She Didn’t Actually Say That
My afternoon piece on Jane Brody’s tone-deaf paean to one-percent living has generated a fair amount of discussion in the past few hours. I’ve been corrected/criticized by a few of our readers, most of whom are using the time-honored I’m So World Weary That Nothing About This Or Any Other Post Is News To Me tactic to belittle the post. But what nobody’s yet bothered to do is attack my central premise: that Ms. Brody is fundamentally Marie Antoinette, professing bewilderment at middle-class Americans’ attachment to non-Park-Slope living.
Not that Ms. Brody isn’t every bit as stupid, callous, hateful, and insulated as Marie Antoinette. Rather, it’s Marie Antoinette who isn’t every bit as stupid, callous, hateful, and insulated as Marie Antoinette.
The attribution of the phrase “Let them eat cake” to Marie Antoinette was an anachronism. For once, Wikipedia is helpful on this topic, as well. It wound up being the French Revolution’s equivalent of “I invented the Internet” or “I can see Alaska from my house”. It’s a deft bit of character assassination via misquoting. In the case of the French queen, it might-coulda-been decapitation via misquoting, although surely the revolutionaries wouldn’t have let her live under any circumstances.
One has to wonder what the eventual fate will be of this century’s one percent. Will they thrive forever, sucking up quantitatively-eased currency, life-extension technologies, exclusive private security, and irreplaceable resources in pursuit of a perfected existence? Will the rest of us tumble down the economic mountain into Neal Stephenson’s brilliant characterization:
once things have evened out, they’re making cars in Bolivia and microwaves in Tadzhikistan and selling them here–once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel–once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani bricklayer would consider to be prosperity
Or will that tumble be mismanaged by our betters, leading to a Weimar-Republic-style crash of the American economy, followed rather immediately by the decision of the 100 million well-armed Americans between Ohio and Nevada to repossess what’s been denied them? When the 28 million tons of food per year abruptly stop being trucked into New York, when there are nine million people who find themselves unable to meet the basic needs of living and there’s no fuel for helicopters and only the savviest and luckiest Gulfstream owners made it out to Europe in time, what then?
I suppose you could ask Marie Antoinette’s ghost about that.
Categorised as: Stuff I wrote
Marie doesn’t stand quite as tall as she used to, what with that big empty space up above her neckline.
On the other hand, her lack of respiration means she’s not exhaling any carbon dioxide, which puts her in a position of Environmental Moral Superiority over any NYT scribbler.
Well played, sir.
I don’t know if your analysis is on target or not. I certainly agree, though, that her braggy, insufferable introductory paragraphs color the way I interpret the information she provides later.
It’s too bad, because there is a real, proven public health cost to commuting. The projects I’m working on right now are in the obesity space, and the science speaks pretty clearly. Spending a lot of time in the car driving everywhere is just not good for us or our kids. It also pains me to see my friends driving their kids everywhere…either circumstances, geography, or anxiety has caused kids to lose a lot of the “free range child” freedom I enjoyed growing up.
All that said, I agree that the ability to craft one’s work and personal lives in an optimized, balanced way is a luxury increasingly reserved for the upper middle class and above. I think you have a good read on the economic insecurity and immobility that a lot of people who used to be middle class are experiencing today.
I do know that I used to go darn near everywhere on a bicycle, starting around age 9 — and so did everyone else at that time. But that time was half a century ago, and seeing a kid on a bike in the neighborhood is increasingly uncommon.