Just watched Margin Call the 2011 film about the Wall Street fiasco that resulted in the collapse of Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns and which revealed Goldman Sachs as a ruthless company which swindled its own customers to maximize profits for itself.
And this morning, I read in the New York Times wedding announcements about the wedding of one of the kids from our old neighborhood, who had grown up and gone to medical school.
Yesterday, I watched that superb documentary: Stronger, Faster, Higher which is nominally about the use of androgens by professional athletes, competitive weight lifters and run of the mill gym rates. But saying Stronger, Faster, Higher is about androgen abuse is like saying Huck Finn is a book about a kid on a raft.
You will ask: What could connect these three experiences?
I myself have pondered the connection and come up with this: They are all about the idea of what it means to be successful, of winning, in American life.
In the case of the Margin Call, you get very quickly caught up in the culture of this Wall Street trading firm, as employees are escorted out of the offices by security guards, carrying personal effects from their offices in cardboard boxes, as their fellow employees watch, knowing they may be next. if they do not meet their sales goals. And you have a sense of the disgrace and economic peril visited upon the fired employees. Those fired employees of this Goldman Sachs like place have likely been stars all their lives, have graduated from Princeton and Yale and even MIT, and now have been booted out, prospects uncertain. In the end, one of the senior employees tells us about how he built a bridge when he was an engineer, before he started his career on Wall Street, and how wonderful that solid accomplishment felt: He had saved the people who used that bridged years of time which would otherwise have been spent in cars commuting longer distances. And you see what he got for leaving his career as an engineer--his beautiful home in Brooklyn Heights.
In Stronger Faster, Higher, you see the fantasies which make life livable for so many Americans in different circumstances and subcultures, the idea of success and value which is so plain and pathetic. The father of a boy who was a star baseball player in a Texas high school tells the camera his son's death has meaning because he's set up a foundation to fight androgen abuse, and it was androgen abuse which killed his son. Well, it turns out his son: A/ Had depression B/ Was being treated with Lexapro and either of these, or something else entirely, might have been more important to his decision to hang himself in his own room. But for the father, "All I have to know is my son is dead and he used Androgens. I don't need to know anything else." That is, he doesn't want to know anything else. He prefers faith and his own version of the truth. His son was a success in that Texas town, but apparently not in his own mind. And now something successful, some win has to emerge for the father--the foundation, testifying before Congress, keeping his son's room as a shrine.
The neighborhood kid in the Times, left his home town a success. He had his share of disappointment and loss in high school--he didn't make the high school soccer team after having been a star in club soccer teams before high school, but this high school is super competitive and most of the starters were kids from Brazil and Europe and the local kids who grew up playing teams coached by their parents were not going to win positions on that team. But he got into Penn, an Ivy League school, and emerged a winner. Except competing against all his Ivy League classmates, he could not get the grades to get into an American medical school and had to go to St. George's in Grenada, offshore. There he met a woman who had had a similar experience, from Georgetown to Grenada. But persistence is very important to anyone who wants to succeed in medicine, and they clawed their way back to the States and both got residencies in fields which are very competitive--orthopedics and plastic surgery. True, they are doing these residencies at a state school, but once they are trained and pass their boards, they will be winners again, and they will get paid the same fees graduates of Harvard medical schools get paid.
So what is success, in this country?
It is, ultimately, what Thoreau described: It is a man's own opinion of himself.
One of the weight lifters talks about his dream of becoming a star professional wrestler, and his frustration that he has never been chosen to be one of the actors on the circuit. His hero, growing up, had been Hulk Hogan, but that career would never happen for this loser. "But I know I was born to greatness. I'm out here and California now. One day, I may be walking down the street and someone may pull me over and say, 'Can I talk to you for a moment?' And that could never happen in Poughkeepsie."
So what is success? In America, it's money; it's finding the right mate; it's getting into the competitive school; it's getting the competitive position at the competitive institution. Until you get all that and discover, not really.
America is about pointless competitiveness, about style over substance and about emotion gaining ascendance over rationality. It is a place which is so big, so diverse, there is no core. New York City is the essence of America. Shaker Heights, Scarsdale, Bethesda, Chapel Hill, Plano, Chevy Chase, Gross Point, Winetka, Darien, none of the rich suburbs or small towns, where people share a core set of values is the real America. They are all versions of Fantasyland.
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