What If They Had a Class War + Everyone Came?
The Boiling Frog apologue is all well and good until you realize we're the frogs.
Trump’s gotten got. To the tune of $355 million plus interest. Plus $83.3 mil for defaming the woman he presumably raped in a dressing room. That’s $438.3 mil, non-negotiable. And we’re not half through with the trials he’s embroiled in. Despite the dictums regarding kicking people when they’re down, even if that is the best place to start with the kicking, a gloat over Trump’s difficulties is not why we’re here.
You see he’s just the apotheosis of the boiling water that we’re up to our necks in because (and despite) America, socially, having risen above so-called class distinctions, we are dying because of them. This is where the frogs come in since the frog apologue posits that while a frog thrown into boiling water will jump out, a frog put in lukewarm water that is then slowly boiled won’t see the danger and will, subsequently, be cooked to death.
Which is, incidentally, how we all died.
But let’s look back at life in the West in the biggest run up to wealth ever, immediately after the end of World War 2 though. Presumably the period of time that Trump, himself, describes as when America was “great”.
See, socially we’ve always aspired to rise through the class rankings. This was a desired (and traditional) two-step and the sweepstakes that have kept Americans from rolling tumbrels to guillotines has always been this idea that we could also do so. That is, it was hardwired into our national narrative that men without means could change their station in life with the Alger-esque “luck, pluck and perseverance”.
No one wanted to sound like they were from “the streets” and no one wanted to seem like they had done anything to get off of the streets.
Consider Irving Berlin’s 1929 hit “Putting on the Ritz”.
“Come, let's mix where Rockefellers/Walk with sticks or umbrellas in their mitts
Puttin' on the Ritz
Have you seen the well-to-do/Up and down Park Avenue?/On that famous thoroughfare/With their noses in the air/High hats and Arrow collars/White spats and lots of dollars”
Which then winds up with: “The time is right for us tonight/We can move”.
Well-to-do characters in movies were paragons of virtue. On film. In real life, despite personal foibles of the robber baron kind, guys like Carnegie (think Carnegie Mellon, Carnegie Hall) and Rockefeller (Rockefeller Center) believed in nurturing the ideal that those to whom much has been given, much will be expected (for reference compare and contrast with Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk).
Tonally, this would account for why period movies have a certain sheen whereby the émigrés who made them paraded their interests in getting out from behind the horse and off the cart and into the penthouse through many and multiple levels of media. And no one wanted to sound like they were from “the streets” and no one wanted to seem like they had done anything to get off of the streets.
Sun tans, the outward signs of the laboring class, were not cool until the 1960s when it had been made clear that if you had one in December in New York it was because you were part of the set that could take jets to the South of France when the mood struck.
But linguistically, we were working on a national non-accent that seemed to be the mark of upper crust living. Everyone from porters to stevedores, unless English was your second language, affected an accent that embraced their interests in class climbing. My great grandmother, a maid for Andre Baruch for years, and a lifetime New Yorker, sounded like a movie star with no trace of wherever it is that we hailed from in South Carolina.
This continued through the ‘50’s but by the 1960s things had started to change. In African American communities realpolitik had struck and with it the realization that if our country wasn’t going to be gracious about social climbing then we would keep it “real” and reject this as an aspiration.
Growing up I’d not heard anything ever about “sounding white” but by the end of the ‘60s I’d heard it so often, with people frequently asking me if I was born somewhere else, that I could feel the plates shifting. Moreover, the ‘70’s saw the ascendancy of the anti-hero who was frequently a working class cat. Who also kept it “real”.
On the actual streets of New York no one who had to spend any time on the streets was thinking that a transit to working class life held anything for us other than felony and street crime.
So, whether it was Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces playing a dropout from the upper class who chooses to work on an oil rig, or John Travolta as a hardware store employee who was going to dance his way to a better life in Manhattan before he turns his back on it all (spoiler alert) in Saturday Night Fever, working class was in.
And upper class? Well these were the folks intoning “Plastics,” in The Graduate.
The mid-to-late ‘70s solidified this as one of the lures of a place like Studio 54 was that it was a place in space where Liza Minelli could get high with sexy bus drivers from Queens before decamping back to the VIP section. The upper class seeing the gyre turn had turned to rough trade and if not directly extolling the virtues of people who were “real”, were making it clear with their preferences that they believed them to be so.
Which was easy to do from a penthouse apartment on Central Park West.
On the actual streets of New York no one who had to spend any time on the streets of New York was thinking that a transit to working class life held anything for us other than felony and street crime.
And this was the milieu in which Trump first entered national consciousness. Specifically when he called for the execution of the teenagers who were falsely accused of raping a stockbroker in Central Park. They hadn’t, but this was early stage Archie Bunker for Trump, a precursor to Joe the Plumber, Larry the Cable Guy, Jeff Foxworthy, and all of the other so-called working class “heroes” who understood what “the people” really wanted.
On top of this, certain tectonic shifts also pushed this idea of “inner wear as outer wear” and airports and casinos that used to be populated by people in evening dress now saw their spaces populated with people in pajamas and bedroom slippers drinking coffee out of massive cups or sucking fluids out of oversized baby bottles.
Working in Silicon Valley at the time, Apple to be exact, I watched the hacker class of tech bro come to work shirtless, in shorts with no shoes while I, looking for all the world like a sales guy, still rocked a suit. And so it went this tyranny of working class comforts, which really had no connection to actual working classes (who were taking it on the chin as labor unions started to suffer), until you have what we have today: a chronic cultural overdose of slob masquerading as class warfare but in actual fact is a mark of surrender. Also known as, when we died.
Which has us where we are today: on the precipice of a dead presidency led by Grandpa Joe (either Biden or that cat from Willy Wonka) and, of course, the harbinger, the apotheosis of our decline, Trump. Neither will yield outcomes that will mark a return to aspirational living.
No. We’ll have to do that on our own. Which is easy for me as I’m an elitist. That is I believe it is desirable if you suck, to want to suck a little less. So, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be over here, in my tux, trying to read a few books, make my move to The Haves and avoid the tumbrels to the best of my abilities. Getting better at living since I have no interest in dying. In shorts. And birkenstocks.
So feel free to join me. No casual dress.
OK…So you have ordered the memoir A Walk Across Dirty Water and Straight Into Murderer's Row, from Amazon…Or the Bookshop.Org dealie: Here?
Might you consider giving it a review in either of those places?
I’ve been told it matters, somehow. So please: review away! Unless you think it sucks. Then, maybe, just keep that part to yourself. At last count there were 53 reviews…so yeah…GET AT IT!!! Every one helps. Or so they tell me.
Heh heh, even Thundercat rocks the Birkenstocks...😎