Tom Wolfe: The Rich Have Feelings Too - Vanity Fair

Do the rich have feelings too? In the latest issue of Vanity Fair, Tom Wolfe, who famously chronicled the buyout kings of the 1980s in The Bonfire Of The Vanities, seems to suggest the rich do, in fact feel emotions -- but only after they've been forced to fly coach.

Wolfe assumes the voice of a commodities trader who laments the loss of his company's prized private jets. Rhapsodizing about pre-Bailout era, the narrator salutes his CEO Robert J. McCorkle ("Corky"), who led offsites that were, well, memorable:

"One of the sweetest sounds in the world was Corky making the rounds up here on the executive floor, saying in his laid-back voice, "I feel like boffing some bimbos in the Caribbean. Anybody like to come along?"

In typical Wolfeian fashion, the narrator's prone to wide-ranging references. Nietzsche's "tarantulas" make an appearance, as do the former CEOs of the Big Three automakers. Here's more from Wolfe:

"At the risk of sounding condescending, we should point out that ordinary people haven't the faintest conception of the strain we had to endure daily. How many ordinary people have ever done anything remotely like betting $7.4 billion--bango!--just so!--that the price of energy will rise sharply 14 months from a certain date?"

It almost tugs on your heart strings. But not quite...Read the entire piece at Vanity Fair.

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Comments

[Aristofaness]

The fed need to borrow the cheap money directly to bussinesses and consumers before is tooooo late, the banks are looking for profit and the economy in main street is suffering, If the banks increase fees and rates the economy of most of consumers is going to colapse, They need to understand that IS NOT time to be looking for marvelous profits, IT'S TIME FOR A RATIONAL CAPITALISM AND TRY TO HELP CONSUMERS TO SURVIVE, NOT TO TERMINATE THEM.
50% OF THE SOLUTION TO THE ECONOMY IS BORROW TO CONSUMERS WITH ZERO INTEREST.
FED BERNANKE AND CONGRESS;
OPEN YOUR EYES!!!!!
DO YOUR JOB!!!!!, HELP THE ECONOMY!!!!
PROTECT CONSUMERS AND IN THIS WAY YOU CAN SAVE THE ECONOMY!!!!!
BORROW THEM THE CHEAP MONEY!!!!
BEFORE IS TOOOO LATE
YOU CAN SAVE THE MOTOR OF THE ECONOMY (THE CONSUMER) IN THIS WAY

[fabricnthreads]

Feelings, just not much of a conscience.

[raoulhubris]

Let me give up my job and health care if it will in some small way assuage the anguish suffered by the loss of a yacht or maid of some wall street banker.

[Godweiser]

How many of these masters of the universe have had the rounds whizzing by their ears? Yeah, it's great being a fifty something wall street whiz that's spent his whole life lurching from one binge to the next and relying on Uncle Sam to pick up the tab. They say my generation, the guys in a promotion freeze because these Boomers won't retire, the guys fighting Afghanistan and Iraq years on end, no end in sight, the guys that are set to pick up the tab on social security and a bunch of other stuff without collecting, are spoiled. But these guys truly and utterly take the cake.

They clearly need to do a tour in Helmand province if they need to bet money to get adrenaline flowing. The Corps or the Army can show them all the adrenaline they need. They might not like the rough cob company they'd find themselves in though.

We're fighting a war because these guys want a commercial empire that they don't have to pay for but profit from. I love how much they think of us 'little' people that prop these Caligulas up.

[LHoney]

Just so you know, most boomers can't retire because they have 401K's (now 101K's) instead of pensions. Most boomers will never be able to retire...

[Godweiser]

That's very true, and...well, sometimes my antagonism needs to be specified. The situation where Boomers can't retire isn't their fault any more than it is the fault of any other generation of citizen -- it wasn't one generation that sold themselves down the river after being manipulated by politicians stooging for the companies. They may get blamed unduly, though, as they were the most prosperous generation, and saw it get urinated away by Reagan era economic decisions, often insufficiently justified in rational terms.

[FogBelter]

Wealth has always been a narcotic that drives one to madness ... anyone who has viewed President Marcos in his stately glass coffin, flanked by Philippine and American flags, adorned in the finery of his political and economic station, in room echoing the recorded funeral mass, and designed to look like the cave where Jesus was resurrected, has evidence of it.

[Godweiser]

The problem is that Americans don't want to compare developing world corporate despots, and the business sector leadership here. The reality is that the same mentality motivates and if these people could rape us the way they rape Igbos in Nigeria, they would.

[xraygrrl]

I think that the resentment that average people feel towards the wealthy elite is not so simply shrugged off as "envy". I could care less if I can't have a yacht or fly on a private jet.
What irks me is that a system exists where WORKING people are not able to get by in life and raise their families. People are losing their homes and jobs while all the GDP gets funneled up to these arrogant SOBs.

[EminemsRevenge]

Yeah, when your HMO is Visa even though the company you work for has THESE kind of numbers:
All numbers in thousands
PERIOD ENDING 30-Apr-09 31-Jan-09 31-Oct-08 31-Jul-08
Total Revenue 92,233 97,557 115,452 119,092
Cost of Revenue 67,383 72,246 84,443 86,822

Gross Profit 24,850 25,311 31,009 32,270

and a P/E ratio of 14.43, the "let them eat cake" attitude tend to IRK us somewhat!

[doublels]

My beef also. I'm so tired of hearing about there never being enough money for education or how states are literally going broke. Show me the money!!

[Godweiser]

It's that they benefit from a system that is borne by us and we get no input. We fight the wars, do the work, pay the taxes, yet they have the ear of government because they 'provide the work' (whereas the reality is that the consumer with money in hand provides the actual work.)

I'm tired of Reaganomics, and I'm tired of Reagan-era relics like these guys.

You're right, they benefit disproportionately from a collective effort while what we reap out of this system dwindles. And they're not intelligent enough to know how to fix that system so they continue to benefit, they seem to feel entitled to bleed this country white and then rely on the taxpayer to guarantee them

I'm no socialist, though some Foghorn Leghorn republican might disagree (of course, he probably dropped out of high school and got the definition of the week from Limpbaws) but I think if a system doesn't adequately address the concerns of a substantial number within it, that system eventually will collapse one way or another. For now, much of the put-upon class are manipulated into thinking everything's fine through a combination of nationalism and overinflated claims designed to feed their fears of change, but that can't last forever.

The system needs to be fixed now, before the problem becomes acute and much worse arises from it. Desperate people do desperate things.

[xraygrrl]

The way the system is now really isn't much different from medieval feudalism. People who try to live on minimum wage...just can't. Not with the cost of living these days.
A lot of people talk about "Freedom". Freedom to do what? Go bankrupt if you get sick? Show up at a minimum wage job every day while you get further and further behind in your payments? A good portion of people are only a couple paychecks away from being out on the street.
Big money has usurped way to much power in the government.I wonder if it is already too late to stop them? They sit in their ivory towers and laugh at everyone as they squabble about partisan distractions.
Maybe the name of the country should be changed to "United Serfdom of America"

[JonnyTruant]

That's precisely the reason Bill Gates and Warren Buffett support progressive taxes, progressive capital investment taxes, and the estate tax, as well as progressive social programs. They recognize that in order for them to do well, they need a strong middle class. Without intelligent, capable consumers, they have no business.

[DiogenesOfAlaska]

At first, one might think that Tom Wolfe would be making the mistake of giving this whole airplane privilege thing way more importance than it has, and too much.

But that's not true. I think the whole thing was written as a wrap for putting the musings about Nietzsche and the tarantulas of resentment into the mouth of the privileged.

Because that really IS key. It is the self-serving sense of entitlement which is a major part of the problem. And the reason it is insanely difficult to get at it is precisely the tempting intricacy of Nietzsche's argument - of which Ayn Rand is a prole-version.

It's not only self-serving but it is self-sealing in the same way as simplistic psychobabble is. That's the cancererous part in it: no matter how you argue against it, you will always be interpreted as having MERELY expressed your resentment.

I think Tom Wolfe has done great work expressing this in an unassailable manner.

[dadw5boys]

Wolf makes it plain that some view wealth as a toy instead of a tool and that can only happen when extreme excess allows power to corrupt your thinking.

[DiogenesOfAlaska]

Well, the article is humoristic. So I'm not sure Wolf actually claims that executives really think that way. But the point remains: there is too little in place that could keep them from thinking and acting that way.

[dawlishgal]

There is a big difference between resenting the rich for being rich, and resenting the governments that increasingly cater to the rich AND the politicians who take their bribes in the form of campaign contributions.

The Republicans' concept of a free market is one that pays no penalties for cheating the little guy. Big insurance is the clearest case in point. How can competition work when insurance companies pay no meaningful penalties for having cheated. How can very sick or tully disabled people find a competitor willing to sell them policies?

I have lived through 15 years of big for-profit companies trying to cheat my husband by failing to honor the terms of his disability policies. When we weren't actually fighting the dishonesty (and my husband's employer was a huge help in this...they advocated for him and eventually they got the insurance companies to pay), we were worrying about what efforts would be made to cheat us in the future. It had a huge effect on our daily lives and our health because not knowing whether or not the life insurance would be paid made it necessary to count every penny and it caused a huge strain on our nervous systems, wondering if I would have to fight them after he died.

My husband died in May, and, sure enough, his life insurer (the one that had cooked up bogus reasons to not grant the premium-waiver when he became disabled) tried again to cheat us.

[doublels]

My sympathies on the loss of your husband and the terrible ordeal you had to suffer at the hands of a profit making insurer.

Your story says in a nutshell why there should be reform. How awful to have to fight till the day you die to obtain what is rightfully yours. It's abhorent.

[DiogenesOfAlaska]

I have no doubt at all that you have every right to resent insurance companies who try to get around their liabilities by employing lawyers to keep contracts deliberately opaque in order to then frighten their customers into a judicial battle they cannot win.

This is the worst of the worst.

It is even worse than the notion of 'free markets' that republicans have. It is beyond the pale, and Obama has said so, since his mother and hence to some extent he himself suffered a similar fate at the hands of big insurance.

[WilliePilgrim]

I am an admirer of Wolfe's writing. HIs style, for sure, but also the wry intimacy with which he treats his subjects. I think that the headline used here to draw attention to Wolfe's latest is an example of th small thinking that supplants satisfaction in our lives and replaces it with envy, and envy never looks good on anyone, not even on,chimps, or binibis for those post martriarchals out here in the reading publik.
Humans are never better regardless of their status as determined by raw power and material wealth, than when they are giving their time and consideration to others, and not in a meddling way, but by being generous and engaged.
One of Tom Wolfe's premises that he's written and spoken about is the influence of the Scots-Irish in the culture of the US, it's genesis in the diaspora from the feudal landscape of Ireland to the never fully domesticated landscape of the American frontier and it's constant stance in stark oppostion to the established order (the english), and the Jacksonian character. Witness that in light of the eulogies for Teddy Kennedy and you see there is some threat, or perhaps a stong iron chain, linking history to our present. .

[MadHeart]

I love Tom Wolfe! He skewers the rich and the pretentious and isn't always "politically correct." Just about the same mood I retain. Everyone makes judgments, everyone, in spite of their denials (read the posts on this thread.) When you've been around trust fund babies who tried to dress, think and act like the working class way back when it was trendy, you know you're on to something, BTW, which was my experience. And where are those trust fund "revolutionaries" of yesterday? Making lots of money, of course! Bango! Just so! (LMAO)

[TommyBobama]

Tom Wolfe is an American treasure.

[Knowitall]

If only he could write.

[dadw5boys]

envy looks good on you

[doublels]

Really...you don't know it all.

[TFlint]

Whether you like what he writes about or not, he is one of the greatest American writers of our time. He puts words together like Beethoven put notes together.

[fabricnthreads]

One must read in order to adequately determine whether or not another person is a writer.

[Alan Wendt]

A real-lfe CEO who was kicked out of Amazon after he pulled the employees' ASPIRINs
in order to save money, and was traumatized by having to fly coach. You can't make this
stuff up.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123316803228825095.html

[PhillyQuaker]

I agree totally!

[Knowitall]

Earlier I posted that I didn't like Wolfe's writing. (so I hadn't read the VF article). But after reading some of the comments here, I decided it wasn't fair to judge. Maybe he had improved. Afterall, I haven't read EVERYTHING he's written. I was also intrigued by someone who wrote the VF article was "lame". So I read it.

It wasn't "lame". It was asinine.

[dadw5boys]

You need to join a descent Yatch Club and see that Wolf has a hit the nail on the head .

[PhilipTaylor]

Do the rich have feelings? Vanity Fair’s Tom Wolfe suggests the rich do, in fact feel emotions -- but only after they've been forced to fly coach.

They might feel something if we taxed then like we did the 50 Years before REAGAN:

63% to 94% on all INCOME OVER $3,000,000!

[DesertDogAlpha]

Was that all income over $3 million in 1979 dollars? What would that be in inflation-adjusted dollars? Work harder and smarter so you too can pay some big taxes for the government that you so clearly desire to benefit from.

[mgd2854]

Progressive taxation is to even the playing field to increase the potential of those who were not lucky enough to be born with a silver spoon in their mouth to reach their potential by spreading prosperity for those who earn rather than giving more to those who have more than they will ever need. We see the results of loosening the restraints on those with no conscience, or morals they steal all the money because they are in position to do so without earning it!

[valkyrie607]

Are you making $3 million or more? If not, I have no interest in listening to you because, according to your own statement, you're dumb and lazy.

[LHoney]

Fanned and faved again Philip!

[Knowitall]

Sounds like something Wolfe would say. The older he gets, the more ridiculous he gets. Never did like his writing. (Bonfires was a joke.)

[dfarmer1584]

That would be "Bonfire," Knowitall. Bonfire is singular in the title. The plural is in the vanities.

And, by the way Knowitall, your posts exude an overpowering, almost physical stench. I imagine is dreadful to be you.

[swift goat pet for truth]

Lots of commenters blasting the rich.

Don't forget the two richest in the US are working on giving their money away, and have helped thousands.

And there was no stronger advocate for the poor in our government than Sen. Ted Kennedy.

Having said that, yes, a lot of the rich focus only on themselves.

[janeycat]

who and where are the two richest in the US giving away there money ??
one of them might help me get a car so i dont have to ask my daughter and son to take me every where i have to go.....
it's hard to sit home 24/7 , if i didn't have this pc,i would not even have contact with you guys.
bought this pc with last stimulas check and a loan on my next disability check.paid son back in next month
but i could use a car ( really )

[MadHeart]

I hear you. At 68, I'm driving a 97 Saturn w/230K miles on it, worrying every day it will collapse, blogging on a 5 yr old desktop, bought for cash when I was still working. No way to get another of either, even if someone would hire me (pipe dream in this economy when I'm competing with much younger people). Maybe Oprah...? Nah, can't afford a trip to the show anyway and it would be my luck to be there on the day she was just giving away the latest in shower gel. : )

[Knowitall]

Tom Wolfe isone who gives the good ones bad names.

[dadw5boys]

Wolf points out the problem when power corrupts ones thinking .

[doublels]

wow...you really have a hard on for this guy.

[dadw5boys]

Boffin is not helping .

[mgd2854]

I agree with you about Sen. Kennedy. Since he has gone those who believe like him need to go out there and do the heavy lifting to fight against the super-wealthy who still are not satisfied and are still trying to take what little is left. I have mixed feelings about Mr. Gates, computers have made it possible for so few to control so many. Maybe the Gates foundation is his way of making up for that. Buffet is a wealthy man who is better than most billionaires but I have a problem with him telling people to buy stocks to avoid having people lose money from rampant inflation. I didn't know stocks rallied during periods of high inflation??? It seems to me that you would buy gold or get CDs due to the rise in interest rates. It sounds kind of specious to me, but I am skeptical about any financial advise given. These guys are worse than used car dealers.

[RevBookburn]

Wolfe almost never has anything worthwhile to say. The Acid Test book was a fun read, but disputed by most of the participants. The books that followed were rubbish. As a commentator, he offerings are even worse. Rev. Bookburn - Radio Volta