22 January 2010
 
Die Yuppie Scum
 

(Biff and Buffy Go to Work)

Sorry- I missed the 1980s. Not completely, of course the time was marked the same way on the calendar as it was anywhere else, and by the “80s,” of course I mean the end of the previous decade and most of the way into the Decade of Greed.
 
There was a movie about it all that summed things up pretty well for viewers in Japan, Korea and Hawaii, which is where I washed up as a newly minted intelligence officer. I was worried about crazed Mullahs in Tehran and cranky north Koreans and those pesky Soviets and their dozens of noisy submarines.
 
I have to think about that, since the birthdays of my sons are upon me, only hours apart but across the gulf of midnight just about a quarter century ago.
 
By the time I arrived back in CONUS in 1986 the decade had become a caricature. Morning in America had become Greed is Good for that asshole Oliver Stone in the film “Wall Street.” Gordon Gekko was Stone’s poster boy for untrammeled greed and venality, played by a young man named Michael Douglas.
 
It was all a little bewildering. When I left, we were still wearing tie-died t-shirts and smeared with the sackcloth and ashes from the melt-down in Vietnam.

(Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko)
 
I found a picture of the Junk Bond King Michael Milken, and compared the images of him with the bad toupee and Douglas and still bewildered.

(Milken as Milken, The Junk Bond King, in the day)
 
 
On the one side we had the go-go reality of the New Commerce that came back to bite us last year, and on the other we had the resurgence of Yuppie Culture, the strangely morphed culture of Prep that we had all grown up with in suburban Detroit, and then cast down with disgust to put on the tie-died rags.
 
Barbara Ehrenreich did a study of middle-class life in the 80s called “Fear of Falling.” We laughed a little about the Preppy handbook, and the antics of Biff and Buffy in their plaid pants and kilts and turned-up collars on their Izod polo shirts. Barbara noted Yuppies- no longer exclusive province of the Prep crowd of Choat and Philips Exeter-were actually markers of middle-class anxieties. She put forth the proposition that:

    "The very frivolity of yuppies — and hence of the very subject of yuppies — was a distraction from the deeper changes their appearance signaled. In the eighties, the class contours of American society were undergoing a seismic shift. The extremes of wealth and poverty moved further apart."

I don’t know what Rex thought about it at the time. He got our of the investment banking business in 1983 to retire for good just as Michael Milken’s style of finance was becoming the pattern for a decade of wild excess. I know Rex was appalled by anything more than a measured and conservative approach to the management of money; his projects were marked by social conscience and probity. He had a quip, "surprises are for birthdays," and that applied for business and personal matters.  
 
Rex specialized in  municipal bonds, among other things, and underwrote local schools and other good works, serving on the boards of the Westmoreland County Airport Authority, the Lutheran Service Society, Westmoreland Symphony Orchestra Board, the Pennsylvania Inter-Governmental Council and others.
 
I am sure that Michael Milken’s antics appalled him. Evntually, Milken was indicted on 98 counts of racketeering and securities fraud as the result of an insider trading investigation. After a plea bargain, he pled out to six securities and reporting violations but was never convicted of racketeering or insider trading. At the trial at the end of the Decade of Greed, the presiding judge reduced his sentence for cooperating with the authorities and ratting out his former colleagues.
 
Increasingly, and not surprisingly in those times of excess, Rex turned to a conservative approach to the events of the day. He was active in the Pittsburgh Patriots Coalition for Peace through Strength, the Institute of Strategic Trade, and a variety of veterans groups, including ones specifically organized to commemorate the struggle in SE Asia.
 
I talked to his son about it recently. They did not always see eye-to-eye on politics, and I have often thought about the impact of a high-profile military career on the kids. Earl Junior said that he grew up as an only child, moving every eighteen months and forever changing schools.
 
He commented on the irony of a man with strong conservative instincts who had hitched his wagon to that of Bud Zumwalt, the wildest radical in the history of the hide-bound Navy. He said “the paradox of Dad being so "old school" while being under the tutelage of such a young Turk.  As is true of most people, Dad did become substantially more conservative with age, and what happened in Viet Nam certainly had a profound impact on increasing that effect.  I think it was Churchill who said that a man who is not a liberal as a youth, has no heart, and a man who is not a conservative at age, has no mind.”
 
“Of course,” Earl added thoughtfully, “we should recall that Churchill, was clinically a life-long depressive and alcoholic, so there are alternative explanations.”  
 
There certainly were about what happened in the 1980s. The Yuppies’ apparent insouciance in light of economic and social change, and the media’s humorous cultivation of Biff and Buffy’s frivolity, began to bring about a cultural sea-change. As we used to mutter at the radio “Disco Still Sucks,” a new contempt came along with the term decribing the Young and Upwardly Mobile.
 
The phrase “Die Yuppie Scum” began to be sprayed on buildings across the country. Punk was on the way.
 
Rex was not the kind to take up the spray can, being old school enough not to see the irony in a decent pair of go-to-hell trousers, and moved to Fort Myers Beach in Florida.
 
Oh, Mike Milken? He lost the toupee, did two years in the slammer and was barred from trading on Wall Street. He is still worth more than a billion dollars, though one would hope that he took a bit of a hit in the downturn.
 
The Feds were starting to look into his affairs with an eye to prosecution the first time I actually talked to Rex, and we will get to that tomorrow.
 
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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