How to Be Useful

Friday night a friend nearly choked on his Spanky’s BBQ beef brisket as he ranted about how a man who grew up in modest circumstances, and who owns just one house and one car, was getting slapped with the “elitist” tag — relentlessly! — while another man who married a young heiress and now enjoys several houses in several locations doesn’t get smeared that same way. Here’s my How to Be Useful-inspired explanation. I have to number these points because I’ll get lost in the fog otherwise.

1. Americans love the idea that we live in a classless society. In other words, that class distinctions don’t matter much here.*

2. Right alongside this belief is a yen for meritocracy. A meritocratic system fast-tracks its smartest and most talented citizens to the top, where they run both government and business.

3. As much as we like the idea of meritocracy, we shy away from its uglier implications. Say you think the U.S.A. is wonderfully meritocratic, and yet you’re struggling financially. Does this mean you’re not that bright? And if your I.Q. is low, does that mean you deserve to be poor? That you’ve earned your low-status…well, because you’re just not good enough? The notion that a meritocracy was going to be tough on the majority of people’s self-esteem was embedded in the concept from the beginning.*

4. For someone staring at a tall stack of credit card bills, it’s an uncomfortable thought. How can you reconcile your lack of power and money (grating enough as is) with the (even more painful) doctrine that the people at the top are “the best and the brightest”?

5. It’s a dilemma. Someone like Obama — he’s smart! he stayed up late, working hard! and now he’s on the road to the White House! — is unsettling. No one (except maybe Geraldine Ferraro) can claim he got lucky, or was born on third base. He really did hit a triple.

6. Strangely enough, this is why many people feel more comfortable with high-class folks who aren’t, frankly, the sharpest knife in the drawer. Witness George W. Bush. Born a member of the nation’s social and economic elite, and yet…it doesn’t seem he would have made it on his own. This, given the competitive pressures people feel, actually comes as a relief. They suspect that if there were a level playing field, W. wouldn’t be much competition.

7. In this jumble of ambivalence, the worst thing you can be is Al Gore. Born into the elite (indeed, with a background much like Bush’s) but also an overachiever. That’s just obnoxious.

8. So when people pull out the “elitist” smear, they’re really talking in code. They’re talking elite in the Jeffersonian “natural elite” sense. Here’s the thought process: “Gosh, Obama’s got talent. And he seems to think that’s worth something.” And to those for whom hard work has not paid off nearly as well, it adds insult to injury.

9. Bottom line is, if you believe we live in a classless society, and you believe at the same time that we’ve a fully functioning meritocracy, you’ve erected a big, big psychological obstacle for yourself. Unless you happen to be doing very, very well.

10. As someone who’s experienced not doing very,very well, I can suggest…when the Spanky’s waitress asks if you want to take your uneaten black-eyed peas and candied sweet potatoes home with you, say yes. Leave a big tip. Then, on the way home, admit to yourself that class matters, this is not a perfect meritocracy we live in, and that’s o.k. You’ll figure something out.

*Pop sociologist Vance Packard wrote about this in the late 1950s, and he traced the “classlessness” idea to a U.S. production boom that began in the early 1940s. Thanks to the G.I. bill and a strong manufacturing sector, middle class ranks swelled. Widespread prosperity was such a happy change from the Great Depression — still very much on people’s minds — that it was easy to believe that social class distinctions were withering away. Advertising helped this along, Packard claims in The Status Seekers: “…the director of a market-research organization announced his discovery that America was becoming ‘one vast middle class.’ Meanwhile, a corporation in paid advertisements was assuring us that ‘there are more opportunities in this country than ever before.’ Whatever else we are, we certainly are the world’s most self-proclaimed equalitarian people.”

**The phrase comes from a 1958 book called The Rise of the Meritocracy. Written by British Labour minister Michael Young, it was actually intended as a cautionary tale. Young wanted to show how, “if the rich and powerful were encouraged by the general culture to believe that they fully deserved all they had, how arrogant they could become, and, if they were convinced it was all for the common good, how ruthless in pursuing their own advantage.” And likewise, how ordinary people who “have less worldly goods and less worldly power than a select minority” can, if they subscribe to the notion of a meritocracy, “can be damaged in their own self-esteem, and generally demoralized.”

On the corner of Clinton and Stanton:

Click it, and it’ll be easier to read. Is this advertising? Are they going to follow this up with a “Then It Hit Me: I might as well buy an expensive handbag while I’m at it, so at least I feel better!” poster?

In any event, it reminded me this pile o’ ironic garbage from earlier in the year.

A reconsideration of the movie (and soon to be musical) 9 to 5.

Keira Knightley is reportedly in talks to star as Zelda Fitzgerald (nee Sayre) in an upcoming F. Scott biopic. Which is all wrong. Before Zelda went completely nuts, she was only mildly nuts. And one of the most spoiled rotten brats, if Nancy Milford is to be believed, ever to have walked the earth. If she were alive today, she’d be a candidate for Exiled. I love me some Knightley but I don’t know if she’s willing — yet — to do unlikable. (Ellen Page, however…?) Besides, Zelda was pretty enough but not shazam pretty.

From the Independent (UK):

The film is written by Hanna Weg, who also wrote Enigma, and directed by Nick Cassavetes. It is to begin shooting in April, although the role of [F. Scott] Fitzgerald has not yet been cast.

Role of F. Scott Fitzgerald? They need to get Ryan Gosling on the phone. I think we can all agree on that.

My friends know I worry about plastic. What are we gonna do with all those water bottles? My only idea so far: Big public sculpture. (Like the Watts Towers, but made of Fiji bottles.) I’m a history major, therefore…limited skills. So I was happy to hear of this engineering initiative by fellow University of Minnesota grads. Go go Gophers.

I’ll be at the Burgundy Books Fall Festival. 2:00 p.m. TODAY. Burgundy Books is located at 4 Norwich Road in lovely — I’m assuming! Never been — East Haddam, Connecticut.

…brings us to Malaysia, and advice on how to survive an economic downturn. First suggestion? Renew interest in your hobbies. “If no hobby, get one soon.” Then:

If you need income, then you may have to forgo your enjoyment for the time being and think seriously of how to be useful to others, especially those with cash so that when they are happy with you in whatever you were doing for them, they would or might give you some cash.

If you are without talent or ideas, and you are hungry, then I suggest that you go to the countryside or maybe your parents back home and go to the nearby forest and gather some fruits or vegetables or hunt for some meat in order to feed yourself.

Every time I see a statement by Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton, I wince the way I do when confronted with emails written to loves lost five years ago. The unease hits fast, like a drag off a Marlboro Red. Then irritation settles in.

My first thought was that Burton’s sentences were too long. He just needed an editor. Read the rest of this entry »

Once you’ve read about this quasi-philosophy — subject of How to Be Useful ch. 2 —  you start seeing traces of it everywhere. Like in Christopher Hitchens’ piece on Sarah Palin here:

Walter Dean Burnham, one of the country’s pre-eminent Marxists, used to attract ridicule back in the 1960s and ’70s by saying that Ronald Reagan would one day be president. He based this on various calculations, one of which was what I’ll call the attraction-repulsion factor. Previous candidates of the right, from McCarthy to Nixon, indeed, had expressed powerful dislike and resentment of their foes. That can work, up to a point, but the problem is that if you radiate hostility, you also tend to attract it. Reagan didn’t radiate it and also didn’t attract it. He went on, in a genial enough way, to destroy the Democratic “New Deal” coalition. I don’t think Gov. Palin has quite that sort of folksy charisma, but I am still not sure it’s entirely wise to patronize her.

[emphasis mine] I’d go one further: It’s never entirely wise to patronize anyone. Except for small children.

Dear Luke Wilson,

A few moments in Blonde Ambition might have prompted you to think hard about whether to sign on to this project. The first is when Ms. Simpson cracks wise about a thick-waisted girl with flat, greasy hair and glasses. Pretty girls making fun of homely ones is not “comedy gold.” A pretty girl making fun of an ugly girl in a movie produced by the pretty girl’s father doesn’t even live in the same state as “funny.”

The second moment is when the fat black secretary squeaks “Oh, lawd, here come [sic] trouble!” at the sight of an approaching colleague. Also not funny! Maybe if this character had been named, oh…Aunt Jemima, the retrograde racial stereotyping might have been more…of a piece. But as is, no.

Honestly, though, most troubling was when Ms. Simpson falls on her face in a crowded Manhattan office lobby and no one stoops to help her. I’ve witnessed stumbling, stinking, Bowery drunks helped up in this town. That lobby scene asks us to suspend disbelief for no good reason. New Yorkers also never snatch the cab you’ve just hailed out from under you — as happens three times in this film. So these attempts to position Ms. Simpson as a vulnerable innocent in a mean, indifferent city instead prompted me to think, “You know, Showgirls was a better movie than most people remember.”

Kind Regards,

Megan

PS. Did you see this? Papa Joe Simpson speaks in the DVD bonus material. On Jessica’s work in Blonde Ambition:

“This is a great moment for America.”

On director Scott Marshall:

“You know, the first time we sat down, I told him, I said, ‘What your father did in Pretty Woman is what I’m looking for in this movie. I’m challenging you to look beyond the script and find those things that are just natural for Jessica and if we can put that together with what’s happening in the script, I think we’ll be successful.’”