Alcohol tax hike cuts two ways_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Alcohol tax hike cuts two ways

Gatsby is a fable about betrayal – of others, and of our own ideals. The concept that a New World in America is even possible, that it won't simply reproduce the follies and vices of the Old World, is already an illusion, a paradise lost before it has even been conceived. By the time Gatsby tries to force that world to fulfil its promise, the dream is long gone. But that doesn’t stop him from chasing “the green light” of wealth and status, the dangled promise of power that can only create a corrupt plutocracy shored up by vast social inequality.

If that sounds familiar, it should: our gilded age bears a marked resemblance to Fitzgerald’s. It has become a truism that Fitzgerald was dazzled by wealth, but the charge infuriated him: “Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction,” he insisted, adding later, “I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich, and it has colored my entire life and works”. He wasn’t in thrall to wealth, but making a study of how it was corrupting the country he loved. “Like so many Americans,” Fitzgerald wrote in his 1927 story “Jacob’s Ladder”, “he valued things rather than cared about them.”

The materialistic world of Gatsby is defined by social politics in a metropolitan America. It is a story of class warfare in a nation that denies it even has a class system, in which the game is eternally rigged for the rich to win. As the eminent critic Lionel Trilling observed in 1951: “Fitzgerald, more than anyone else of his time, realised the rigorousness of the systems of prestige that lie beneath the American social fluidity.” In fact, as a young man Fitzgerald described himself as a socialist, and in the 1930s, like almost all writers of his era, he became interested in communism (although he was soon unimpressed). And it is certainly true that if Fitzgerald was a socialist, he was the original champagne socialist.