What Happened to the Elite?

When I was a kid (here I go again — back to the Stone Age) the word ‘elite’ meant something much different than it means now. In those days you were a member of the elite if you were male, white, at least 50 years old, Protestant, college-educated in private schools from first grade through the Ivy League, and from a family that was recognized as being at the top of the social pyramid in your community and the whole world as well.

It goes without saying that elite members of society were society. They were the people whom we respected, whom we tried to imitate in our looks and deeds, and most of all, they were leaders — financially and politically — in every way.

If you weren’t born into the elite, and that was impossible for me and my siblings because we were: a) Jewish; b) children of immigrants; c) educated in public schools; d) destined to work in some merchandising or manual trades, you were lucky to have a job.

The elite, on the other hand, not only had jobs in things like banks, insurance companies and Wall Street firms, they owned the goddamn banks, the insurance companies, and the Wall Street firms.

If you were really lucky and if, by the way, you happened to be a man, maybe there was a job for you at a Wall Street brokerage company to be the broker who handled the ‘Jew’ accounts, described as such. Ditto…