If 1990 was the year of freedom and democracy–you know, when all the huddled masses yearning to breathe free in Eastern Europe gained their liberation–why do I feel so depressed? Maybe it’s just me. (My favorite Dylan song always was “Desolation Row.”) Or maybe it’s that it all looks like a stage show. The people get on their feet, give a push, and the walls come tumbling down. The tyrants turn out to be little, frightened men–Straub of Hungary, Zhivkov of Bulgaria, Honecker of East Germany, Husak of Czechoslovakia: who can even remember their names without a crib sheet? They scamper out of their presidential palaces and plead that they never really meant it, never really wanted to be bad. It’s all been too easy. I’m waiting for the tragic denouement.
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Free enterprise. Pure capitalism. I thought we just finished a decade of unrestricted freedom of enterprise–one that brought, among other things, the budget deficit and the great savings and loan crisis. Champions of capitalism have always boasted that it’s a system of unleashing private greed for the greater good of all. I thought maybe recent events had given the lie to that.
Like Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco, Bryan Burrough and John Helyar’s lively tale of 1988’s $25 billion sale of the foodstuffs giant; and Burning Down the House: How Greed, Deceit, and Bitter Revenge Destroyed E.F. Hutton (these titles do tend to the vivid and apocalyptic, don’t they? They’re an education in themselves), James Steragold’s story of scandal and ruination in an old-line Wall Street firm; and Peter Bart’s Fade Out: The Calamitous Final Days of MGM, the archetypal story of a corporate raider’s takeover and bleeding of an old-time movie maker; not to mention Too Good to Be True: The Outlandish Story of Wedtech, by James Traub, the tale of a company whose modus operandi was the corruption of high officials and which ended up costing taxpayers and investors some $300 million.
On a more general level, speaking of invasions and such, in The Rockets’ Red Glare: When America Goes to War: The Presidents and the People, Richard J. Barnet recounts the history of America’s entrances into its wars, concentrating on the interplay between presidential initiative and the feelings of the people. His finding is that over the years presidents have become more addicted to secrecy and more adept at manipulating public opinion. One more lesson about the workings of capitalist democracy for our new proselytes in Europe–perhaps an unwelcome one, in that this is more or less what they were hoping to get away from, but them’s the breaks.
