Frank - Rendezvous with Oblivion

INTRODUCTION

The First Shall Be First

The essays collected here scan over many diverse aspects of American life, but they all aim to tell one essential story: This is what a society looks like when the glue that holds it together starts to dissolve. This is the way ordinary citizens react when they learn the structure beneath them is crumbling. This is the thrill that pulses through the veins of the well-to-do when they discover there is no longer any limit on their power to accumulate.

In headline terms, these essays cover the years of the Barack Obama presidency and the populist explosion that marked its end. It was a time when liberal hopes were sinking and the newly invigorated right was proceeding from triumph to triumph. When I wrote the earliest installment in the collection, Democrats still technically controlled both houses of Congress in addition to the presidency; when I finished these essays, Donald Trump sat in the Oval Office and Republicans had assumed a position of almost unprecedented power over the nations political system.

For a few, these were times of great personal satisfaction. The effects of what was called the Great Recession were receding, and affluence had returned to smile once again on the tasteful and the fortunate. The lucky ones resumed their fascinating inquiries into the art of the cocktail and the science of the grandiose suburban home. For them, things transpired reassuringly as before.

But for the many, this was a period when reassurance was in short supply. Ordinary Americans began to understand that, recovery or not, things would probably never be the same in their town or neighborhood. For them, this was a time of cascading collapse, with one trusted institution after another visibly deteriorating.

It was a golden age of corruption. By this I do not mean that our top political leaders were on the takethey werentbut rather that Americas guardian class had been subverted or put to sleep. Human intellect no longer served the interests of the public; it served moneyor else it ceased to serve at all. That was the theme of the era, whether the locale was Washington, D.C., or the college your kids attended, or the city desk of your rapidly shrinking local newspaper. No one was watching out for the interests of the people, and increasingly the people could see that this was the case.

The financial crisis of 2008 engraved this pattern in the public mind. Every trusted professional group touching the mortgage industry had turned out to be corrupt: real estate appraisers had puffed the housing bubble, credit rating agencies had puffed Wall Streets trashy securities, and of course investment bankers themselves had created the financial instruments that were designed to destroy their clients. And then, as the larger economy spiraled earthward . . . as millions around the world lost jobs and homes . . .