“Your Money or Your Life?”

One of the most frequently cited jokes about parsimonious Americans came out of the Depression era. In the original skit in the 1930s, the radio comedian, Jack Benny, was out for a stroll. He heard footsteps behind him. As one later listener remembered, “A holdup man says, ‘Your money or your life.’ Benny says nothing for a very long time. That’s the joke. But it isn’t the topper. The holdup man repeats his threat and Benny shouts, 'I’m thinking it over!'" Another radio comic of the same era, Fred Allen, played along with the jokes about the miserly Jack Benny. One of Allen’s lines about his fellow comedian was, “This guy wouldn’t give you the parsley off his fish.”

Would those jokes carry the same punch in a flush time – in the last third of the twentieth century, for instance? What has happened to the miser in the more prosperous America of recent decades? Robert Sardello asked that question in 1983 and came up with an intriguing answer. He suggested that “stories about misers are less frequent these days. Miserliness is the other side of consumerism. In both instances, we are trying to possess the whole world to move into our homes.” 

Does Sardello’s equation of misers and consumer-possessed zealots make sense to you? If our answers are more or less “yes,” then another question seems fair game. Will we lampoon the consumerists in our midst, much as previous generations told jokes about misers? Or are jokes about consumerism too close to home in twenty-first century America to seem funny?

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Any Therapies for Greed? Or Therapies for Those Who Worry Unduly about Greed?

“Although greed is a cause of much unhappiness, there are few contemporary therapies for it since it is rarely perceived as undesirable.” Solomon Schimmel offers this provocative conclusion in his recent book, The Seven Deadly Sins: Jewish, Christian and Classical Reflections on Human Psychology. American culture, he wrote, “encourages greed, although euphemisms are usually used, when doing so, such as ‘financial success,’ ‘economic security,’ ‘the good life,’ or ‘having it all.’”  This avoidance of the word greed reflects our ambivalence about greed.

This harsh indictment comes from a therapist who rues the apparent decline in the power of a once great tradition. In the Middle Ages, Schimmel claims, “greed was not only a deadly sin but also a deadly disease, most commonly being considered a sort of spiritual dropsy” or an insatiable thirst.

But then one can ask if the favorite therapies of past centuries would be effective today. Were those stratagems effective in other places and times?

We can venture further in posing questions. Is there something distinctive, even unique about contemporary America that makes our problems and opportunities different from any nation in the past? David Brooks (A Place to Begin 3.1 - Is Money "Virtuous?") seems to think that the United States can now jettison, once and for all, the tradition of worrying about riches and their presumably corrupting consequences. Quit fussing. “The noblest, most creative and fullest life” is “in the rushing mainstream of life, in the office parks and the malls and the Times Squares twinkling with lights, screens and money.”  Brooks said it all in the flamboyant title of his essay – “Why the U.S. Will Always Be Rich.”

Any second guesses about either Schimmel’s worries or Brooks’ sunny optimism?