The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation*
Old Money: the Mythology of Wealth In America’ – Nelson Aldrich
Observant readers will have been following the series of essays in the New York Times about class and income disparity in modern America.
Whilst I disagree completely with much of their analysis from a political standpoint (the general tone seems to be ‘Yes, Virginia, isn’t it dreadful there are class diffferences here, but hey, that’s the American way!”) nevertheless, for once the NYT should be commended for even tackling the subject. Class is, like death and old-age, one of the great unspokens in American life.
On television and in the movies now, and even in the pages of novels, people tend to dwell in a classless, homogenized American Never-Never Land. This place is an upgrade, but not a drastic one, from the old neighborhood where Beaver, Ozzie and Harriet, and Donna Reed used to live; it’s those yuppified city blocks where the friends on “Friends” and the “Seinfeld” gang had their apartments, or in the now more fashionable version, it’s part of the same exurb as One Tree Hill and Wisteria Lane – those airbrushed suburbs where all the cool young people hang out and where the pecking order of sex and looks has replaced the old hierarchy of jobs and money.
This is progress of a sort, but it’s also repression, since it means that pop culture has succeeded to a considerable extent in burying something that used to be right out in the open. In the old days, when we were more consumed by social class, we were also more honest about it.
There is an un-American secret at the heart of American culture: for a long time, it was preoccupied by class. That preoccupation has diminished somewhat – or been sublimated – in recent years as we have subscribed to an all-purpose, mass-market version of the American dream, but it hasn’t entirely disappeared. The subject is a little like a ne’er-do-well relative; it’s sometimes a shameful reminder, sometimes openly acknowledged, but always there, even, or especially, when it’s never mentioned.
You can read the whole series here.
While there continues to be denial about these huge fault-lines in society regarding income, class and power, and of their effect on the lives of the average Josephine, US politicians, pundits and bloggers will never ever get a grip on what ails the US.
*Henry David Thoreau, Walden, (1854)
