[Reader-list] FINANCE: Waiting for Schadenfreude

[Naeem Mohaiemen]

"Schadenfreude is impossible because the fat cats ‹ the ones who bent the
rules, the ones who pushed the envelopes, the ones who paid lower taxes
because capital gains were most of their income, the ones who opposed
regulations on the banking and mortgage industries ‹ are taking us down with
them."


October 2, 2008, 10:02 PM
Waiting for Schadenfreude

Judith Warner

(Judith Warner's book, "Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety",
a New York Times best-seller, was published in February 2005.)

A couple of years ago, at the height of the boom, a friend in New York
publishing described to me the indignities of being a five-figure employee
commuting daily from suburban New Jersey on trains packed with traders,
stock brokers and hedge-fund types.

³These were the guys who, in college, I used to step over on Sunday mornings
when they were lying in a pool of their own vomit,² he said. ³And now
they¹re earning millions and millions ­ in bonuses alone.²

The image, as you might imagine, stuck in my mind. For it summed up so well
a certain kind of resentment and sense of injustice that a particular class
of non-monied professionals in the New York area came to feel sometime in
the late 1990s.

The feeling of injustice wasn¹t just about money, though it was partly about
being more than solidly middle class and still struggling to pay the bills,
as New York writer Vince Passaro captured so well in his ³Reflections on the
Art of Going Broke² (³Who¹ll Stop the Drain?²) in Harper¹s in 1998.

It was, rather, about a sense that the wrong people had inherited the earth.

They had taken over everything. Their salaries (and bonuses in particular)
had pushed real estate costs and living expenses sky-high. Their values had
permeated every aspect of life. And their choices seemed to have become the
only acceptable ‹ even viable ‹ ones possible.

In the 1970s, even in New York, it had been financially possible for a
middle class family to survive if parents ‹ even one parent ‹ built a
professional life around something other than purely making money. In the
1980s ‹ even in the ³greed is good² (which was of course meant to be a
damning phrase) 1980s ‹ it seemed respectable, honorable and, dare I say,
valuable to do things other than make a lot of money. But by the late 1990s,
in New York, if you weren¹t in the financial industry, it was hard to
survive.

And so it went, in a more general way, throughout the country, in the whole
winner-take-all-era ushered in by the boom years of the late 1990s. The
model for success narrowed. The goal posts marking success grew more out of
reach. For all the people who did something with their lives other than
doggedly, single-mindedly ‹ and successfully ‹ pursuing wealth (³You mean,
some people¹s jobs are just about making money?² Julia once asked me in the
course of one of our ³What the World is About² conversations), life got
harder and scarier and more confusing.

Many of us who¹d proudly decided, in our twenties, to pursue edifying or
creative, or ³helping² professions, woke up to realize, once we had
families, that we¹d perhaps been irresponsible. We couldn¹t save for
college. We could barely save for retirement. If we set up a
³family-friendly² lifestyle, we threw our financial futures down the drain.

So, like just about everyone, we worked hard and treaded water, but felt we
were entitled to do better than that. And if we lived in the New York area,
or another similarly wealthy area where the spoils of the new Gilded Age
were constantly thrust in our faces, we felt, like my friend on the train, a
little something more: we knew that we were losers.

(³The Big L,² a friend, an art school grad turned design consultant,
declared last week, calling me in tears after her stockbroker told her how
little she cared about her modest portfolio. ³Why not just brand it right on
my forehead and be done with it?²)

This financial crisis is supposed to be a big moment of reckoning. ³666-Mark
of the Beast² and ³Root of all Evil² the End-of-World Web sites are
shouting, quoting prominent economists on the demise of the American banking
system. ³Wall Street, R.I.P.², a headline in The Times proclaimed last
weekend. ³The Master of the Universe Era is over,² New York magazine chimed
in.

For those of us who have hated this period ‹ the wealth worship, the wealth
gap, the elevation of everything suspiciously shiny and irrationally bubbly
and stupidly ebullient, there should be some feeling of vindication. But it
just isn¹t coming. A great emptiness ‹ and a gnawing kind of fear ‹ has
taken its place.

After 9/11, psychologists said that the tragedy and trauma would magnify
whatever emotional state people were already experiencing. Depressed people
would become much more depressed. Anxious people would become much more
anxious.

The current financial crisis has, I think, proven to be a similar sort of
emotional Rorschach test. People who felt impotent feel even more powerless.
Those who felt lied to see new levels of conspiracy. Demagogues are engaging
in even more demagoguery.

And those of us who felt, well, like losers, are feeling like even bigger
losers, as we shove our unopened 401K or (if we¹re double-loser freelancers)
SEP-IRA statements into bottom desk drawers and wait for a cathartic burst
of schadenfreude that simply refuses to come.

Schadenfreude is impossible because the fat cats ‹ the ones who bent the
rules, the ones who pushed the envelopes, the ones who paid lower taxes
because capital gains were most of their income, the ones who opposed
regulations on the banking and mortgage industries ‹ are taking us down with
them.

The very wealthiest are, as always, likely to do just fine. Real, hard-core
Wall Street, as Tom Wolfe reminded us last weekend, long ago decamped for
the hedge funds of Greenwich. The political leaders who allowed this mess to
develop have turned into the great defenders of ³Main Street.² (If I have to
hear the juxtaposition of ³Main Street² and ³Wall Street² one more time, I
will be the one drowning in a pool of vomit.). It¹s a whole host of other
people ‹ vulnerable middle class homeowners and small business owners and,
now, universities unable to make payroll ‹ who are hurting.

I called my friend in publishing yesterday to ask him how things were going
on the train.

³There¹s a lot of rueful chuckling. There¹s a lot of talk about riding this
out, about maintaining,² is all he had to say.

It was 23 years ago that Tom Wolfe introduced us to the Masters of the
Universe. They were curiosities then ‹ remote, very rich, and decidedly not
like you and me. But now, the world of Wall Street has become our world;
there is no outside to it, there is no other option than to pay and play.
Our fortunes rise and fall together to a degree like never before, and our
values are enmeshed like never before. The language of Wall Street ‹ of
cost-cutting and efficiency, self-interest, using each situation to maximize
profit, is the language of everyday life and social interaction.

We¹re all losers now. There¹s no pleasure to it.