full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/01/13/the-american-ruling-class/
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Among the pleasures of John Kirby’s 2005 documentary “The American
Ruling Class” is watching Doug Henwood coolly dissect a hedge fund
manager in his own office. Since the movie was written by and features
Lewis Lapham as a kind of Virgil escorting two recent fictional Yale
graduates into the hell of class society, it has access to the separate
worlds that the two major social classes live in. From the corporate
offices of the NY Times and Goldman-Sachs to the pancake house that
employs interviewee Barbara Ehrenreich, you get to see all sides of a
system that Lapham has condemned for decades in the pages of “Harper’s”
despite his patrician roots. Like Gore Vidal, Lapham is distinguished by
his hatred for the injustices of a society that his upper crust peers
take for granted.
