"If
it takes a bloodbath, let's
get it over with."--Ronald Reagan
Maybe because it's the beginning of another election year and Bush fils
has already raised 58 million dollars--not to fight the Democrats, but to
fend off other millionaires like Forbes and McCain. Maybe because I can't open
a newspaper without reading about yet another CEO pulling down billions in stock
options. Maybe because these ten years of a bull market have thrown so many
people I know personally into the ranks of the truly rich, leaving me gazing
wistfully after their luxury liner as it disappears towards a rose-pink hotel
on the beach in Cannes. But whatever the reason, my resentment has started to
ferment.
Clear mornings in April, I awaken with the sour
odor as of envy and hatred in my breath. I find myself hoping that accidents
will befall celebrities--a private plane gone astray in the fog, a Mercedes
limo incandescent in a tunnel. When Republicans in Congress bitterly oppose
an increase in the minimum wage and rally as one around a cut in the capital
gains tax, I feel the stir of something primal in my veins and barely stop myself
from rear-ending the massive black BMW at the next light. What's so galling,
so poisoning, so maddening is that one is no longer permitted to hate the rich,
nor even to mutter a word against them. For that would be "divisive," a fretful
whine in the ear of a public chewing the cud of news it gets from the makers
of natural vitamin e and other soybean products.
When was the last time you asked them point-blank
how much money they have and how they got it? Yet your take-the-high-ground
strategy plays right into their hands because it's an obtuseness, like their
obtuseness, that refuses to acknowledge the most glaring fact in the room:
they're rich, and you're not. Until we make that simple little acknowledgment,
they have us right where they want us. Until we admit that they have what
we want, we can't possibly try to grab our share of it. And of course this
social drama of the haut bourgeoisie is played out less intimately but just
as effectively on a national scale. When was the last time you heard a politician
say the word "rich?" Or read that the rich inhabit another country yet control
the one we live in, too?
Perhaps you're thinking that we could criticize
the rich without getting so ... personal. Indeed, that as descendants of Jefferson's
yoeman farmers, we should take the higher moral ground and argue from ideas
rather than envy, from honor not hatred. If my tone strikes you as a bit too
strident--or worse, as the pitiful complaint of a poor loser--that's just
my point. The rich have succeeded in getting us to cauterize the most natural
and necessary of emotions, our envy. They've gotten us to accept as inevitable
a superiority they win through constant exercise of will and force. And when
our wellspring of envy has at last completely dried up, we will have no inner
drive left with which to fight the rich as they bring to fulfillment the iron
logic of their destiny--getting richer while we get poorer. We know that the
rich can be willfully stupid, but must they succeed in making us stupid, too?
Or do you think they'll draw a clean line in the sand and say this far, and
no further, this rich and no richer, this much but no more power?
Let us admit to each other that the rich have
somehow managed to twist us. Their mere proximity transforms us. If they
lived within moated castles and we didn't see them smiling at us from the cover
of every magazine, we would hate and fear them as we hate and fear everything
we find strange. But precisely because they have lured us into their charmed
circle, where they hand us a glass of wine and the hope of one day sharing their
self-assurance, we surrender to their happier and simpler outlook. Invited to
the homes of the very rich, Edith Wharton's heroine Lily Bart "felt within her
a stealing allegiance to their standards, an acceptance of their limitations,
a disbelief in the things they did not believe in." We may not set foot in the
palaces of the rich and famous, but every mall is a Rodeo Drive, and as we gaze
at all the marvelous things money can buy don't we feel this same stealing
allegiance to our betters, to those who are really running the show?
Nowadays, no one teases the rich kid next door,
calls him a sissy, and lies in wait to trash his shiny Schwinn Roadmaster. Now
everyone wants to be one of the rich--rich like Michael Jordan, rich
like Bill Gates, rich like a rock star or a rapper, like a model, like a writer,
like a banker. Ronald Reagan was right: there is a trickle-down effect. But
what has trickled down in significant quantity is values, not money. Today,
we all want Corian countertops in our gourmet chef's kitchen, a jacuzzi in our
cavernous master bathroom, a king-size bed in our master bedroom.
Now we can all be J.P. Morgans, financiers trading our mite on the internet.
Now we can all make the scene at e-mail auctions. And if we're very "successful"--in alumni magazines that's code for rich--we can even hire our own personal
assistant, the Roman slave of the '90s, smart enough to handle difficult phone
calls yet craven enough to pick up the dry-cleaning and take the kids to birthday
parties. Do the rest of us have a choice? Be rich or die. Be a winner
of a loser.
Like Lily Bart, we're already in the house of
mirth, playing by the rules we find there--and they don't work to our advantage.
For the rich have the quality, as Wharton put it, "of making other standards
non-existent by ignoring them, a force of negation which eliminates everything
beyond their own range of perception." Standing at a cocktail party, I slowly
realize that in the eyes of the person I'm talking to I am essentially not present.
The little struggles that make up my round of existence--keeping an old car
on the road, making mortgage payments, chipping away at my monumental credit
card debt, worrying about what my kids are learning in school--have no meaning
to this denizen of the wealthier precincts. His eyes glaze over even as his
features mime the friendliest of interests. It's not just that James has never
owned a car that failed inspection, never had to balance a check book, never
sent his kids to a public school, but that he doesn't want to hear that I do.
The news of even these little frictions appalls and terrifies the inner child
he so ruthlessly protects behind his bland blue gaze. The rich are not stupid,
obviously. But their silent refusal to grant that the lives of those with less
money are more difficult is a stupidity the smartest of them accepts without
demur.
So when I visit the rich I become someone else,
co-signer of a compact that commands my allegiance, my good manners: if you
want to hang around us (and the choice is yours) you will have to behave as
if you were one of us. And most of the time I do. It is only afterwards,. driving
home to the house I bought in a "good" (that is, rich) neighborhood and can't
really afford, that my mind obsessively returns to the theme. Where did their
money come from? Did he inherit or did she? How otherwise can they afford
that house- not to mention the summer vacations on the Vineyard and their membership
in a tennis club? In the bubble of these unasked and unanswered questions, I
allow a passion to brew. It is the right passion. The true feeling. Why shouldn't
I--shouldn't we--let it go all the way?
What I'm proposing has nothing to do with economic
theory or the like. It's the economy, stupid is a realism of cringing
accommodation. It plays on our fears that we are society's losers and claims
to set a place for us all at the banquet of the wealthy. It turns fear into
hope--mindless, misguided, stupid hope. Because what everyone knows deep down
is that the real feast is going on somewhere else. That while Clinton has helped
the working poor bring home a few more bucks each Friday, the senior partners
at hundreds of law firms and financial services are bringing home bonuses of
several million dollars. What's needed is not hope but hate, not a politics
of meaning, but a politics of envy.
Deep down, whether we admit it or not, we all
feel the same way about the rich. If you aren't willing to admit to yourself
that underneath your surface amiability, underneath your twinges of envy, underneath
your liberal disapproval, underneath what you still recall of the Marxist analysis
you learned in college, underneath all the lubrications of the social world
there burns a single steady flame of hatred, not just a feeling but a passion,
like lust or envy, a monster of sorts but nonetheless our monster, the
one equalizer we can wield in the face of their careless possession of mutual
fund accounts, college savings, new cars, and big houses, don't worry. One day
you will. As long as the rich keep getting richer, the postponed day of reckoning
becomes ever more inevitable.
And they will go on getting richer. Stupid as
they can be when they wish, they're smart about what count. Money. Just as sharks
have the lowest IQ in the marine world yet are perfectly adapted to dominate
it, so the dozen or so rich people I know have in their blood a wisdom about
wealth that has helped them compound their advantages, saving money I have squandered,
making investments I can't afford, and so forging steadily ahead of me until
one day they retire and disappear from view entirely--sending back the occasional
Christmas card from Pinehurst or Pebble Beach.
Maybe if the rich apologized once in a while,
or just admitted to the fact of their wealth, or just named it--came right
out and said, I know I'm rich, I know you're not rich--then
maybe I could begin to process my envy and forgive them. I imagine a day of
national reconciliation. The rich emerge from their enclaves and circulate freely
among us wearing "I'm Sorry" buttons with us wearing "That's OK" buttons. Or
maybe something more like a carnival, with all of us dressed in costumes and
mingling in the streets, with the rich occasionally slipping a $1000 bill into
our hands.
But of course no such thing will happen. Not
just because the rich are loathe to part with their money under duress, but
because they've already won. As soon as I realize that my hatred of them should
logically entail a hatred of myself, I pipe down and stop complaining. Like
that nurse in the Beatles' song, even while I know I'm in a play, I am anyway.
I may not think I'm "rich," but my income places me among the wealthiest 10
percent of Americans. Never mind that it's the top 3 percent who are really
rich and who own 40 percent of America's wealth. Compared to the rest of the
world I might as well be a Mellon or a Rockefeller. And that's why I'm so
bitter. In the last analysis, I have no moral superiority to the rich, my
life is not significantly more honest or more real than theirs. I mean, what's
so real about keeping a 1985 Toyota Camry on the road? If I had a lot more
money, I'd certainly buy a new one. So you see how cunningly they've woven
their web? We're silenced by self-consciousness, and as we struggle to escape
from sticky threads of self-contradiction, the spider delights in our frenzy
and descends for her meal.
What, then, is to be done? If I cherish my flame
of hatred, will it consume me, too? Perhaps. But every great cause requires
great sacrifice. If the sympathetic aristocracy must ever be the first victims
of the Jacobins, let us go forward nonetheless. We may be the first to feel
the cool steel of the underclass's fury, but let us speak the honest word anyway.
Let honesty beget rage, let rage beget change. Let's put down the glass of wine
and wipe the smile from their faces.
It's someone else's turn to be rich, don't you
think?
My friend Robert, who has married a rich woman,
does sometimes let a gleam of irony play across the surface of his impeccable
detachment, acknowledging with the subtlest intonation that all of this--from
the grand piano in the living room to the new Toyota Forerunner in the driveway
to his wife chattering about the swim team in the kitchen--is them,
not him, the rich, not us. But like a lifer who has grown so used to
his cell that sunlight feels blinding and the breeze outside chills and frightens,
Robert never steps outside his wealth. After all, as he says to me in all
but words, he knows what's good for him. And so would I, if I had his good
fortune.
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