RECLAIMING THE CULTURE. Professor McCracken is in a good position to observe the end of the investment bankers' dominance in New York City.

There is evidence of hostility these days...against the hedge fund managers, banking executives, those who ran the likes of AIG, and guys like Bernie Madoff. This ad suggests that the wealthy are vain, self centered, irresponsible. Conspicuous consumption is now doubly conspicuous.

But is that the traditional snobbery of old money, or the reverse-snobbery of the class of knowledge workers that includes your Superintendent, particularly on curmudgeonly days? The ad in question features a Hollywood dad, possibly divorced. That's not determinative of a leveling influence at work.

The anthropological questions: could this hostility scale up into a more substantial class hostility? Will it be used by individuals to mandate their own departures from existing consumption patterns? Can something like shame be used by some people to comment on and constrain the behavior of others? Will this work?

I'm not sure a graffito on an advertisement is an indicator of a mood shift. The McDonald's digs at coffee snobs are also a small sample, but they could be indicative, although McDonald's is a good metaphor for the Third Worldization of the United States. I'd be more encouraged if I saw a restoration of the more modest expectations and attitudes of The America That Worked^(TM).