It is now possible to hear every one of George Carlin’s seven dirty words on prime-time television. Indeed, things that Carlin would never have said to his highly sophisticated audience are now accepted subject matter for shows aimed at minors. The clinical details of violence are routinely included in PG movies. Does that mean that, as Cole Porter would have said, “anything goes” in the 21st century?
Well, no. You can check this out for yourself. There is one kind of information that is conveyed on television and in films only by either pointing to a piece of paper or whispering in someone’s ear. Think about it. That’s right—money. How much is a character paid? How much did she pay for her house? What does her new car cost? Ssshh. We can’t say that out loud. Let’s get back to the fine points of fellatio.
There may be practical reasons for this convention. Nothing dates an old movie or a rerun faster than antiquated numbers. “It’s a Wonderful Life” gets its quaintness and loses its immediacy because of the numbers in the bank panic episode. Today’s technology may be able to solve that problem—if Turner could colorize Casablanca, why can’t computer technology come up with today’s equivalent for the salaries and prices in a film or rerun from ten years ago, and just change the figures in computer-sim dialogue? And change them again next year, and so on?
The fact that nobody is discussing that possibility tells us that the real issue is something else altogether. In the real world, we don’t talk real numbers either. At some workplaces, telling your fellow employees your salary is grounds for firing. Miss Manners, who has quite successfully adapted Victorian etiquette to modern circumstances in other areas of life, says it is still the height of rudeness to ask someone his salary or the cost of any major purchase. Parents who have managed to tell the children all about the birds, the bees, and Mr. Stranger-Danger’s agenda, and even why Mommy lives with a girlfriend instead of with Daddy, still don’t tell them how much Daddy and Mommy bring home or the size of the mortgage and car payments. Indeed, the younger generation is likely never to gain that knowledge until Daddy and Mommy are retired and need their children’s help with finances.
Which is one of the reasons the younger generation begins its economic life in a state of near-total financial incompetence. They generally get started by running up unmanageable credit-card debt, getting behind on bills, and hoping to solve the problems with their next raise or promotion or new job. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. When it doesn’t, the result is a financial catastrophe that often leaves divorce, desertion, or even petty crime in its wake.
Even among more competent self-supporting citizens, financial ignorance is rampant. For instance, back when I practiced divorce law, I kept running into soon-to-be-ex-husbands who, with the best possible intentions, wanted their child support payments to go into the child’s college fund. They honestly believed that the money would not be needed for the child’s ongoing expenses before college, because they honestly believed that the presence of one or more minor children does not increase a family’s expenses. These were not deadbeat dads in the making, they just didn’t know what it costs to raise a child.
Many high schools now teach “consumer education”, which helps a bit. But the high school teacher teaches abstract figures, averages and medians, not the real numbers in the students’ own lives. Those numbers are unavailable, even to the students themselves. They are the most private part of the family’s private lives, more private even than sex or emotional problems or the ingestion of illegal substances.
Secrecy about money is a taboo in which all levels of our society collude. We impose it on ourselves, our children, our employees, and the mass media. Where does the power of this taboo come from? From above, it is partly a tactic to divide the workforce and head off the forces of the free market as applied to wages. If the workers don’t know each other’s wages, they don’t know whether it is safe to demand more, and they don’t have the information it takes to file sex or race discrimination charges with EEOC. They cannot bargain effectively. Mostly they can’t bargain at all.
From below, the taboo is a mechanism by which we protect ourselves from the shame of discovering we are at the bottom of the totem pole, from the envy of others who may be underneath us, or from the arrogance of those above us. It is how we maintain the great American myth that we are all “middle-class,” in a “classless society.”
But no law binds us to this code of silence. No mob boss lies in wait to slash our throats and cut out our tongues for breaching omerta’. What would happen if we just started wearing a button announcing our financial data to the world at large? Maybe other people would start doing it too. Which might enable all of us to see how our employers, our landlords, our car dealers, set us all against each other while making each of us believe we are getting some special “deal.”
If we really believe in the free market economy, why can’t we operate it in the open? Why shouldn’t everybody know the real cost of the goods we buy, the real markup and profit, the real wages of the people who provide our services, the real wages of the people we work with and for? That would be a first step toward making those real numbers really equitable. Let’s start talking dirty, and maybe we can help clean up the economy.
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