"The Marching Morons" by C.M. Kornbluth was one of the best science fiction stories written in the 1950's, and instrumental in making me a science fiction fan for life. I've had it on my bookshelf for close to 30 years now, and occasionally pull it out to re-read.
It is, at one and the same time, tragic, comic, loathsome, prescient, and just about any other adjective that you might care to come up with.
Listening to the Republicans "plans" for the future, Michael Steele's incomprehensible opposition to the stimulus plan on "This Week," John Thain and the rest of Wall Streets "Masters of the Universe," brought the phrase to mind, and as I began to ruminate on it, I was reminded of just why I love that old story so much.
That, and one of the companion stories in "The Science Fiction Hall of Fame," Frederick Pohl's "The Midas Plague," speak from out of the past to offer us a bleak, ironic view of a future which has, in large part, come to pass.
The premise of "The Marching Morons" is simple: A man wakes up in the distant future, to find that the world is ruled by a small class of "elite" people, those with an IQ far, far, above even our own average, while those who are ruled are people of very low intelligence (hence, Morons). Forget "regression to the mean;" in this future, the low IQ's have outbred the elites, and populated the world with far too many of their ilk. The man from the past is (what else?) a shady real-estate "salesman," who comes up with a plan to help the elites rid themselves of all the morons: convince them to colonize Venus.
When I first read the story, I remember that it resonated with me because of one of the popular "Moron" entertainments, where the gagline "Would you buy that for quarter?" was used repeatedly. Back then, it seemed to me a perfect precursor to, and commentary on, the vapidity of such brilliant television programming as "Three's Company." Simplistically, I thought it a good commentary on mass media marketing to the lowest common denominator, the manufacture of consumerism and consent, and in general the power of the media to dis-inform.
For those of you not old enough to remember, there were only two national television networks when I was young; NBC and CBS. ABC went nationwide as an "upstart" network catering to prurient and contorversial interests with programming like Three's Company, The Love Boat, and the "Battle of the Network Stars" (once famously spoofed as the "Battle of the Network T's and A's). Watch TVLand for a few days, and see if you can get the feel for just how monolithically the networks controlled and, if you will, self-censored content in those days. The centralized message control that many of us Kossacks bemoan about the "traditional media" is in fact, a tradition dating back decades. But back to the Morons.
The obvious parallels to the Nazi jewish-extermination program, copied brilliantly by the protagonist, John Barlow, to help the intelligent elites come up with a final solution to their Moron problem, didn't occur to me until I read it again some years later, after I'd learned about the Holocaust. Barlow creates a mass media campaign to persuade the Morons to voluntarily hop aboard ships to Venus, where of course they will all die, a nice, clean orderly solution. The ships are fired off into space, where they inevitably suffer fatal breakdowns, poor piloting, etc., having been built, and manned, by Morons. Oh, the humanity!
In the final, ironic twist, Barlow, the tool of the elite, is hoist by his own petar, and sent off in one of his own unreliable spaceships -- having completed his task, the elites dispose of him as contemptuously as any of the other Morons; after all, as one of their ancestors, isn't he in part responsible for the development of a world populated by Morons, and therefore culpable? Alas, the irony seems lost on poor Barlow.
But before Wachtell lawyers, who were representing Bank of America, signed off on the deal, they told Merrill's lawyers that they wanted to be sure about just one more thing: the size of the bonuses that Mr. Thain and his colleagues would snare at the end of the year. A page was ripped from a notebook, and someone on Merrill's team scribbled eight-digit figures for each of Merrill's top five executives, including $40 million for Mr. Thain alone.
Although Merrill had been bleeding money all year - and would continue to do so - the bonuses weren't, as Merrill executives later explained to colleagues, about that performance. Rather, they were fees for getting the merger done, akin to what investment bankers receive for blockbuster deals. Mr. Thain in particular felt he deserved a hefty payout for his deal-making heroics, according to five individuals with detailed knowledge of the situation who requested anonymity because of their personal and business relationships with those involved.
(snip)
ON Jan. 22, only shortly after the Merrill takeover was formally complete, breaking news drew Bank of America's traders away from their blinking computer screens in New York to nearby televisions: John Thain was out. Spontaneous applause broke out across the trading floor and bets were placed on which one of Mr. Thain's highly paid lieutenants would be next.
That reaction was hardly a surprise. In the eyes of Bank of America employees, Mr. Thain sold them a lemon of a company that put their own company - and their jobs - at risk. The animosity was fueled by reports of Mr. Thain's lavish $1.2 million office renovation and last-minute bonuses that he paid out to Merrill employees days before the deal closed.
(snip)
AS the merger closed, and a new year began, Mr. Thain was prepared to take on a leadership role at Bank of America, even though several of his top deputies, longtime Merrill leaders, began leaving the bank themselves. Mr. Lewis, battered by analyst questions about the wisdom of the Merrill takeover, became disenchanted with Mr. Thain. In mid-January, he met with Mr. Thain at Merrill's downtown headquarters. After a five-minute meeting, Mr. Thain was out.
Furious, Mr. Thain paced the halls of Merrill, venting his frustration to at least two people. "I don't know how these people can run this company without me," he told them.
Certainly, there is some overlap between the the irony of John Barlow's fate and that of John Thain; but there are deeper currents than mere irony, particularly if one considers Pohl's "Midas Plague" as well.
I was once given the opportunity to structure a course for a fellow college student, a summer reading program on science fiction as literature. One of the first stories I had her read, in addition to "The Marching Morons" was Pohl's "The Midas Plague." I'll never forget her reaction when we sat down to discuss it. She told me that she'd had to read the first section three separate times, because it just didn't make sense to her at first.
The initial setup of the story is commonplace; a marriage between two persons from vastly different social and economic classes. The part that kept tripping up my fellow student comes after the descriptions of the lavish lifestlye that the young couple engages in after their marriage; a mansion of a house, opulent clothing, jewels, robotic servants, banquets for every meal. The poor bride, Cherry, can't take it, and tearfully confesses to her loving husband, Morey, "I'm getting fat! I'm tired of being poor!" Of course, it is Cherry who is from the uppper class, and Morey who is forced to live in such obscene, lower-class squalor, making his living devising new ways to help people meet their consumption quotas.
You see, in Pohl's dystopia, supply is no longer an issue -- robotic production has created a literal plague of wealth. Unable to slow down production without the entire system collapsing, the dis-advantaged are forced to live a life of unending consumption, meeting daily, weekly, monthly, quotas; the lower class must eat more, wear more, consume more, than their higher class counterparts, because "A pipeline has two ends." When you overproduce, you have to raise demand, because if you don't, the whole system will crash. (Pohl's eventual solution to the problem is to have the robots programmed to begin consuming, thus taking the burden off the lower classes, and producing a means of ensuring that demand can keep up with supply.) Think of a certain popular film from last summer . . .
I eventually got my fellow student to understand some of the parallels between "The Midas Plague" and life in the USA. You hear, for example, Republican complaints about hunger in America; "If poor people are going hungry, why are so many of them fat?" Perhaps because the food they are able to afford is that which is produced most cheaply, in abundance, loaded with fat and sugar, but otherwise often nutritionally deficient? As for robotic, or lower class consumption; consider all those nice, low-paying service jobs upon which our economy has been so largely based these last thirty years. And of course, this was long before our economy became the consuming end of the cheap Chinese production pipeline.
You see, the "elites," of our time, aka, the Wall Street Masters of the Universe, and the Republican Permanent Majority, didn't understand something the Frederik Pohl warned us all about back in 1954; a pipeline has two ends. The driving force in our economy is consumption, i.e., the consumer, and has been for decades.
My parents were moderate consumers, my dad much more so than my mom; he was always trading in cars, boats, vacation homes, etc. But then, he also had a steady, good paying job, with the same company, for over 35 years. He worked his way up from the production floor, to running the plant, to running the warehouse after they shut the plant down and shipped the production off overseas (to China, of course). That kind of career hardly exists anymore in the U.S.
Instead, we've financed our consumption with ever higher levels of debts. We all know that wages have not kept up with inflation, and that real earnings haven't increased in decades. When the credit dried up (as it eventually had to), consumption had to decline, and has -- precipitously.
Which brings me back to the Marching Morons. In the story, the elites are portrayed as overburdened, overworked, and long-suffering in their attempts to keep society functioning, and provide stability to the literally stupid masses. Yet, in the end, they engage in a eugenics program which would make Hitler gasp at the ambition of its size and scope. Their motivation for keeping society going is revealed not to be some philanthropic or noble thing; indeed, it's revealed that they tried to abandon the world to Morons, and allow them to exterminate themselves, but couldn't figure out how to deal with all the 500 million pounds of rotting flesh. Once Barlow reveals his plan to exterminate the rest of humanity in a cleanly fashion, they leap to put the plan into effect, and rid themselves of the Morons. Oh, there is some lip service paid to the inhumanity of the plan, but it is directed at Barlow for having conceived of the plan, not themselves for actually implementing it.
Contrast John Thain's obvious sense of entitlement and superiority with
Land of Enchantment's Recommended Diary, Welcome to Hooverville. Watch the smug superiority of the CNBC regulars interviewing Nouriel Roubini and Nassim Taleb, or "Dr. DOOM and The Black Swan," as they caustically refer to them. "How is this actionable? Do I stuff my money in my mattress?" It really is abhorrent, how out of touch these "elites" are.
There you see it, on full display; the final, ironic twist to Kornbluth's not-so-amusing amusette. The elites are revealed for what they truly are; selfish, self-obsessed, self-superior, arrogant, know-it-alls who, for all of their alleged brilliance and intelligence, can't figure out a way to deal with the "Problem of Population," (as they call it, a wickedly insightful euphemism reminiscent of "the Jewish Problem" and "the Final Solution") except to embrace mass murder. Neither, it seems, can the Wall Street Elite conceive of a different way of doing business, despite the fact that the current business model they all endorse has manifestly failed. Let Main Street suffer, we must save the financial industry, at taxpayer expense, without any fundamental change in that failed "institution."
That's the genius of Kornbluth's story; he draws you into sympathy with the elites, only to expose them as the most morally reprehensible beings humanity has to offer. At last, free of the burden of providing direction for the Morons, they may pursue their intellectual pursuits, rejoicing in the destruction of the greater portion of mankind so long as it frees them up for their selfish pursuits. Truly, Time Enough at Last.
Who are the real Morons? Those unable to do better, or those who, though able, are so wrapped up in their own sense of superiority and entitlement that they regard the rest of humanity merely as an obstacle to be removed, or used as cheap, disposable labor, robots to balance out the production/consumption machine?
Which would you rather be, Moron, or Mass Murderer? These are the choices Kornbluth gives the reader, perhaps in the hope that the reader will recognize that indeed, it is an illusory, false choice; we are morons, and mass murderers, if only nascently. The impulse to say "caveat emptor" or "am I my brother's keeper?" lies within each of us.
Wall Street, filled with people of great intellect and (allegedly) the best education money can buy from the most prestigious schools in the nation, has shown itself to be more myopic than Henry Bemis. Even now, the solution that is most favored by the Street is to "free up credit" so that America can go back to the treadmill of endless debt and consumption, so the Streeters can continue to charge usurious interest rates, and live the elite lifestyle to which they are entitled by their obvious superiority.
Five hundred thousand dollars - the amount President Obama wants to set as the top pay for banking executives whose firms accept government bailout money - seems like a lot, and it is a lot. To many people in many places, it is a princely sum to live on. But in the neighborhoods of New York City and its suburban enclaves where successful bankers live, half a million a year can go very fast.
"As hard as it is to believe, bankers who are living on the Upper East Side making $2 or $3 million a year have set up a life for themselves in which they are also at zero at the end of the year with credit cards and mortgage bills that are inescapable," said Holly Peterson, the author of an Upper East Side novel of manners, "The Manny," and the daughter of Peter G. Peterson, a founder of the equity firm the Blackstone Group. "Five hundred thousand dollars means taking their kids out of private school and selling their home in a fire sale."
Better than having it foreclosed, and having to move into a tent. And just exactly why are your children entitled to tax mine, so yours can go to a private school, and mine will have to borrow to go to college? As BuffaloGirl said, Cry Me A FREAKIN river!
Kornbluth (and to a lesser extent, Pohl) understood more than 50 years ago that the American promise of economic opportunity and equality were inherently unstable, undermined by the human condition and our instinctive drive to create stratified societies. Today, that observation seems manifest to many of us as we watch the Marching Morons of Wall Street steal yet more of our money. But it was just as true in 1954, when the story was published, in the aftermath of the Great Depression, WWII, and in the midst of the Cold War. Same as it ever was.
Kornbluth's cynical view proposes no real solutions. There are no real winners in "The Marching Morons," no heroes, no one worthy of moral approbation. The story is only an amusement, creating the opportunity to examine what Harlan Ellison once called "the indescribable ugliness of simply being human," to laugh at our own vanity, and, perhaps, the opportunity to appreciate the importance of remaining humane. As literature, it is less than profound, but still a worthy representative of its' genre. As a parable, it speaks quite succinctly to the disjunct between what is happening in the real world today, and the way the "Talking Heads" of Wall Street and DC perceive the world, and their place in it.
The Huffington Post has obtained audio of a conference call last week on which the co-president of Morgan Stanley, James Gorman, tells financial advisers at his firm and Citigroup's Smith Barney that they will be receiving "very generous" retention payments, and urging them not to call them bonuses.
(snip)
The payments, Gorman said, will be calculated based on performance numbers from 2008 instead of 2009, when the merger is expected to be completed. That decision virtually guarantees an increase in the size of the awards. While 2008 was challenging for the firms -- Morgan Stanley's client assets in fee-based accounts dropped 25 percent in the fourth quarter, and a round of lay-offs is expected -- 2009 is expected to be substantially weaker.
As I type this, I can hear Morgan Stanley's CEO John Mack bragging to Congress about the measures his firm has taken to rein in excessive compensation.
A House member from South Carolina asked whether the federal government handing over $8 trillion to Wall Street would fundamentally change the economy and the system and processes that brought us to this point of crisis. Bank of New York CEO Robert Kelly promptly responded by saying "the system has not fundamentally changed." He meant this as a reassurance - as a way to comfort lawmakers that free-market capitalism is alive and well. But what he admitted was the opposite of reassurance. It was confirmation of what bailout opponents have been saying from the very beginning: namely, that the bailout is, indeed, a no-strings-attached, no-change-required handout to banks - one that hasn't mandated any "fundamental change" to the system that destroyed the economy.
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