"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
A pretty sunrise out there. I opened the slider a crack to take the photo, rather than venturing out onto the patio, because I'm in a t-shirt and it's a breezy 43 degrees out there. My blood's gotten thin being back in the South lately. Corning for Christmas may prove jarring.
As usual in this time of my life, I'm writing in a hurry. I'd thought making P coffee and sitting down with a cup of my own at 5:20 would make for a luxuriously leisurely morning, but such is not the case. I need to be at the tailor's trailer for the fitting of my Krewe of Dominique Youx costume promptly at 8, so I have time to race back to the office for a multiparty mediation at 9. Always racing. It's the one constant these days.
This costume has turned into a vexation. Members of the Krewe customize their gharish attire with reminders of their tribal identity--a college football team's logo, a squadron patch--and she's pretty insistent that I need something F-15 related on mine. This seems pathetic to me; it's been thirty-nine years, four months, and thirteen days since my last flight in the Eagle (but who's counting?). I've done other things since then. That experience, the cameraderie and war and moments of solitary awe six miles above terra firma, all are a part of who I am. But they're just a slice. Why define yourself by something that was a short chapter of a much longer story?
Of course, she knew about that part of my life because I mentioned it. She's not clairvoyant. That's on me.
But I need to come up with some design that's more now than then. Maybe an outline of a Columbia? How about a big dollar sign?
That last snide remark at myself flows from this morning's readings, another factor in the present time crunch. The first was from Business Insider, an essay about the quiet crash of private equity with the upturn in interest rates.
What made the article interesting wasn't the bare economic determinism of how interest rate movements affect the flow of capital into private equity, or why leveraged buyouts with money borrowed at zero percent work better than when the funds cost 8% annually. Rather, the survey of how venture capitalists have ruined most of our economy for the people who live in it hit home based on what I've observed around me. Everything from assisted living facilities to HVAC contractors to, most miserably, medicine, has been swallowed up by investment groups determined to find "efficiencies" that can only be achieved by delivering a crappy product to consumers and a Dickensian existence to their employees in exchange for dividends paid to investors. A great model if you're the investor; not so much for everyone else.
The long read that pretty much crushed my morning, however, was an essay from a 2018 issue of the Atlantic, The 9.9 Percent is the New American Aristocracy, by Matthew Stewart.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-birth-of-a-new-american-aristocracy/559130/
The writer is a former management consultant, and also Oxford trained philosopher, living just outside of Boston. He's descended from a Gatsby-style family of American aristocrats who made and lost their fortune through Standard Oil investments, and so has the interesting perspective of having lived in the aftermath of a family story in the .1 percent while observing what's happening to our country while a member of the 9.9 percent.
I won't butcher his reasoning or short-change his entertaining and incisive writing with a rushed summary here--you really ought to take a few minutes (okay, more than a few minutes. It's quite a long essay) reading Stewart's observations about how the 9.9 percent--lawyers, doctors, CRNAs, accountants-, IT types: you know the group--have lost touch with what the next ninety percent of us experience in terms of frenzied worklife, lousy healthcare, and precarious finances. And over time we've built a wall around ourselves with unaffordable neighborhoods, academic pedigrees that are signals of class and wealth, and even a full head of well-maintained teeth and a few extra inches of heighth from our diets. There's almost no way in the U.S. now to cross that divide between the two worlds, with paths of social mobility slamming shut and a system rigged to protect our most favored status.
I know what you're thinking--isn't that every system of human organization? I suppose so, but the others have been at least somewhat honest about grouping by calcified caste. We're living the lie of our Horatio Alger myth.
Stewart ties all this to the politics of resentment that have grown more acute over the last several years, a resentment fanned by the .1 percent, and directed from the bottom 90 percent toward the 9.9 crowd, pointy-headed snobs that we/they are. That's an old formula too, divide the less privileged, and one that doesn't bode well for our country in the long run.
But rather than trying to fix all that, I'll don my puffy blue pirate costume in a few minutes, then charge a lot of money to untangle the consequences of a fumble at a real estate closing that's led to a lawsuit. Here I am, part of the problem.
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