Once upon a time, banking and investment banking were far less complex than they are today, especially recently. In ancient times, i.e., when I took basic economics more than fifty years ago, banks used the deposits of their customers to lend to other customers, paying less to their depositors than what they charged those to whom they made loans. Their loans were limited by their deposits, and banks were required to retain a certain percentage of their assets in, if you will, real dollars. Even investment banks had some fairly fixed rules, and in both cases what was classed as an asset had to be just that, generally either real property, something close to blue chip securities, municipal, state, or federal notes or bonds, or cash. With the creeping deregulatory legislation that reached its apex in the 1990s, almost anything could be, with appropriate laundering, otherwise known as derivative creation, be classed as someone’s asset.
And we all know where that led.
And for all the furor about derivatives, and the finger-pointing, something else, it seems to me, has gone largely unnoticed. The fact is that our entire society, especially in the United States, has become obsessed with derivatives in so many ways.
What are McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King, Applebee’s, Olive Garden, Red Lobster, Chili’s, and endless other restaurant chains, fast-food and otherwise, but derivatives. What happened to unique local restaurants? The ones with good inexpensive food often became chains, deriving their success from the original. The others, except for a few handfuls, failed. Every year it seems, another big name chef starts a restaurant franchise, hoping to derive success and profit from a hopefully original concept [which is becoming less and less the case].
Department stores used to be unique to each city. I grew up in Denver, and we had Daniels & Fisher, with its special clock tower, the Denver Dry Goods [“The Denver”], and Neustaeder’s. Then the May Company took over D&F, and before long all the department stores were generic. In Louisville, where my wife was raised, there were Bacon’s, Kaufmann’s, Byck’s, Selman’s, and Stewart’s. Not a single name remains.
Even Broadway, especially in musical theatre, has gone big for remakes and derivatives. Most of the new musicals appear to be remakes of movies, certainly derivative, or re-dos of older musicals. Every time there is a new twist on TV programming the derivatives proliferate. How many different “Law and Order” versions are there? Or CSI? How many spin-offs from the “American Idol” concept? How many “Reality TV” shows are there? Derivative after derivative… and that proliferation seems to be increasing. Even “Snow White” has become a derivative property now.
In the field of fantasy and science fiction writing, the derivatives were a bit slower in taking off, although there were more than a few early attempts at derivatives based on Tolkien, but then… somewhere after Fred Saberhagen came up with an original derivative of the Dracula mythos, vampires hit the big-time, followed by werewolves, and more vampires, and then zombies. Along the way, we’ve had steampunk, a derivative of a time that never was, fantasy derivatives based on Jane Austin, and more names than I could possibly list, and now, after the “Twilight” derivatives, we have a raft of others.
Now… I understand, possibly more than most, that all writing and literature derives from its predecessors, but there’s a huge difference between say, a work like Mary Robinette Kowal’s Shades of Milk and Honey, which uses the ambiance of a Regency-type culture and setting in introducing a new kind of fantasy [which Kowal does] and a derivative rip-off such as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or Emma and the Werewolves. When Roger Zelazny wrote Creatures of Light and Darkness or Lord of Light, he derived something new from the old myths. In a sense, T.S. Eliot did the same in The Wasteland or Yeats in “No Second Troy.” On the other hand, I don’t see that in John Scalzi’s Redshirts, which appears to me as a derivative capitalization on Star Trek nostalgia.
How about a bit more originality and a lot fewer “literary” derivatives? Or have too many writers succumbed to the lure of fast bucks from cheap derivatives? Or have too many readers become too lazy to sort out the difference between rip-off and robbery whole-cloth derivatives and thoughtful new treatments of eternal human themes?