By Ralph R. Reiland on 6.10.05 @ 12:04AM
The New York Times can stop even fish from biting.
SEA ISLE, N.J. -- The eighth article of the "Class Matters"
series in the New York Times was delivered the other day
as I was getting ready to write about the latest fishing news.
We're on a barrier island where the inlets that connect the bay
with the ocean provide a steady stream of baitfish like bunker and
mullet that can't help being a magnet for schools of hungry blues
and stripers this time of year. The world-record striper was caught
about 25 miles north of here in 1982 off Atlantic City at the
Vermont Avenue jetty -- a big 78-pound, 8-ouncer landed in the high
surf during the throes of a hard Nor'easter.
According to the scuttlebutt in the local bait shops, the
stripers off Sea Isle are currently biting best on a bright pink
rubbery lure with silvery streaks. My wife says it's exactly the
same pink and silver color combination of the bikini that the girl
next door was wearing yesterday. No dummy, I said I hadn't
noticed.
In any case, this latest article in the "Class Matters" series,
"The Five-Bedroom, Six-Figure Rootless Life: For the Corporate
'Relo' Class, Good Jobs, Good Schools and Goodbyes," has pushed the
stripers off to the back burner.
The Times typecasts a "relo" as an upper-middle-class
gypsy executive who moves every few years in order to keep from
getting bumped from the cutthroat competition on the corporate
ladder. We learn that the relo class, as a group, is married,
mostly white, Republican, and making something like $250,000 a
year. Their kids play soccer and go to schools with top SAT scores
while the wives rush around in SUVs with color-coded itineraries on
the front seat. Strongly squeezing the steering wheel of her
eight-seat GMC Denali in impatient frustration, the "knuckles go
white" on one of these frenzied wives when someone in the car in
front pauses a second or two too long at a busy intersection.
What's traded are grandparents and roots for $500,000 houses and
salons that tattoo on lipstick and eyeliner so they won't fade in
the pool. "Relo children do not know a hometown; their parents do
not know where their funerals will be."
It's an environment that's safe and homogeneous, "cut off from
the single, the gay and the gray and, except for those tending
them, anyone from lower classes." The cleaning ladies and the
brownish crews who come to keep the greenery in shape live some 30
miles away.
Everyone makes sure that nothing and no one is out of step.
"Toys and even garden hoses are tucked out of sight lest the
subdivision homeowner's association issue warnings and fines.
Garage doors, all motorized, must stay shut."
At best, it all sounds highly suffocating, like a string of
well-appointed cages arranged with precision around perfect cul de
sacs -- nice, perhaps, well-manicured, but still cages -- and not
exactly the lifestyle that I'd see as setting off a new round of
class warfare.
Still, the Times isn't at all happy about the growing
inequality in America, or about how we don't seem to be bothered by
it, or about how our "destiny" is influenced by class in "a society
that likes to think of itself as a land of unbounded opportunity."
What the Times found in its polling is that most Americans
say they're living better than their parents and they think their
kids will be better off than they are. It's all too optimistic.
Ronald Bailey, Reason magazine's science writer, sees the
Times concluding, "somewhat grumpily," that Americans
appear not to be upset that the slicing of society's pie is more
unequal than it used to be --- just so long as they're getting a
bigger piece than they or their parents once did.
Overall, the Times series is beginning to sound not
unlike a grumpy Ted Kennedy when, on March 13, 1991, he summed up
the Reagan years. "We had class warfare during the 1980s," he
declared. "And the wealthy won." In fact, the Reagan tax cuts
exempted most of the poor from the individual income tax; the real
income of the poorest fifth of U.S. households, after falling 17
percent during the Carter years, jumped by 12 percent during the
Reagan terms; the unemployment rate fell from 7 percent in 1980 to
5.4 percent in 1988; inflation declined from 10.4 percent in 1980
to 4.2 percent in 1988; and the poverty population, after growing
by 7 million during the late 1970s, dropped by 4 million in the
1980s. With each of those things, it's the poor who won.
topics:
Trade, Environment
