I used to do this informal poll of my classes at Northwestern University, where I would ask my students to write on a piece of paper how much their parents made, and then what class they belonged to, such as “working class,” “middle class,” or “upper class.”
What happened was students would write down “middle class,” no matter how much their parents made, even those who made more than half a million a year. Sure they might have waffled with “upper middle class,” but no one wanted to acknowledge that they were of the upper class.
Our politicians have pretended that we have no upper class. But we do. We have people so wealthy, and so careless about their wealth, that it makes normal people spit. I did some landscaping a couple of years ago for a woman from Texas, who had a big apartment in New York, and then a nice house (not a mansion, but nice, like $750,000 in Santa Fe) that I would have given my eye teeth to live in. She used it about two weeks a year.
And when she did use it she brought her dogs from Texas. And her dog-walker. Her little poochie-woochies just couldn’t live without their dog-walker! He seemed like a normal guy. Sort of like one of those Dumb-and-Dumber guys who can’t believe what a cool job he got. But this lady needed another dog, pure-bred of course, so one weekend she went to pick it up…IN BERLIN!
What is it with the dogs and the wealthy? The other egregious-wealth story I heard came from a column by Barbara Ehrenreich, about some wealthy folks she knew. They lived in L.A., and London. When they needed to commute back and forth, they would use their private jet. OK. Well, a private jet is ok, just so we can make the suckers and sell them to someone. But they had another private jet, so that they wouldn’t have to ride in their private jet with the dogs. See, they flew behind, or who knows, ahead, in their own jet.
The theoretical kicker is these are the same people who criticize welfare because it removes people’s motivation, and besides, it’s just not fair when you get a hand-out you don’t deserve. There is this café in Santa Fe called Downtown Subscription. It’s a nice café, with all the magazines and newspapers you could ever want. It’s nicknamed the “Trust-Fund Café.” It’s on the east side, where all the nice, adobe and fancy faux-adobe houses are. That’s where they live. It’s a good place to do an ethnography on people who never have had to work in their lives, and have the attitude that they deserve it. As Jim Hightower said about George Bush (or any of the current Bush orchard), “He was born on third base, stood up, looked around, and said ‘I’ve hit a triple!’”
I’m spitting.
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