Bianca Steele

Meritocrats Vs. Rockefeller Republicans

I don’t know as much about Robert McNamara as I should.  I do know he was the Lyndon Johnson adviser who was responsible for the escalation of American military involvement in Vietnam.  His recent death brings David Brooks and Gail Collins, on their New York Times blog, “The Conversation,” to discuss a question the caption writer words as, “Has our ruling class gotten better or worse over the ages?”

Brooks starts off.  He compares the bureaucratic elite of the 1950s to the elite of the 1960s (McNamara’s time), and presents McNamara’s failings as of a piece with what he as a conservative considers the decline of America generally over those two decades.  He presents a narrative in which the “wise men” of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations were great men, innovators, responsible for creating the institutions that made the America of the second half of the twentieth century what it was.  The corresponding “best and brightest” of the succeeding decade, however, were entirely different.  In their hands, everything fell apart.

In case you were wondering why, Brooks offers up a handful of possibilities: the kind of education they were given, their belief that they were in possession of scientific knowledge that could tell them exactly how to govern, their belief in their own competence, and their belief that they could improve conditions for other people at home and around the world.  Basically, they were Democrats.  The men of the 1950s, on the other hand, were wealthy industrialists (and the sons of industrialists), plutocrats with Wall Street values who believed their wealth and opportunities gave them the responsibility and the competence to participate in government.  In other words, Republicans (though probably Rockefeller Republicans, as they’d later be called, not necessarily conservatives).

Undeniably, something happened sometime between 1958 and 1974.  The difference between the bureaucrats of the immediate post-war period and those of the Vietnam era makes a nice example.  But the question remains what the causes of the difference really were.

With the data Brooks relays to us, it seems that the only way of explaining the change is by the subsequent generation’s being inexplicably dumber than its predecessor had been (not its parents: the only subsequent political Harrimans that Wikipedia lists exist in science fiction).  Or we might invent some theory of inevitable decline—where the men of the 1950s were indeed better than those of any other period in recent memory, but where the law of reversion to the mean shows that all good things must come to an end, and that they correspondingly did.  What seems certain is that, for Brooks, many other possibilities, though imaginable, are not likely.  The men of the 1950s did not leave weak or fragile institutions to their successors.  The men of the 1950s did not leave nearly insuperable problems, of their own creation, to those of the 1960s.  The men of the 1960s did not do the best they could under bad circumstances, and certainly did not lay the groundwork for improvement in the next two or three decades.  (Any of these possibilities would cast in doubt Brooks’ assertion that the 1960s were a sad falling off from a high place.)  No: what you see is what you get.

What you see is what you get.  Americans were generally happy in the 1950s, and the presidents of the 1950s were Republicans.  Americans were increasingly unhappy in the 1960s, and the presidents of that decade were Democrats.  In the 1950s there wasn’t yet much in the way of the social sciences, and bureaucrats could be only generally educated yet govern with little outside criticism.  In the 1960s many people felt a lot more was known, and at the same time problems were being identified with increasing frequency.  Conservatives like David Brooks are asking you to do the math.  He thinks you’ll be forced to draw the right conclusion.

From The Broom of the System, by David Foster Wallace

This is possibly my favorite passage in Wallace's first novel, The Broom of the System:

"Now, Weight Watchers perceives the problem as one involving the need to have as much Other around as possible, so that the relation is one of minimum Self to maximum Other.  This is a valid though, as I've seen this afternoon, by no means exclusive way to attack the problem.  Are you getting my drift, Vigorous?"

"Well, a drift is such a--"

"It occurs to me that I couldn't care less.  A full universe, Vigorous, Ms. Beadsman.  We each need a full universe.  Weight Watchers and their allies would have us systematically decrease the Self-component of the universe, so that the great Other-set will be physically attracted to the now more physically attractive Self, and rush in to fill the void created by that diminution of the Self.  Certainly not incorrect, but just as certainly only half of the range of valid solutions to the full-universe problem.  Is my drift getting palpable?  Just as in genetic engineering, Vigorous.  There is always more than one solution."

. . .

"Of course one other advantage of my approach to the Yin/Yang problem is that dieting becomes the worst possible thing to do.  I find dieting makes me extremely angry at everything.  Dieting makes me want to murder everyone around me."

"Instead of merely appropriating their space."

"You are not un-sharp, are you?  Rather like your father.  Your father whips a mean carrot.  I could, of course, leave selected small corners of the universe unfilled for those who might arouse in me feelings of affection and attachment."

"I'll get back to you, probably, if things begin to crowd."

This is not, of course, a light-hearded view of the universe.  Corporate CEO Norman Bombardini has rethought the idea of universal complements as an idea of aggression: taking a gentle theory and importing an entirely different idea into it, making it something very dark.  He appears not to have considered the possibility of a middle ground between total equivalence and total domination--or, at best, if he did consider such middle ground, it seems he had not been able to discover any appropriate stopping point between these two extremes.  But it is a fascinating personalization of what I personally feel to be a problem in philosophy or in logic.

"All Summer in a Day"

It has been raining around Boston for a really long time, and the Globe editorial page is reminded of Ray Bradbury’s 1954 story, “All Summer in a Day,” which

describes a gloomy world where it rains all the time, and where the inhabitants see the sun for an hour every seven years. . . .  Bradbury’s story revolves around a maladjusted schoolgirl who’d emigrated from Earth. The mean Venusian kids lock her in a school closet, just as the long-hidden sun is about to peek out.”

Like a great deal of mid-century science fiction, Bradbury’s story is usually understood as a commentary on 1950s (McCarthyite, conformist) America, and in Bradbury’s writing, the science fiction foundation usually serves mostly as background for a rather conventional story, the kind of thing the Saturday Evening Review Post or Redbook might accept.  “All Summer in a Day,” accordingly, illustrates various truisms: Children (and by extension, people generally) can be cruel, especially to those who are different.  Careless actions can have serious consequences.  It can be more difficult to go without something one remembers having had, once, in the past, than never to have had that thing in the first place.  Some events, once done, cannot be reversed or repaired.  No one would quarrel with these statements, as possible “morals” for the story.

Without this historical and political context, however, the psychological meaning is outlined clearly, and the story might appear to be only about metaphorical darkness and a metaphorical “closet.”  That is not to say that the closet represents Margot’s denial of her own homosexuality, only to say that she is denying something.  Subjectively—from her own point of view—she feels “as if she has been locked in a closet and cannot get out to see the sun.”  But a closet is always something one puts oneself in, never the fault of another.  By depicting Margot’s suffering in the closet as having been caused by the deliberate actions of another person (a person whose overt intentions were malicious towards her), the story appears to be a fantasy, written from Margot’s point of view, improperly relieving herself of responsibility for her own actions.

It is not necessary to read the story as written from the child’s point of view.  It could be read from the point of view of an adult who cares about children, or of any adult generally who thinks scapegoating and bullying are wrong.  It could be read as speaking from the omniscient, or “God’s eye,” point of view.  However, the omniscient stance is unfashionable these days (and since fiction writers are themselves not omniscient, the idea of pretending they can represent omniscience raises questions).

Without knowing the convention that stories like this one are expected to present a unique, even eccentric individual, and ask the reader to “identify with” him or her for the duration of the reading, there is actually little reason why one might not read the story from the point of view of someone who sympathizes more with the schoolhouse bullies than with Margot.  Bradbury even provides hints as to how that might be done.  The other children are excellently adapted to their gloomy world, where they hardly ever see the sun they don’t remember in the slightest, where the rain creates such oppressively effusive growth.  They take real joy in their two hours of sunlit outdoor play, and can expect similarly ecstatic joy at regular intervals, even if those intervals are for children unimaginably long.  Margot makes them feel bad about what little they have even though she can really expect no better—she makes herself feel bad about what is really pretty good.

However, that reading emphasizes our feelings about what the characters “are like,” as if they were real people, over and above the actions that actually form part of the narrative.  It discounts narrative (in the sense of story, of actions the characters engage in, and way they interact with one another), viewing it as an unavoidable obstacle to expressing what the author supposedly really wants to say.

Also, the interpretation I’ve offered is almost certainly not compatible with Bradbury’s intentions in writing the story.  At best, Bradbury’s probable libertarian streak—incompatible, as he illustrates, with the prevailing mores of society—could be understood as a pathology: to preserve the interpretation that the story is a criticism of society, it could become a criticism of the way society failed to prevent this pathology.  That is obviously ridiculous—maybe there’s a theoretical way to express it that makes it sound better, though I hope not.  Whatever one thinks about “authorial intention” as a guide to interpretation, it is undeniable that someone who interpreted “All Summer in a Day” in that way would be incapable of understanding Bradbury’s work as a whole (what would become of works like Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles?), and probably also incapable of understanding most popular or “genre” writing of the period.

(Via Wikipedia: It seems that the US Department of Defense has placed “All Summer in a Day” online for the use of K-6 educators worldwide.  Is this really a story for ten- and eleven-year-olds?  Apart from what the television censors call the “thematic content” of the piece, most sixth-graders are still reading from children’s books and from textbooks specially written to be level-appropriate.)

Di Chirico and Art History

At The Wisdom of the West, Jim H. has a painting by Di Chirico up.  I think a lot of people could identify Di Chirico’s style—it’s kind of Escher-like, a little more filled out—and have probably seen a few of the paintings he did.  Fewer, I’d guess, could place him in his historical context.  I’ve been thinking about this since I saw an exhibit a few years ago at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.  The museum has been expanding and renovating, and in the process of doing that they decided to display their entire collection of art from the first half of the twentieth century, some of which was already on permanent display, and some of which had been in storage.

Since the choice of works to display was already made, there could be no imposition of some curatorial vision that manipulated the viewer into believing some modern, fashionable idea that in the end might turn out to be only the idiosyncratic opinion of the probably youngish curator and their circle of friends.  Only the division of the paintings into groups (by geography: England; France, Spain, and Italy; Central and Eastern Europe), and the order in which they were placed (Picasso’s mythology-inspired paintings interspersed with the more run-of-the-mill mythology-inspired paintings done by his contemporaries, later Picasso’s cubism-inspired paintings ditto, and so forth), imposed any narrative at all.  It was impossible by the rules self-imposed on the curators to exclude a painting that didn’t fit what they wanted to say, or to add a painting that made their pet theories more plausible.  They included what they had and excluded everything else.  This meant that no real narrative emerged.

I’m not trying to make a distinction between “traditional” and “fashionable” ways of thinking about art.  There are people who do make that distinction; they complain that, as they think, too many people these days try to impose new, false, probably politically-inspired ideas on art to which these ideas are actually totally foreign.  I’m just pointing out that ideas about art do change over time, and that it is really possible to make a specious argument that isn’t really supported by the evidence (the evidence, in this case, being the paintings).  But people who think of themselves as “traditional” can make specious arguments too.  A specious argument is an imposition no matter what point of view the person making it has.  Even a good argument can be an imposition, for one thing because it usually has to exclude a lot in order to get made in a reasonable amount of time.  The exhibit was interesting in part because it had so much stuff in it: way too much stuff for any theory to be convincing.

Mona Lisa, a film by Neil Jordan

Mona Lisa turns out to be the second movie set in Kings Cross that I’ve seen in as many Saturdays. 

Like Breaking and Entering, it depicts London’s criminal underworld.  Unlike that movie, it shows us almost nothing of any other part of London.  George, a former taxi driver (I think) played by Bob Hoskins, has just been released from a seven-year prison sentence and finds his wife won’t talk to him.  She won’t let him see his fifteen-year-old daughter either.  George moves in with his friend Thomas (Robbie Coltrane)—a mechanic whose hobby is putting together strange, semi-artistic installations made of kitsch plastic spaghetti towers and glowing Madonnas.  He needs a job.  Since Thomas has preserved his vintage Jaguar for him, and since, in some obscure way, a small-time crime boss (Michael Caine) owes him for taking a fall, the latter gives him a job as a driver.  In fact, his assignment is to act as a beard for Simone, a lovely black call girl (Kathy Tyson) who has a secret. 

The cinematography is beautiful.  The film opens in the fog as George crosses the Thames.  He sits alone on a park bench for a while, then gets up and resumes his walk to the old neighborhood.  Nat Cole’s “Mona Lisa” plays in the background.  The lighting is reminiscent of classic British cinema and somehow also of those films that used to lovingly depict the tight-knit neighborhoods of New York’s outer boroughs.

True, Tyson’s hairdos were distractingly reminiscent of Rachel Ward’s in Blade Runner, and Ward herself had probably darker skin than Simone’s Arab client, Raschid.  (Intriguingly, the end of the story could be interpreted—though with some violence—as having some similarities to that of Thelma and Louise, which like Blade Runner was directed by Jordan’s fellow Brit, Ridley Scott.)  But these are minor points.  Mona Lisa was released when independent film was just getting big.  It has something of the nascent underworld vibe of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, and even Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill, as George uncovers a world of kinky sex and degradation that he had never sunk quite low enough to suspect the existence of. 

The sexual politics of the film, however, are what stand out twenty-three years later.  George rescues Simone from her destructive way of life, but not in the traditional way he’d hoped.  Hoping to win her gratitude and consequently her affection, he agrees to search the London sex clubs for her younger, drug-addicted friend.  He rescues her and they all run off to Brighton.  There, he discovers that the two women are in love with one another. 

Shocked and disappointed, he accuses Simone of using him, but before long the bad guys intervene.  Simone kills them both in a nearly hysterical rage (the life of a prostitute, in the end, has been too much for her), and stops just short of killing George.  He returns to an honest mechanic’s life with Thomas and reacquaints himself with his daughter.  The nonjudgmental treatment of homosexuality is very subtle, and very brave for its time.

Miscellaneous Friday

Angels and Mullets

How can anybody resist the word mullet?  I wouldn’t say mullet is one of my favorite words, in the sense meant in this thread on Language Log.  I don’t think saying “mullet” is a pleasure in itself, or hearing “mullet.”  It’s the idea that I think is fascinating, with all the cloud of connotations and historical references and visualized images that follow in its trail.  I first saw a mullet, I think (at least as a distinct look, up close), in 1984, as a freshman in college, on an engineering student from one of the more distant villages of Queens County, and first heard the word about fifteen years later.  In between, I’d seen lots and lots of them.  I really didn’t know there was such a word.  By way of pointing to Christopher Orr’s review of Angels and Demons as a film about a haircut:

Robert Langdon, has returned, but without the mullet, which in the interim evidently detached itself from his scalp, crawled off to some dark corner, and grew up to be Danny McBride.

Orr says the film has been “lightly reworked.”

The Producers is being produced in Berlin.

Despite coverage of the show in local newspapers, not all Berliners have been clued in to its comic nature, Bech said. City police have received a number of complaints about posters for the production, which “provoked associations with the Nazis” despite the fact that swastikas have been replaced with images of pretzels in order to conform to German law. (Swastikas can be used onstage as part of an “artistic statement,” Bech said, but not as part of the show’s promotional materials.) 

Here's the poster, complete with pretzels.

Every so often, Michael Bérubé

. . . finds himself witnessing . . .

. . . or sometimes actually taking part in, exchanges that go like this:

First Person: Hey, what do you think of this proposal?

Second Person: Excuse me, but I wasn’t consulted about this.

First Person: Beg pardon?

Second Person: I wasn’t consulted about this.

First Person: Um . . . but that’s why I’m asking what you think.  I’m consulting you.  This is the consultation right now.

Second Person: I can’t believe you went ahead and did this without asking for anybody’s input.  I really think we need to talk.

First Person: ??

And no, I am never the Second Person.  When people ask me what I think about X, I simply say “kewl” or “meh” or “ZOMG” or “do not want” or some other Internets locution. 

"Let Them Work in Marketing!"

Via the Boston Globe’s Monday business blog round-up, Elizabeth Rosabeth Moss Kanter at Harvard’s Business School says, during a recession, everyone in a company should think of themselves as working in the marketing department.  She means that with revenues dropping and the bottom line dwindling, in order to keep the concern going, everybody has to drum up business, and in everything they do to think in terms of getting new customers and keeping them happy.  But the Globe’s very brief summary suggests that Kanter could be read as suggesting something more literal.

It’s not a stupid idea.  It ensures that everyone in the organization is on the same page.  It gets everyone in the organization speaking the same language—which helps everyone avoid misunderstandings and makes any mistakes that do occur easy to correct.  In effect, it makes the customer the CEO, so everybody knows who’s the boss and what that boss wants.

Moreover, it orients the organization in the direction that’s supposed to be best for the modern economy.  A business textbook will tell you that the correct vision of the firm is the “marketing model.”  A firm exists to facilitate a relationship between people with goods or services and people who need goods and services, and Marketing is the department (or profession) that most concerns itself with establishing and maintaining that relationship.  In accordance with this model, employees who have the interests of the firm in mind will think, not in terms of shareholder value and stock price, but in terms of the multifarious needs of customers.

In practice, though, I think it would be a distraction.  People are already pressed for time.  Most employees are not trained to think like marketers.  They would have to take time away from other tasks to learn how to think of their jobs in terms more appropriate to somebody else’s job.  They would have to take time away from thinking about their jobs in the terms they were actually trained in.  The topics of discussion that are “traditional” in their professions or trades could easily be edged out in favor of something they don’t fully understand.

I think the problem is ultimately a kind of discomfort with Adam Smith’s idea of the division of labor.  (Karl Marx did not envision the division of labor coming to an end, only a shorter working day and a more flexible approach to both avocation and vocation.)  So it seems unfair to people and almost immoral to ask them to work towards a goal that’s subordinate to “the main goal” of the organization.  There’s an understandable wish that everybody might understand the big picture all the time.

Are Humans Creative?

In yesterday’s Boston Globe, language columnist Jan Freeman raises a question that’s of interest to all bloggers: can we have too many peeves? and can community peeving increase each person’s count of annoyances even an order of magnitude higher than it would have been normally?

She starts with the great problem of the word “create.”  Many of us, I suppose, have never heard anyone complain that the word “create” has a modern implication that is foreign to our traditional way of thinking.  I think I first ran into this purported “issue” when reading The Closing of the American Mind, by Allan Bloom, or maybe in George Steiner.  At the time, most likely, I assumed the idea—that only since the modern era have artists been considered “creative” in a sense previously reserved to God’s creation of the universe in the Biblical book of Genesis—was a commonplace.  I can easily imagine Percy Bysshe Shelley, perhaps, arrogating the word “creative” to himself and his fellow poets.  Yet that is only speculation, especially if, as Freeman says, there’s no basis in historical fact for thinking that “creative” in this sense is a modern invention.

In Bloom’s case, it is easy for me to dismiss what he says in retrospect.  In the fifteen or twenty years since I read his book, I’ve learned a little about how political disputes can contaminate otherwise scholarly thought, and these days I wouldn’t believe anything Allan Bloom says about anything unless I could find corroboration, properly documented and argued.  The case of George Steiner is more difficult given his liberal politics, but the personality he conveys in his books (and the fact that he says much Bloom would also agree with), makes it increasingly less so.  Yet, if there isn’t a real issue there, why would Daniel Boorstin have begun his popular book The Creators, about the literary canon, with a survey of metaphysics or creation myths in various world civilizations?  Though, on the other hand, the absence of a real issue might be exactly what makes that book a little unconvincing.

Is there really anybody who believes it’s immoral or impious for individuals to “create”?  A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times Book Review ran a review of a book by the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus that inspired me to coin the new logical fallacy, “dixit ergo creavit”: he said it, therefore he created it.  Neuhaus, in essence, blames philosopher of postmodern pragmatism Richard Rorty for certain ills of the modern world.  His evidence: Rorty’s vivid description of the effects of those ills.  That is unfair, surely.  Describing problems does not make them any worse or bring them more concrete being than they had before.  In fact, Neuhaus himself would have been unable to attack those putative developments without Rorty’s description.

Anyway, I considered whether “creavit” or “invenit” (discovered) was the better word.  “Discovered” certainly describes better what I think Rorty, a scholar, not a belle-lettriste, was trying to do in his book.  But the fallacy is not only the unsurprising fact that the first person who says a thing may not have been the first person to think it.  Without the idea that Rorty had introduced something new into the world, Neuhaus’s accusation doesn’t have a lot of force.  Evidently he felt Rorty had created the turn of thought he wrote about: taught his students to believe this, whether or not that was an actual fact.  Evidently he felt human beings would be better off if nobody at all had even suggested its possibility.

Breaking and Entering

The other day I watched Breaking and Entering, one of the last films that Anthony Minghella directed.  It got pretty bad reviews among Netflix viewers but it sounded interesting, and I guess it was, but I’m not really sure whether I liked it or not.

It is fairly easy to see why movies that seem “interesting” while you’re watching them can trigger negative reactions with some viewers.  I don’t think it’s only that such viewers dislike these kinds of films, and that they’re translating the thought “I don’t like this kind of movie” into the language “Nobody will like this kind of movie: it’s a bad movie.”  Interesting means something most filmmakers don’t automatically do, and movies that try very hard to be interesting often fail.  These readers are probably accurately picking up on things that promised something interesting and ultimately fell short, elements in the film that weren’t persuasive about the new information they tried to communicate.

Usually the main problem seems to be the dialogue.  It’s stilted, or else it’s overly metaphorical.  It has nothing to do with the plot.  It may not make sense as normal, conversational human verbal behavior, or even as any recognizable form of in-group banter.  At times the actors are very evidently uncomfortable with it.  Occasionally you suspect that what you’re seeing is the least interesting parts of the script, and that what otherwise would have been significant scenes were relegated to the cutting room floor.  Which does no good to a plot that may be teetering on the edge of coherence anyway.

But there’s no such thing as a perfect movie.  It’s still not obvious why this problem generates more hostility than others might. I don’t know the answer.

Anyway, the plot is still there, but what is the story about, really?  The main character is an English architect, played by Jude Law, still young but getting close to middle age, often enough tempted to stray from his beautiful wife but never yet having done so.  He is very nearly the only thoroughly English character in the film.  His wife is Swedish though her father was American and she attended college here.  His partner (Jim from the English version of The Office) is apparently Jewish.  Their subordinates are Asian (and only one, that I recall, is male).  The criminal gang with which his apparently perfect life becomes tangled up is composed of refugees from Bosnia.  The only other English character is the gruff but not uncompassionate police detective.

The Dickensian situation Law finds himself him in uncovers the reality of how the other half live.  Or maybe opens a somewhat cold (typically English?) professional to the possibility of compassion.  Or something.

In the dénouement, he saves a Bosnian teenager—who has twice burglarized his office—from the prison sentence that ought to be his fate.  Instead, the boy gets to return to Sarajevo with his Muslim mother, and escapes the bad influence imposed by his father’s Serbian relatives.  (Though his uncle runs a crime ring, his father had been a doctor and died because he stayed behind to care for victims of the war.  His mother, now a very busy seamstress for rich people, used to play Bach on the piano before the smallness of her apartment required her to give it up.  These are utterly gorgeous housing projects by American standards, incidentally.)  To do this, he bravely announces, publicly, that he has had “an inappropriate relationship” with the boy’s mother.  That part is true.  He goes on, though, to fabricate an intimate and long-lived relationship with the pair of them, in which he had employed the mother for years, and (together with his partner, who’s inclined to be a bit more vindictive) had offered extensive career counseling to the son.  Thus, he knows the boy ought not to get caught up in “the system,” that he ought to be let go, and given a second chance.

So this pure person saves two lives by telling a lie.  But it’s strange how their lives are saved.  The good Bosnians go back to Bosnia and get away from the privileged Brits who exploit them at low pay; the Muslims get away from the Serbs who tempt them into a life of crime.  How is this so different from the ethnic cleansing that had them fleeing to London in the first place?  (The violence is missing, of course, and that’s not nothing.)

And there is a shadow tale that’s the more traditional ending for an English story like this one.  London, that most urban of cities, corrupts outsiders who aren’t prepared to deal with it safely.  It seems Law is permitting a young man to live a more normal life—which he may be—and to finish school, and also rescuing a sensitive middle-class woman from life in a tiny mews apartment strewn with the suit jackets and party dresses of strangers. But distant as the Dalmatian coast of Bosnia may seem, it is not the bucolic English countryside, much less Eden.  And the architect who plans to beautify dismal Kings Cross with greenery is a very good liar.

Is this coherent?  I don’t know, but I felt I was missing something important by not being English.  All of this occurred to me days after I’d watched the thing.  Emotionally, at the end of the film, I felt the story was about this Englishman and his discovery that there is an other half out there at all.  But, if so, so what?  It’s a typical story of discovery, a typical plot for this quiet little kind of film.  If that’s not enough, I do think it’s a failure of execution on the director’s part.

You Have to Read This

You have to read this article (“Why I Fired My Broker”) in the May Atlantic.  If I were still a subscriber, I would feel worse about it than I do.

In fact, he didn’t fire his broker; he fired his financial adviser.  He didn’t want to do business directly with a broker, because brokers get commissions and are in it for their own self-interest.  He didn’t want to buy into a mutual fund, because he didn’t know anything about the people who ran them.  He felt he needed—and deserved—personal attention, from a highly-qualified person who talked directly to him and had time to devote to his account and his account alone.  He didn’t want an adviser who made all his decisions based on a computer program.  He wanted a good adviser, one who could get the best returns possible, who could explain to him, briefly and in language he understood, exactly how.

The article is about how selfish and self-protective financial advisers have become, in the form of a complaint that the writer’s own broker no longer returns his calls.  The reader follows him as he visits big-name finance thinker after child of international financial guru and philanthropist, trying to get them to acknowledge the point of view of an investor who, because he only has $200,000 to invest, is forced into the financial equivalent of taking the crosstown bus instead of a cab.  (Remember Roger and Me?)

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to take seriously a journalist who begins by saying he thinks the stock market should have only an insignificant risk of loss within only a one-year time window.