I came to maturity, as it were, during the Financial Crisis of 2009 (As for an end date of this "Great Recession", I don't know for sure. The answer depends on who you are talking to. A commercial lender experienced the downturn differently than a farmer. People come from various situations and those bear upon how they perceive any given event. Go figure.).
Through no choice of my own, CNBC became part of the background noise of my young adult life during those years. For those long in the tooth, this was a time when new household names gained prominence among the American upper middle class, including David Faber, Carl Quintanilla, Melissa Lee, and many more who followed the steps of the veteran finance journalist Joe Kernen.
For those who are young to remember those names, these served as a buttoned-up counterbalance to the more flamboyant and far more memorable Jim Cramers of the world, whose gimmicks and shallow optimism aimed to keep the "retail investor" mollified with bells and whistles and shiny objects just as the sky was falling.
These were the last desperate fumes of what the fin-de-siecle Fed Chairman Allan Greenspan termed "irrational exuberance." To this day, I can think of nothing more cynical than the peculiar insight that what was driving the problem was evidently also its own solution.
But I digress.
As much as people complain about anything from SVB to SBF, over a decade ago (which might as well be a century), people were openly having fun when entire fortunes were melting into thin air. Even then, it was so frivolous, so absurd, yet so spectacular that an otherwise morally bankrupt Hollywood elite felt the need to enlist George Clooney to star in a surprisingly belated film satirizing Cramer and his class of pundits (Here, I am not endorsing the film, but only vaguely remembering that it was at least watchable back in....<cough>...2016!).
Back to CNBC: there was this one program that stood out in my mind; hosted by Sue Herera, it was called "Power Lunch."
To those not in the finance world, this phrase refers to an executive-only lunch where company leaders discuss weighty matters of importance over "protein bowls" and smart water. To my knowledge, this program is still on the air. To my knowledge, it is still promotional rather than analytical in nature. Par for the course with financial news shows.
Flashback to 2008-2011 when many young people were unemployed... This motley fool, yours truly, looked to these mavins of the financial world just to make sense of what was happening: first off, why couldn't we find work? For those who could find work, why couldn't we apply what we had learned in school to make a living? (That is, why couldn't young people start their careers?) What was in store for this future generation just out of college? What caused this catastrophe? How should we navigate the storm?, etc.
So many questions, so few answers.
Looking back, I am surprised I was naive enough to expect answers in the first place. These are not the kinds of questions that financial analysts openly discuss on a for profit cable network. Their target demographic was not 20-somethings fresh out of college. Their demographic was not people without money. No, this programming was for our parents and grandparents who wanted to know how much they should shore up their savings. In retrospect, that was perfectly understandable. CNBC is not a public network. It is not what NPR amusingly imagines of itself.
I bring this vague memory up because through the fracas of the late 2000s, the phrase "power lunch" became forever stuck in some dark recess of my mind. Those juxtaposed words have always filled me with disgust. But why? When so much had occurred during that time, why did that phrase in particular enjoy particular notoriety? Simply because the well-to-do spoke that way? No, they said many obnoxious things.
So, why then?
As someone who sat somewhat comfortably against the fence dividing "haves" from "have nots", my reasons were not altogether personal per se. I came from a comfortable family, and my father was a successful entrepreneur who could help soften the descent of my downward trajectory. I was not so desperate to live in a camp at Occupy Wallstreet. I did not throw milkshakes at businessmen with expensive haircuts simply because they could afford to look better than me.
No, my reasoning was more philosophical: My younger self would have said that he despised the phrase "power lunch" because it manifested the entire dehumanizing enterprise of abstractionism in the modern economy, i.e. the need to put "efficiency" on a pedestal, the imperative to expand one's "margins", the "creativity" of bundling this and that "asset" together and disguise the risk, or to put a fancy euphemism on that junk asset to pass that "hot potato" to some other schmuck who turned around to do the same, etc.
Looking back, I suppose that I still hate the term "power lunch" because it was and is a shameless reflection of how the spiritual vice of avarice could and did supplant the carnal venality of gluttony. To clarify by way of analogy, the phrase itself struck me as soulless as the wife of the protagonist of 1984 whenever she alluded to marital intimacy as "duty" to the Party. I didn't mind when rich people acted rich. What I despised was their insatiable monomania in place of the good life that was within their reach, or that irrational drive that prevented them from considering ends rather than means. You see, I hated the peculiar asceticism of the successful. With certain qualifications that I hope indicate some modicum of maturity on my part, I must confess that I still hate that perverse professionalized form of self-denial.
Before the days of algorithms, social media, and A.I. bots, the phrase "power lunch" demonstrated just how alienated the monied classes were from their own bodily and social needs, or just how robotic "homo economicus" could became, to such an extent that even meals were seen as an inconvenience.
There was something not merely sinful, but inhuman about the phrase. What I saw was veiled contempt for the mortal body (a contempt that reached to others' bodies and bodily needs) that anticipated, oddly enough, the mass somatic dysphoria of today's younger generation and this universalized compulsive "need" to shed your skin and *evolve* into something.
For some reason or another, the phrase reminded me of a scene from Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972) where the noble, yet irredeemably hot-headed criminal Santino Corleone chastises his weaselly brother-in-law Carlo Rizzi over the vulgar discussion of racketeering at the family dinner table: "We don't talk business at the table!", exclaimed Sonny. Even Connie, Santino's kid sister and unfortunate wife to Carlo, reminded her husband how "Papa never talked about business in front of the kids."
These were our imagined criminals of yesteryear.
What of our real "thought leaders" of today?
What does it matter to me if Jack Dorsey lives in a box of his own choosing and practices "transcendental yoga" while eating one meal per day? What is the world-weary asceticism of a billionaire to me and you? The Ancient Romans had their vomitoria as well, but they surely never starved...
I am not content at mockery alone of our elites. There are people who are better equipped at insults than I am. Rather, I champion a bolder response to imposture of our "social superiors". What we should take from asinine shibboleth like "power lunch" is not a momentary eye roll, as with any obnoxious neologism, but instead a collective need for some soul searching. We would do just as well to examine the concerning habits of our leaders, movers and shakers, and what they think it says about them, a far more pressing task given the power they have over us and our material destinies.
For when people say such things, what they are really implying is why they are better than us-- and thus entitled to govern.
Again, it does not bother me in the least that there are people who have more than others. Inequality in some way, shape, or form is inherent in our social nature. What bothers me then is that there is so much inequality that our superiors feel the psychological need to justify it almost constantly. What they fail to realize is that this impulse is typically self-incriminating when they fail to resist it.
As the religious know, the Lord may have dined with the influential and powerful Pharisees, but he also broke bread with society's most reviled outcasts. And, it was there at the table of wealthy and poor alike that Christ echoed his cousin's declaration of "repentance!" from all. The idea was that temptation alone was a sign of one's fallen state or dividedness against the world. Being so corrupted, such as to have the ability to sin, human beings alone-- no matter who in particular-- couldn't climb their way out of this predicament. All were thus equally in need of saving.
For the less religiously observant, what more can I say? You may believe in the redemptive power of innovation and technology, and the urgent need to put away strange metaphysical fixations with "God" and be "practical" and "solutions-oriented", but when your arch-pragmatic demiurge known as the Singularity comes to roost on those self-same values, I suspect things might not be all that different...
More efficient? Absolutely. More convenient? Sure, in a sense. More bountiful? Well, A.I. certainly does not sleep. Despite all of these "transformations" and endless permutations, you and I both know, dear reader, how inertia doesn't confuse motion with genuine change. You will remain insatiable. As time passes, I suspect it will prove more and more difficult to convince yourself that it is a virtue.
My point, if I may care to have one, is that the future of our elites' imagining might NOT seem all that more "inhuman" from today. What if we already reached a "singularity" of our own design long ago? Points of no return buried deep within such trite phrases as "power lunch"?
After all, how did we get here? And why do you actually believe that the Next Big Thing will really make all that much of a difference inside you? After everything you've experienced, how do you still profess a faith in such things? It's far more curious than the religious sort's belief in the Resurrection. Maybe, that's just me though.
I jest for the moment, but I sense something truly gloomy around this event horizon that defies measurement, where people of all kinds--- rich and poor alike (and fewer and fewer of us in between)--- would do well to prepare for their own redundancy in the face of the total reign of the inhuman.
In the meantime, there is not much one can do, is there? If you think of yourself as caring, then do this much to satisfy your impulse to "help" others: perhaps you can do the lowly a favor and slow down when you eat? Maybe do something as simple as enjoy your food? As you do so, try to slow down your thinking (for a computer can outpace you) and care to have a thought for its own sake too, i.e. one that you can't maximize for the sake of some other end? Stop confusing means with ends as a habit. As I stated previously, if anybody is in the position to enjoy the "good life", it is you. My only complaint is that you do so. After all, all things must end at some point. So, why not start now?
