From The S.F. Chronicle
By Mark Morford

Call it the backlash against the recoil against the collapse. Call it the completely natural response to the downward-spiraling times, though that seems a bit feeble and pansy-assed and not at all in alignment with the general attitude of raging seethingosity.

Call it, then, the death of all we once held dear, if what you held dear consisted of seven McMansions and three trophy wives and five revolving psychiatrists and four personal trainers and regular spa treatments for the Wheaten terriers, along with blatantly rubbing your aging genitalia against the stiff leather of your fleet of Porsche Cayenne Turbos after drunkenly nailing your mistress in your corner office at Goldman Sachs. Ahh yes, that’s more like it.

Whatever you call it, there’s a bitter tang in the air, a nasty streak of anti-Everythingism, a collective bullet of disgust and frustration that’s most violently aimed at the most precious American commodity of all: the rich, the overly entitled, the uberwealthy, the manicured bankers and CEOs and Wall Street cash jockeys we used to cherish like royalty but who now smell vaguely of death and foreclosure and Bernie Madoff.

What a strange phenomenon. From the public outcry against giant investment firms daring to hold fancy Christmas parties, to the image of those bloated Big Auto CEOs driving themselves to Congress in cute little hatchbacks, to Obama himself decrying the obscenity that is the typical executive salary, it’s like you can’t swing a dead Gulfstream 450 these days without hitting a wall of anti-privilege outrage. Frugality might be the current national pastime, but it’s also a mean sonofabitch.

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