The collapse of credibility.

• Author: Ehrenreich, Barbara
• Position: Flip Side

It's a pleasure, of the schadenfreude variety, to sit back and watch the credibility peel off our principal institutions with no help from their usual critics.

Our corporate CEOs, for example, have gone from rocking to reeking in a mere two years. At the height of the dot-com bubble, when they had won the highest status American culture awards--that of "role model" and even "icon"--we hastened to offer them our adoration and, via the stock market, our life savings, as well. No traditional patriarchs, these--the `90s-era CEO combined the silver-templed authority figure of old with an appropriately up-to-date "out-of-the-box" image derived from Silicon Valley: reliable old dad and "edgy" young rebel wrapped into one. What was to rebel against when the leaders of our economy were already in full-throttle rebellion themselves--against irritatingly slow communications technologies, stultifying regulations, and obsolete national boundaries? If they earned 500 times more than their average employees, wasn't this a fit reward for the risks they took and the stress they endured?

But now--after Enron, Global Crossing, Adelphia, ImClone, Tyco, Merrill Lynch, WorldCom--it turns out the only thing they were rebelling against was common decency, and the only risk that of getting caught.

Or consider the federal agencies charged with saving us from grue-some deaths by terrorism. The FBI and the CIA, omnipotent bogeymen of my radical youth, turn out to possess archaic software and a system of information flow designed by Franz Kafka. And who would have guessed last fall, when the President promised us a long war, that these two agencies would be the warring parties? The only hope at the moment is that the new Department of Homeland Security will somehow be able to mediate.

The President himself--or as he was widely known before September 11, the "President"--has seen wild fluctuations in his credibility quotient. The nonelection of 2000, combined with the chosen winner's incurable callowness, left him scrambling for a bit of gravitas. After 9/11 though, and his subsequent bold pulverization of Afghanistan, Bush briefly had even liberals eating out of his hand. Maybe he was a dimwit about domestic governance and a sworn foe of birds and trees, but, the pundits insisted, he had crushed the "evildoers" with remarkable speed and aplomb.

A few months later, however, we discover that he was so complacent about the urgent warnings of oncoming terrorist attacks he...