The Two Bills

Remembering the 1990s one may remember quite pointedly the prominence of two men named Bill through it. There is the Bill who, son of a poor single mother, became a Rhodes Scholar and rose to the highest office in the land, from which he presided over an era of unexampled national prosperity. And there is the Bill who not unlike him a "self-made man," followed the path of business rather than politics and became the richest man in history through the part that "the good things he brought to life" played in that '90s boom over which the other Bill presided, central as the "tech industry" and the proliferation of personal computing and the Internet were during it.

Of course, this view of the two Bills--Bill Clinton and Bill Gates, respectively--is the Establishment claptrap version so beloved by singers of nonsense about "meritocracy." What Bill Clinton's political career teaches is in fact the benefit to be gained by siding with the winners in a political battle (the Neo-Liberals, and neoliberals, ascendant in the Democratic Party and the country at that time, at whose forefront Clinton put himself), as well as the lucky break one catches when a competitor self-destructs (for had Gary Hart remained a "frontrunner" Clinton might never have become a national figure).

Meanwhile Bill Gates' story is not, as some have it, that of a rise from rags to riches but of the rich getting richer because in fact born rich they have the inherited capital and family connections (say, a mother who knows the chair of IBM through her position on a charity's board) that enable them to take advantage of opportunities with which others can do little or nothing--such as exploiting the genius of others. Rather than a tale of opportunity for all it is, properly understood, a tale of how the system works for the few and not the many, especially in the era of which the other Bill was such an icon, his eight-year presidency representing above all the neoliberal-neoconservative consensus that was virtually unchallenged in any significant way for a generation (1993-2016) that was itself part of a half century of neoliberal-neoconservative dominance (1978-), with all it meant for the chances of the other Bill to enrich themselves in a time in which talk of national "prosperity" usually meant a paper boom benefiting the super-rich as the long-run decline in the standard of living of the many just went on and on.

It seems highly symbolic of that time, and this one, that both Bills' faces are being seen so much in the news lately--along with a certain other famous face, that of Jeffrey Epstein, as said individual's secrets are drip-fed to the public. In its coverage of the revelations the mainstream media is, of course, being its usual, cowardly centrist self, downplaying the aspect of political scandal--especially insofar as political scandal meant more than the "embarrassment" of political figures by revelations regarding the sordid details of their sex lives (Epstein was a player in some very high-level affairs of the other kind)--and the way in which this is an indictment not merely of certain high-profile figures that knee-jerk defenders of the status quo consider Great Men who merely lapsed, or at worst bad apples, but a whole elite stratum.

Thus true to its relentless fixation on identity politics over class the Guardian's Marina Hyde's relentless reduction of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal to the gender first, last and always, male villains and female victims, narrative her paper is ever ready to flog, with any reference to class and politics a mere distraction from the "real" and indeed only issue at hand in tones implying that anyone paying attention to anything else is an idiot. Fortunately, obtuse as the public so often appears to be where these matters are concerned, I suspect that no amount of spin will allow that particular bit of obfuscation to fly, however slight the consequences are likely to be for the friends of Epstein in a context where the malefactors are so squarely among the "protected but unbound" as the outraged can only wail and gnash their teeth as they endure the lot of the "bound but unprotected."