, “I follow my wife’s dresses.”

126. The comparable states of mind habitual to the American plutocracy of the Gilded Age aroused Teddy Roosevelt’s lifelong loathing for “the kind of money-maker whose soul has grown hard while his body has grown soft.”

127. Precisely the same tone of voice characterized the American announcement, by Secretaries Shultz and Weinberger, of the bombing raid on Libya in the spring of 1986.

128. As of the present writing only four journalists hold a proper license—Russell Baker, Art Buchwald, Dave Barry and Roy Blount—suggesting that one of the requirements for the office is a surname beginning with the letter B. Other journalists must be careful of their deportment. Above all, they must restrain the impulse to laugh. A best-selling tract, no matter what the burden of its improving text (cf. the works of Carl Sagan, George Gilder, Charles Reich, David Halberstam, Norman Cousins, Norman Podhoretz, etc.), is, by definition, humorless.

129. Under the prevailing set of superstitions, the big campaign money aligns itself with incumbents. For the senatorial election in the autumn of 1986 Senator Robert Dole (R.-Kan.) easily raised by September 15 a fund of $2,141,466. His opponent had found it hard to come up with $751.

130. The fatuity of the British peerage prompted the lords to a flattering estimate of the nation’s military prowess. Some months prior to the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, a British general and aide-de-camp to George III boasted, in the presence of Benjamin Franklin, that with 1,000 grenadiers he would undertake “to go from one end of America to the other and geld all the males, partly by force and partly by a little coaxing.” The tone of voice brings to mind the American assumption of a Vietnamese rabble and Lyndon Johnson saying he was damned if he was going to be frightened of “a raggedy-ass little fourth-rate country.”

131. The corporate grandees make a brave show of talking about risk and the maximization of profit. The set phrases appear in after-dinner speeches and annual reports, in memoranda circulated among junior management, in statements to the press. The drone of ceaseless repetition testifies to the importance of the phrases as ritual chant, such as Reagan’s speech at St. John’s and Peter Grace, “Business is tough . . . it’s no kissing game.” But, of course, it is.

132. The emptiness of the faith in money reveals itself in the monthly best-seller lists, which, together with the instructor manuals for the making of new fortunes, contain so many tracts promising spiritual remedies for the despair associated with rabid consumerism.

133. Franklin expressed his disgust with the customs of the Old World as early as 1774, in a letter from London to John Galloway of Pennsylvania. Arguing against the idea of American independence at the First Continental Congress, Galloway had proposed some sort of union or federation between the colonies and Britain. Franklin thought the British too degraded in their political habits of mind, and he asked Galloway to consider “the extreme corruption prevalent among all orders of men in this old rotten state,” with its “numberless and needless places, enormous salaries, pensions, perquisites, bribes, groundless quarrels, foolish expeditions, false accounts or no accounts, contracts and jobs [that] devour all revenue.” Writing from London in the same decade, John Adams compared the city to the old Roman Republic, “venal and ripe for destruction.” Together with Franklin and Jugurtha, Adams could as easily have been writing about Washington in the 1980s.

134. Psychiatrists with a practice among Wall Street financiers describe the resident superstitions in the language of clinical pathology. Writing in The New York Times in May 1987, Jay B. Rohrlich, identified as a “partner” in a “psychological consulting firm,” compared the effects of addiction to money with those resulting from addictions to drugs and alcohol. Apropos the euphoric states associated with “the big numbers,” Rohrlich said: “An ‘injection’ of money can make people feel instantly secure, victorious, strong, loved, proud and sexually attractive. Money becomes the antidote to a perceived sense of insufficiency.”

135. In February 1987 the Worldwatch Institute published a report stating that if the exploitation of the earth’s natural resources continued at its current rate, we could look forward not only to mass exterminations of plant and animal species but also to a changed climate and a severely damaged atmosphere. The United Nations reiterated the lesson in late April of the same year, publishing an even more ominous report about the likelihood of a “radically altered planet.” Both reports mentioned the stupidity of spending so much money on weapons and so little on the preservation of the seas and forests. The American government’s 1986 appropriation of $100 billion for the Navy’s Trident II submarine and F-18 jet fighter programs would pay the cost of cleaning up 10,000 toxic waste dumps that contaminate the nation’s water and soil.