False Idols MONEY AND CLASS IN AMERICA

By Paul Gray

The love of money is the root of all evil. Money cannot buy happiness. Many writers would be abashed at the prospect of wringing anything new or interesting out of these hoary maxims. Not Lewis H. Lapham, the editor of Harper's magazine and a regular contributor to it as well, whose Money and Class in America amusingly roams over the glitzy terrain of contemporary consumerism. Lapham of course rephrases old adages. Radix malorum est cupiditas becomes "It isn't the money itself that causes the trouble, but rather the use of money as votive ritual and pagan ornament." Wealth's inability to provide lasting cheer is limned anew: "Believing that they can buy the future and make time stand still, the faithful fall victim to a nameless and stupefying dread."

Lapham, 53, speaks with some authority, since he has spent much of his life in nodding acquaintance with the rich. He grew up in a well-to-do, influential San Francisco family, and he attended schools (Hotchkiss, Yale) where mixing with the scions of wealth was hard to avoid. After choosing journalism as his life's work, he discovered that financiers, corporate chiefs and politicians were happy to let him trail along in their retinues. Lapham's background and his access to the mighty have given him a privileged perch from which to view the past few decades of U.S. history. He believes he has seen something new, and he is not happy about it: "I think it fair to say that the current ardor of the American faith in money easily surpasses the degrees of intensity achieved by other societies in other times and places."

He is probably right. At the very least, his sober jeremiad is punctuated by numerous up-to-date examples of wretched excess: fur coats for Cabbage Patch dolls, a stretch limousine for rent in Los Angeles that boasts a hot tub and a helicopter pad, a Manhattan interior decorator who charges his clients $500 to toss throw pillows artistically around a drawing room. The customers for these esoteric goods and services spring from what Lapham calls the "equestrian class," which has multiplied impressively during the decades of postwar American prosperity and which "comprises all those who can afford to ride rather than walk and who can buy any or all of the baubles that constitute the proofs of social status. As with the ancient Romans, the rank is for sale."

Bashing the rich has always made for rib-tickling entertainment, and this book is no exception. Lapham effectively ridicules the widespread notion that money is omnipotent and can make everything all right: "Given the current expectations among an increasingly rich and fastidious clientele it is entirely plausible to imagine a dissatisfied traveler to Florida bringing a lawsuit against the sun." But tireless denials of the infinite efficacy of wealth ultimately cost the author his sense of humor, and he begins to manifest the mania he condemns, in looking-glass fashion. The "civil religion" of unbridled capitalism makes everything awful to him. Among his complaints: the plethora of soaps and deodorizing products available to U.S. consumers, the lamentable historical and geographic illiteracy of most Americans, and the fact that Hollywood actresses feel the need to dress down or otherwise disguise themselves before venturing out alone in public.

Money grubbing simply will not explain all these phenomena. False idols raise some deeper questions about the people who conceive and swear by them. Lapham understands this, but his fixation on the ruinously addling idea of riches leaves him little time for explanations or the formulation of a higher ; system of values. His diatribe eventually comes to resemble an item of the consumer culture: amusing, momentarily appealing and supererogatory.