Michael Douglas was attractive. I don’t know that was ever a great actor but he had a style which is primarily what famous and good looking actors really need.
He is most famous for playing the role at the left.
Gordon Gekko, the Wall Street tycoon who lectured a bunch of neophytes that “Greed is good,” because greed, he felt, drove the economy. At least that’s what I presume he was saying. He believed that greed was a prime mover of humanity.
I’m not really sure he (meaning Oliver Stone, who wrote the character) is wrong. Ghandi almost said the same thing at the outbreak of the second world war. He is quoted somewhere as saying something like , ‘”‘you will never stop war until you solve the problem of human greed.’
As an aside: Virginia Woolf was asked, as a premise to Three Guineas (a fictional essay which is structured as a response to a letter received from an educated gentleman), how “we” might solve the problem of war. She turned the question on its head, and essentially didn’t answer the question, by pointing out that men were educated and almost no money was spent on a woman’s education, and what was spent, was spent mostly on teaching her domestic duties. It’s almost impossible to believe, but this argument is still absolutely relevant today.
I’ve been thinking about greed lately, because someone recently said to me, “What’s the matter, don’t you love money,” and I was almost physically repulsed by the question. It was like someone had thrown rotten and stinking food on me. I recovered by trying to say something silly, like, “I love wasting money.” But I can’t stop thinking about the smile on that person’s face as he talked about money (the money we were going to get). And to a lesser extent, greed in general.
Greed is pernicious. Philosophically, it is nearly identical to the question of evil. With evil, we are always trying to decide, from a philosophical point of view, whether or not evil is a real thing. This is because we can divide the world into good and bad, but stretching it to evil and — I suppose the opposite might be “divine” — is when what we call good and bad, which is purely an earthly phenomenon, starts to take on characteristics of religion or spiritual. So we have a car accident which results in someone’s death, which we label “bad,” but then vehicular manslaughter, which we label “evil.” Both are caused by a 2-1/2 ton motorized machine running over a soft body. One, however, has an intent that the other doesn’t. That’s why it’s hard to define “evil” and relatively easy to define “bad.”
Greed is similar. But I think it’s got it’s own — I don’t know — personality, maybe. And it would probably be good for all of us, in this western world, to think about how we have lived in a world dominated by greed since about 1980, when Ronald Reagan inaugurated an era of unregulated and unshackled greed. The exact quote in the movie is, “Greed, for a lack of a better term, is good.” That movie, “Wall Street,” was released in 1987, and the film opens in 1985 which means Oliver Stone probably wrote it somewhere around 1984/1985. Reaganism had taken over by then and he was just into his second term. In 1985 Margaret Thatcher was about 6 years into her long run. They both, perhaps because of the influence of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics, gave people, including a young Donald Trump, that the pursuit of more and more money was a good thing.
The orange menace is full on greed. He’s all in for greed. He loves it. He is not a Gordon Gekko, who was also a thinker and probably a great Wall Street business person. No, the Orange Menace is one of those people in the audience, who only ate the fried chicken on his lunch plate because he hates vegetables, who daydreams of being admired simply for being rich and having beautiful woman hang on him, all day long.
What’s happening now, imho, is the death throes of greed. Even the 2025 project which they are still trying to implement — though it’s failing everywhere — is basically a treatise for embracing greed. Greed asks stupid questions. Greed ignores logic. Greed asks, “Why share money with people who are too stupid to work?” “Why should the government tax the wealthy when the wealthy could get richer by keeping that money?” “Why shouldn’t the tax code be rewritten and rewritten, for the benefit of the rich?”
But greed is insidious. It gets inside us. It gets inside all of us.
Trump’s multi-faced and ham-fisted attempt to imprint himself on everything in Washington is a sexual gift basket for a man who has made Greed his life’s work. He wants to be able to drive around Washington and see his photo everywhere, and gold plated statues of himself, and see his name on things like the White House Blahroom and the Arch De Disaster. This is where Greed ends, goes back underground. And it will continue with many more outrages which will make it seem like it’s never ending. But there is nothing more than this for Greed. This is the last stage of Greed — the stage when King Midas touched everything and it turned to gold, including a grape he wanted to eat and his daughter when she entered the room and he hugged her. Online, it’ll tell you that the story of Midas is about how we become slaves to our desires. I don’t think that’s the case. He wasn’t a slave. He was just gripped by greed.
With Trump, if he were, to say to himself, this dictator chic is awful and weird, I’m going to start giving away my money. Even then, I don’t think he could be redeemed from Greed. Midas begged the Gods to remove the curse of his golden touch, and they gave him a typical mythological type formula that got rid of it by washing his hands in a river. He went on to live a happy life and was beloved by his people. And I can almost see Trump being that type of person. He’d have to do a lot of penancing to get there — perhaps even public self-flagellation, but I could almost see it.
But it’s too late for him, and for us. As we call the kettle black, turn our back on our ancestors, and blame the immigrants for all our problems, we will continue to cover statues in gold. And pretend that the greed Ronald Regan and Margaret Thatcher brought into this world has nothing to do with it.