STUMPTALK: Recent events remind us of Tom Wolfe’s 'Bonfire of the Vanities'

By Phillip Chesser  / Chronicle contributor

March 02, 2009 04:51 pm

— “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life,” said Oscar Wilde, and the current financial mess involving Wall Street and the Duke Lacrosse team outrage of 2006 provide stark testimony to the accuracy of the Wilde quotation. In his wonderfully entertaining Bonfire of the Vanities Tom Wolfe gives readers master of the universe and Wall Street bond salesman Sherman McCoy, who makes millions of dollars a year almost all of which goes for his two thousand dollar suits, his eight hundred dollar imported shoes, several luxury automobiles (a Mercedes Benz convertible among them – more about that below), his million dollar apartment on Manhattan’s very fashionable Upper East Side, and his high maintenance wife who spends much of what he makes on personal trainers, clothing, cosmetics, and personal beauty treatments.
Unlike former Democratic New York Governor Eliot Spitzer who preferred thousand dollars an hour hookers, McCoy has a mistress and she gets him into big trouble when driving McCoy and herself in his Mercedes on the Cross Bronx Expressway, from where she takes a wrong exit and almost immediately hits a young black high school student who lies for a long time in a coma and then dies. Worse, they then leave the scene. Revolving around this incident, the novel shows readers real life when McCoy becomes “The Great White Defendant” for the Bronx prosecutor under the influence of Reverend Bacon, an Al Sharpton/Jeremiah Wright knockoff.
The Duke Lacrosse fiasco – all the accused were exonerated and prosecutor Mike Nifong was disbarred for prosecutorial misconduct – had its parallels in Wolfe’s Bronx DA Weiss and Reverend Bacon.
And while not in their league, Wolfe’s McCoy reminds us of the Wall Street money manipulators and corporate CEO’s like those who ran AIG, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and the rest, who paid themselves huge bonuses while at the same time presiding over their companies’ financial ruin. While his moral vacuity does not match theirs in scope, he shows the same proclivities. McCoy can’t come clean about the hit and run because his mistress was driving his car, he is a big time Wall Street bond salesman … and readers know the rest.
Adam Smith, called the father of laissez faire economics because of his book "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations," before that wrote "The Theory of Moral Sentiments," where among other things he insists that if they are to succeed, entrepreneurs, sellers, and buyers must strictly adhere to rules of right moral conduct: no lying, cheating, or stealing. If they don’t, markets are undermined trust is lost, and people run to Kings to make everything right, even though many Kings and their modern versions, elected politicians, succeed mostly by lying, cheating, and stealing.
The financial crisis now has people again calling for bold government action, as if we haven’t had that for the past eight years or the past seventy years for that matter, and as if the government can fix things for which it is largely responsible. Readers inclined to blame only business and Republicans for the current fix should look at Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Democratic Representative Barney Frank’s earlier assurances about the soundness of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and Democratic Senator Christopher Dodd’s cozy relationships with big banks. See your bold government in action.
Bold government action means bigger and more expensive government, which means more debt, which caused the problems in the first place. It reminds me of the parlor definition of insanity: doing what obviously does not work again and again.