Which isn't to say Manhattanites are especially pleased with said fat cats either. The banker found himself at a dinner party last week with two Goldman Sachs employees, both of whom are set to receive massive, and massively controversial, bonuses this month. The rest of the guests, Manhattanites among them, started giving them a hard time. The Goldmanites sat there and took it. "They had been told not to say anything by management," the banker says. They were defenseless.
Or were they? This was, after all, just after a columnist for Bloomberg wrote a piece Dec. 1 about how some Goldman Sachs executives are now applying for pistol permits. "Senior Goldman people have loaded up on firearms," the story contended, "and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank." From there the revelation exploded across multiple media, inspiring commentaries, and commentaries on those commentaries, and so on and so forth.
Mark Lennihan, AP
A commenter on The Business Insider Web site wrote: "I kinda like the idea of these guys looking over their shoulder all the time. ... They don't know which Populist has a Pitchfork with their name on it." Meanwhile, a spokesman for legendary market prognosticator Barton Biggs, who last year published a book urging the rich to buy farms and stockpile canned food and weaponry, told me he found himself under "a barrage" of media queries on the heels of the Bloomberg piece. Presumably, all those reporters had a variation on the same question: Were Biggs' peers preparing to test his prediction that "a few rounds over the approaching brigands' heads would probably be a compelling persuader that there are easier farms to pillage"?
Clearly, any news item that fits into the paranoid banker/populist avengers plot line is guaranteed to go viral these days, carried along by the approval of readers, bloggers and journalists. But the warmth of their embrace has little to do with reality. The Bloomberg story was pocked with errors and built on hearsay. The Reuters yarn was based on a survey conducted by Illicit Encounters, a British dating site for adults looking to have an affair. Any sane person can see that Biggs' dystopian worldview is drawn more from laughable Wild West fantasies and alpha-male chest thumping nonsense than any recognizable facts.
Not one of the finance industry professionals I spoke to in three days of interviews was worried for his or her safety, or knew anyone else who was. Likewise, Tim Larkin says he has not in fact been getting a lot of interest from U.S. bankers fearful of domestic threats, and is, to be honest, a little annoyed that such was the angle all the stories on him took. (His company, Target Focus Training, has been teaching self-defense to bankers who travel to dangerous or developing nations since the 1990s.)
Yet there's no question that the American people (or as a friend calls them, "The American People!") are spitting mad, and getting madder. That anger is then duly mistaken for populism, a word whose meaning has become hazy, but which is nevertheless rolled out any time the rabble finds itself roused. Once you have populism, media outlets reason, can a mob be far behind?
More than that, though, the angry mob storyline also serves a psychological purpose for angry people. Even if a sizable percentage of Americans can't have their jobs or their homes or their life savings back, at the very least they can savor the image of bloated greed-heads hunkered down in darkened Fifth Avenue penthouses, expensive furniture splintered and piled against the door, trying in vain to steady their pistol hands. It's the modern populist impulse at play: If the people who wrecked the nation's economy won't express contrition, the very least they can do is express misery and terror. Glorying in that misery, even if it is imaginary, provides some quick succor to angry citizens.
At the same time, though, it amounts to an admission of helplessness, much in the way that the most enraged online comments are admissions of helplessness (not to mention futility, frustration and all the other ingredients that make for your standard populist pound cake).
As UC Berkeley linguist Geoffrey Nunberg wrote earlier this year, "It's a big jump from figurative pitchforks to literal ones." And a jump that we as a nation very seldom make. Historically speaking, anti-bank sentiment has rarely if ever spilled over into mob action, no matter how acid it became. Wall Street historian John Steele Gordon notes that while banks have been scapegoats from the early days of this country, he knows of no instances in which popular anger against bankers erupted into violence. (The bombing of Wall Street in 1920 has been blamed on Italian anarchists running a different errand.) Nor could Gordon think of any instances where financiers were assassinated in the United States as a result of an outpouring of anti-banker hatred. He doubts even the threat of simple assault: "I think you're more likely to post something nasty online than you are to go out and slug somebody," he says.
So for the aggrieved, savoring what promises to be a prolonged run of thinly sourced bankers-fearing-the-wrath-of-the-people stories and posting something nasty in the comments thread will have to do. Even if these sorts of accounts don't pass journalistic muster, they do manage to serve an important role, providing Americans with a way to vent and leaving them the illusion that in the end, justice will out. Even if by now they probably know better.
