THE AMERICAN RULING CLASS is a morality tale set to music about two Yale students who seek their opportunities after graduation. Lewis Lapham, the renowned essayist, author and longtime Harperies Magazine editor, conducts them through the corridors of power Pentagon press briefings, the World Economic Forum, philanthropic foundations, Washington law firms, banks, the Council on Foreign Relations and New York society dinners. As they make their way, the real-life luminaries they meet become characters in a dramatic story about power, it's responsibilities and abuses. The subject is our country's most taboo topic: class, power and privilege in our nominally democratic republic.