What Makes Sammy Run? (49 page)

Individualism run rampant, an arrogant disregard for the views and the welfare of our fellow man, was the root of the Iran-contra debacle, which brought the Great Communicator down from his mythic high. Small wonder in such an atmosphere that a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Marines became his own CIA and State Department, wheeling and dealing with foreign countries, international arms dealers, Swiss bank accounts and rebels in Miami who dreamed of the good old days of Somoza while they gobbled up those mysterious millions.

In the closing lines of
What Makes Sammy Run?
I had described his meteoric career “as a blueprint of a way of life that was paying dividends in America in the first half of the twentieth century.” Well, with our takeover artists, our inside traders, our Ivan Boeskys and Mike Milkens, our Ollie Norths, our college football heroes on the take from filthy rich alumni, our New York City commissioners compromised almost to a man (and woman),
all signs point to even bigger dividends for the Sammy Glicks in the remainder of this century, and on into the next.

The book I had written as an attack on antisocial behavior has become a how- to book on Looking Out for Number 1. Change that line of the old hymn to read, “America, America, God shed His grace on me.” Let’s hear it for me, me,
me!

Who needs free milk and hot lunches for poor kids in school? Who needs loans and assistance for high-school graduates who can’t go on to college for lack of bread? It’s Darwin Time: survival of the fittest! Sure, all people are created equal. Only Sammy Glick is created more equal than the
Schleppers
, get it?

O.K. That’s how they’re reading it in 1989. And if that’s the way they go on reading it, marching behind the flag of Sammy Glick, with a big dollar sign in the square where the stars used to be, the twentieth-century version of Sammy is going to look like an Eagle Scout compared to the twenty-first.

B
UDD
S
CHULBERG
                     
Brookside, Quiogue, New York
June 1989