So three years ago, I inadvertently launched my online column with a look at how New York magazine sucks up to the vanity of Wall Street oligarchs and pretends to call it journalism. And now just look how far we’ve come!
Meanwhile, for a glimpse at the disheveled thinking behind All Things Rich People Things, the good people at Full Stop have published an interview with your humble correspondent here.
Is it really possible to turn a year-end literary review piece into yet another occasion to revisit the occluded state of social thinking in these United States? Judge for yourself!
In which your self-punishing correspondent attends a sell-off of random swag from the failed investment bank, and reports back to the Washington City Paper.
So, two pieces of news: Rich People Things (the book) appears to be headed for a second printing, thanks to the marketing prowess of the good people at Haymarket Books. (Also, a hat tip here to the equally good people at independent bookstores such as McNally-Jackson in NYC, which has grouped my plutocracy-baiting screed among the bestsellers of 2011.)
Meanwhile, a recently released Pew study finds that class antagonism has emerged as the signature social divide of our age.
Coincidence? You decide.
To get rich is to magnify the marginal utility of your consumer preferences, if we might be permitted a clinical paraphrase of Deng Xiao Peng (or some nameless Deng functionary). So if you’re going to commute to Wall Street from this or that tastefully cloistered suburb, you should forgo the seedy bus-ferry-subway nexus in favor of a helicopter. And if you’re trying to kick an inconvenient addiction or two, you can bypass the coffee urns and church basements of your standard A.A. meeting in favor of a horse-equipped spa (with, yes, helicopter-assisted field trips).
And if you’re a clutch of Japanese alpha earners going from Point A to Point B in the throes of an extended midlife crisis, why, you form a monotonous red convoy of six-figure sports cars, which combined to create the world’s most expensive auto accident on a wet stretch of highway between Kyushu and Hirsohima. With damages running to some $3.85 million, the wreck involved 14 vehicles—with eight Ferraris, a Lamborghini, and three Mercedes Benzes among the totalled casualties. The aftermath inspired Mitsuyoshi Isejima, who works at the Expressway Traffic Unit of the Yamaguchi Prefecture to offer this terse bit of rainy-day social criticism: “It was a gathering of narcissists.”
Isejima also provided a more mundane anatomy of the crash: “The accident occurred when the driver of a red Ferrari was switching from the right lane to the left and then skidded.” The chief culprit, he explained, was a 60-year-old self-employed man behind the wheel of a red Ferrari F430 Scuderia, which goes for a cool 18 million yen, or a smidge under $200,000.
Still, the real mystery of the whole costly crack-up is why a group of 20 luxe motorists—all between the ages of 37 and 60, according to area law enforcement—were driving two cars abreast at speeds north of eighty on a rain-slicked expressway. Oh sure, they could have been joyriding, in the great tradition of American Graffiti or Rebel Without a Cause. But really, that would represent some serious regression for drivers in that age demographic—even if they are the type to spend a couple hundred grand on a red Ferrari in the first place. No, the point to some more sinister social dysfunction afoot: a predatory Ferrari gang, for instance, seeking to recruit impressionable youngsters into their fast and furious lifestyle. Or they could, of course, be jaded sybarites, seeking the last potent link to recognizable human sensations in the abrasive thrills of auto crashes.
But ever hopeful about the human experiment, I prefer to think they were, in fact, being chased. Japan has lately been rocked by revelations about the national economy’s thrall to crony capitalism—with the flailing tech-and-photo colossus Olympus on the verge of delisting on the nation’s stock exchanges in the wake of a scandal involving roughly $1.3 billion in bogus reported profits, and quite possibly the Yakuza for good measure. And in a society that already comfortably boasts a 50-percent tax rate on top earners—while quietly passing a bevy soak-the-rich tax legislation to fund recent tsunami relief—class warfare sentiment may have just spontaneously spilled out into streets, just like stateside political observers continually predict will happen here. So what are besieged masters of the Japanese universe to do but repair in a panic to their armada of Ferraris and Lamborghinis? It’s high time they had a lost decade of their own, after all.
In which I review Owen Johnson’s Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class.
In my unmourned midwestern youth, vans were a status symbol for a certain drugged-out kind of dude-on-the-make. If the vehicles in question were airbrushed with the countenances of R Crumb characters or pastel-drenched beachscapes, the owners were singled out on the roads of Davenport—and so they fondly hoped, in the hearts of eager young lasses—as true masters of countercultural leisure.
But now the van, like so many other features of American life, has lost its once-seedy cachet, and metastasized into a brutalist plaything of yon Gotham overclass. Witness the testimony recently collected by New York Times scribe Christine Haughney, who chronicles how rich Manhattanites have embarked on a gaudy romance with “cargo vans on steroids.”
Consider how Steve Kantor, an “affable investment banker” says he likes to roll: “I have two big-screen televisions; I have a couch in the back that goes into a bed,” Mr. Kantor said. “I have four chairs that go back and massage you. It has a desk, a table and an intercom so you can have meetings in there if you want to.”
That’s right: Forget the bong and the shag carpet; our new generation of high-end van owners would like nothing more than to host a mobile financial confab—perhaps to keep Occupy Wall Street protesters off guard—and then unwind with a rubdown in a bank of customized chairs. There’s also the demure, not-so-affable-seeming proprietor of a mega-van that Haughney espied on Park Avenue one late fall morning; he declined an interview, “saying he did not want to draw attention to himself,” but his wheels were clearly speaking a different language altogether. He let photographers capture the interior of the $425,000 tank-like van, while permitting his 44-year-old chauffeur, Carmelo Umpierre, to display the many features and specs of the whole vast, rumbling lifestyle diorama:
“The seats were upholstered with heavily scented leather and a stocked bar had individual lighting for each wine glass and Champagne flute,” Haughney notes in a proper tone of dumbfounded admiration. “Mr. Umpierre said he vacuumed the interior every night and covered the custom-designed gray wool rugs with towels when it rained. He said he tried to navigate the van through side streets so gawkers could not peek in when he dropped off his boss.”
And Mr. Umpierre has to be nimble in navigating his oversized charge through the streets on New York, for the simple reason that the glorified yacht-on-wheels—which customarily docks on evenings and weekends in Connecticut—is too goddamn big to park.
“It is nearly impossible to find a parking space for such a large vehicle,” Haughney notes compassionately, “so Mr. Umpierre often waits for his boss in illegal spots, and moves when the police come by.”
Yes, that’s right: the new Freicorps of supervans has taken James Howard Kuntsler’s “home from nowhere” thesis to the next level, with the overclass simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, never to be fully viewed, or named, before the passing urban public. Was George Romero’s last zombie fantasia, Land of the Dead, really a dystopian glimpse of the urban future, or more in the vein of a gritty contemporary docudrama? Or to paraphrase the crasser horror reveries of Stephen King: How can you kill something that you can’t possibly park?
In Rich People Things, Chris Lehmann lays bare the various dogmas and delusions that prop up plutocratic rule in the post-meltdown age. It’s a humorous and harrowing tale of warped populism, phony reform, and blind deference to the nation’s financial elite. As the author explains, “American class privilege is very much like the idea of sex in a Catholic school—it’s not supposed to exist in the first place, but once it presents itself in your mind’s eye, you realize that it’s everywhere.”
A concise and easy-to-use guide, Rich People Things catalogs the fortifications that shelter the opulent from the resentments of the hoi polloi. From ideological stanchions such as the Free Market through the castellation of media including The New York Times andWired magazine, to gatekeepers such as David Brooks, Steve Forbes, and Alan Greenspan, Lehmann covers the vast array of comforting and comprehensive protections that allow the über-privileged to maintain their iron grip on almost half of America’s wealth. With chapters on Malcolm Gladwell, the Supreme Court, the Memoir—and brand new material on Frank Gehry, Social Media, and Tax Cuts—no one is spared from Lehmann’s pointed prose.
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