The rich and the furious

Who's to blame for the economic meltdown? For the millions of people without work now burning through their savings? For entire neighborhoods abandoned to dust and weeds? For the malaise on the land, the withered dreams, the hard grind of hunger?

For two years I've heard people screaming at each other, politicians blaming their adversaries, analysts blasting the government, the government blasting the private sector.

All along, though, I've tried to focus on stories of ordinary people, small business owners, unlikely start-ups, people with nothing left but heart. I've seen them win on small scales, and I've seen them crash against the world's cold, blunt realities. At some point, one more vacancy sign breaks your heart. One more tear-streaked face and frail voice. Or one more harsh invective thrown at some nameless enemy.

How can anyone with even the slightest investment in humanity stand to watch his fellow human beings fall apart, turn on each other, sink in anguish till all becomes a dull roar, a headache the size of Hiroshima?

Where, to whom, to what should the anger be directed?

In my mind, the guilty cross all lines and can be narrowed down to one word - greed.

The American Dream is based on the democratic idea that anyone who works hard can succeed. The basic tenet is true; rag-to-riches success stories are part of the American consciousness. But there's also a darker side to the American Dream.

In the antebellum South, success depended on what historian Kenneth Stampp called "The Peculiar Institution," a system of labor based on human slavery.

After the Civil War, before anti-trust laws were enacted, success belonged to a handful of robber barons who twisted and plundered the markets.

At the turn of the 21st century, a greedy financial system generated an exorbitant amount of wealth by inflating and swapping assets of questionable value. Predicated on dubious derivatives and shadowy figures, a spurious bubble filled the pockets of many until, punctured by reality, it burst and left millions drowning in a sea of foam and muffled rhetoric.

How one defines success has always been a preoccupation of American writers. Walt Whitman blasted ostentatious wealth and exalted the lower and middle classes for their spiritual richness. In "The Great Gatsby," F. Scott Fitzgerald exposed the emptiness of the East Coast elite, the superficiality, carelessness and decadence that constituted their lives. The real America, he concluded, was the West, specifically the Midwest where he was from, where the salt of the earth had sowed their grains and prospered by way of modesty and decency.

But this is America. We don't begrudge people for monetary success. Wealth is a byproduct of a well-driven dream. What we do begrudge, though, what Americans are decrying as we speak, are the successes of those who didn't earn them, who manipulated, cheated and took shortcuts to obtain their fortunes.

Bernie Madoff is the obvious example of our times, but beneath that posterboy lay a network of developers, financiers and attorneys who peddled the bad paper and fed the dollar-eyed monster.

"You can call these people the mini-Madoffs," Gardnerville resident Paul Bradshaw said in February, while describing a Las Vegas lending firm that bilked him and other Valley residents out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Bradshaw said the company used the money of investors, such as himself, to run a giant Ponzi scheme.

"They kept it going till they ran out of money," he said.

Thus the thievery occurred right here in our hometown, an unusual place in the world, but in no way immune to the world's usual ills.

Growing up here, I was still a product of the Go-Go '90s. A decade of strip malls and subdivisions. Computer chips and cozy franchises. When I was a teenager and my elders criticized the hedonism of my generation, I had a hard time swallowing it. After all, weren't we the millennial whiz kids, the hippest, most progressive, tech-savvy generation ever to walk the face of the earth?

However, as an adult, having lived through the first turmoil and disillusionment of the 21st century, I have a lot more sympathy for those critics. Looking back, I can honestly say teenagers in the '90s were steeped in a culture that honored wealth above work. One only has to look at the rise of get-rich-quick schemes, books and personalities. Shows like "MTV Cribs" that glorified material excess. The emergence of reality TV that showed anything but reality, rather a bunch of talentless, trust-fund starlets running amok in the tabloids.

Even though very much part of that culture, insulated in its artifice, I had one advantage over other Go-Goers. At a young age, I was taught by my parents the value of hard work, a value that doesn't necessarily guarantee monetary success, but does guarantee some degree of personal integrity.

"The good thing about it," my father told me after his own run-in with some dishonest players, "is that I still get to be me, and they still have to be themselves."

Going forward, cheering the hardworking people I see every day, whether a small manufacturer in Johnson Lane or the owner of a new restaurant on the main drag, I only hope that whatever order emerges from this economic chaos will be one that rewards honest, hard-working people, and punishes lying, lawless greed-bags.