The first point is: the usher was not a bad person. Although some of the manager-level bouncer/usher/guards were clearly coplike in their demeanor, enjoying busting people (including me, when I snuck down to floor level) and taking it all a bit too seriously, most of the low-level staff seemed to be college kids on a summer job. It wasn't that they were bad people. This little point is critical, actually, because it shows how our mainstream media misrepresents what is wrong with mainstream, corporate/consumer culture. "Bad" capitalism as depicted in films usually involves businessmen who are portrayed as personally greedy, venal, etc. They are evil people, corrupt, and totally unrealistic. In reality, and I speak from firsthand experience as a software executive, corporate types are usually not that way at all. The venal, greedy types get weeded out pretty quickly. Most suits are just like the usher at the Dead show: decent people.

Moreover, the usher, at least, was as much a victim of the system as a perpetrator of it. I don't think it's fair to ask her to resist, and get fired. She could've been a little more forgiving, but then he'd get yelled at, probably, by his supervisor. Even on a more macro- level, it's complicated to determine how 'guilty' a CEO or lesser-corporate stooge is in perpetuating the system of which they are a part. The line between victim and perpetrator is grey, and lined with green.

But these are decent people doing indecent things. The pleasantness of the usher, or of the CEO, does not in any way lessen what's wrong with what they are doing. Corporate clones participate in a structure of greed and venality which causes inequality, oppression, environmental degradation, overconsumption, and devaluation of some of the most important human endeavours. Yet they share the same error as the anti-corporate activist. The CEO, like the activist, buys the image that 'bad' capitalism means Gordon Gekko, and they know they're not that, so they're doing okay. The private, post-Protestant morality of America allows all but the most evil (and sometimes them too) to say to themselves: I am a good person, and that is what matters.

That is not all that matters. The system matters too. The dumb activist (and I dated one of these, so I speak from experience) thinks CEOs are Gekko, or the rich old white men in Trading Places, and casts about for villains when it is the structure of capitalism that is really the problem. Likewise, the businessman knows these Hollywood images, and knows he is not that, and so he justifies himself. 'This is what reasonable people do. The weirdos are deluding themselves.' As Dan Friedman has written in these pages, the inability of Hollywood - a term I take to include CNN, Time Magazine, USA Today, major network news magazines, and the rest of the 'news' media consumed by 90-95% of American news-consumers -- to depict systemic wrongs perpetuates those wrongs. They aren't stories. And indeed, sometimes the systemic wrong is accompanied by a heartwarming story: the CFO who really, genuinely is a good mom or dad.

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