Tales from the suburbs where bankers do think they deserve the bonuses.

The logic behind the AIG bonuses perplexes most people. We've gone from wondering who would give out these rich rewards to asking who is brazen enough to take one for imperiling the world economy. Barney Frank and Andrew Cuomo have issued or threatened subpoenas that could help name (and therefore, presumably, shame) recipients from AIG's financial products division. That's the great mystery of the bonus fiasco: Don't the recipients feel any sense of responsibility?

Here I think I can offer a tiny bit of enlightenment. By a strange quirk of fate, I live in a waterfront suburb of Manhattan popular with the middling level of the financial elite, the kinds of people who get $1 million bonuses—and feel very entitled to them.

The worst trick of the credit bubble, a trick made crueler by the bubble's long life, was to convince so many that the money they made was more than an opportunity—it was a benediction. Not that a lot of my neighbors have been feeling so blessed lately. For the financial community, the crisis is entering its third year. It's becoming clearer that our way of life is changing irrevocably, and there's more than a little antagonism about who's to blame.

There's a civil war raging out here. It's not a class war in the traditional sense. It is a conflict between the haves and the used-to-haves.

One side of our town is filled with the shock troops of the overleveraged economy. These are the people most upset about Obama's $500,000 salary cap. They are Goldman guys and Morgan Stanley folks, hedge funders who levered up, investment bankers who packaged aircraft leases, and private-equity guys who rolled up insurance companies. From their perspective, the boom was a well-deserved reward for their years of dogged apprenticeship. A decade on the 5:55 a.m. train to Manhattan is enough to convince anyone that they're deserving of seven-figure compensation.

Let's not leave out all the lawyers who serviced these transactions. (One woman I know addressed her husband loudly at a cocktail party as Mr. World's-Leading-Expert-on-Credit-Default-Swaps. The scorn in her voice was playful ... or was it?) Nor should we overlook the run-of-the-mill banking executives and traders of every flavor who tromp up and down the streets of our hamlet. These lives on Wall Street are a long slog through a dark tunnel. Many are looking up now only to see the far-off light flickering out, not because they never made money but because the money was never enough to cover all of the necessary expenses.