Bogeyman, Inc.

Over the past decade or so, Americans turned the tobacco industry into the great common foe, a true corporate villain. Sure, there were plenty of people who enjoyed a little tobacco, but Big Tobacco was an all-purpose whipping boy: Big companies, extremely profitable, run by arrogant executives — fat cats — whose products were not just addictive and lethal, but also smelly. There were times in the past decade when it actually seemed that a dislike of Big Tobacco, our all-purpose cultural whipping boy, was the last thing Americans could agree on. It practically took the place of the Soviet Union: Who wanted to be known as soft on cigarettes?

But the most recent in a long series of blows, a Florida jury's $145 billion punitive judgment against the industry, has brought a certain fatigue with this particular villain. These firms have already coughed up billions and been placed under all kinds of restrictions; they've been taxed and taxed again; their products have been banned from restaurants, offices, even parks. The companies will soldier on, but there is nothing left to argue about. Tobacco has been thoroughly bashed, and there is a blank space in the American discourse. The role of Bogeyman Inc. stands open.

There are plenty of contenders, but finding a true replacement — one that can serve different segments of society's different needs in a villain — is harder than you think. Some people decried second-hand smoke's threat to individual health. Others bemoaned the cost to the health care system. Still others loathed the firms' political clout. Some simply found smoke annoying. That's the sort of broad base that's necessary to build a new Bogeyman Inc. If the obsession with healthier living, for example, were enough, politicians would be railing against the power of Big Mayonnaise.

One early candidate has been the gun business, whose products are linked to actual deaths without a great deal of mental gymnastics. But despite all the lawsuits and diatribes, gunmaker-hating has had little traction. Partly this is because Americans disagree about gun rights. But it is also because those manufacturers are a dispersed group, some of them subsidiaries of foreign companies. It's hard to reduce the plot to the nefarious actions of a handful of men running mammoth corporations with obscene profits. There's a fat-cat gap. Some efforts were also made to demonize the entertainment industry, but — as with frequently annoying airlines and the possibly carcinogenic cell phones — we're all too dependent on its product to sustain a grudge.

What about Microsoft? Or the dot-coms? Admittedly, there's nothing deadly about their creations, but surely we can all get angry together about the obscene fortunes of the tech industry's virtual robber barons, right? Well, no, not at the same time that we're snapping up their wares, totting up the latest changes in their net worth, fantasizing about joining their ranks and generally treating them as philosopher-kings. Besides, we just love tech stocks, which brings us to a final complication.

There was a time when tobacco stocks performed quite nicely for a lot of people. But only since the last presidential election has shareholder culture so decisively moved to the center of American public discourse. We have heard endlessly that half of the country has money in the markets, that Main Street and Wall Street are on the same side. By now we even seem to believe it. Consider Al Gore's efforts to villainize the “price gouging” pharmaceutical industry. Do drug companies not seem like prime targets for demonization? Yes, they make products that save lives, but like tobacco companies, they seem to be able to charge whatever they want, raking in profits and forcing elderly Americans (to borrow from Gore's rap) to eat macaroni and cheese to pay for vital medication.

But it isn't so simple. When Gore picks on the maker of the allergy drug Claritin D for trying to muscle special patent treatment out of Congress, he is picking on Schering-Plough, whose share price has risen from about 12 to 44, adjusted for splits, in the past five years. The No. 1 mutual-fund holder of Schering-Plough is Fidelity Magellan, one of the most popular funds in the United States; the No. 3 holder is the famous Vanguard 500 Index fund. Less than a month before he began tilting at Big Pharma, Gore set out on a “prosperity and progress” tour to remind us of the Clinton-Gore economic boom. Plenty of those whose prosperity progressed during the last eight years are investors in Magellan and the Vanguard 500.

Few fund holders would directly attribute their financial comfort to this or that industry. But the assumption that businesses should be out making profits for shareholders is far more popular now than when the assault on (publicly held) tobacco firms began. And this makes it entirely plausible that we will never have another Bogeyman Inc. — or at least not until Main Street finds some reason to diverge from Wall Street. Until then, one man's “price gouging” remains another's “killer profit margin,” or maybe more to the point, another's “shareholder value.”

I am, of course, as opposed to price gouging as the next guy, and I applaud anyone who can force this issue into the open. But I recently noticed that a fund I have money in is a top owner of Bristol-Myers Squibb and Pfizer. Pfizer, the maker of Viagra, is up 500 percent in the past five years. So am I part of a nation of consumers, anxious to see corporate power checked? Or part of a nation of shareholders, anxious to finance a luxurious retirement? I suppose you can say that Al Gore has campaigned like a candidate who wants it both ways. You could also make a case that there's no truer reflection of the current electorate.

A very similar version of this essay appeared in the August 6, 2000 issue ofThe New York Times Magazine.