Class in America: a Superficial Meditation

The late Soviet Union used to pride itself on being a “classless society.” This notion, not unlike the USSR’s implementation of socialism, was imperfectly realized*, but it was sufficiently seductive that for many decades, including those of my formative years, it was considered poor form in the United States to dwell too much on class stratification. That “the poor” existed (with the subtext that it was in most cases their own damned fault) was aknowledged, but alongside this there was the vision of great fluidity—essentially an upwelling current—between the strata. Why shouldn’t the shop foreman, having risen that far on grit and initiative, finish up as a Captain of Industry? Although no shop foreman actually ever rose to be the Chairman of General Motors, there was at one time enough social mobility to permit the foreman plausibly to imagine that his son (his son, of course, in that era) would work in the office rather than on the shop floor, and that his grandson might even rise to the professional class: lawyer, doctor, architect. Good times. Today, of course, the USA ranks fairly low in social mobility measured against the other remaining industrialized democracies (and who knows how much longer we will qualify for that cohort?).

But class in America and elsewhere is surely informed by metrics other than tax brackets, isn’t it? We are advised, these latter decades, that a category—class?—of people known as “coastal elites” looks down upon the honest yeomanry, the “real Americans” who live in “flyover country” (I used to think of them as “those funny little rectangular states”). And yet, there are folks in, say, Oklahoma or Indiana who, with three or four times my household income, would regard me as “elite,” so surely that makes us upper class here at The Crumbling Manse™, aren’t we?

Well of course, by Bay Area standards, we’re only getting by, although we have the incomparable advantage, accounts payable-wise, of no children, no carried-over consumer debt, no student loans (at last!) and a mortgage that should be retired within another thirty months, leaving us with a property that has appreciated considerably since its purchase late in the last century. And I am startled to see that our household income puts us slightly north of the ninety-fifth percentile, national median-wise. But again, let’s leave money aside.

In my twenties I was a guest at a suburban manse owned by a friend’s father, a self-made millionaire. “Millionaire” counted for a great deal more in the mid-seventies than it does today. The place was tricked out with ghastly vulgarity: not unlike (although in fairness to my friend, nothing like as over-the-top) Donald Trump’s decorating schemes. During the preceding years I had been received in the homes of other college friends who, by no means as prosperous in terms of fungible assets, rested comfortably on nest eggs of cultural and intellectual attainments. They were, what, upper-middle class, if that? The millionaire was probably worth a dozen or more of these households, but culturally, had they been his neighbors, he would have been the Tony Soprano (I do not mean to impute an organized crime connection, although in the case of the paterfamilias’ line of work the possibility cannot be excluded) on the block.

So about that: the, let us say, solid-waste management guy brings in $x each year, and has rebuilt and remodeled his home in McMansion style on steroids. Across the street the retired Stanford associate professor (household income closer to $.05x of Tony Soprano’s), who purchased his considerably more modest bungalow back when Bay Area houses were affordable, holds state in his comfortable premises, perhaps a tad shabby, perhaps a tad deficient when it comes to gilded faux-Louis XIV furniture. Professor Poor can comfortably discourse about a range of topics that would leave Tony Soprano tongue-tied, although in fairness Tony Soprano knows much about disposing of corpses in municipal landfills, a discipline that would leave Professor Poor utterly bewildered. Tony dismisses Poor because he is, by Soprano standards, well, poor, while the academic regards the solid-waste mogul, his vast, gaudy house, his dreadful decorating scheme (in particular his “library,” consisting of buckram-bound volumes from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, purchased by the yard), his indifference to scholarship, with boundless contempt. Each man regards himself as dwelling in the superior “class.”

So how do we evaluate them? Does it matter?

I have connections—I will not say more than that I am obliged not to sunder these—with a couple of individuals, both of them probably in percentile 99.5 (and ardent Trump supporters, natch), who share in addition to considerable personal wealth, an indifference—nay, an outright contempt—toward the “cultural elite,” whom they likely believe personified by “Hollywood celebrities” (so Barbra Streisand claims to care for the poor, but she lives in a Malibu mansion! Hyuck, hyuck, checkmate, libtards!), and also toward erudition and intellectual attainment generally, particularly those that come under the rubric of “liberal arts.” I might have asserted that they would indignantly deny “elite” status until the God-Emperor Trump said this a year ago:

“They always call the other side ‘the elite’. Why are they elite? I have a much better apartment than they do,” the US president said. “I’m smarter than they are. I’m richer than they are. I became president and they didn’t. And I’m representing the greatest, smartest, most loyal best people [sic] on Earth — the deplorables, remember that?”

So perhaps they’ll embrace the label after all.

But class: I did not come myself from an educated family—neither of my parents continued their studies past high school—but they were cultural strivers after the fashion of their cohort in the Fifties. Both of them regretted skipping college; both were, I think, keenly conscious of their deficits, and endeavored to better themselves: they subscribed, for example, to a service that mailed the household LPs of “classical” music, not because they actually liked this—their tastes ran more toward Broadway musicals and the “Great American Songbook,”—but because they admired, and aspired to, the stratum of society that did. I owe to them, in part, my own enjoyment of all of these genres. Now might be a good time, incidentally, for the occasional reader to refer to my long-ago entry on “Mid-Century Middlebrow.” Go ahead. I’ll wait. And they aspired for better things for their children in terms of standard of living and culture.

Obviously I come down on the side of class-as-culture rather than class-as-income-bracket, but of course, when it comes time to draw a charmed circle, most of us will devise one with ourselves at the center, as the short-fingered vulgarian so tellingly contrived to do in his 2018 remarks. There is no need, to be sure, for the two categories not to overlap: indeed, at one time they were very nearly congruent, and as the striving, presumptuous middle class that emerged following the New Deal and the postwar reforms is gradually squeezed out of existence—hanging on by its fingertips to the hem of privilege, or cast down to the upper proletariat to be milked by the rentier class—it may be that the “elites” will reunite, with perhaps a significantly larger percentage of semiliterate vulgarian thugs in their ranks. I can hardly wait.

*The existence of the USSR as a countervailing economic and political system, its horrific moral deficits notwithstanding, served as a brake on some of capitalism’s direst impulses, and we are living through some of the consequences of its absence—but this is properly the topic of another entry.

An anniversary

A court order dissolved my marriage, which had been barely on life support for rather over twenty-four months at that point, on this day in 1988. I should not imagine that the co-respondent has retained the date in memory.

Drainward the Course of Empire

Ben Franklin’s remarks delivered near the close of the Constitutional Convention. For a wonder, the words are not modern fabrications devised as ventriloquism:

“In these sentiments, Sir, I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of Government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other.”

As impatient children are wont to ask from the back seat: “Are we there yet?” I fear we are.

Legacy Not

Visiting the former workplace last week, I was struck at how what I once regarded as my potential “legacy” has been utterly erased: both the design sense I attempted to inculcate for the last three decades of my alleged career, and the consciousness of institutional history I labored to leave behind.

I might as well never have walked into the place forty years ago. I thought at one time that I was building something, but it turns out that all the while I was piling sand.

“I never knew the old Vienna…”

(Another in a series of repurposed film reviews)

The process of transmuting a novel from the page to the screen unavoidably involves some measure of diminution, often drastic, of the source material. The Third Man is one of the rare exceptions to that rule, taking as its point of departure one of novelist Graham Greene’s lesser tales and turning it into one of the supreme achievements of postwar film noir. A certain amount of credit is due to Greene himself, who wrote the screenplay, but the author has acknowledged that director Carol Reed’s handling of the material (including some creative differences in points of plot development on which Reed prevailed) was decisive. Also, Orson Welles, whose character dominates the picture all out of proportion to his actual screen time, contributed some of his own dialogue, including the memorable, oft-quoted “cuckoo clock” speech.

A little historical background might be in order here: At the beginning of the nineteenth century, “Germany” consisted of, oh, three or four hundred pissant little kingdoms and principalities (I exaggerate for effect here), plus half a dozen bigger ones, the most powerful of which was the Kingdom of Prussia. In the 1870s, Prussia’s gifted and overbearing statesman Otto von Bismarck oversaw the unification of these disparate components into the German Empire, with the Prussian king as emperor (or “Kaiser”) and Bismarck as the Empire’s first Chancellor. Left outside of this amalgamation was German-speaking Austria, which was already the center of its own empire, then known as Austria-Hungary, and which included in its subject territory large swatches of president-day Hungary, Poland, Romania, the former Czechoslovakia and the former Yugoslavia, and little bits of Italy. Fast forward fifty years, and after being on the losing side in World War I, Austria is shorn of its empire, thereby freeing a lot of its former subjects to go back to their former pastimes of burning one another’s homes, violating one another’s womenfolk and cutting one another’s throats, a social dynamic toward which it sometimes seems as though our own unhappy fractious imperium is latterly tending. Austria, once a big, honking (albeit ramshackle) polyglot multi-ethnic empire, is now reduced to a smallish, mainly German-speaking country (I trust you’re taking notes: there’ll be a quiz afterward). Fast forward another decade or so, and neighboring Germany, under the dynamic leadership of, by golly, a transplanted Austrian, seems to be going great guns compared to its still-demoralized southern neighbor:

Springtime for Hitler and Germany, 

Deutschland is happy and gay!

We’re marching to a faster pace:

Look out, here comes the master race!

The way the Austrians prefer to remember it, Hitler rolled into Vienna in 1938 and forcibly incorporated it into Germany (or the “German Reich,” as they were styling themselves by then) in what became known as the Anschluss. To much of the rest of the world, it didn’t even meet the “date rape” test, and when the Third Reich went to war with the other major powers of the world the following year, the Austrians were not found wanting by their cousins in martial zeal. Hitler’s project ended badly from the Nazi standpoint in 1945, and although Austria had its national identity restored, it was subject like its senior partner to occupation by the victorious belligerents, France, Great Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union, with each power governing a section of the country.  Vienna, the capital, was likewise subdivided, and it is against this backdrop that the story of The Third Man is laid. Here endeth the historical digression.

Holly Martins is a writer working the lower end of the literary food chain: he pens cowboy novels of the mass-market paperback variety, and although he appears to have a devoted following among the lower socioeconomic strata, he’s not doing so well that he can afford to turn down an invitation to join his old pal Harry Lime, who has set himself up as a successful businessman in occupied Vienna. Precisely what kind of business Lime has been engaged in is not initially made clear, and in any event, the clueless Martins comes to the rather knocked-about city with his head planted securely up his arse, where it remains for much of the movie, and is shocked to discover that Harry has been tragically killed in a traffic accident. Arriving just in time to attend the funeral, Martins attracts the notice of a world-weary British military policeman (a starchy Trevor Howard, with an affect of acerbic disdain he does not trouble to conceal from the American), who advises him to go home. Instead, the writer undertakes his own investigation into the circumstances of Lime’s death, in the course of which he forms an attraction toward his friend’s mistress (she regards him with the sort of affection and esteem in which you and I might hold something we were obliged to scrape from the soles of our shoes), and discovers some very uncomfortable truths about the nature of Lime’s enterprises. Fun factoid: Penicillin had been produced in limited quantities during the war, and for military use only. It did not become available for civilian use in the United States until almost the end of the conflict and was direly needed, and extremely hard to come by, in war-ravaged Central Europe throughout the latter 1940s.


Stylishly photographed (an industry colleague jokingly sent director Reed a spirit level afterward, so that he could set up his cameras straight) and highly atmospheric, and not without its moments of levity, as when the hapless Holly Martins is mistaken for a “serious” novelist and hauled before a literary audience to give a lecture, The Third Man is among the greatest English-language films produced since the last world war, and it’s a little surprising that it isn’t better known. The usual qualifier applies that the pace of editing, although brisk for its time, may be a little downtempo by the reckoning of anyone born since 1980. Some people have found the movie’s once-famous zither music an intolerable annoyance. Final fun factoid: the director’s stepdaughter, Tracy Reed, was the only woman in the cast of Dr. Strangelove (as General Turgidson’s “secretary,” and as “Miss Foreign Affairs” in the Playboy centerfold seen in the B-52 in that film).

Silence, Security, Logic, Prudence

(A few years ago I compiled about fifty film reviews for a cherished younger relative who probably did not follow up any of the garrulous recommendations of her senescent kinsman, so I think I will post selections now and again for the delectation of my one or two followers here. Also, it’s less effort than devising new content.)

Audiences in the pre-Star Wars era (or more properly the pre-2001: A Space Odyssey era, although Kubrick’s extraordinary vision, unlike the space operas of George Lucas, remains sui generis almost half a century later) used to put up with some pretty cheesy sets, costumes and effects in their science fiction—the original “Star Trek” television series was considered cutting-edge in 1966, but even then we could see that the instrumentation on the Enterprise bridge consisted of plywood and Christmas tree lights. So prolific French director Jean Luc Godard (not to be confused with Jean-Luc Picard) decides to do a science fiction flick, and he spends nothing on sets and effects when he makes Alphaville (full title: Alphaville: A Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution), and that “nothing” is money well (un)spent. The result might be off-putting to an American audience today—hell, they weren’t exactly lining up around the block fifty years ago, and poor old Bosley Crowther, not surprisingly, didn’t know what to make of this shit—but after all, like the most intelligent sci-fi, Alphaville was not about how human beings will live in the future, but about how we’re living now.  That’s the “now” of then, of course, but the sterile, alienating future that Godard saw from 1965, and conveyed by means of shooting some of the most anti-human modernistic architecture of the “new” Paris (trends which have, mercifully, been held in check in Paris proper, which remains one of the fabled beauties among the world’s cities), will not look entirely unfamiliar to contemporary audiences.

We needn’t pay much attention to the story, which is the sheerest twaddle: I don’t think that Godard did. In brief, tough-guy detective Lemmy Caution, a character who had already been played by expat American actor Eddie Constantine in a dozen cheapoid French movies with titles like Dames Get Along, is plucked out of his accustomed genre and into this tongue-in-cheek, highly philosophical production, wherein his character is assigned to go undercover in Alphaville, a city on a planet in a distant galaxy (he arrives there by car).  No one’s striving for verisimilitude here, of course (if they were, you wouldn’t hear “light year” being employed as a measure of time), but particularly to French audiences accustomed to Lemmy Caution’s usual vehicles, this must have seemed like…oh, not just William Shatner cast as Hamlet, but William Shatner playing Captain Kirk as Hamlet and directed by Quentin Tarrantino. Gumshoes don’t get much more hard-boiled than Eddie Constantine, who has what you call a “lived-in” face. He looks like an iguana in a trenchcoat, suffering from a bad hangover. He’s up against the faceless masters of Alphaville, including evil Professor von Braun (a tip o’ the hat to then-NASA chief scientist and ex-Nazi Wernher von Braun) and his most fearsome creation, the supercomputer Alpha 60—depicted, oddly, as a backlit window fan mounted behind what appears to be a set of bedsprings—which is much given to croaking weighty Gallic aphorisms on the order of: “Once we know the number one, we believe that we know the number two, because one plus one equals two. We forget that first we must know the meaning of plus.” “Everything has been said, provided words do not change their meanings, and meanings their words.” “Sometimes reality is too complex for oral communication. But legend embodies it in a form which enables it to spread all over the world.” “Is it not obvious that someone who customarily lives in a state of suffering requires a different sort of religion from a person habitually in a state of well-being?” And so forth. These are not lines of dialogue that would have made it past an American studio script conference fifty-four years ago—or today. It’s all very French and, to my mind, more fun than a barrel of ferrets, but perhaps too weird for casual viewing.

At the time the film was made, it was an article of cultural faith that the mighty Computer (state of the art in 1965 deploying rather less processing power than my watch can draw upon today) could be laid low by the power of paradox (“So who shaves the barber, huh? Answer me that, ya big hunka vacuum tubes!”) or, as here, by human love. Since then, of course, automated systems have grown far more cunning, and if they’re still short of sentience, the average intelligence of the people who directly interact with these has gone way down since the pocket-protector and slide rule set commanded those heights, and the elements of human love, or its counterfeits, are likelier wielded against rather than on behalf of the human consumer.

You probably need to see Alphaville.

Living in the Future

For a long time I have taken 1970 as the baseline of my life, although 1972 would probably be the more apt marker: I think that could the eighteen and twenty year-olds and I be magically brought together in some bardo analogue, the guy in the middle might find more in common with his superannuated future incarnation than with the mewling ninny he’d been two years earlier. At least, I venture to hope that he’d find me less embarrassing. On the other hand, it’s amusing to measure my emotional progress from the same Moment Zero as UNIX does.

Whichever point I might choose, I’m struck as I look back at how incurious both young men were about the world in which they would pass their maturity. I can’t recall ever giving much thought about what the world of the twenty-first century might be like. I suppose there was a vague notion that urban architecture would resemble the skyline depicted in “The Jetsons” (as it does indeed now in parts of China), and perhaps there was an expectation of flying cars, which I’m grateful, observing the behavior of drivers down below, has not yet come to pass.

I did take for granted, I think, the civic mythos with which my cohort had been raised: infinite upward mobility. Every year, things were going to get better. Middle-class families—I knew no other—would move up the sequence in automotive lines (in General Motors terms, Chevrolet to Pontiac to Oldsmobile to Buick to, eventually, Cadillac), and to progressively larger and better-appointed homes. There had been signs, of course, of strain in the system, including the debasement of the coinage in 1965, but, not alone among the citizenry, I hadn’t paid much attention to these. I did not foresee, for example, that after 1968 I would not again reside in a single-family dwelling with more than one toilet until late in 1999.

The 1973 oil embargo—I was twenty-one by that time—that got my attention, and around the same period the price of residential real estate began to climb at rates which appeared steep at the time, although mollusc-slow by the standards of our recent bubbles. It occurred to me by 1974 that perhaps the economic escalator might not have room for all of us, and still I did not attempt to form a mental picture of The Future, which I assumed would take care of itself, and which in any event was a long way off.

Digression: until around that time, it was rather easy for those of us who had been raised in stultifying suburban comfort to dispense with the bourgeois amenities, but this owed in part, I believe, to our awareness that if we ever did tire of going without these conveniences, we could at any time shrug off our renunciation and sit down at the table again. Gradually it dawned on us that the table had a finite circumference, and that it was rimmed by only so many chairs. As a friend of mine observed in 1987, anent the rise of the so-called yuppies, “People have realized that some of us are going to be left out, and they’re saying not me.”

Still, The Future. In the early nineties, when I was about forty, the pace of technological change appeared to have gone on afterburners, and this seemed exciting. I can’t claim to have been exactly au courant in my thinking: for example, I thought that this whole “internet” thing was a passing fad, a misapprehension shared at the time, to their subsequent sorrow, by numerous captains of industry who have spent the intervening decades attempting to corral the thing. And indeed, the pace of change appears in substantial part to have moved into cyberspace. An American plucked from, say, downtown San Francisco in 1948 into the same spot in 1968 would instantly notice the change in tailoring, grooming, automotive styling. Notice? Hell, he’d be gobsmacked; would fall to the sidewalk shitting himself and bleeding from the ears. Move a San Franciscan from 1998 to 2018 and he’d likely register a shift, but it would be the online environment (if he could find a “cyber cafe”—remember those?) that would appear outlandishly foreign to him.

But here we are. Occasionally, as I walk to the corner Whole Foods Market (the “Food Hole” as we call it, with latterly imperfect affection), I play a mental game, imagining either of my two baseline selves to be vouchsafed or cursed back then with a view of the world through my 2018 eyes. What would they make of it? The apparel of the XXI century would not appear far removed from 1972, although the tattoos—these were a class-signifier back in the day, and not a positive one—and the piercings would be startling. I suppose also that I imagined by now that we’d be going about in outfits with ribbed fronts and flared shoulders (we almost got to the latter element, at least in women’s “power” attire, in the early eighties), whereas jeans and apparel that would not have appeared inconsistent with these still abound in the visual field I’ve granted to my boggle-eyed youthful voyeurs.

The sheer shabbiness of the urban environment would, I think, have astonished my younger selves. Again, the idea of eternal upward mobility, of prosperity ever expanding, was part of the package my cohort was raised on. Beginning in 1979 I began to commute each day from Oakland to San Francisco, and as I passed the Mechanics Monument at Battery and Market streets marked the presence of the “potato lady,” as I and a coworker called her, who stood beside that civic statue, begging for change in her shabby brown coat (she resembled, as we thought, a largish baked potato. It must have been humiliating for her—she looked fiftyish to us—but we regarded her with dismissive contempt: compassion is not an affliction of the young). It occasioned remark because there were no other mendicants routinely to be seen in the Financial District back then.

Fast forward to 2018. San Francisco is overrun with beggars. I never, for the last quarter-century of my alleged career, made it between work and home without being solicited. Nor indeed, for longer than that, did I dwell in Oakland without a sharp awareness of the city’s criminal lumpenproletariat. This, too, would not have figured in my youthful picture of the present century, had I troubled to formulate one. Until I moved to Oakland, and actually for three or four years thereafter (for I fetched up at first in one of the tonier districts of this troubled city), “crime” was something that happened to other people, whereas for many years awareness of it has been a natural condition of my existence here, something akin to the tetanus that keeps our fingers slightly curled by our sides.

In 1962 we had “The Jetsons.” Placed before us just twenty years later, the vision of the twenty-first century, still distant, was Blade Runner, and I think we can all agree that while neither prophecy was perfect, Ridley Scott and his production team landed closer to the mark than did the showrunners at Hanna-Barbera.

And politics? The Soviet Union appeared to be a permanent feature of the global landscape. In 1970 or thereabouts I read an article ludicrously titled “Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?” What a joke! In the event, of course, the author, who predeceased his subject by just eleven years had a better take on it than I did in my late teens. So, communism essentially dead. And fascism of course, except—what the fuck?—in the United States of America, in the XXI century promised by the Jetsons or at least by Stanley Kubrick, fascism claws its way out of the six feet of earth and loam heaped upon it, yanks out the stake pounded into its heart in 1945, and rises gibbering, vicious and ravenous seventy years later incarnated—“the second time as farce”—as President Donald Trump.

I did not see this coming. And I think that the late USSR may serve as a cautionary example that a Great Power in decline can vanish, historically speaking, in a heartbeat. Indeed, if there are historians still doing business half a dozen decades from now, I suspect that they will record that the two global empires of the late twentieth century ultimately committed suicide out of sheer self-loathing. And the coroner may report that in each instance it was assisted suicide.

Somehow we have blundered into a future wherein the American genius has contrived to deliver a society combining most of the worst features of anarchy and authoritarianism while signally failing to deliver the putative benefits of either scheme. I want my money back.

I want my future back.