Corporate Cynicism

"I couldn't forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made..."

This passage describes the separation of class, defined by the more obviously divide in monetary worth and less obviously divide in moral intentions. While reading the passage, I was surprised by the immediate relevance this passage held to modern events much discussed in America's political rhetoric.

In the wake of Obama's administration denying further construction of the North Dakota Access Pipeline, an act requested through turmoil and irritated voices, it is worth analyzing the corporate origins, much summarized in the passage, of the initial construction. For the first time in history, many Native American tribes unified against a common antagonist: Energy Transfer Partners, a corporation that represents blind greed and repetitive institutional infringement of Native American rights.

Energy Transfer Partners, and much of its political allies, has consciously ignored the cultural and historic relevance of the land the pipeline would have crudely run through and the environmental implications of the pipeline itself. As in the passage, Energy Transfer Partners and many other modern corporations "[smash] up things and creatures and then [retreat] back into their money or their vast carelessness," for profits outweigh humanity.

Because literature of any time period often reflects the predominant ideology, the passage from The Great Gatsby, exposes a cynical truth that was known back then and is ever more relevant today: a clear barrier exists between the goals of much of those surrounded in wealth and the reality of the repercussions of their destructive greed.