The Bleating of the Cushioned Classes
"My husband woke up this morning singing 'O Canada,' " said the well-to-do woman sitting on my left in the theater last week. "What a terrible night," she added ruefully.
This caught me short. What was she talking about? Had I missed some late-breaking news about the death of Prime Minister Jean Chretien? Had terrorists attacked Toronto?
Then I realized. She meant the previous day's midterm elections in the United States.
Apparently the specter of jackbooted Republicans banging home their belligerent agenda in Congress untrammeled by sensible dissent had turned her husband into an expatriate overnight. To survive the coming coup d'etat, he would have to emigrate. Or joke about it, as would his wife, who would be dining out on that gibe for months.
I know this woman. She is a solidly upper-middle-class, stay-at-home mother of two whose husband has a cushy job in the arts. They own a large, well- appointed Victorian home on a pricey chunk of real estate in the quaint suburbs. They are living the American dream, but their politics haven't caught up yet.
You know the type: hippies come of age who are, alas, emblematic of our age. And, courtesy of journalist David Brooks, they have a name: bobos, or bourgeois bohemians. Their political peacockery also has a name; Tom Wolfe called it radical chic. They are a less stratospheric, though no less mouthy, version of certain Hollywood celebrities whose hyperbolic and deeply hypocritical criticisms of "Amerika" under the Bush administration seem to grow more shrill and ridiculous every day.
Remember, for example, Tom Cruise's recent assertion that the U.S. is a "frightening" place to live or Alec Baldwin's purported promise (as yet unfulfilled) to leave the country if Bush won in 2000 or Woody Harrelson's claim that taking military action against Iraq would be imperialist? This from men who live like gods off the fruits of the greedy, oppressive empire they impugn.
The quip of my fellow theatergoer was hardly less absurd or irritating. Had it come from a convenience store clerk, a ditch digger or another practitioner of thankless labor who could make a more plausible case for having been shafted by the supposedly Republican-run capitalist, classist hegemony, I might have accepted it as legitimate. But such extremist cries seem to emanate less often or noticeably from day laborers than from the comfy berths of "progressives."
