WCU grad’s book inspires Times columnist
In today’s Times column, he ties current market crises to what he calls the culture of “two M’s — Money and Me”. “[They've become] the lodestones of the zeitgeist,” he writes, “and damn those distant wars.”
He quotes lyrics from the band Coldplay almost as comfortably as he quotes Barack Obama, who warned in a springtime speech: beware of the “poverty of ambition” in a culture of “the big house and the nice suits.”
Cohen points out that between 30% and 50% of Ivy League grads end up with investment banking firms, not because they have a particular interest, in many cases, but because it seems the thing to do. And he argues that our detached, self-interested financial elite are fiddling while the country’s infrastructure crumbles all around.
He winds things up with a call to public service during which he cites as “stirring” WCU graduate Nick Taylor’s “American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the W.P.A.: When F.D.R. Put the Nation to Work.”
Writes Cohen: “It shows how the Works Progress Administration, a linchpin of Roosevelt’s New Deal, put millions of unemployed to work on dams, airports and the like. It’s a book about how imaginative political leadership can rally a nation in crisis.”
Read a 2007 profile of Taylor from the Smoky Mountain News’s Michael Beadle here.
Tags: Cullowhee, New York Times, Smoky Mountain News, Western Carolina University
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