Pursuit

"There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired." That's Nick Carraway commenting at the end of Chapter IV of The Great Gatsby. It's kind of a thrill to teach this novel in 2009, parsing Fitzgerald's class distinctions about wealth, class, status with a new generation of divergent thinkers for whom money and celebrity mean just about everything.

James Gatz and his North Dakota dreamin'. A boy poised for change, loafing on the flat squat shore of Lake Superior. He had prepared. Even the name was ready. He borrows a skiff and paddles to Dan Cody's yacht. That green light, beckoning. The green of "Go." The color of money, green with envy. The cinematic morph into Gatsby. Once he had a dream. Of social mobility, of having it all. He had the audacity of hope.

Jay Gatsby "sprang from his Platonic conception of himself" but too easily sold his vision "in the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty."

My students get it. Their Gatsby is P. Diddy: gun and bling and pinky ring. Or Bernie Madoff, with a scheme as shadowy as that of Gatsby's Wolfscheim, who fixed the 1919 World Series. This novel highlights the meretricious underbelly of the pursuit of wealth at any cost. It ends with three deaths.

Hopefully the correction that is now occurring in the financial sector will trigger a review of compensation. A friend reminded me of a passage from The Grapes of Wrath. "The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it."

Income inequality (a current political buzzword) exists because performance measures need re-evaluation. Obama's much maligned suggestion of "spreading the wealth around" challenges public policy to develop measures to assess the worth of soft capital (cultural, intellectual, social, etc.) vs. pure risk, and radically re-envision the compensation of those who choose to pursue the compassionate dream -- the dream of serving others.