This morning I did one of the most servile things I've ever done. A friend had left her daughter's homework in her country house over the weekend. Daughter needed it. Instead of all the productive activities I could be doing around here, like building my blog or the woodshed for my firewood, I drove over to her house and hunted everywhere for two pages of childish prose (all the while talking to ye olde secretary in the Manhattoes to get the coordinates). Then faxed it in. A friendly gesture, you say. Yes, but. I'm not going into it, but there's an economic framework to this story. Issues of employment.
The amazing wealth created for a small segment of American society over the last 20 years also generated a new servant class. My wife noticed it about 15 years ago when a friend started doing calligraphy for Martha Stewart. A lot of people who were overeducated and had artistic ambition fixed their sucking organs on to the new wealth, and began providing "essential" and often specialized services. Gardening, construction, faux-painting, giltwork, antique-picking, that kind of thing. I'd have to put my wife and myself in that class ourselves, though we're media workers. David Brooks wrote about these people in Bobos in Paradise. Bourgeois Bohemians. That's me. My wife and I have a good lifestyle and call ourselves independent and I get to work at novels, but as media workers we serve the rich both directly (our bosses) and by proxy (glossy magazine readers). When my friend James North says that investment banking geniuses "purchased a culture that exalted their so-called achievements," he is describing some portion of my journalistic labors.
We servants have had a fancy lifestyle, here in the exurbs, but we could never fully hide the character of our servitude, even from ourselves. I have a friend in a more servile status than I am who had to ferry his neighbor's wallet to him in the city, and turn on the heat in the guy's country house a couple hours ahead of his weekend arrival. Humiliating. We never stole good bottles of wine like those other greasy servants; we learned to scam them. I've also done some construction, and walked dogs.
Now that the financial superstructure on which we have depended is crashing down, I wonder what's going to happen. Certainly we're kissing a lot more ass, as James North reminded me last week, and as I demonstrated this morning. But I've also seen some resentment licking out, and some socialism.
Last week in the midst of the crash, two friends of mine who are contractors, one in stone-scaping, one in construction, independently drove their tasteful dark green pickups up my driveway to shoot the bull, and both expressed the same sentiment. My contractor friend said, "Hey let it all come down, it's a disgusting outrageous system." "But —-," says I, "you have a house on the market and two big jobs going, you're pouring over there right now." "Fuck it," he said. "I'm sick of the gigantic wealth transfer that's been going on for 20 years. Let everyone's mortgage fail. Hey, they're getting $600 a cord for firewood in the city, I can always cut wood."
My other friend, the landscape guy, said he was looking forward to a more egalitarian society, and didn't mind a big crash to get there. "Screw this bailout. Who's going to get that money? Hey at least we've learned some basic skills. I can grow a lot of my own food."
We're dependent and fearful. But we still have our pride. A little anyway. Just let me know if I can fetch your kid's homework.
