T.D.C.o.t.E: An Ugly Scene

This morning I was party to an unpleasant, and rather absurd encounter.  I almost always take my morning caffeine injection at a local (Cambridge, MA) establishment, the Crema Cafe, which, unusually, has a relatively long common table.  At this table,  people unrelated to each other can sit together without feeling Anglo-Saxon anxiety at the idea that they are in the intimate presence of strangers.  This morning I settled down at the table virtually alone, when members of a group slowly began congregating around me.  As the group gathered, and the conversation developed, it became clear that these were students at Harvard Business School, who were reacquainting themselves after summer recess.  All very normal, right?

Well, as I continued to read my newspaper, the conversation centered on the various  internships the students had been involved in over the summer.  One student did hers in Philadelphia, and another was just back from Moscow.  Another, who (on account of his age) may not have been a student, but a teacher, had been traipsing around Amsterdam.  All of them seemed to be doing private equity work of some sort.

As I sat there, I became more and more angry.  I suppose it was the kid from Moscow who set me off: here he is, coming from a country which has seen its GDP drop by close to 10% in the last year, seemingly interested only in recounting his daily routine: how many hours he worked, what the nightlife was like, that sort of thing.  But that's no big deal: it's normal among friends to focus on things like this when they first meet up after a while.  Why was I so upset?

My frustration with this question amplified my original annoyance, which was itself exaggerated by what my eyes kept glancing over.  I was reading the Sunday New York Times print edition, and I kept looking at an article I posted yesterday on this blog, about how Wall Streeters are developing products to get the elderly to sell their life insurance policies at a loss for a larger up-front sum than they can get from the insurance companies, which would be securitized, a la subprime mortgages, and provide potentially high winnings for investors if the previously-insured died prematurely (the revenue streams would go towards paying the premiums the former holders didn't want to pay anymore).  Considering that at least some of the sellers must be selling precisely because they got saddled with mortgages that have gone bad, the whole idea made me sick.  But this didn't necessarily have anything to do with those at the table.  And I just kept getting angrier.

Finally I finished my coffee and went to leave.  As I passed on the way out, I excused myself and said some stupid things to these people, which must have appeared even more stupid because my voice tends to crack when I get all hot and bothered.  I told them that they, prime examples of the jet-setting, super-networked elite, made me sick with their internships and elite pursuits.  After this outburst, I was so mortified that I beat a hasty retreat, but one of them followed me out of the cafe and challenged me: why didn't I just move away from them?

I responded by going a little--only just--deeper, and offering a boilerplate denunciation of the kind of mentality fostered in business schools, which wrecked the global financial system and screwed up innumerable lives.  I was becoming even more horrified by my pathetic performance in elucidating the obvious, though, and continued to leave.  Finally, she administered the coup de grace, spoken with contempt, of course, rather than feeling: "I'm sorry you're unemployed!"

At this point I was transported, through no effort of my own, from the ridiculous to, if not the sublime, a major fault-line in relations between the incipient elite and the rest of us in a time of an economic contraction of historic proportions.  In the rest of this post, I'll try to explain what this fault line consists of.

The chief implication of the woman's rejoinder, to me, was that I was animated primarily by resentment, which was certainly true.  But what was interesting to me was the following: first of all, I'm not unemployed, but--even worse for me, as I could be making more if I was collecting unemployment, based on my last employer's wage--seriously and perilously underemployed (I'm working at a temp job for $9 hour in expensive Boston right now, two years after leaving my last permanent position).  Second, there's no way she could have known, based on my dress, my speech, my reading material, appearance or anything like that, what my class or occupational status was, unless I had gone off the handle like I did.  One of the chief characteristics of the elite these days is that they, unlike their forebears, go out of their way to look and talk not only like "us", but like an absurdly representative everyman: hence Obama and Bernake appearing with identical open collared  shirts and blazers on Martha's Vineyard a few weeks ago, Steve Jobs' grungy black-turtleneck/jeans combo, etc.

Back to the original point, though, my--not even class, but class-attitudinal (itself conditioned increasingly by consumer choice)--status was made clear to this woman by my imputed resentment.  Resentment at what?  To her, and I'm guessing here, I was some unemployed guy, who, while enduring a temporary hardship, would, "when things pick up", find myself in a similar position to the one I had, able to resume the lifestyle to which I was accustomed, and we'd all live happily ever after.  After all, in the words of so many well-meaning people, "something will turn up."  Thus, my contention with them had no basis in fact, and I was merely fulminating, and I should, like my betters, just stop whining and, even if I get pissed off, move away.  

But there may have been something else: in another time, I could see someone similarly placed responding with a hearty "get a job!"  Today, this exhortation is not available.  The future business leaders of today do not even have the luxury of entertaining ideas that they are creating jobs and generating conditions for upwards mobility for those of us who aren't so resentful and uppity that we don't recognize an opportunity when we see one.  So they offer faux sympathies for those temporarily--and this qualification remains the key assumption for them, even though all evidence is pointing to the contrary (the great majority of job losses in this recession are permanent, the periods spent unemployed are rising, the workweek is plummeting, etc; and workers in certain demographic categories are being hit exceptionally hard)--indisposed, hoping they'll get a grip and avoid further embarrassing themselves with impromptu protests about things no one can do anything about anyway.

And to me, this sheds light on a key feature of today's elite: they may look and sound like us (or like the ever-shrinking economic, if not cultural, "middle-class"), but they are in one important sense different from their forebears: they tend to work extremely hard; and, far from being a leisure class, often do not allow themselves anywhere near enough space to properly enjoy their trophies.  One consequence of this is that they have no time: constantly engaged in projects, internships, charity work, networking and so on, they require a vast sector of glorified servants in the service industries to allow them the means to perpetuate not only their privileges, but even to cushion their competitive advantages (by providing them with timesaving, educational, regenerative leisure and other services increasingly out of reach for the general population) in the workforce.  And that means that they don't necessarily reflect on what should be obvious to them merely by looking around.  And they certainly don't realize the extent to which they enjoy extraordinary privileges: after all, they've worked for it, right?

But consider these internships.  Recently an increasing amount of attention has been placed on the importance of internships to career success.  It's got so bad, in fact, that desperate parents are paying so their children can be, well, unpaid laborers.  This in addition to ponying up for skyrocketing educational bills, starting with day care and on to test-prep and then on to elite college tuition.  When I was young, virtually no one did an internship or volunteer work--most kids worked in restaurants or stores; now it's becoming not only a cost of doing business for the elite-to-be, but a modern form of indentured servitude for middle-class students who can still get the work.  Everywhere, students are being pressured to do this sort of work in order to gain a foothold on the corporate or government ladder, and if you don't do it, you are going to be less connected--and probably less employable--than those (who almost always come from families with larger pockets) who do, or simply can afford to do so.  But even those in the latter category are still working their butts off--so they "deserve" it.

I have to wrap this up soon, even though I'm highly dis-satisfied with my armchair theorizing on a complicated topic, and with the fact that I made a fool of myself to no effect this morning.  But there's one thing I should mention in closing.  There's one thing the geniuses at Harvard Business School still need me for: my propensity to consume.  And, after the bursting of a bubble which desperately sustained obviously unsustainable levels of consumption on several levels--economically, financially, environmentally and even politically (impact of consumerism on the decline of political consciousness, etc)--that's not something that's going to materialize unless some of the elites--not to mention the rest of us--start getting as animated about the dire state of the labor market as I was this morning.  And it's not likely to happen if we confine our protests to comic scenes at a little cafe.