In the background the cleaning client’s television is tuned to CNBC. Marcus Lemonis, host of The Profit – yet another show where a rich guy is parachuted in to yell at small business owners about their failures – talks about success with country music star Brett Young and his songwriter-cum-golf buddy Tyler Reeve. ‘Five years ago you had nothing,’ Lemonis says with incredulity, as the threesome throw hundred dollar bills on the ground and make bets about who’ll hit the longest drive. Young, the son of a megachurch pastor, recounts the daily grind of playing to packed arenas with considerably less Southern twang than his singing voice - unsurprising once you discover he's actually from Orange County, California. ‘It’s the toughest business,’ Reeve says with a straight face.
Now I may be a bit cynical here. A bit overtired of the American Dream nonsense. But you could cough on anyone in Walmart working through the coronavirus pandemic and find a person in a tougher business than making generic songs like ‘In Case You Didn’t Know’ top the charts. People who really did come from ‘nothing,’ not wealthy preacher’s kids.
But there is a reason television loves stories like Brett Young’s and why these shows do mad numbers with the same demographics they blithely shit on. Presenting this Huntington Beach bleached blonde as Just a Regular Guy reinforces the narrative that with some ill-defined struggle and a bit of perfunctory hard work, anyone can – and more importantly should – make it. That success is a function of desire and not circumstances. That for every Brett Young there aren’t actually ten thousand near-identical people with songs and a guitar bussing tables at a Waffle House near you instead of taking the stage at the Opry. Brett’s is a reassuring fantasy but bears about as much resemblance to real life as a three-minute song flogged by guys who throw hundred dollar bills on the ground like they're worthless. And we eat it up like it’s the All-Star Special with two eggs over easy and bottomless coffee.
Twenty years ago that waitress with a song and a dream could have been me. A few months before moving to the UK I was invited to a staff Christmas meal at a local restaurant. A party for dishwashers and table servers to let their hair down, and a handful of friends and family. I was there because I knew the owner and was so much of a regular I ate there more often than I ate at home. At the time, working three jobs to save for grad school, getting most of my meals from a neighborhood joint made more sense than cooking at the end of a day when my flat had only the most basic of kitchenettes. Anyway.
Three margaritas or so into festivities, I stood up with a group of people to sing the 12 Days of Christmas. I wore a deep v-cut sparkly gunmetal top and a silver miniskirt and was Six Geese A-Laying. Afterwards, a friend of the owner tapped me on the shoulder and gave me his card. He was an agent in Nashville, the kind of guy with expensive jeans and heavy turquoise bracelets. He said he thought I had something. Did I play the guitar, he asked. No sir, but I play the banjo. Could I read music? Yes. He put his hand on my arm over and over. I smiled and pocketed the card but of course I never called even though the restaurant owner said he was legit. I may have grown up in a tin roof shack with dogs in the yard and raising rabbits for meat but I was no fool. Why throw away the future on a silly dream when I was about to move to another country and go to graduate school?
Little did I know that I was on the cusp of a generation for whom the dream of making it through education alone was about to evaporate as quickly as a singing waitress’s dreams in the Bluebird Café.
The America of my memory, the one I left and to some degree thought I would be moving back to, is another country. It’s pre-9/11. It’s pre-Homeland Security. It’s pre-big trucks in every driveway. It’s the place where writer Molly Ivins penned a most damning assessment of Texas’s then-governor, that Dubya ‘was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.’ It’s a place where the criteria to be able to call yourself working class included doing some work.
It’s post civil rights, even though racism was still widespread. A place where if it was not yet true that anyone could make it, we still believed it could be that place someday.
America today is not that place. It is Dubyafied. The Connecticut Cowboy with his fake accent and homespun malapropisms ushered in an age of inward-looking blind privilege. It’s a culture empty of meaning, as bland and pointless as all chart country since Garth Brooks’s heyday. It’s the clean cut multimillionaires of Duck Dynasty growing beards and pretending to be rednecks for television fame. It’s all hat and no cattle.
It is perhaps the arrogance of middle age to imagine that the height of our - and by this I mean society in general, not just oneself - peak was sometime in our childhood. That after some imagined idyll that just so happens to coincide with a year sometime between when we were 8 and 18, things everywhere were at their natural best, and it is that point at which society should have stopped... evolving, growing, changing. Or something.
I nominate 1988.
There is no question that 9/11 changed everything, but the rot was setting in even before then. Sometime around the part when Greed became Good, when we were ordered to eliminate our existing music collections only to replace them with another impermanent medium. When shops became malls but were already starting to lose out to enormous retail parks.
Some would say the internet has a hand in our current malaise/ discontent/ incipient apocalypse and maybe that was an accelerant. Social media frequently gets the blame. But I’ll put the turning point even before anyone had mobile phones. When you could still date the people in family photos by the clothes they were wearing, because you only went shopping once a year.
That was the year my parents sold the little timber frame tin roof house on the literal wrong side of the tracks and their used cars, and upgraded to the house with a pool in the ‘burbs and a new sedan on lease. When my Pop-pop died, and he left a small sum of money for me, with strings: it had to go on Catholic school tuition.
When high school started. When boys went from pushing unpopular kids down steps to trying to snap their bra straps. When school uniforms became for the first time a daily part of my life, and I learned that the rules of financial competition didn’t disappear just because differences in our shirts and skirts did.
They say the Western disease is “I’ll be happy when.” I’ll be happy when I own that thing, have that experience, date that person, get that grade. (Aside: minimalism, as practiced here, is an extension of that, replacing “I’ll be happy when I have more” with “I’ll be happy when I have less.” As a veteran of having both more and less, I can guarantee that’s not the thing.)
What changed in that time? Credit? Late Reagan? The first hints of irrational exuberance? 24-hour cable news? 57 varieties of Suddenly Salad? Disposable lunch box lunches with pre-cut salami for kids? The stagnation of the untipped federal minimum wage? The coming dawn of Endless War? Lockerbie? Rush Limbaugh? Newt Gingrich and the Contract With America?
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what went wrong - I’ll leave that to historians - but here are some facts. The ability to rent a place to live or open utility accounts didn’t used to rely on your credit score, because credit scores as we now know them didn’t exist until 1989. Income inequality in the US fell from the 1930s until 1980, when Reagan slashed top tax rates and decimated public assistance programs. Wages for the middle classes have stagnated since. His action against striking air traffic controllers was a blow for unions everywhere, and as union membership has gone down, income inequality has correspondingly gone up. The financial deregulation ushered in during the Reagan and Bush years gave us the Savings and Loan Crisis, the Dot Com Bubble, and the Great Recession. White collar crime has gone unpunished while prisons are full of victims of “tough on crime” judiciaries that put punishment before rehabilitation and prevent vast numbers of people from being able to vote or even find gainful post-incarceration employment. The price of post-high school education has gone through the roof as more and more jobs require degrees. The amount of debt carried by Americans has spiraled out of control. And no politician, no major party, is doing much of anything to stop any of this since it’s now been over a generation of Reaganomics as a baseline for American decay.
It played out in my own family pretty much on that timeline too.
When was the last good year in our family? Decades later my father would say he was never as happy again, after we moved. His plumbing business went from strength to strength, his marriage fell apart. Drugs and women filtered in on the sidelines, though no one but him knew that yet. He said he had never been able to resist darkness and I know that, I know it hard, I walk that line every damn day. Which I guess makes me all the angrier that he succumbed even though I know how easy it would be for me to do the same. As I wrote in one of my Belle books a while back: it is not about the sex, it never has been. It is about the heart of darkness.
But you see, it wasn’t only my family. We all succumbed. To staring at screens being drip-fed anxiety and horror every waking hour. To the death of local newspapers and independent downtowns. What we gained, perhaps, was some awareness of lives not like our own. But did we change for the better because of it?
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We want to believe in that American Dream so hard. We all want to be Brett Young, going from a guitar and a song to hundred-dollar-bill golf bets. How is that working out? In the ten months from February 2020 when the first US covid cases were confirmed to the inauguration of Joe Biden as America’s 46th President, billionaires consolidated their financial standing enormously. Elon Musk, the richest man int he world, gained $173 billion. Jeff Bezos, head of Amazon, gained $77 billion. The Walton family of Wal-Mart fame gained $60 billion.
Meanwhile, American unemployment remains staggeringly high. The federal minimum wage has not gone up in 12 years. We look to people like Elon Musk, the son of a South African gem mine owner, and think what he has is attainable with work. We turn on each other.
Elon Musk is an affable, pot-smoking guy who banters with his Twitter followers and his partner is a cool musician, so he’s the Good Billionaire, right? Here’s the reality: he threatened to take stock options away from employees if they unionized, which is illegal. He fired staff for taking unpaid time off after telling them they could stay home if they feared for their health in the coronavirus pandemic. And 43 workers’ rights violations have been filed against his company in the last decade. But point out any of this on social media and an army of regular guys and gals - Musk’s keyboard warriors - will swiftly descend on your account and report tweets, make threats, and more to see if they can get your account banned.
Amazingly, they do all this for a billionaire… for free. Notice me, senpai.
Why? In part it’s because the American true faith in wealth holds that if you criticize a system, even rightly, you will somehow be excluded from it. But do any of these people realistically expect to attain even a fraction of Musk’s wealth? It’s hard to wrap our minds around how big one billion is.
Think of it this way. You know what the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars is? Approximately a billion dollars.
You would have to work full time for over 66 years straight, no vacation, to earn a million dollars at the federal minimum wage. A billion is one thousand times that. What that means is, therefore, there is no way to get billions through work alone. No wage, no salary, will get nine zeroes in your account someday. It’s money made off the speculative craziness of the stock market, of the overblown plans of venture investors. It’s imaginary numbers being built on top of the bedrock of people who still get an hourly wage, usually not enough of one, to make whatever this or that tech hero is selling. It is not only not attainable it is so laughably out of reach that most of the 1% are not even close to billionaires themselves. You won’t become a billionaire by recording a hit song, or writing some books, or having this amazing idea that you take to Shark Tank.
It’s impossible to get a billion through earnings, which makes it also impossible to get a billion through savings. Let me repeat: it is impossible to save a billion. Or a million, or any significant fraction of it, no matter what the hit pieces about Millennials and all that avocado toast they buy want you to believe. You won’t become a billionaire through not having a cappuccino when you want it, or buying dried beans instead of canned, or scouring comparison websites for higher interest savings accounts. You will not get rich from being poor.
Life is not a smooth upward trajectory from struggle to success. Sometimes, circumstances dictate that you become a cleaner at the age of 45, that you mow lawns at 70.
Believing we can all become rich if we just want it hard enough is like going to bed in princess pajamas age six and expecting you’ll wake up in Disney’s magic castle. But from the way American media and politics have shifted in the time I was gone, it seems like that is all anybody wants. It is as if by shifting the focus of our dreams from having a modest and satisfying life to shooting for stock IPO stardom, people were made to believe the failure to become super rich is a moral failure. That the decrease in living standards which has been apparent in America since the 80s is not at all systemic but somehow our own fault because we didn’t hustle enough. And that the people who are becoming rich through exploiting us are simply reaping their natural rewards.
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I’m older than you. My father, the artist, bought our first ‘tract’ home on the GI Bill. He and my ultimately alcoholic mother had been born in Missouri, the Bible Belt. His father and uncles owned the biggest ‘department’ store in town. My father, an Agnostic, was groomed to work there. On the boat back from the Pacific Theater he decided to become a professional artist and to marry my mother, his high school sweetheart. Somehow, he managed to tell his father, then he and his new bride did something else revolutionary in 1950, they moved to California for him to work as an artist and leave their parents and that State behind. They almost starved. Eventually, he realized that he would have to teach to augment his income. I remember that first house, in Northern California. My mother was a ‘housewife’ and started to drink even more. My father taught all day and worked into the night in his studio (garage.) I was in Elementary School before I realized everyone had a garage and not a studio. All kinds of artists from all races and faiths from Beatniks to classical musicians stopped by. My mother had been a concert-quality violinist. We were always poor, and my mother’s drinking worsened. I have learned a lot and don’t know anything at all. Capitalism has entropy built in. That’s what I think is happening now. Society is breaking down at an ever increasing pace. No one will be spared. Perhaps Millennials are fortunate not to remember the other America. The one that you and I grew up in. They only know chaos — the new normal, and so are OK with that.
OK, you got me; I’ve paid up. This one is a gem. You have made me think again about bin Laden, how he landed the fatal blow on “the West”, and how culpable the Bushbaby was.
I will join you in picking 1988 because I was 35, happily married, and in my dream job in Hong Kong. We had just bought our dream house in rural Suffolk. Of course none of those things lasted a decade.
Your reflections on the billionaires are very sound.
I have noticed that my need to know more about the decline and fall of the Roman Republic is quite widely shared.
Keep it up!