From a Public Relations perspective, the executives on Wall
Street, and the American corporate CEOs in general, have so tried the patience
of the American public, what with their grabbing all they can for themselves
behavior in the most lean of times, it’s amazing people aren’t marching on them
with pitchforks, et. al. And if they want the public to like them, they can
just forget it! Unless…
Hey, has anyone noticed how the characters in that
fabulously popular PBS television series Downton Abbey are so very like the hated Wall Street
executives and the 1%’ers we all seem to despise? But nobody seems to rail
against this TV show for being about such rich, rapacious people, now do they?
And that got me to thinking…
Hey, I’ll bet the Wall Street executives, the system-abusing
corporate CEOs, etc., could all gain the support of the (justly) resentful
American public if only they would do one thing: make a show like Downton
Abbey, but about the Richie Rich Wall
Street 1%’ers, and how their lives are so much like the glittery soap opera
that is Downton Abbey.
Now before you laugh and deny it, just consider this: I’ll
bet the “little people” in the UK in the teens and twenties probably felt the
upper-crust Downton crowd
was every bit as
repugnant as we find the Wall Street economy-rapers. Oh, but aren’t they about
the same, really? (Come on, you know it’s true!) Maybe all the Dick Fulds and
Lloyd Blankfeins have family estates just like Downton Abbey that they feel, due to tradition, they simply must keep in the family, just like in Downton
Abbey. And if we could peer into their
world, and see all the stresses and expectations and pressures to keep up
appearances, maybe we’d be on their side, or at the least, understand. (And if
not, then how come we care about the Downton crowd who is in the same class? Are we hypocrites,
or is it that they’re fictional? Because based upon the level of fraud our own
captains of industry have perpetrated and overseen, I’d say they’re just as
fictional here as well.)
So, really, if the American 1% wants the 99% to care about
them, then they’re going to have to make a Downton Abbey-esque, dramatically sympathetic TV series about
themselves. And once we see their world, full of expectations, pressures and
heartbreak, not to mention worries about losing that family castle in the
Hamptons, surely we’ll start to care more about them than we do ourselves. And
best of all for them, we’ll start to live vicariously through them, in a new
sort of “American Dream”. And then we’ll never storm the gates, unless we miss
an episode, and we want to catch up on what happened.
Well, Wall Street guys, it’s either that, or the pitchforks:
what’ll it be?
(Hey, you don’t suppose that guy Julian Fellowes is secretly
a Wall Street Hedge Fund CEO, do you? Maybe that’s why he’s trying to make the upper class seem so
sympathetic in his TV show. {A-Ha! Now I know what his game is…})
