Go into any successful franchise or chain store with an open mind and it is easy to see why they are successful. In most cases, it is because they offer a product that, for the price, is demonstrably superior. Wal-Mart sells premium brands at low prices and has superior inventory management. It offers discounted prescriptions to seniors. It offers free RV parking for vacationers. Home Depot hires aisle attendants who are genuinely knowledgeable. They will cut your wood for you, on the spot, no hassles. You can rent a van to take it all home. Subway sells sandwiches on fresh-baked bread, often still hot from the oven. You get to put it together precisely the way you like. Tim Hortons sells the best filter coffee around. And we sometimes forget that even McDonald's sells fries that are superior to what you can find at half the bistros in Paris.
These companies may advertise heavily now, but they did not build their businesses through advertising. When they were able to make significant inroads into a particular market, it was usually because that market was so poorly served before. Independent bookstores could have installed comfortable chairs and started serving coffee long ago; they just didn't get around to it until they started feeling the heat from Barnes & Noble or Chapters. Lumberyard attendants could have stopped being jerks or intimidating female customers years ago; they just didn't get around to it until the Home Depot opened up around the corner. Service stations could have stopped ripping off their customers whenever they wanted: they just didn't get around to it until chains like Midas took away a significant chunk of their business. Coffee shops could have invested in an espresso machine any time they wanted; they just didn't get around to it until Starbucks came along. Department stores could have adopted "no hassle" refund policies from the beginning; they just didn't get around to it until the big chains started doing it. The list goes on and on.
Part of the reason that so many of these successful chains are American is that Americans have dedicated an extraordinary amount of time and thought to the question of how to produce an enjoyable retail experience. How many times have you walked into a store only to have the staff act as though they're the ones doing you a favor by talking to you? How many times have you looked at your mechanic and suspected that you're being taken for a ride? How many times have you been afraid to ask a question in the hardware store for fear that the staff would treat you like you're stupid? How many times has the waiter in a fancy restaurant rat- tied off the list of daily specials without telling you any of the prices? These are the sorts of negative experiences that drive customers away. A successful franchise generally has a system in place that eliminates these sorts of experiences—otherwise every branch and outlet suffers.
I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it.
I am.
- Henry Miller
The insecurity and relative deprivation of the artists’ lifestyle is often described as an advantage over the staid existence of buttoned-down professionals, and in this way artists signal the superiority of their existence over both the poor and the privileged. Says Shappy, a local performer:
I don’t think [yuppies] have any creative gumption. Yes they may take chances on a business deal or an ad campaign or something stupid. . . but they don’t have the balls to put it in play in their own personal lives. And when they see people living I think they’re jealous of the artist’s lifestyle, wishing they could feel like they could be free and live on macaroni and cheese and not have to worry about these accounts and their bills and their credit cards and their SUVs, and their blah, blah, blah. You know, I think a lot of people want to be more bohemian, but they don’t want to take the chance on actually living the life as a bohemian. They’re too insecure without their credit cards.
The allure of Bohemia is that it provides a concentrated set of practices that enable people to engage in specific kinds of expressive actions and social theatrics. Bohemian practices are devoted not primarily to achieving useful goals (like making money) or conforming to conventional social norms (like having a “good job”). Rather, they are concerned with cultivating and displaying a unique self, and enjoying the company of like-minded others. The theatricality of bohemian life revolves around mutual displays of transgressiveness. Its dramas promote styles of seeing and being seen that celebrate deviant, untraditional, unconventional, and oppositional culture. Épater la bourgeoisie. - Daniel Silver
We have just crossed the meat loaf line in America, that invisible divide in the landscape across which restaurants are far less likely to have sun-dried tomato concoctions and far more likely to have, gravy.
We come across American-made cars and bumper stickers such as: “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Fords” and “Warning: In Case of Rapture, This Vehicle Will Be Unmanned. We have found an entirely different attitude toward money. A lot of people don’t have much, even though they don’t exactly look poor. Rural America has suffered some appalling economic blows over the past few decades—falling commodity prices, the decimation of small manufacturing plants, farm after farm going bankrupt. While many young people move away, those who remain decide that money is not their god. There is intense social pressure not to put on airs. In many rural precincts, if you had some money and tried to drive a Mercedes, you’d be asking for trouble. If you hired a cook for a dinner party, people would wonder who died and made you queen.
If we’d continued to rural America, we would have entered a giant deflation machine. Gas is somehow fifty cents cheaper a gallon, parking tickets are three dollars, and there are racks and racks of blouses at the Dollar General for $9.99. There are no Saks Fifth Avenues, Neiman Marcuses, or Tiffanys in these rural regions, just Kohl’s and Value City, and it’s nice to be in a place where you can afford nearly everything for sale (when you’re in a city or an inner-ring suburb, you are constantly afflicted with high-end products ridiculously out of your price range).
In many small towns, you can set yourself a goal: Try to spend twenty dollars a person on dinner. You can order the most expensive thing on the menu—steak au jus, seafood delight, “slippery beef” pot pie, whatever—and you probably won’t be able to do it. You can ask the locals to direct you to the nicest restaurant in town; they’ll send you to a Red Lobster or an Applebees. You’ll spy a restaurant that seems from the outside to have some pretensions—maybe a “Les Desserts” glass cooler for the key lime pie and tapioca pudding. But you’ll check out the entrée prices and realize that you didn’t crack that twenty dollar barrier.
I was out at the Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, recently, and everybody there was dressed for a glacier climb, with boots, rugged khaki pants, and carabiners around their belts with cell phones hanging down. It’s like going into a nightclub where everybody is constantly shoving their endurance cleavage in your face.
Then I drove over to the store where these Microsofties buy this sort of gear, the 80,000-square-foot REI emporium in Seattle. It’s a store that sells leisure stuff to people who spend their leisure hours strenuously, or at least would like to look like they do.
To get there, I drove my rented minivan to downtown Seattle and parked it amidst the muddied-up sport-utes in the RET garage. I walked past the postage-stamp forest the RET people have landscaped as a place for customers to test-ride their mountain bikes. After a trip up the slate-floored elevator, I was on a large front balcony with huge wooden benches. A plaque on each reassures us that the wood used for the bench was blown down in 1995; no trees were murdered in the making of this rest spot. Up above there are clocks that tell the current time atop Mount Everest and the north face of Eiger in the Swiss Alps, in case you want to make a call there.
I walked through the front door and found myself a few steps in front of the ice-ax section. Out in front of me stretched a great expanse of ordeal-oriented merchandise, aisle upon aisle of snowshoes, crampons, kayaks, tents, and parkas, a daunting profusion of equipment options. I must admit I began feeling as if I were suffering from oxygen deprivation. The goal of reaching the coffee shop upstairs at the store’s summit seemed an absurdity. I was like a character in a Jon Krakauer book. Dazed by this bewildering environment, I knew only that I must somehow summon the strength to trudge on.
To my right as I entered there was a museum of outdoor gear, so I could enjoy a little edifying foreplay before I got down to the serious shopping. At the far end of the museum was the climbing wall, at 65 feet the largest freestanding climbing structure in the world.
It wasn’t the salespeople that made my brain spin. I knew they’d be products of Seattle’s culture of hiking shorts macho. They bounce around the store displaying their enormous calves, looking like escapees from the Norwegian Olympic Team. Nor was it my fellow customers that put me in this state. I was ready for squads of super-fit software designers with glacier glasses hanging from Croakies around their necks (because you can never tell when a 600-foot mountain of ice might suddenly roll into town, sending off hazardous glare).
The thing that got to me was the load of requirements. If you are going to spend any leisure time with members of the educated class, you have to prove you are serious about whatever it is you are doing. “Serious” is the highest compliment Bobos use to describe their leisure activities. You want to be a serious skier or a serious tennis player or a serious walker or a serious cross-country skier or even a serious skateboarder. People engaged in any of these pastimes are constantly evaluating each other to see who is serious and who is not. The most accomplished are so serious they never have any fun at all, whereas if you went out onto some field or trail or court and acted happy and goofy, you’d be regarded as someone who is insulting the whole discipline.
Now to be a serious outdoorsperson, you have to master the complex science of knowing how to equip yourself, which basically requires joint degrees in chemistry and physics from MIT. For example, up beyond the ice-ax section there’s a tank where customers try to test and fathom the differences between a dozen different water filters and purifiers. To traverse that spot, you have to distinguish between purifiers made from iodine resin and iodine resin, glass fiber and pleated glass fiber, a ceramic microstrainer and a structured matrix microstrainer.
And it only gets worse. Every item in the store comes in a mind-boggling number of chemically engineered options that only experienced wilderness geeks could possibly understand. And from each product dangles a thick booklet so packed with high-tech jargon that it makes selecting a computer mainframe seem as simple as picking an apple off a tree. For backpacks, do you want a Sun Tooth Tech pack with 500 x 1000-denier Cordura or a Bitterroot Tech Pack with the 430-denier Hexstop trim? Do you want the semi-rigid 12-point Charlet Moser S-12 Crampon Laniers with the heel-clip in the rear or the Grivel Rambo with the rigid drop-forged points and the step-in bindings? Even something as basic as sandals comes in various high-tech versions, loaded with expedition-class straps and high-performance treads, in case you want to climb to Mount Pinatubo on your way to the Alanis Morissette concert.
I was dimly aware of some code of gear connoisseur-ship I should be paying attention to. For true nature techies, some things, like boots and sport utility vehicles, should be bought in forms as big as possible. Other things, like stoves and food packs, should be bought as small as possible. And other things, like tents and sleeping bags, should pack up small and open up big.
But the real reason for the REI store is upstairs on the mezzanine level, where the clothing department is. Because while not a lot of people actually go climb glaciers, there are millions and millions who want to dress as if they do. So most of the foot traffic at RET seems to be up on the mezzanine. T went up to the clothing department looking for a respite from all the high-tech mumbo jumbo of the gear section. There were indeed a few soothing racks of all-cotton shirts in muted colors. But T didn’t have to walk far before I was assaulted by a blaze of cobalt blue glaring off a vast profusion of polyester. It soon became obvious that while in the seventies the polyester people were low-class disco denizens, now they are high-status strenuous nature types. Between me and the coffee shop at the far end of the mezzanine there remained a treacherous field of artificial-fiber parkas, paddle jackets, zip pants, stretch vests, anoraks, and ponchos. And each of them had ominous-sized booklets hanging down, stuffed with dissertation-level technical detail highlighting the state-of-the-artness of each item. I confess at that moment I lost the will to live. I was content just to sit down and let somebody find my lifeless body there amidst the Gore-Tex mountain bibs.
But an inner voice—which sounded like James Earl Jones’s—urged me on, and pretty soon I was slogging through racks and racks of outdoor gear processed from the world’s finest chemical labs: Cordura, Polartec, and all the “ex” fabrics—Royalex, spandex, Supplex, and GoreTex. There were $400 parkas that advertised their core vent kinetic systems and sleeves with universal radial hinges (I guess that means you can move your arms around). There were heavy-denier parka shells, power stretch tights with microfilaments, expedition-weight leggings, fleece, microfleece, and bipolar fleece (which must be for people on Prozac). My favorite was a titanium Omnitech parka with double-rip-stop nylon supplemented with ceramic particles and polyurethane-coat welded seams. I imagined myself sporting that titanium Omnitech thing and suddenly saying to myself, “Here I am in the middle of the forest and I’m wearing the Starship Enterprise.”
Finally I had to puzzle my way through the “performance underwear” section, which was a baffling maze of Capilene and bifaced power-dry polyester with a few Lycra spandex briefs strengthened with MTS2 polyester. And finally, just as I was about to turn into an underwear Luddite screaming out for a pair of honest white briefs, I spied the coffee shop not more than 50 yards away. I made my way toward the side of the store that has the art gallery, with majestic nature photos, and the lecture hall. I made it through the bookstore and past the park ranger station. And there, finally, was a smiling barista offering me a warm brew and a choice from among a multicultural panoply of sandwich wraps. I settled down amidst the Mission furniture they have strewn up there and finally began to realize how wholesome I was feeling.
I looked around the store and there was nothing but healthy people, educated-class naturalists who seemed to work out regularly, eat carefully, and party moderately. They were evidently well informed about their outdoor- gear options, judging by their boots, packs, and shopping bags. Moreover, as they sat there reading Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac and such books purchased from the adjacent bookstore, they radiated environmental concern. Here was a community of good stewards, people who were protecting the earth and themselves. Nature used to mean wildness, abandon, Dionysian lustfulness. But here was a set of people who went out into nature carefully, who didn’t want to upset the delicate balance, who studied their options, prepared and trained. If Norman Rockwell were a young man today, he’d head up to this coffee shop to get all this wholesome goodness down on canvas.
All at once Sherman was aware of a figure approaching him on the sidewalk, in the wet black shadows of the town houses and the trees. Even from fifty feet away, in the darkness, he could tell. It was that deep worry that lives in the base of the skull of every resident of Park Avenue south of Ninety-sixth Street—a black youth, tall, rangy, wearing white sneakers. Now he was forty feet away, thirty-five. Sherman stared at him. Well, let him come! I’m not budging! It’s my territory! I’m not giving way for any street punks!
The black youth suddenly made a ninety-degree turn and cut straight across the street to the sidewalk on the other side. The feeble yellow of a sodium-vapor streetlight reflected for an instant on his face as he checked Sherman out.
He had crossed over! ‘What a stroke of luck!
Not once did it dawn on Sherman McCoy that what the boy had seen was a thirty-eight-year-old white man, soaking wet, dressed in Sortie sort of military-looking raincoat full of straps and buckles, holding a violently lurching animal in his arms, staring, bug-eyed, and talking to himself.
Our new elite of bobos have constructed new social codes that characteristically synthesize bourgeois self-control and bohemian emancipation. Now we have a new set of standards to distinguish permissible pleasures from impermissible ones. We have new social codes to regulate the senses.
To get a firsthand glimpse of these new codes, go down to your local park in the summertime. You’ll see women jogging or running in sports bras and skin-tight spandex pants. Imagine if the Puritans could get a load of this! Women running around in their underwear in public. They’d pull out the tracts on Sodom and Gomorrah. Even a cosmopolitan historian such as Edward Gibbon would take a first glance at these women and begin speculating about the decline of empires. But look at the bra joggers more closely. It’s not wanton hedonism you see on their faces. They’re not exposing themselves for the sake of exhibitionism. Any erotic effect of their near nudity is counteracted by their expressions of grim determination. They are working out. They are working. They’re building their muscles. They’re setting goals and striving to achieve them. You never see them smile. On the contrary, some of them seem to be suffering. These near-naked young women are self-discipline personified—no pain, no gain— and the reason they are practically naked, they will tell you, is that this sort of clothing is most practical, most useful for strenuous exercise. What we see at the park is near nudity, but somehow it’s nudity in the service of achievement. Dionysius, the god of abandon, has been reconciled with Prometheus, the god of work.
The Bobos take a utilitarian view of pleasure. Any sensual pleasure that can be edifying or life-enhancing is celebrated. On the other hand, any pleasure that is counterproductive or dangerous is judged harshly. So exercise is celebrated, but smoking is now considered a worse sin than at least 5 of the 10 commandments. Coffee becomes the beverage of the age because it stimulates mental acuity, while booze is out of favor because it dulls the judgment. You can go to the beach near naked in a skimpy bathing suit and that is normal, but if you neglect to put on sun block to protect against skin cancer people are astonished. It is admirable to eat healthy, but we use the word guilt more often in connection with unhealthy foods— high fat, high sodium, or high calorie—than in any other context. Contemplative pleasures like taking a long bath are admired, but dangerous pleasures like speeding on a motorcycle are disdained, and driving without a seatbelt is positively immoral. Sports that are aerobic, like cross-country skiing and Rollerblading, thrive, while sports that do little to improve cardiovascular health, like pool, bowling, and Ping-Pong, are low class. Even an afternoon spent playing with the kids is thought to be “a good thing” because we are invariably helping the little ones improve some set of skills (watch the Bobo parents taking part in their kids’ “play”) or at least we are building better relationships or self-esteem (“Good job! Good for you!”).
We Bobos have taken the bourgeois imperative to strive and succeed, and we have married it to the bohemian impulse to experience new sensations. The result is a set of social regulations constructed to encourage pleasures that are physically, spiritually, and intellectually useful while stigmatizing ones that are useless or harmful. In this way the Protestant Work Ethic has been replaced by the Bobo Play Ethic, which is equally demanding. Everything we do must serve the Life Mission, which is cultivation, progress, and self-improvement.
It’s perfectly fitting that the two leisure-time institutions that have thrived during the Bobo age are health clubs and museums. Both places offer sensual satisfactions in uplifting settings. At health clubs you can enjoy the pleasure of an ennobling muscle burn—you get off the Stairmaster, exhausted and sweaty after 35 minutes of pure exertion, and admire your virtuous self in the floor- to-ceiling mirrors. Meanwhile, at museums you can luxuriate in a sensual cornucopia, enjoying the colors and forms of the paint and materials, while being edified by informative Acoustiguides, scholarly texts on the walls, and the wonderful bookshop downstairs. Health clubs and museums have become the chapels and cathedrals of our age, the former serving to improve the body, the latter the mind.
It’s also fitting that we Bobos have taken the ultimate symbol of Dionysian release, the party, and merged it with work. A couple of years ago in the New Yorker, James Atlas published an essay called “The Fall of Fun,” which pretty accurately captured the transformation of the literary party scene and shed light on educated-class parties as a whole.
Next to the writers, poets, and essayists of earlier decades, Atlas argued, today’s creative types are a pretty tame bunch. He recalled that the literary giants he admired during his student days at Harvard drank and caroused with abandon. “My gurus were the famously hard-drinking literati of an earlier epoch: a shaky hung- over Robert Lowell chain-smoking mentholated Trues at a seminar table in the Quincy House basement; a drunken Norman Mailer brandishing a bottle of whiskey and baiting the crows in Sanders Theatre; Allen Ginsberg toking up at a Signet Society dinner and chanting his poems to the hypnotic accompaniment of a harmonium. Postwar poetry was a hymn of excess.”
These were artists living the bohemian way. Atlas described the booze-filled gatherings of the old literati, the smoky parties, the embarrassing scenes, the bitter feuds, and the ensuing divorces. Even the diaries of austere Edmund Wilson are filled with adultery and lewd drunkenness; Edmund found himself one day doing a threesome on a couch. Many of these people, in fact, caroused themselves to an early grave. Delmore Schwartz died at fifty- two; John Berryman killed himself at fifty-seven; Shirley Jackson died at forty-five; Robert Lowell died at sixty, relatively old for his group.
But nowadays people who drink and carouse that way are likely to be greeted with medical diagnoses—alcoholism, drug addiction, depression. Even in what used to be the bohemian quarters, as James Atlas eloquently testifies, the days of booze and brawling are over. Now parties tend to be work parties; a glass or two of white wine, a little networking with editors and agents, and then it’s home to the kids. Almost nobody drinks at lunch anymore. People don’t gather around kitchen tables staying up nights imbibing and talking. Everybody is healthier, more orderly, and more success oriented.
The same pattern has been acted out in other circles. Journalists used to be smoking, drinking vulgarians. Now, next to the writers, poets and essayists of earlier as the older reporters never stop reminding us, the campaign buses are filled with mild college grads sipping bottied water. Nobody gets drunk at journalist parties, and anybody who did would be regarded as a loser. Academic social life, the articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education tell us, is drier and tamer than it was two decades ago. Even Hollywood, which should be the epicenter of hedonism, is overrun by health consciousness, career consciousness, and (relative) moderation. More Bobos pass out business cards at parties than pass out under the table.
When it comes to alcohol consumption more generally, we are probably living through the most abstemious era since Prohibition, maybe in American history. In our age all the old terms are fading away—sours, slings, high- balls, fizzes, nightcaps—despite a little self-conscious nostalgia at the cigar and martini bars. On cable I recently stumbled across an old episode of Match Game ‘73. Six celebrities were asked to complete the phrase “half,“ and the contestant had to guess how they had filled in the blank. He guessed “half-drunk.” That was a good answer because four of the six celebrities chose either “half-drunk” or “half-crocked.” Today if the same Match Game question were asked, the most common answer might be “half-and-half.”
One of the reasons the old bohemians were so wild and free was that they were rebelling against square bourgeois mores. But once the bourgeoisie assimilated the liberated culture of the 1960s, there was not much left to rebel against. Once bohemian symbols were absorbed into the mainstream, they lost some of their countercultural panache. The novels of Henry Miller seemed cool when they offended middle-class librarians, but they don’t seem so daring now. Nude performance art may have been a thrilling statement once, but it lost its cachet when it became titillation for the tourist trade. When drugs were discovered by disco kids from Queens and yuppies from Wall Street in the seventies and eighties, naturally they seemed less like mind-expanding tools and more like grubby playthings. Living for pleasure no longer makes the same rebellious cultural statement it once did.
Moreover, playtime in the earlier decades seemed more like release. People were stuck in boring jobs, so wanted a little revelry at night. Creative types felt themselves stuck in a boring society, so wanted to up-end the rules. But for Bobos work is not boring. It’s challenging and interesting. So maybe it’s not surprising they should make play more like work. Bobos are reconcilers, after all, so maybe it is inevitable they would strive to blur their duties with their pleasures, making the former more enjoyable and the latter more tame.
As we drive farther, we begin to notice that the houses are getting bigger, the lawns look professionally manicured, and the driveways tend to be filled with Audis, Volvos, and Saabs. In these upscale neighborhoods, it is apparently socially acceptable to buy a luxury car so long as it comes from a country that is hostile to U.S. foreign policy. Soon you begin to see discount but morally elevated supermarkets such as Trader Joe’s. Here you can get your Spinoza Bagels (for people whose lives peaked in graduate school), fennel-flavored myrrh toothpaste from Tom’s of Maine, free-range chicken broth, gluten-free challah, spelt-based throat lozenges, and bread from farms with no-tillage soil. (What, does the dirt turn itself over?)
Trader Joe’s is for people who wouldn’t dream of buying an avocado salad that didn’t take a position on offshore drilling or a whey-based protein bar that wasn’t fully committed to campaign finance reform. Someday, somebody should build a right-wing Trader Joe’s, with faith-based chewing tobacco, rice pilaf grown by school-voucher-funded Mormon agricultural academies, and a meat section that’s a bowl of cartridges and a sign reading “Go ahead, kill it yourself.” But in the meantime, we will have to make do with the ethos of social concern that prevails at places like Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods.
You get the impression that everybody associated with Trader Joe’s is excessively good—that every cashier is on temporary furlough from Amnesty International, that the chipotle-pepper hummus was mixed by pluralistic Muslims committed to equal rights for women, that the Irish soda bread was baked by indigenous U2 groupies marching in Belfast for Protestant-Catholic reconciliation, and that the olive spread was prepared by idealistic Athenians who are reaching out to the Turks on the whole matter of Cyprus.
The folks at Trader Joe’s also confront higher moral problems, such as snacks. Everyone knows that snack food is morally suspect, since it contributes to the obesity of the American public, but the clientele still seems to want it. So the folks behind this enterprise have managed to come up with globally concerned stomach filler that tastes virtuously like sawdust ground from unendangered wood. For kids who come home from school screaming, “Mom, I want a snack that will prevent colo-rectal cancer,” there’s Veggie Booty with kale, baked pea-pod chips, roasted plantains, wasabi peas, and flavor-free rice clusters. If you smuggled a bag of Doritos into Trader Joe’s, some preservative alarm would go off, and the whole place would have to be fumigated and resanctified.
You usually don’t have to wander far from a Trader Joe’s before you find yourself in bistroville. These are inner-ring restaurant-packed suburban town centers that have performed the neat trick of being clearly suburban while still making it nearly impossible to park. In these new urbanist zones, highly affluent professionals emerge from their recently renovated lawyer foyers on Friday and Saturday nights, hoping to show off their discerning taste in olive oils. They want sidewalks, stores with overpriced French children’s clothes to browse in after dinner, six-dollar-a-cone ice-cream vendors, and plenty of restaurants. They don’t want suburban formula restaurants. They want places where they can offer disquisitions on the reliability of the risotto, where the predinner complimentary bread slices look like they were baked by Burgundian monks, and where they can top off their dinner with a self-righteous carrot smoothie.
The rule in these pedestrian-friendly town centers is “Fight a war, gain a restaurant.” You’ll find Afghan eateries, Vietnamese restaurants, Lebanese diners, Japanese sushi bars alongside dining options from Haiti, Cambodia, India, Mongolia, and Moscow. And this is not to even mention the J Cosi-style casual dining spots offering shiitake mushroom panini sandwiches or the gourmet pizzerias serving artichoke, prosciutto, and brie pizzas (which can also come with a black-bean topping). When you stumble across Teriyaki Fajita Salad du Jardin, you realize it is possible to cram so many authentic indigenous cultures together that they’ve created something totally bogus and artificial.
Ozzie and Harriet would find it odd that their old suburban town center now has a vegan restaurant for feminist reproductive-rights activists and their support circles, but these inner-ring suburbs are sophisticated places. They are the home of the upscale urban exiles—affluent sophisticated types who disapprove of the suburbs in principle but find themselves living in one in practice. Like the crunchy suburbanites, they disapprove of the sterility of suburban life, the split-level subdivisions, the billiard rooms, and the blueberry bagels. But unlike the crunchy suburbanites, these inner-ring people just happen to have landed jobs that earn them a quarter million dollars a year, darn it, and they somehow moved into recently renovated Arts and Crafts mansions with an Olympic-sized Jacuzzi in the master-bathroom spa, the emblem of their great sellout.
The people who live in the inner-ring suburbs are hardcore meritocrats and the chief beneficiaries of the information age. This economy showers money down upon education, so the fine young achievers who went to graduate school and got jobs as litigators and mortgage-company executives can now live in towns that are close to downtown theaters and concert halls but also filled with houses big enough to support a kitchen the size of Arkansas. About 15 percent of American households now earn over $100,000 a year. There are over seven million households with a net worth over $1 million. This nation, in other words, now possesses a mass upper class, and many of these folks are congregating in the upscale archipelago of such places as Bethesda, Maryland; Greenwich, Connecticut; Tarrytown, New York; Villanova, Pennsylvania; Winnetka, Illinois; San Mateo and Santa Monica, California; Austin, Texas; Shaker Heights, Ohio; and the Research Triangle Park of North Carolina. In the mornings, there are so many blue New York Times delivery bags in the driveways of these towns, they are visible from space.
Back when the old WASP elite dominated these places, they were rock-ribbed Republican. But the new educated elite has brought new values and new voting patterns. In 1998 National Journal studied the voting patterns of the richest 261 towns in America and discovered that the Democratic share of the vote had risen in each of the previous five elections. In 2000 the Democrats went over the top. A Democratic presidential candidate carried the area around the Main Line, outside of Philadelphia, for the first time in history. And the first Democrat ever won the area around NewTrierHigh School, north of Chicago. Once Republican strongholds, the inner-ring suburbs have become Democratic zones, thanks to the influx of the educated and affluent cultural elite, with their graduate degrees, high incomes, and liberal social values.
These places have their good and bad features. On the downside, they are strangely insular. Though the people here are in most ways well informed, and often can name the foreign minister of France, they tend to live in neighborhoods where everybody has a college degree (only about a quarter of adult Americans do), and they often don’t know much about the rest of the country. They might not know who Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins are, even though these men are among the nation’s best-selling authors, with over fifty million books sold. They often don’t know what makes a Pentecostal a Pentecostal, even though Pentecostalism is the most successful social movement of the twentieth century, starting in Los Angeles with no members a hundred years ago and growing so fast there are now roughly four hundred million Pentecostals worldwide. They can’t name five NASCAR drivers, though stock-car races are the best-attended sporting events in the country. They can’t tell a military officer’s rank by looking at his insignia. They may not know what soy beans look like growing in the field. Sometimes they can’t even tell you what happens in Branson, Missouri, though, as sort of the country music Vegas, it is one of the top tourist destinations in the country. On the other hand, they are really good at building attractive and interesting places to live. This is, after all, the red-hot center of the achievement ethos, and while few people in these neighborhoods have fought in wars, many have endured extensive home renovations.
So if you are in an inner-ring suburb, you are likely to be amid people who have developed views on beveled granite, and no inner-ring dinner party has gone all the way to dessert without a serious conversational phase on the merits and demerits of Conan countertops. People here talk about their relationships with architects the way they used to talk about their priests, rabbis, and ministers. Bathroom tile is their cocaine; instead of blowing their life savings on narcotic white powder they blow it on the handcrafted Italian wall covering they saw at Waterworks.
The sumptuary codes in these neighborhoods are always shifting. Highly educated folk don’t want to look materialistic and vulgar, but on the other hand, it would be nice to have an in-house theater with a fourteen-foot high-definition projection screen to better appreciate the interviews on Charlie Rose. Eventually these advanced-degree moguls cave in and buy the toys they really want: the heated bathroom floors to protect their bare feet, the power showers with nozzles every six inches, the mudrooms the size of your first apartment, the sixteen-foot refrigerators with the through-the-door goat cheese and guacamole delivery systems, the cathedral ceilings in the master bedroom that seem to be compensation for not quite ‘getting to church. Later, when they show off to you, they do so in an apologetic manner, as if some other family member forced them to make the purchase.
Inner-ring people work so arduously at perfecting their homes because they dream of building a haven where they can relax, lay aside all that striving, and just cocoon. They have deep simplicity longings, visions of having enough money and space so they can finally rest. Yet you know they are wired for hard work, because they feel compelled to put offices in every room in the house. Mom has an office in the kitchen, Dad has an office off the bedroom, the kids have computer centers near the family room, and it’s only a matter of time before builders start installing high-speed Internet access in bathrooms. That dream of perfect serenity and domestic bliss will just have to be transferred to the vacation home.
Inner-ring people tend to have omnivorous musical tastes. They’re interested in zydeco and that Louisiana dance music they heard on Fresh Air, even if they do tend to drift back to Melissa Etheridge and Lyle Lovett. They prefer independent bookstores, and they bend down and read the recommendations in the staff-picks section. That’s how they stumbled across Anita Diamant, Paul Auster, and Wally Lamb before they got really popular.
If they are not perpetually renovating their properties, inner-ring people are off on allegedly educational vacations improving their minds. When Christopher Columbus returned from the New World, he didn’t go to Queen Isabella and say, “Well, I didn’t find a trade route to India, but I did find myself.” That, however is exactly what highly educated inner-ring people are looking for in a vacation. They go on personal-growth Greek cruises sponsored by alumni associations, during which university classics professors lecture on the Peloponnesian wars while the former econ majors try to commit adultery with the lifeguards.
As you sit with them intimately in their reading alcove (not the one in the master bedroom suite; rather, the one beside the office, near the nanny suite) they tell you about the weeklong painting seminar they took with Comtesse Anne de Liedekerke in Belgium, the cooking seminar in Siena, the tiger-watching adventure in India, or the vineyard touring week in Bordeaux. When they put all this hard-won knowledge to work by using the word “geometric” in reference to a cabernet, you want to applaud their commitment to lifelong learning, but you are distracted because your butt is shaking as a result of the eighteen-inch woofer their architect cleverly embedded in the built-in divan you are resting upon.
When people in their twenties are surveyed on where they want to live, more of them answer inner-ring suburbs than any other place. It’s easy to see why. These places combine the sophistication of the city with the child-friendly greenery of the suburb. The people here are well educated, lively, and tolerant (unless you want to, say, build a school in their neighborhood, in which case they turn into NIMBY-fired savages ripping the flesh from your bones with their bare hands).
The ongoing academic quarrel over the definition of globalization is a postmodern version of the parable of the blind monks and the elephant, in which each man reaches a different conclusion based on which part of the elephant he has examined.
Itcho Hanabusa - Blind monks examining an elephant
Globalization can thus be defined as the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa.
- Anthony Giddens
The concept of globalization reflects the sense of an immense enlargement of world communication, as well as of the horizon of a world market, both of which seem far more tangible and immediate than in earlier stages of modernity.
- Fredric Jameson
Globalization may be thought of as a process (or set of processes) which embodies a transformation in the spatial organization of social relations and transactions assessed in terms of their extensity, intensity, velocity and impact-generating transcontinental or interregional flows and networks of activity, interaction, and the exercise of power.
- David Held
Globalization as a concept refers both to the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole.
- Roland Robertson
Globalization compresses the time and space aspects of social relations.
From the cool zone, we drive out of town, just across the city line, to the crunchy zone. Here one finds starter suburbs populated by people who regard themselves as countercultural urbanites, but now they have kids, so the energy that once went into sex and raving now goes into salads. They need suburban space so their kids have a place to play, but they still want enough panhandlers and check- cashing places nearby so they can feel urban and gritty.
Dotted around most cities—especially in the northern rim of the country, through Vermont, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Oregon, and Washington—there are one or two crunchy suburbs that declared themselves nuclear-free zones during the cold war although some would argue that the military-industrial complex was not overly inconvenienced by being unable to base ICBM launch sites in Takoma Park, Maryland. You can tell you are in a crunchy suburb by the sudden profusion of meat-free food co-ops, boys with names like Mandela and Milo running around the all-wood playgrounds, the herbal-soapmaking cooperatives, pottery galleries, dance collectives, and middle-aged sandal wearers (people with progressive politics have this strange penchant for toe exhibitionism).
You have to remember that crunchy suburbs are the stoner versions of regular suburbs. All the status codes are reversed. So in a crunchy suburb, all the sports teams are really bad, except those involving Frisbees. The parking spaces are occupied by automobiles in need of psychotherapy because they are filled with self-hatred and wish they were Danish wood-burning stoves. The locals sit around on the weekends listening to Click and Clack, the self-amused NPR car-repair gurus who tell other crunchy-suburb people how to repair a crank shaft on their 1982 Honda Civic—the one with 285,000 miles and a Darwin fish on the bumper, next to the sticker attesting to the driver’s tendency to practice random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty.
The true sign that you are in a crunchy suburb is when you come across an anti-lawn. Crunchy-suburb people subtly compete to prove that they have the worst lawn in the neighborhood, just to show how fervently they reject the soul-destroying standards of conventional success. An anti-lawn looks like a regular lawn with an eating disorder. Some are bare patches of compacted brown dirt with sickly stray pieces of green matter poking out, the vegetation version of Yasser Arafat’s face. Other anti-lawns burst forth with great symphonies of onion grass, vast spreads of dandelions and crabgrass, expanding waves of depressed ivies and melancholy ferns—such an impressive array of weed life uninterrupted by any trace of actual grass that you can only conclude some progressive agribusiness makes a soy-based weed enhancer/grass suppressant, with special discounts for Nader voters.
When you are in these neighborhoods—maybe you’ve been invited over for a backyard stir-fry—you might want to ask for terrible lawn-care secrets, but you get distracted by the housepaint issue, which is another moral dilemma for crunchy-suburb residents. Painting your house exterior colonial white or production-home beige would, in these areas, be the moral equivalent of putting a National Rifle Association sign in the front yard. So crunchy-suburb residents again fall into two categories, starting with those who choose to paint their house every decade or so, but do so in such bright New Age colors—lavender, cobalt blue, fuchsia, or purple haze—that no one can possibly doubt the Buddhist bona fides of the people who live inside.
The other camp regards exterior housepaint in the same way they regard makeup, as something that was probably developed using animal testing. Centuries go by without any fresh coats, and the run-down drabness of the exteriors is highlighted only by the peace signs made out of Christmas lights that pop up around holiday time. The roofs in these homes tend to undulate in great waves and warps, because the residents either cannot afford roof repair or reject the rigid uniformity of straight lines, unchipped shingles, and the whole symmetry thing. The front porches are rusted and cracked, buried under sedimentary deposits of former lawn furniture picked up from neighborhood thrift shops (crunchy-suburb residents are not really into material things, but strangely, they still can’t manage to throw anything away). The settlement in these homes is such that if you put a marble in the middle of a living room here, it would pick up so much speed as it rolled downhill that it would bore into the philosophically named housecat if she happened to be standing in its path.
The nice thing about these crunchy suburbs—aside from the fact that 96 percent of all children’s book illustrators live in them—is that their residents are so relaxed. The ethos is almost excessively casual. While these folks might regard it as unusual to show up for a dinner party in anything other than black jeans and Birkenstocks, a suit and tie not made from hemp won’t bend them out of shape. In other words, you may not really be part of their culture, but if you come to one of their towns, they will still welcome you. They may have little direct knowledge of anything that happens outside the nonprofit sector, but they tend to be genuinely warm toward new people. Tolerance is practically their profession. The cool zone is built on exclusion and one-upmanship, but the crunchy zone is built on inclusion and open-mindedness.
To their credit, the crunchy zones represent the last bastions of anticommercialism. The world used to be dotted with cultures that rejected the marketplace mentality. There were agrarians, old-family aristocrats, artsy bohemians, southern cavaliers, Marxists, Maoists, monks, and hoboes. But now the marketplace has co-opted or overrun each of those subcultures. Now, if you want to live an anticommercial lifestyle, or even a pseudo-anticommercial lifestyle, crunchiness is just about your only mode.
Amid the organic cauliflower stands and Moosewood Cookbook—inspired dinner parties, you’ll find people suspicious of technological progress, efficiency, mass culture, and ever-rising affluence. The crunchies don’t let their kids watch much TV they disdain shopping malls, they prefer the small and the local and the particular and the old to the powerful and the modern. In any normal political taxonomy, they would be called conservative; though they are progressive on civil rights and social issues, they shelter the idiosyncratic, ethnic, and traditional institutions from the onrush of technology, homogenization, efficiency, and progress. But in the U.S., political orientations are defined by one’s attitude to the free market, and the word “conservative” ha been assigned to those who defend the free market, which of course is not a conservative institution. So crunchy towns tend to be associated with the left (though Rod Dreher of National Review has emerged as the champion of the Crunchy Cons—the pro-life vegetarian high-church Catholics who can their own preserves, care too much about zucchini, home-school their kids, and read Edmund Burke while wearing Swedish clogs).
Crunchy people also tend not to have a lot of money, and some of them actually don’t care about it—they aren’t merely pretending they don’t care. Maybe you wouldn’t want to spend your life in towns where half the men look like Allen Ginsberg, where the chief dilemma is whether to send the kids to Antioch or Hampshire College, or where Celtic folk/bluegrass songs intersperse with Phish anthems on the teahouse sound systems, but it is kind of interesting to be in a place in which the holy dollar has lost its divinity.
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