File this one under questions nobody is asking: What does Thomas Frank, the far left author of What’s the Matter with Kansas? think about the oeuvre of the late Harold Ramis? But “For Anyone Who Wonders What Thomas Frank Thinks of the Films of Harold Ramis,” Jesse Walker of Reason has you covered:
And Frank gets off a clever line when he writes that “the fraternity at Dartmouth which served as one of the models for ‘Animal House’ has of late become a kind of pipeline into the investment-banking industry” right after he quotes one of the movie’s most famous bits of dialogue—the part where one of the Delta House crew says, “You fucked up. You trusted us.” You can see the seeds of an interesting comparison there: If Animal House blurred the boundary between anti-authoritarian fun and entitled assholery, there are people on Wall Street whose rhetoric blurs the boundary between desubsidized deregulation and subsidized moral hazard. Frank, alas, isn’t keen on drawing that distinction either.
But this really is a classic case of “you f***ed, you trusted us,” as there’s a direct pipeline between Goldman-Sachs and the Obama White House — but then, who’s surprised that Frank gets Ramis’s films as wrong as he did, oh, Kansas, to name one of the 57 states at random?
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