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EVERYBODY'S BUSINESS
From Harvey Road to Crescent Drive, Something Changed
  By BEN STEIN
Published: July 23, 2006
SO now we know.

Thanks to some fine reporting at The Wall Street Journal, we now know
that right after 9/11, as the crushed bodies of heroic firemen were
still being pulled from the rubble of the World Trade Center, and the
nation was in deep, bone-chilling mourning, the smart people who run
some of America¹s biggest and most powerful corporations may have
already figured out An Angle.
Certain officers and directors at companies including UnitedHealth,
Merrill Lynch, Teradyne, Black & Decker and Home Depot knew that their
stock was way down because of panic about the attacks and whether more
were coming. They also knew that their long-term prospects were
excellent and that their stocks were a bargain. And right after the
attacks, they quickly awarded themselves options priced to strike at the
super-low prices their stocks reached when the fires at the Pentagon
were still smoldering. In many cases, they went on to make serious money
from those options.
The ordinary stockholders (obviously) were not awarded options or
anything similar that might allow them to take advantage of the tragedy
that had befallen the nation.
This ‹ as I see it ‹ went beyond war profiteering. This was actual
³death profiteering,² as my friend, the writer Marina Malenic, put it.
Now, to be sure, such actions are not illegal. As far as I know, there
is no law that says insiders cannot gather together to make an unseemly
profit off a national catastrophe. But it¹s sickening in its breach of
faith, and its breach of trust with the society at large. (Some of the
companies that granted 9/11 options are also part of an investigation
into the backdating of options ‹ a practice that in some cases could be
illegal.)
As I thought about it all, I picked up Philip Roth¹s magnificent
³American Pastoral² and began to read it, thinking as I did: ³How the
hell did everything go so wrong in this country? How did we stop giving
a damn about our neighbors and viewing this earthly transit, this brief
wink between eternity and eternity (to paraphrase the great Hart Crane),
as mostly a chance to make money off a nameless, faceless Other?² And as
I read Roth¹s incredibly potent words about America in the 1940¹s and
50¹s, the America I was born into and grew up into, I thought about the
Sculls.
On Harvey Road, our little dead-end street in Silver Spring, Md.,
overlooking Sligo Creek Park, there were about 30 homes and families.
Every family knew every other family, and every mom would take of care
of anyone¹s kid sent home sick from school.
In about 1955, one family in the neighborhood, and one family only,
built an in-ground swimming pool. That family was the Sculls ‹ David and
Elizabeth Lee Scull and their children, my idol and dear friend David
Lee Scull, and his sister, Betsy Blair Scull. In a neighborhood of
mostly second-generation middle-class Jews, the Sculls were genuine
American nobility.
The Sculls were direct descendants of Richard Henry Lee, a signer of the
Declaration of Independence, and distantly related to Gen. Robert E.
Lee. Daughter and son-in-law of one of the largest private landowners in
Montgomery County, they would have been aristocrats in the Court of St.
James. But they were more than that: they were friends and neighbors.
When the Sculls built their pool, they made a schedule and passed it
around the neighborhood. There was a set of times so that every family
on the street could use the pool every week of the summer.
That is, in the America that had banded together to win World War II,
the America bursting with togetherness, community spirit, and the
feeling that anything could happen if we all pulled together, the Sculls
shared their pool with every single family in the neighborhood as if we
all owned it. It was a small, unheated pool, but how we all loved it,
and what splash fights and free-style races and underwater
breath-holding contests we had there in the wild cathedral afternoons of
summertime youth. There was no wall around the pool, or around any lot
nearby. It was a neighborhood of trust and sharing.
Then something happened. Maybe it was the explosion of individualism.
Maybe it was new kinds of people who did not speak the language or who
seemed different and threatening coming into our towns. Maybe it was
just the life cycle of empires. But now life is different.
Now, in 2006, on my street in Beverly Hills, every home has a pool, as
far as I know. Many of them are spectacular and all are heated. But we
all have high walls around our homes. I have lived on my street in my
house for eight years and know only one neighbor, my next-door
neighbors, who throw parties and sing lovely Persian songs.
If our son got sick at school and my wife or I were not home, the school
nurse would just have to keep him until we could be found. There is not
one neighbor on the street who would take him in, or who even knows him.
(Sometimes I think my wife and I don¹t know him, either: the modern
American affluent teenager, a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an
enigma, to cite Churchill on Stalin¹s Russia.)
AS I said, something happened. It happened not only in neighborhoods,
but also in corporate America, where the only meaningful units to
management are the manager himself and his wealth. The workers are just
the most easily varied input of costs, not people to whom you feel any
obligation, or by whom you want to be viewed as a kind and decent
person. There is certainly no community between workers and management
at most companies.
The stockholders are not owners. All too often ‹ not always ‹ they¹re
just chumps who are lucky to get whatever scraps the board leaves them.
Owners of the company? That¹s a joke now.
And the nation as a whole, under siege by terrorists and militants who
are very sure of their values? It¹s just a mass of strangers you have to
be nice to when you want them to invest in your company or when you want
them to go off to war to save you while you are making money off of a
national tragedy. Otherwise, they¹re just strangers and you certainly
would not want them inside your walls or in your pool. It¹s nothing
personal, as they say in ³The Godfather,² ³It¹s just business.²
As I look back on it, Harvey Road was not a dead-end street at all, but
Crescent Drive, Beverly Hills 90210, might be.

I¹ll say it again. Something happened.
Ben Stein is a lawyer, writer, actor and economist. E-mail:
ebiz@nytimes.com