Sore Winners (and the Rest of Us) in George Bush’s America

In this, he merely reflects the prevailing values of what Robert Frank has dubbed the “Winner-Take-All Society,” in which a small number of star performers reap ever greater rewards while the majority receives less and less. You can see it in the retail world, where the Wal-Mart store on the outskirts of a small city devours the business of its entire downtown. You see it in pop culture, where the sales of one Harry Potter novel dominate bookstore revenues for an entire summer, and a single hit franchise like Law and Order can keep an entire network in the black. (“There are only two kinds of TV shows,” an industry honcho once told me. “Hits — and the ones that don’t matter.”) You see it in the media, which keeps churning out Power Lists, Hot Lists, Cool Lists, and It Lists, makes sure every kid knows which movie is No. 1, and even bombards us with stories about precocious young Winners like the 18-year-old novelist Nick McDonell, who wrote the 2002 novel Twelve, a Manhattan knockoff of Less Than Zero, and 15-year-old Nikki Reed, screenwriter of the rancid girls-gone-bad teen flick Thirteen. And naturally, you see it in business, where (depending on the source) corporate CEOs make 282 to 400 times more than their hourly workers, seven times higher than when Reagan took office. The Onioncaptured the spirit of our time in a headline: CONGRESS RAISES EXECUTIVE MINIMUM WAGE TO $565.15/HR.

Nowhere was the Hobbesian war of the few against the many keener than at the president’s favorite crooked company, which will be studied for years as a prime example of run-amok crony capitalism. Enron’s ethos was superbly portrayed by the Houston Chronicle’s Greg Hassell, whose postmortem on the company painted a memorable portrait of Enron’s glory days, laying bare a corporate culture that almost gleefully tossed its vanities onto the bonfire. Beyond the in-building health club and free Starbucks coffee, silver Porsches became an obligatory status symbol, and traders were known to freak out when their annual bonus was only half a million bucks. This conspicuous consumption was encouraged by an evangelical leadership that one former executive compared to the Taliban — either you were for the company or you were an infidel. To call down an Enron fatwa, you needed merely ask for proof of its extravagant claims of profitability. This same casual amorality turned office politics into one endless struggle for survival in which a policy nicknamed “rank and yank” had employees give one another annual ratings, with the bottom 15 percent being fired. Given such a cutthroat culture, it was hardly surprising when so many of the top Enron execs sold off their own shares for a fortune but prohibited underlings from doing the same, even after it became obvious that the value of Enron stock was dropping faster than an Irish heavyweight. Such is the fine art of Darwinian bankruptcy.