(2 of 2)
Greenspan tells the graduates they are embarking on "a material existence that neither my generation nor any that preceded it could have even remotely imagined." He adds that the gains from the long bull market in stocks "regrettably...have not been as widely spread across households." About 40 students protest, walking out of his speech carrying huge red balloons. They wind up in the Square, between a bank and Au Bon Pain. Down the Square, the Tasty, a famous cheap diner, is the latest old fixture to be replaced by high-rent glam: this time an Abercrombie & Fitch. And so it feels sweet and ironic but futile as the scraggly crowd rails against Greenspan and disgusting capitalism.
But then someone reads from Emerson's "The American Scholar": "The world is nothing. The man is all." Looked at that way, the Harvard graduates--hey, this is no easy school to get through--deserve commendation. But the men and women of Pine Street? Now that calls for some irrational exuberance.