Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007 - (Page 62)

him and he’d say, “I only talk to Michael.” I didn’t know anything, but he would only talk to me. So he made me. From that it was easy to become a success because everybody said I was a success. So all the other customers wanted to talk to me. I was dealing in my specialty on the Wall Street trading floor; I was the specialist in options and futures, now known as derivatives. These were new kinds of complicated securities, which required supposedly some mathematical training to understand. What it meant was none of my bosses knew what I did. They didn’t understand it, so I got left alone. The money came in, Salomon Brothers got a bunch of money, and they rewarded me–-they never understood just how flukish my success there was—they thought I was kind of meant to be there. But I knew if Jacob Rothschild was hit by a bus, I was done for. Sartisky: What they didn’t understand was, yours was a New Orleans success story. You succeeded by charm, indolence, and indifference. We have an entire city that has succeeded on that premise. Lewis: These people, my relatives on the wall. My Aunt Norma’s in the audience, my father’s sister, and she can confirm that growing up, from the time I was this high, my father would make me recite back to him the Lewis family motto. He swore to me it was on the coat of arms, though I’ve never seen this, and he said the Lewis family motto was, “Do as little as possible and that unwillingly, for it is better to receive a slight reprimand than to perform an arduous task.” If it does not describe the Lewis family, it certainly describes the city, and especially now. So yes, New Orleans is in my blood. Sartisky: The other thing that is fascinating is that when you read The Money Culture and especially when you read Liar’s Poker, Michael renders intelligible enormously complex transactions. We are all familiar with the notion that the rich get rich and the rest of us stay poor. Michael actually not only reveals and at the same time eviscerates the process, at least eviscerates the moral underpinnings of the process, the LBOs for example, which stands for leveraged buyouts but really ought to stand for something like legal buccaneering organizations. It’s really how billions of dollars are stolen in plain sight and paid for by shareholders and even eventually the American government, fair to say? Lewis: You’re generating a moral outrage I’ve never generated on the page. I regarded a lot of it with a kind of detachment. I did think, “It is true that there is very little connection between the amount of money a human being makes on Wall Street and that human being’s social contribution.” Those two things are just severed. They have nothing to do with each other. Now, how one feels about that is a different thing. I always felt every now and then I could get myself worked up about it, but I just felt it was interesting to describe and so left it at that. Others were much more outraged than I was. Sartisky: On the face of it that might be true and that might be the difference between Michael being a native son of New Orleans and my being a native son of New York. One of the principal differences being that a Yankee like myself would rather be right than polite. So we live in the realm of moral outrage as opposed to acceptance. I’m going to challenge Michael on that premise and ask him to read a section from a later book next in which he connects some of this back to New Orleans. Lewis: I had spent my childhood in New Orleans. I would like now to consider this otherwise uninteresting fact as it is bound up with my interest in what follows. By the mercenary standards of the modern world, New Orleans is a failed place. In my lifetime, it has ceased to be the capital of trade and commerce in the American South and become a museum city like Venice. The new capital of the American South is Atlanta, which has made the shrewd but spiritually vacuous decision not to stand on ceremony or tradition but rather to go whoring after progress. Sartisky: There is no moral outrage in any of this, by the way. Please continue. Lewis: I’m just telling it like it is. Sartisky: I’m just watching you quote yourself. Lewis: Atlanta has transformed itself. It is no longer even a city. It’s an airport, a blur of movement unrelated to anything but the pursuit of money. It is also not uncoincidentally one of America’s Internet business centers. Not so New Orleans. Decades of economic failure in many ways unappealing, but in one way an advantage. Where there is no economic development there is no big change. There is just a slow inexorable crumbling. For that reason New Orleans has always been an excellent place to observe progress. The same might be said for any number of European cities: Manchester, England; Paris, France. To know LEWIS FAMILY COLLECTION Michael Lewis pitches for Newman High School at age 16, 1976. 62 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Winter 2007-08

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007 Contents Friends Editor’s Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Katrina: Days of Terror, Months of Anguish Paintings by Rolland Golden The Historic New Orleans Collection The Great Ouachita River Flood of 1932 Jazz Notes Louisiana Architecture Louisiana: Where Land Meets Water Louisiana State Museum Through A Lens Sharply: An Interview with Michael Lewis MR-GO: A “miracle” mired in controversy Louisiana Foodways Louisiana Association of Museums New Orleans: An Autopsy Bookstand Sound Advice Forum

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007

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