Why the British are obsessed with class is fairly obvious. Why Americans are not is troublesome. Sure, we wrote about it in the ‘20s and ‘30s: Fitzgerald channeled the great undercurrent of angst that ran through that heady era of stock market boom, and Steinbeck during the Great Depression? How could he not? It’s hard to stare down a soup line and pretend it doesn’t matter. But our lives and our experiences (excluding, perhaps, along racial lines) were, in fact, quite a bit more integrated then. The cheap apartments of the hired help lined the same blocks as the mansions they worked in. The Hoovervilles may have spread out on the outskirts of town, but you still had to drive past them if there was anywhere you wanted to go.
These days it’s the gated communities, the great, inane tracts of winding, cul-de-sac-ed exurban sprawl, that house the wealthy. The poor are safely condemned to cities or rural areas so far out that respectable people never have to drive there. The rich even have a term for these places: flyovers. Flyover states are the jet-set equivalent of flyover roads: the massive elevated highways beneath which the squalor of blue collar and service-industry housing looks distant and ghostly. Ironically, it is often the sales and property taxes of these less-well-off city dwellers that fund the ring roads the wealthy use to scoot out to their low-tax McMansions out in the county or the bedroom community over yonder.
Once there, in the rarefied air of the developments, the wealthy are supported by their own strip-mall infrastructure. Increasingly, corporate headquarters, like that of the Sprint long distance company in suburban Kansas City, have themselves fled the inner city, along with the churches that make our new bourgeoisie feel justified in living the life they live. These corporate office complexes are the sort of clean, well-lighted place at which the new wealthy would like to work, as brand new as can be, and utterly free from the reality of how those who built it, those who staff its lower echelons, and those who are forever excluded from it, themselves live.
The exurban experience, then, almost completely separates those who can afford it from everybody else. Our city-fleer may go weeks, months, even years piloting his massive SUV through yesterday’s farm field, only vaguely aware of what it used to be. He may go those weeks or years without ever knowingly meeting anyone of a different class: the corporate behavior codes are so well developed for those working his drive-thrus and gas stations as to make even the most desperate oh-so-helpful-and-friendly. Who can tell the suffering single mom and the laid-off machinist from anybody else? The poor, in other words, may as well not exist for homo exurbanis.
He may see the poor on the local news, I suppose, but then it will only be because of a killing or a fire that just reinforces his view that “those” people are utterly incapable of getting their act together. If, that is, he watches the news at all. With a million cable channels, why be bothered with the ugly reality of other people? There is bass fishing to watch or high-stakes poker all night long. If he’s really feeling curious, there’s always FoxNews for a version of the world he can agree with.
His environment won’t let him see the poor, and nor will his entertainments. Nobody is poor on TV. When there’s a minority, it’s Denzel Washington or else a pimp or drug dealer or hooker. That our po-mo bourgeoisie’s taste in legislation is of the “get tough on crime” variety should be no surprise.
Our separation from each other marks a separation from reality. Dropping the notion for a minute that those who are truly bad off should be our focus – the third world victims of AIDS and genocide and starvation – we can’t even see our own laid off, our own illiterate, our own working poor. How can we ever help if all we see, all we identify with, are the wealthy that populate our screens? And how can they see us as they cruise so far above?
Right on. I would also point out that it’s hard to see this without moving between the layers, and upward mobility these days at least is harder. When I was young I was middle class with aspirations to upper middle; now I’m working class with an eye to the middle. Now I’m not saying put the rich in a soup kitchen for a day and it’ll open their eyes to the hardships of the little people, of course.
Although that may be a start . . .