Wall Street

Well, this essay is a day late. Shit happens. Shit happened yesterday. I wish that I could avoid shit.

Anyway, when I was in the eighth grade my history teacher shifted away from European dynasties and the lifestyles of the aristocracy with, "now we are going to talk about the stories of YOUR ancestors." The fact is that the vast majority of us are descended from people of modest or poor means. The economies of yesteryear basically consisted of a lower class and an upper class. In the history of "civilized" man, the middle class is a modern anomaly.

As there was a Soviet system in which the state usurped the workings of East Europe's economy and supposedly doled the collected resources to people according to their needs, I believe that there is an equally extremist yet polar opposite paradigm that believes that corporations and the wealthy should have laissez-faire, government-free control of the economy. The people who believe in the laissez-faire model believe subconsiously or consciously that a rich/poor dichotomy is the natural order of things, and America needs to return to such a model. Please bear in mind that most of the American middle class is a product of the reforms that occured during the 1930's and '40s during which regulations prevented the sort of "great depressions" and "roaring '20s" ("boom and bust cycle) that occured mostly during the early 20th century and late 19th century.

Since the foundation of modern economic systems there always seems to be a battle to remain somewhere in between these two extremes.

Enter Wall Street. Enter the colossal fuck-ups of the last several years. When Oliver Stone made "Wall Street" I don't think that even he recognized its prescience-- I believe that Orson Welles said that the best movies are made by mistake. Anyway, at the time, Stone's project probably seemed like a vanity project that he made to honor his deceased father, who was a stock broker. To many '80s movie critics it probably seemed like the "Pushing Tin" of its time-- i.e.: "who gives a fuck about air traffic controllers?"

Well, who gives a fuck about Wall Street traders? Did we truly remember anything about this movie? Two words; one name: Gordon Gekko. As with most great movies, the characters are striking, but only one name stands out. I defy you to remember the Sheens' characters names. You can't. Unfortunately, Gekko is the embodiment of modern America. At the time he probably seemed like the sort of evil bastard who my parents and grandparents worked hard to avoid. Now he is America-- the guy from the lower of middle class who used cutthroat tactics (do "toxic loans" ring a bell?) to scale the pile of skulls to the top. Now we have second or third generation Gekkos -- a newly established class of American aristocracy. They are the sort of people who were either unaffected by the last economic crash or they actually benefited from it. They are the people who continue to manipulate the economy to their own ends without hesitation. Nowadays, unlike Gekko, they are not arrested. There is almost nothing in place to hold them back.
As Gekko himself stated in the Wall Street 2 trailer, "I said 'greed is good.' Well, now it's LEGAL."

The characters whose names you have forgotten-- Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) and Carl Fox (Martin Sheen)-- are things of the past. Carl, who was a union leader, is now a relic partly because multinational corporations now OWN the American government (especially since the end of the Cold War). Bud Fox, in a move of brilliance on Stone's part, is apparently a Gekko-like character in the movie... He is a reprentation of the twisted transformation that America has undergone during the last several decades.

Carl Fox's last words in Wall Street continue to haunt me: "Stop going for the easy buck, and start producing something with your life. Create, instead of living off the buying and selling of others."
Where are America's industries? We shipped them overseas when the Soviet Union collapsed in an effort to appear "free." "Protectionism" was no longer necessary, apparently. I guess that regulations of the markets were also no longer needed. The sort of "insider trading" that is explored in Wall Street is perfectly fine "because everyone engages in it." What have we done to the middle class? Does anyone give a fuck anymore?
Carl: "Create, instead of living off the buying and selling of others."
Lesson NOT learned, America. The Age of Gekko sucks.