conversation about the role of pharmaceuticals in our American society.
Dad had raised his eyebrows and was tapping his index finger on his cranium. “This,” he was saying, “is the new frontier.” The Croxol fiasco notwithstanding, he had decided to make pharmaceutical concerns pretty central to his recovering portfolio and he felt it was one of the smartest things he’d done.
“But aren’t you bankrupt, I mean . . . ?”
“I was.” He stopped walking and looked off—I did too—into the hazy distance. “I was, as you say, bankrupt. Had to put the house in your mother’s name. True. But no one in commodities made it through 2000. You know that much.”
I did know but never, even after lengthy explanation, did I get exactly why. I knew money had been managed for institutional clients, and that it had been invested at high risk, generating high returns, in gambles on foreign-exchange rates, actual commodities, interest rates, and so on. You took an average directional movement of this, and some relative strength indicators from that, and figured in some four-day average true ranges, and you fed this stuff to the computer until arrows came on-screen telling you to get in or out, and this meant being, until 2000, a hero among commodities traders, profiled in Barron’s and elsewhere, and a mystery to your wife and kids, all of whom liked complaining that you weren’t a good listener but then turned into, like, hypocrite deaf-mutes the moment you tried to explain to them the baroque system your semidipsomaniacal genius had devised one evening when you were supposedly in your office reading literature books.
Dad said, “I’m speaking to you as a private individual now. The drug companies are the place to be.”
It was like I was being taken into his confidence as a potential investor in my own right. Dad’s confidence in the pharmaceutical industry gave me some faith that the Abulinix might be starting to work and I said, “There’s probably, dad, something that I should—and that might be of interest on a somewhat different, but also related—”
“People have so much money these days, Dwight—have you noticed this? They’ve really bought up most of the goods they’re going to want.” This was the place where Alice would have noted in chilling tones that it was in fact a tiny minority of the global count that dad was including in his category of people. And I would have said, “You know what he means, Al,” because it just seemed like too much for dad to have two kids who felt that the best response to the available pleasures was a constant awareness of those unable to enjoy them.
“But that’s outer goods,” dad was saying. “There we’re sated. Consumer electronics, SUVs. In fact this is one reason the economy’s so sluggish. There’s a lot of excess manufacturing capacity in this world, this”—he pointed to my golf clubs with one of his—“this world of what you and I would call physical things. But the market for what are essentially inner goods—this has only begun to be tapped.”
Dad and I often had these very zeitgeisty conversations—they seemed to be an aspect of the father-son relationship. For a couple of years whenever we went golfing or skiing he’d initiate dialogue about how nice it was that we’d won the Cold War. It was like we’d chipped in together. “During the Cold War you felt like you had a reason to get up in the morning. Now what have we got?” The words had seemed to imply a certain sympathy with me, since my own reasons for getting up in the morning were unknown to us both, hence I was studying philosophy at Eureka Valley, in order to learn them.
We proceeded from hole to hole underneath the low Connecticut sky. “Ten years,” dad was saying, “and people won’t be so suspicious of drugs. Sure, the Arabs might be. But we’re chemistry. That’s what we are. We just have to wait for this realization to trickle all the way down. Food, exercise,
Dad had raised his eyebrows and was tapping his index finger on his cranium. “This,” he was saying, “is the new frontier.” The Croxol fiasco notwithstanding, he had decided to make pharmaceutical concerns pretty central to his recovering portfolio and he felt it was one of the smartest things he’d done.
“But aren’t you bankrupt, I mean . . . ?”
“I was.” He stopped walking and looked off—I did too—into the hazy distance. “I was, as you say, bankrupt. Had to put the house in your mother’s name. True. But no one in commodities made it through 2000. You know that much.”
I did know but never, even after lengthy explanation, did I get exactly why. I knew money had been managed for institutional clients, and that it had been invested at high risk, generating high returns, in gambles on foreign-exchange rates, actual commodities, interest rates, and so on. You took an average directional movement of this, and some relative strength indicators from that, and figured in some four-day average true ranges, and you fed this stuff to the computer until arrows came on-screen telling you to get in or out, and this meant being, until 2000, a hero among commodities traders, profiled in Barron’s and elsewhere, and a mystery to your wife and kids, all of whom liked complaining that you weren’t a good listener but then turned into, like, hypocrite deaf-mutes the moment you tried to explain to them the baroque system your semidipsomaniacal genius had devised one evening when you were supposedly in your office reading literature books.
Dad said, “I’m speaking to you as a private individual now. The drug companies are the place to be.”
It was like I was being taken into his confidence as a potential investor in my own right. Dad’s confidence in the pharmaceutical industry gave me some faith that the Abulinix might be starting to work and I said, “There’s probably, dad, something that I should—and that might be of interest on a somewhat different, but also related—”
“People have so much money these days, Dwight—have you noticed this? They’ve really bought up most of the goods they’re going to want.” This was the place where Alice would have noted in chilling tones that it was in fact a tiny minority of the global count that dad was including in his category of people. And I would have said, “You know what he means, Al,” because it just seemed like too much for dad to have two kids who felt that the best response to the available pleasures was a constant awareness of those unable to enjoy them.
“But that’s outer goods,” dad was saying. “There we’re sated. Consumer electronics, SUVs. In fact this is one reason the economy’s so sluggish. There’s a lot of excess manufacturing capacity in this world, this”—he pointed to my golf clubs with one of his—“this world of what you and I would call physical things. But the market for what are essentially inner goods—this has only begun to be tapped.”
Dad and I often had these very zeitgeisty conversations—they seemed to be an aspect of the father-son relationship. For a couple of years whenever we went golfing or skiing he’d initiate dialogue about how nice it was that we’d won the Cold War. It was like we’d chipped in together. “During the Cold War you felt like you had a reason to get up in the morning. Now what have we got?” The words had seemed to imply a certain sympathy with me, since my own reasons for getting up in the morning were unknown to us both, hence I was studying philosophy at Eureka Valley, in order to learn them.
We proceeded from hole to hole underneath the low Connecticut sky. “Ten years,” dad was saying, “and people won’t be so suspicious of drugs. Sure, the Arabs might be. But we’re chemistry. That’s what we are. We just have to wait for this realization to trickle all the way down. Food, exercise,
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