The One Percenters
----- // -----
by
Christopher Ketcham *
[Income
inequality and the death of culture in New
York City]
For my
daughter’s benefit, so that she might know the enemy better, know what he looks
like, where he nests, and when and where to throw eggs at his head, we start
the tour at Wall Street. It’s hot. August. We’re sweating like old cheese.
Here are
the monuments that matter, I tell her: the offices of Deutsche Bank and Bank of
New York Mellon; the JPMorgan Chase tower up the block; around the corner, the
AIG building. The structures dwarf us, imposing themselves skyward.
“Linked
together like rat warrens, with air conditioning,” I tell her. “These are
dangerous creatures, Léa. Sociopaths.”
She doesn’t
know what sociopath means.
“It’s a
person who doesn’t care about anybody but himself. Socio, meaning
society—you, me, this city, civilization. Patho, like pathogen—carrying
and spreading disease.”
Long roll
of eyes.
I’m intent
on making this a teachable moment for my daughter, who is fifteen, but I have
to quit the vitriol, break it down for her. I have to explain why the tour is
important, what it has to do with her, her friends, her generation, the future
they will grow up into.
On a
smaller scale, I want Léa to understand what New York, my birthplace and home, once
beloved to me, is really about. Because I’m convinced that the beating heart of
the city today is not its art galleries, its boutiques, its restaurants or
bars, its theaters, its museums, nor its miserable remnants in manufacturing,
nor its creative types—its writers, dancers, artists, sculptors, thinkers,
musicians, or, god forbid, its journalists.
“Here,” I
tell her, standing in the canyons of world finance, “is what New York is about. Sociopaths getting really
rich while everyone else just sits on their asses and lets it happen.”
…………
__________________________
* “The Reign of One
Percenters” – by Christopher Ketcham, November/December issue of Orion
Magazine.
