By Mencken’s
Ghost
January 30, 2012
“Hey, Dude,” the
tattooed and pierced waiters and bartenders said to the
dude sitting on the barstool next to my wife and me at
the bar of a popular Scottsdale restaurant that we
frequently patronize to watch the decline of the United
States.
The dude was an
unemployed former employee of the restaurant. Naturally, he had
his i-Phone on the bar in front of him, and, like the
male employees who greeted him, had his hair gelled into
what looked like a shark fin on the top of his head. As each of his
former co-workers greeted him, they went through an
elaborate fist-knocking and thumb-interlocking procedure
that has replaced the old-fashioned handshake.
Above them was a
blaring TV, one of several in the place and typical of
contemporary American bars and restaurants, where noise
has replaced meaningful conversation. On the TVs were
scenes of tattooed sports stars and barely literate
sports commentators, interspersed every eight minutes
with four minutes of commercials, featuring guys with
scruffy beards and shark fins on their heads driving
expensive cars, as if someone who looks like them could
hold a high-paying job and afford such an extravagance.
Had the TVs been
turned to non-sports channels, it would have been likely
that some reality show would have been on the air,
inadvertently showing the state of the American culture
and economy. Of
the popular genre, one show is about an overweight guy
with a scruffy beard and disgusting table manners who
travels the nation gorging himself in local eating
challenges. He
is a poster child for a nation in which the cost of
medical care is bankrupting federal and state
governments, due in large part to over half the
population being overweight and nearly a third being
obese.
Other reality
shows are about people who literally trade in, and pick
through, the economic remains of the nation, like a
family picking the carcass of a Thanksgiving turkey
after the holiday. One
show, fittingly, is about a Las Vegas pawn shop
run by three generations of the same family, with each
generation being more overweight and tattooed than the
preceding one. Another
show is even more fitting. It is about two personable and tattooed
guys who travel the country picking through old stuff
from America’s
industrial past to resell at their Iowa store, which
is staffed by a charming but plump young woman covered
in tattoos.
I digress. Let’s return to
the scene at the Scottsdale
restaurant.
“So what have
you been up to, Dude?” the unemployed dude on the
barstool asked one of the bartenders, whose hair was
graying. “Well,
Dude, I just had my fortieth birthday and my girlfriend
is pregnant.” “Cool,
Dude,” responded the barstool dude. “Are you going to
marry her?” “Probably
not,” responded the bartender dude, “but we might move
in together.” The
father-to-be didn’t add: But we
plan to consign our kid to a life like ours.
As conservative
sociologist Charles Murray has correctly pointed out and
has been vilified for doing so, marital status is the
leading distinction between the haves and have-nots in
America--between those who are like the aimless and
future-less dudes at the restaurant and those patrons
who pull up to the valet parking in front of the
restaurant in their Escalades, BMWs, Priuses, Mini
Coopers, Leafs and other displays of their wealth and/or
environmental pretensions.
Granted, not all
of the patrons who pull up in expensive cars are rich,
or, more accurately, nouveau riche. Some are pretend-rich. They are the clerks
and service workers who toil in the bowels of the
bureaucracies of business and government, which is where
their lack of a college degree or their acquisition of a
useless but expensive degree has gotten them. Sadly, instead of
emulating the successful people at the top of their
place of work, they emulate the dominant low-brow
culture they see on TV and all around them. Unbeknownst to
them, their speech, mannerisms, dress, and tattoos speak
louder about their true social status than their
smartphones, expensive cars, and seven-dollar margaritas
bought on credit.
Chances are, as
Murray
has sagely documented, the dudes and the pretend-rich
are either divorced, or the offspring of divorced
parents, or single parents themselves. Many have grown
up with no models of virtuous and loving marriages, of
the importance of deferring immediate gratification for
long-term gains, or of any other traits that are
required to be successful in just about every culture in
the world.
According to Murray,
83% of upper-middle-class whites are married today,
versus 94% in 1960. Conversely,
only 48% of working-class whites are married today,
versus 84% in 1960. Equally
troubling and predictive of a life of low income,
mothers with fewer than 12 years of education have a
rate of out-of-wedlock births of 65.4%. And even before the
current recession, 20% of working-class males of working
age were working fewer than 40 hours per week, a lack of
industriousness that Murray attributes, not to a lack of
well-paying jobs, but to social norms and welfare
policies that have devalued the traditional male roles
of provider and protector.
Murray’s diagnosis is accurate, but
one of his solutions is naïve. He suggests that the affluent should
move from their upper-income enclaves and into the
neighborhoods of the working class in order to be role
models of what it takes to be successful--as it used to
be decades ago in much of America, when the classes
lived closer together. To see how futile that would be, Murray should get out of his
office and listen to the dudes at a Scottsdale
restaurant.
_______________
Mencken’s Ghost
is the nom de plume of an Arizona writer who
can be reached at ghost@menckensghost.com.
