Why ThePeopleInChargeOfSuchThings Are Viewed With Such Suspicion

David Brooks, columnist at the YewNorkTimes, offers some wry thoughts on a subject that bears consideration.

That general, undefined group of ThePeopleInChargeOfSuchThings seem to garner less and less of our respect. You know, the people who run banks, businesses, institutions that need more than anything to remain stable. Things like universities, electric utilities, school boards, churches, foundations, etc. For many years, in town after town, state after state, a person could wander into such an institution and see the portraits of such people on a wall somewhere.  In a lot of places they remain on display. It matters a lot in America, which is such a cauldron of rapid change, that an image of stability be projected.

Inevitably, the portraits are of middle-aged white guys, and they project an image of absolute boring stability. If you're going to borrow money for a house, farm and tractors from this guy, you'd better have a long and wide good family reputation, and a demonstrated ability to make money at farming, by golly. If you're going to propose a change in course of educational policy at this university, you'd better have your ducks in a row, 'cuz we're doing just fine thank-you-very-much.

It's like everyone strove to look and act like Truman, Eisenhower, or even Truman's VP Alvin Barkley.

It was a badge of honor.

Brooks notes how this has changed, and why it may have contributed to our present unease:

[T]his new system has created new social chasms. In the old days, there were obviously big differences between people whose lives were defined by ''The Philadelphia Story'' and those who were defined by ''The Grapes of Wrath.'' But if you ran the largest bank in Murfreesboro, Tenn., you probably lived in Murfreesboro. Now you live in Charlotte or New York City. You might have married a secretary. Now you marry another banker. You would have had similar lifestyle habits as other people in town. Now the lifestyle patterns of the college-educated are very different from the patterns in other classes. Social attitudes are very different, too.

Too much in the essay to do it justice by pulling one quote. But he's right, in many ways, and like all good writers, he is able to put clear words to unclear intuitions.

OldSouth circulates, quietly, amongst folks in the New Managerial Class. Sometimes he wonders if they possess either souls or common sense. Here they are, making big decisions in their little worlds, and they seem oddly, wierdly disconnected from the context in which they daily live.  To quote a grumpy neighbor: 'These people make me nervous!'.

OS does not wish to return to a world where being female, or black, or any number of other variations of the human condition automatically excludes one from opportunity. That is purely immoral. But there might much to learn from those grey, boring faces who stare out at us from the hall portraits, about attitudes toward life, duty, honor, and stability.