“To your knowledge has fraud ever been committed by management in an organization you have worked for?” Forty-seven percent of the 223 responding members of the Illinois CPA Society checked “yes” in response to this question on the group’s recent annual opinion poll. And who would be in a better position to know?
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“We will have new generations of youth rebellion as certainly as we will have new generations of mufflers or toothpaste or footwear,” concludes Tom Frank in his new book, The Conquest of Cool. “The countercultural style has become a permanent fixture on the American scene, impervious to the angriest assaults of cultural and political conservatives, because it so conveniently and efficiently transforms the myriad petty tyrannies of economic life–all the complaints about conformity, oppression, bureaucracy, meaninglessness, and the disappearance of individualism that became virtually a national obsession during the 1950s–into rationales for consuming. No longer would Americans buy to fit in or impress the Joneses, but to demonstrate that they were wise to the game, to express their revulsion with the artifice and conformity of consumerism”–creating “a cultural perpetual motion machine in which disgust with the falseness, shoddiness, and everyday oppressions of consumer society could be enlisted to drive the ever-accelerating wheels of consumption.”
The last word on the Dearborn Park saga, from Robert Giloth in The Neighborhood Works (November/December): In her book At Home in the Loop: How Clout and Community Built Chicago’s Dearborn Park, Lois Wille “makes the promoters of Dearborn Park into civic heroes, but all neighborhood development projects in Chicago must overcome multiple barriers, without the Dearborn Park boys’ easy access to banks, cash, and mayors.”
