In the United States we speak a great deal, as did President Barack Obama last evening, about The Middle Class without clearly identifying the qualifications for membership. We define The Middle Class by what it is not, by those who are not members: The Rich and The Poor. Our definition of those classes is equally vague. The former is made up of people with much more wealth than we possess, and the latter by those unfortunates who have little or nothing to call their own. Class in these United States is a fair muddle.
In The Old World, class is a matter of parentage, position and employment with little or no regard to income. In George Orwell’s mining communities, a miner is clearly of a lower class than a store clerk even though the miner brings home a few pounds more at the end of the year than the clerk. In The New World, the autoworker and the nurse see themselves as members of The Middle Class able to provide for their families within the confines of a forty-hour work week. The chemical worker and the fireman own homes and cars; the bookkeeper and the construction worker plan vacations to Florida and take cruises. We may define all of these people as Middle Class then, not by what they can afford, but rather by the extent to which they worry about affording them. That is a problem.
If I question whether or not I can afford the mortgage on a house with five bathrooms instead of three, then I call myself Middle Class. If I worry about finding the money to pay for tuition at Emery College instead of Ohio University, then I call myself Middle Class. If I am uncertain if I can pay for visits to both Italy and France this summer, then I call myself Middle Class. These are questions that don’t concern The Rich and that The Poor can’t ask. We make our Middle Class impossibly broad and this cripples our economic discussions. By making The Lower Class and The Upper Class less exclusive, we allow ourselves to exaggerate economic mobility – upward much more so than downward – but in both directions nonetheless; and create an illusion of prosperity.
Our World Economy greatly contributes to that illusion. In my early years I grew up in homes that had one bathroom, one rotary telephone and one black-white television that received, via an antenna on the roof, three VHF and one UHF station (two marks if you know what those acronyms stand for). My family was not poor. I never missed a meal. Each year my father bought me new clothes to begin the school year, a new winter coat and each Easter, a new suit to wear to church. My parent’s home today has two bathrooms (his and hers), a cordless landline telephone plus two cell phones, three color televisions (one a large flat screen and two with DVD players) and much more – microwaves ovens, garage-door openers, lawn tractors, computers, digital stereos, Internet service, &c. – that had yet to be dreamed of in my childhood. My parents have done well for themselves, but I would not suggest that they changed their place in the class structure. Rather, because of our nation’s ability in the 21st Century to exploit the 19th-Century wages and environmental laws of our World Economy, the availability of the trappings of upward mobility are much less costly.
Last evening President Obama asked for no sacrifices from those who make nothing, produce nothing, build nothing, but instead who create wealth from wealth. Instead he asked those who could lose all their faux wealth in a pink-slip heartbeat to accept, and spend as quickly as possible, a relative pittance so that the people who never give a second thought to the working people who are the source of their fortunes might sleep more easily.
How quickly we’ve come from hope and change to hope for spare change.
*The Ronco Channel.
On 8 December 2004, Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) slipped Section 111 of Title I, Division J, of the Fiscal Year 2005 Consolidated Appropriations Act (Pub. L. 108-447) and a new national holiday into our collective consciousness: Constitution Day. Our Constitution is the single most important document in Human History; read it all.
