market—triumphing or not—has been recognized as a potent and ultimately unavoidable force in human events, and as something that’s going to get in our hair for the rest of our lives. And here is another reason to look at the New York Stock Exchange. It’s personal. That’s our own money in the stock market, jumping up and down like a maniac on the price trampoline. Either we’ve made somersaulting investments of our own or pension funds and insurance companies have done it for us. We’re worried our money is going to break its neck. Even if we don’t have a cent in stocks, we’re concerned about the economy in general—what will happen to Bill Clinton’s sex life if the Dow Jones goes down? So the stock market is important. We should pay attention to it. However, we’re already paying attention to it—too much attention. And almost all of that attention is the wrong kind. The New York Stock Exchange has achieved celebrity status. It appears on the network news every night and in The New York Times headlines every day, is kidded during Jay Leno monologues, and attracts 700,000 tourists a year to live performances. Expect the secondary effects of fame to kick in soon. Nike merger-and-acquisition shoes. Tommy Hilfiger margin-call sweat suits. This is an era of strange renown, but the New York Stock Exchange is an odd star even by current standards. It’s just a room, or actually three rooms: the Main Room (it’s the main room), the Blue Room (the walls are blue), and the Garage (it used to be one). These are big, dumpy, overlit spaces festooned with coaxial cables and mobbed by gesticulating clerks and hollering middle-aged men all wearing ridiculous jackets and scurrying around with complete absence of dignity. Thousands of telephones ring. The floor is covered with trash. Large boards full of little lightbulbs blink astronomy-class strings of digits. Hundreds of video screens display runic symbols and funny numbers. And girdling it all, at cricked-neck height above the frenzy, is the ever-changing stock ticker, a crawling electronic ribbon of gibberish. Behold the hero of the late ’90s. We thrill with its victories, shudder at its defeats, admire its resilience, sympathize with its shortcomings. And now there are the effects of the “Asia crisis” to add tabloid interest. We identify. Generation X has given up playing in garage bands and trying to make indie films, and has gone back to grad school en masse to get that MBA. An older, even loopier generation is spending the money in its IRAs and Keoghs
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