Having raised [Bill Gates] and his fellow billionaires above all men and all things, we Americans, in the great narrative of the nineties, saw that it was good and decided to remake utterly both our society and the outside world so that this wondrous operation might be repeated again and again. Unfortunately, the price of building billionaires was very high: To get a country on the billionaire scoreboard its citizens must do nothing less than, as [Lester] Thurow repeatedly chanted, ‘destroy the old.’ Only when we have smashed our culture, our institutions, our assumptions, our sense of pastness generally, will we have made it possible for billionaires to walk among us, to appear on our TVs and announce, ‘I Am.’