"Don't Mock the Artisanal-Pickle Makers" Adam Davidson opines in today's (Feb.19, 2012) The New York Times Magazine as he gushes that hipsters ("Let's call those hipsters by their real names: capitalists.") starting up hip, high-end craft businesses such as "handcrafted, all-natural beef jerky" are the future of the U.S. economy in an article that makes extravagant, unsubstantiated claims (which I'll outline after the swirl) and exhibits a troubling yet revealing mentality that suggests perhaps it is not just the 1% leading separate, cosseted lives in certain privileged urban and suburban enclaves that leave them distressingly out of touch with the realities of life at it is lived by the vast majority of Americans, but it includes, perhaps, the top 10%, a group that is doing quite ok in stark contrast to the other 90% (and is presumably the one that will have the means to consume and produce all that pricey beef jerky and hand-milled organic vegetable soap and what-have-you.)
In an election year in which we Democrats have a real opportunity to win back the so-called Reagan Democrats, blue collar workers across the nation, but especially in heartland America, in crucial swing states like Ohio, Michigan, Indiana and Iowa, who are becoming increasingly disgruntled with the virulent anti-union, anti-auto industry bailout, anti-medicare views of Republicans, we must avoid at all costs succumbing to the myopic, elitist and delusional "Marie Antoinettism" (so what if all those great high-paying manufacturing jobs with generous benefits have disappeared; you can handcraft beef jerky or, say, bake artisanal cakes for the privileged few) that this article reeks of.
Even just the whiff of it could be costly.
(Though in all fairness I have no idea the politics of this writer, but alas, his views are present among some Democrats, especially those at the top, who inhabit this "handcrafted" world)
In his article, Davidson writes of successful corporate execs, tired of the rat race, who trade in lucrative earnings and high perks for lower pay and less security in order to start craft businesses that inspire them and make them happpy. (He makes no mention of the many shoved out of that corporate world and starting up businesses out of desperation, nor is there any sense that these trade-offs are not ones available to average working Americans who have neither the means nor the luxury to do what these people have done.)
But here's where he really loses touch with the reality of life as it is lived by most Americans when he states (without any evidence to back it up):
...despite all the economic pain we're enduring, the average American leads a shockingly good life by any historical or international standard.
(And I'm wondering, besides his total ignorance of the recent history of average Americans--outside of, say, Brooklyn or Manhattan--has this guy ever been to Germany, or Denmark, or even Canada?)
But he continues:
Huge numbers of middle-class people are now able to make a living specializing in something they enjoy, including making niche products for other middle-class people who have enough money to indulge in buying things like high-end beef jerky.
Huge numbers? Really? Really? Really?
(And now I realize that Mr. Davidson and I are living in two different countries, his is that of the 10%, and I live in a hard-pressed, small city in heartland America that is representative of the plight of the other 90% and I realize that Mr. Davidson needs a history lesson--about the rest of America. The one in which most Americans live. The America that is all but invisible to a media that sees little beyond the New York/Washington D.C. corridor and the elites it caters to.)
"A Shockingly Good Life"
The small city I live in was once one of the most affluent places on the face of this earth, for working class and middle class alike (of which there were once many). With a population of around 33,000, it boasted the corporate headquarters of a Fortune 500 company (and two of its factories) as well as the regional headquarters of several others (In the 1960s, this is where all those box tops got sent).
It had numerous factories, all union, all paying high wages with great benefits (there are many retirees here still living in comfort with their generous pensions and health benefits). Many of the appliances bought at places like Sears were manufactured here.
"Huge Numbers of Middle-Class People"
What this affluent working class and significant executive class did was provide a solid foundation for a large, prosperous, entrepreneurial middle class. This was indeed the huge middle class Davidson speaks of that could pursue their interests doing work that inspired them.
And it was mostly in the glorious downtown that you could see this most clearly. You could get anything downtown, from a Chevrolet to a Schwinn, from an uncirculated 1909 vdb penny to an HO model train.
Here, entreprenuers turned their interests into careers and achieved, middle, even upper-middle-class status.
The model train fanatic had a hobby shop with trains running all over the place and stocked the best box kites in town. (He loved telling us to go fly a kite.) The bike guy, a kid who never grew up, stocked all the latest models and could fix just about anything and if he knew you were hard up for cash would charge practically nothing at all.
Two competing fashionistas had the two top dress shops in town and were always heading to New York to stock the latest and at that time even working class women could afford a designer dress every now and then.
The local comic book collector had a newstand where you could buy the latest Super Man comic or the New York Times (a big deal back then) or sneak a peak at the "dirty" magazines.
The photography buff opened a camera store that became a chain and became a multi-millionaire. He would take the time to teach you how to use the cameras; he would even critque your photos if you asked to show you how to make them better. He helped me set up my dark room.
And talk about inventive. The first soft serve ice cream in America was served at a local ice cream parlor as an experiment. It succeeded; there were lines down the block and not long after the first Dairy Queen was opened in a nearby community.
One woman turned her love of Lladro into a shop from which the Lladros and Hummels almost flew out the door. Back then you didn't have to be a Carmella Soprano to be able to afford them. Her husband got rich selling organs and color tvs and band instruments in his music store and had the best guitar instructors in town.
The owner of the local sporting goods store taught me how to fly fish and clued my father in to one of the best fishing lakes in Minnesota near the Canadian border.
There were three cinemas, all locally owned, and lots of mom and pop diners and pubs and coffee shops and bakeries and even a piano bar. There were two locally owned hotels with restaurants and ballrooms and not far from downtown there was a gourmet restaurant and gift complex in a Frank Lloyd Wright prairie house. (Friends of my parents owned a hardware store and were stunned to learn how much the Frank Lloyd Wright table they used in the office to hold their Mr. Coffee was worth. When they divorced they fought over the chairs).
The affluence helped spawn a good way of life: Country clubs; many public golf courses for those who couldn't afford the country clubs; A symphony orchestra; A tennis club; Dance clubs; Book clubs; Art clubs; Art galleries; Book stores; Community theater; A youth orchestra; A public marina; Beautiful parks; Two new high schools that provided the best education in the region.
So I guess you could say by "historical standards" most people here had a "shockingly good life" and there were "huge numbers of middle-class people" working in businesses that interested them.
Paradise Lost
And now it's all gone. Almost all of it. The affluence, the shops, the huge entrepreneurial middle class.
And it was union busting, plain and simple, that did it.
Before there was outsourcing to China or even to Mexico, there was union busting. The corporations demanded huge concessions from the workers, threatening to move their factories South to right to work states and when the workers resisted, the factories moved south. Almost all of them. And the corporate headquarters, too.
And in the South, because they paid starvation wages, they did not create the affluent working class and the huge middle class that they did up here. (And now many of these factories have fled to Mexico and China, wreaking similar havoc in the South.)
And the community declined. Amazingly quickly. And in its weakened state, the current recession has just about finished it off. It's been gutted; hollowed out. The downtown is gone. No one goes there. It's not safe. One shopping center is 2/3 vacant. The local mall is so broke it had to hit the town up for a loan to fix its leaky roof (no one else would lend them the money). One of the most outstanding golf courses in the region was plowed up and planted in corn and beans.
And in a town that at its peak had real estate values higher than Los Angeles, the average price of a house has plummeted to $125,000 (but they say its bottomed out--woohoo).
How The 90% Lives Today
This is not just happening in my community. It is happening across the country. Once you get out of the few affluent enclaves, it's just town after town that's been gutted; hollowed out. It looks as if we lost a war (and in some ways I guess we have.)
And it's happening on a huge scale in places like Detroit and Cleveland and St. Louis.
You see, nobody bailed out Main Street.
But because we bailed out the banks and the insurance companies, because we bailed out Wall Street big time, because we won't let them fail the way we've let community after community across America fail, writers like Adam Davidson, safely ensconced in their affluent enclaves among the 10%, can make shockingly false statements like:
the average American leads a shockingly good life by any historical or international standard
Well, the history of my community says otherwise. And the history of my community is typical of the history of hard-pressed communities across the country.
It is the history of the decline and fall of Main Street. And for many of the 90% these are the worst times since the Great Depression (and in fact in many communites real estate values have fallen more than they did during the Depression.)
And around here, and in most of the country, we can only dream of this:
Huge numbers of middle-class people are now able to make a living specializing in something they enjoy.
Here, the formerly middle class clamor for jobs at Walmart.
And we can't "boutique" our way out of this. There simply aren't enough middle class people left to sell "handcrafted all-natural" beef jerky to.
Now I'm not sneering at hand-crafted pickles nor knocking all-natural beef jerky (If you can make a living at it, go for it.) and Davidson makes some good points about how difficult it is for American businesses to compete against low-cost, low-wage producers in the global economy, so that they probably have a better chance with high-end tech products (this works for Germany) and upscale foods.
But it's difficult to see how this could be a solution for all but a few lucky and skilled entrepreneurs (and that maybe such things as Obama's bail-out of the automobile industry and increasing government support for "green" industries may be part of the answer for the 90%, as well as taking steps to address the growing inequality in America so that more people can buy these wonderful high-end, handcrafted products)
But I must run off and can some pickles and bake that cake. Happy days are just around the corner.