Interesting Quotes from my writing Friends;

Louis H. Lapham, essayist; Harpers Magazine, Lapham’s Quarterly….. From Money and Class In America, 2018……. “A frivolous Society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys. Its tragic implications lie in its power of debasing people and ideals.” — Edith Wharton “The populace may hiss me, but when I go home and think of my money, I applaud myself.. — Horace………………………………………………………. At the higher elevations of informed American opinion in the spring of 2018 the voices of reason stand united in their fear and loathing of Donald J. Trump, real estate mogul, reality TV star, forty-fifth president of the United States. Their viewing with alarm is bipartisan and heartfelt, but the dumbfounded question, “How can such things be?” is well behind the times. Trump is undoubtedly a menace, but he isn’t a surprise. His smug and self-satisfied face is the face is the face of the way things are and have been in Washington and Wall Street for the last quarter of a century……………………Trump staked his claim to the White House on the proposition that he was “really rich,” embodiment of the divine right of money and therefore free to say and do whatever it takes to make America great again. A deus ex machina descending an escalator into the atrium of his eponymous tower on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue in June 2015, Trump was there to say, and say it plainly, that money is power, and power, ladies and gentlemen, is not self-sacrificing or democratic. The big money cares for nothing other than itself, always has and always will. Name of the game, nature of the beast……………Not the exact words in Trump’s loud and thoughtless mouth, but the gist of the message that over the next seventeen months he shouted to fairground crowd and camera in states red, white and blue. A fair enough share of his fellow citizens screamed, stamped and voted in agreement because what he was saying they knew to be true, knew it not as precept borrowed from the collected works of V.I. Lenin or Ralph Lauren but from their own downwardly mobile experience on the losing side of a class war waged over the past forty years by America’s increasingly frightened and selfish rich against it’s increasingly angry and debt-bound poor…………………………………………Trump didn’t need briefing papers to refine the message. He presented it live and in person, an unscripted and overweight canary flown from its gilded cage, telling it like it is when seen from the perch of the haves looking down on the birdseed of the have nots. Had he time or patience for looking into books instead of mirrors, he could have sourced his wisdom to Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who in 1933 presented his case for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal: “We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” ………………………………………………………………………………Not that it would have occurred to Trump to want both, but he might have to been glad to know the Supreme Court had excused him from further study under the heading of politics. In the world according to Trump — As it was in the worlds according to Ronald Reagan, George Bush pere et fils, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — the concentration of wealth is the good, the true and the beautiful. Democracy is for losers………………………………………………Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980 with an attitude and agenda similar to Trump’s — to restore America to its rightful place where “someone can always get rich.” His administration arrived in Washington firm in its resolve to uproot the democratic style of feeling and thought that underwrote FDR’s New Deal. What was billed as the Reagan Revolution and the dawning of a New Morning in America recruited various parties of the dissatisfied right (conservative, neoconservative, libertarian, reactionary and evangelical) under one flag of abiding and transcendent truth — money ennobles rich people, making them healthy, wealthy and wise; money corrupts poor people, making them ignorant, lazy and sick……………………………………………Re-branded as neoliberalism in the 1990’s the doctrine of enlightened selfishness has served as the wisdom in political and cultural office ever since Reagan stepped onto the White House Stage promising a happy return to an imaginary American past — to the home on the range made safe from the Apaches by John Wayne, an America once again cowboy-hatted and standing tall, risen from the ashes of defeat in Vietnam, cleansed of its Watergate impurities, outspending the Russians on weapons of mass destruction, releasing the free market from the prison of government regulation, going long on the private good, selling short the public good………………………For forty years under administrations Republican and Democrat, the concentrations of wealth and power have systematically shuffled public land and light and air into a private purse, extended the reach of corporate monopoly, shifted the bulk of the nations income to its top-tier fatted calves, let fall into disrepair nearly all the infrastructure — roads, water systems, schools, bridges, hospitals and power plants — that provides a democratic commonwealth with the means of production for its mutual enterprise. The subdivision of America the Beautiful into a nation of the rich and a nation of the poor has outfitted a tenth of the population with three-quarters of the nation’s wealth. The work in progress has been accompanied by the construction of a national security and surveillance state backed by the guarantee of never-ending foreign war and equipped with increasingly repressive police powers to quiet the voices of domestic discontent. In the 1950’s the word public indicated a common good (Public health, public school, public service, public spirit); private was a synonym for selfishness and greed (plutocrats in top hats, pigs at troughs) The connotations traded places in the 1980’s; private to be associated with all things bright and beautiful (private trainer, private school, private plane), a synonym for all things ugly, incompetent and unclean (public housing, public welfare, public toilet)…..Reagan left office in 1989, the same year Donald J. Trump emerged as poster child for what the news media were touting as a second coming of an American Gilded Age more gloriously frivolous than the one known to Commodore Vanderbilt and Big Jim Fisk, money was the hero with a thousand faces, greed the creative frenzy from which all blessings conspicuously flow. Time magazine in 1989 posed Trump on its cover fondling the ace of diamonds; Trump’s photograph was decorating college dormitory walls once reserved for posters of Dylan and Che; Trump’s 1987 book, The Art Of The Deal, was up there in lights with Oliver Stone’s Wall Street and Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities……………………………When Money and Class in America was published in 1988, Trump showed up for the welcoming dinner party given by Ann Getty, billionaire patron of the arts and proud new owner of Weidenfeld & Nicolson, the books publisher. She didn’t expect Trump to read the book; his simple acknowledgement of its existence could be construed in 1988 as baptism in the temple of Mammon. Although the joke was unintended, his presence in the in Getty’s fifth avenue apartment seconded the motion of the book, which was to draw a satirical portrait of a society captivated by the story of Midas, mighty King in Greek and Roman legend, who wished that everything he touched be turned to Gold. So too in 1988 the consummation devoutly wished in all quarters of the body politic, on every tabloid forehead, breast and buttock angling to become commodity or brand, minted into the coin of divine celebrity…………………………………Midas wish was granted by Dionysus, god of wine and ecstasy, and for one bright morning in antiquity the king rejoiced in changing sticks and stones and sunflowers into precious heavy metal. But then, so did his food and drink turn to gold when he touched it with his wonder-working hands, and he would have died of thirst before he died of hunger had not Dionysus released him from the prison of his golden wish…..The ancient king at least had the wit to know something had gone wrong with the IPO. Unable to lift or taste les poissons d’or he begged the god of wine and ecstasy for deliverance, and in 1988 I expected America’s propertied classes to experience a similar awakening. To mark the Midas touch to market — not a glad tiding of comfort and joy, the kiss of peace and death bestowed by the mobster god in the machine of creatively destructive capitalism. The writing of Money and Class in America followed from the assumption that the country’s befuddled overlords would soon regain their wits. At Ann Getty’s dinner table listening to Trump talk — lovingly about himself, loudly about stray topics running around loose in his Rush Limbaugh ditto-head — I took solace in the thought that any trend or spirit of the times shaped in the image of his willful ignorance and grotesque vanity was on final approach to its sell-by date……………………I was mistaken. Thirty years later Trump is President of the United States, and what in 1988 was a weakened but still operational Democracy has become a dysfunctional, stupefied plutocracy. No matter who occupies the White House, or what the issue to hand in Congress (Environment or debt, military spending, immigration, health care, education, the wars on poverty, drugs, and terror) the concentrations of wealth and power impose more laws restraining the liberty of persons, fewer laws restricting the license of property; open an ever-widening spread of income inequality, reserve an ever-larger share of the nation’s wealth to an ever- smaller fraction of its people…… If you have followed along with this and want more of Mr. Lapham’s eredite writing, please feel free to purchase “Money and Class in America, 2018 edition, paperback ISBN 978–1–944869–89–2 OR Books…..