Tom Wolfe Takes Aim at Fallen CEOs

Posted on August 26, 2009

Tom Wolfe has a new short story in Vanity Fair magazine called "The Rich Have Feelings, Too, in which he channels the self-righteous anger of the CEOs who have lost jobs and perks like private jets after the bottom fell out of the banking industry. Wolfe is very funny as he describes the absolute horror of having to fly commercial after being used to fly in private jets where the captain serves you drinks and obeys your every whim. Here is part of the narrator's stream of consciousness thoughts about going through airports security:

... and inspected us up and down again before admitting us to what proved to be the inner coils of Hell ... We found ourselves walking down a corridor with a disconcertingly slick surface made of some sort of synthetic concrete ... After what seemed like a very long time we arrived at an open space -- and the line from Inner Hell ... It folded back upon itself, back upon itself, back upon itself, back upon itself so many times, it looked like Hell's descending colon ...

And it only gets worse from there. It's most amusing and it's free to read online. It's nice to see that some writers are still getting paid to write fiction for major magazines. We'd almost forgotten what that was like.