Like the spooks at Langley, book publishers need expert
intelligence to do their jobs well. A good publisher can predict
what social causes, historical eras, and intellectual fads and
fashions will be in vogue a few years down the road. This is
critical since it usually takes a book two to three years to go
from finished manuscript to your local Barnes & Noble’s new
non-fiction shelf.
Apparently three or four years ago publishers decided today’s
hot topic would be the “Decline of the Professional Middle Class.”
This explains why several popular new titles have just appeared wherein members of the
self-styled creative class bellyache about not having it as good as
their parents. Which begs the question, if these people are so
creative why can’t they find an innovative way to make a living?
Invariably these books tell the familiar, hackneyed stories of
bright, unmarried, thirty-something narcissists, expensively
educated and enjoying the latest alternative lifestyle. She is
either pregnant or a newly minted mother living in Manhattan or San
Francisco, and is tenuously employed in the creative economy. She
is resentful and unhappy, particularly in regard to her income
level; she therefore writes a nonfiction book in which she blames
her plight on the government, the economy, the Republicans, the
capitalist system, her parents, her employer — in short everyone
but herself and her dubious life-choices. If she is lucky, she will
earn enough in book sales to send her scrupulously spoiled toddler
to the elite La Petite Academy.
Such an author will couch her book not as a memoir of one gal’s
dumb decisions, but as a sociological study of the worrisome
cultural phenomenon she dubs the “decline of the professional
middle class,” which is sexier and more likely to grab the
attention of NPR talk show hosts. Only the facts do not bear her
out. Indeed since 1970, median household income has risen by 41%,
according to a recent Pew Research study. What is more, nearly two-thirds (65%) of those
surveyed said they have a higher standard of living than their
parents had when their parents were their age. The bad news is that
nearly eight-in-ten (79%) respondents say it is more difficult now
than five years ago for the middle class to maintain its standard
of living. So 65% are better off than their parents, but 79% say
it’s harder to be better off than five years ago.
Let’s see, the culprit couldn’t be “lifestyle inflation,” could
it? Lifestyle inflation, according to the Weekly
Standard’s Gary Andres, is the escalating worry about paying
for more “stuff” — cell phones, Internet access, car leases, flat
screen TV’s, etc. — all those “essentials” that didn’t exist in
your parents’ generation. Andres left off alimony, day care,
private school tuition and, the real killer, credit card debt. But
how is lifestyle inflation unique to the middle class?
Every class has been affected by higher gas and food
prices, higher insurance premiums, and higher college tuitions, and
it is dishonest to imply that only Blue Collar Joe is tightening
his belt.
But then writers like Nan Mooney would have nothing to whine
about. Mooney is the author of (Not) Keeping Up With Our
Parents, and this notoriously whiny essay describing the
trials of being single, broke, and pregnant at 37, and having to
move back in with her Seattle-based parents. Perhaps the most
grating thing about this bit of self-indulgent puling is how the
author repeatedly attacks her aged parents — the ones who have
just allowed their 37-year-old slacker daughter to move back in
with them. Mooney the ingrate shudders at the thought of raising
her son “in an environment where stiff upper lips are mandatory,
where his illegitimate arrival was first greeted with shock and
shame, where emotions are swallowed and then fester,” as though her
parents should have celebrated their single, unemployed daughter’s
good fortune in getting knocked up. “Though my family has plenty of
positive traits that I hope he’ll inherit — the loving of reading,
for one — when it comes down to it, I don’t want to raise my son
the way my parents raised me.” Maybe she is afraid her child too
will turn out to be a shallow, self-pitying slacker?
THERE ARE SEVERAL misleading facts at work here. The first is the
curious notion that our parents had it easy when they were raising
backseat-loads of screaming, fighting children in the '50s and '60s
and '70s. Indeed, just because the author was born into privilege
and grew up enjoying “a wonderful childhood — private schools,
soccer games, summers at the beach,” she makes the amateurish
assumption that her silver-spooned, idyllic childhood was standard
for the times.
The source of Mooney’s intense bitterness seems to be her
decision to opt for a journalism career. Now you might expect that
a journalist would take a few minutes to research average salaries,
in which case you’d find that the starting salary in 2006, was
$26,000, for a daily newspaper reporter, and $22,880, for a weekly
newspaper reporter. This makes journalist the lowest paying of all
“professional” jobs. (No wonder so many journalists are bitter.)
The Mooneys of this world believe they should be handed meaningful,
highly paid work as their aristocratic birthright. Only that isn’t
how the capitalist system works, which is one reason (among many)
that they hate capitalism. Unless you are a David Remnick, a Tom
Wolfe, or a Thomas Friedman meaningful and/or enjoyable work pays
what the market bears, which is why teachers, journalists,
nonprofit directors, nurses, legal aid attorneys and anyone else
who majored in English, philosophy, or women’s studies tend to make
peanuts. Whether that is fair is beside the point. If Ms. Mooney
wants to be assured a good income she could learn a trade like
plumbing, dentistry, bond trading, corporate law or software
engineering.
Mooney deftly finishes off her parents and their entire
well-to-do generation in her final paragraph with a few expertly
aimed words (coupled with a curious confession of parental
negligence), that I am obligated to reprint in full:
Most importantly, I’ve let go of my biggest fear —
that, because Leo and I live with my parents, we will automatically
become them. He has a buffer in place that I never had. Me. When my
mother tries to yank away the frozen teething ring because she’s
convinced it will burn his cheeks, I’m there to hand it back. And
someday in the future when my father gets judgmental about someone
who’s fat or lazy, I will be there with a lesson about
compassion.
There you have it, today’s alternative lifestyler, whiny,
self-righteous, smugly moralistic and happy to bite the hand that
feeds her
and her child.
