Dear David,
As I understand our charge, we are to expand on the ephemera of the day with great displays of wit and plenty of collateral cleverness. But though I have watched a lot of TV and collected great stacks of in-flight magazines and taped hours and hours of commercials suitable for mocking, I’m hoping to take a different approach.
My suggestion is that we start with a big, historically sweeping proposition, which will then give us lots of room for irresponsible conjecture and grand pronouncements. And, as it happens, your very amusing book Bobos in Paradise provides a succinct way to get at an issue I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Let’s grant your main point–that in certain precincts bourgeois and bohemian (bo + bo = Bobo) have merged in recent years, have grown prosperous in their hip neighborhoods and provided a market for all those accouterments of commodified dissent like Starbucks, Fruitopia, and Humvee stretch limos.
You point out that Bobos reign in the boardroom these days, that they are now the ones who inhabit the mainline suburbs, read the management literature, direct the work force, and consume the various luxury goods. In fact, you identify them as a “New Upper Class.” So here’s the big question: What is to become of the great 30-year conservative ascendancy now that bohemianism is clearly a style of the corporate class?
The conservative politicians who’ve built the free market order haven’t done so by campaigning openly for increased power for corporations, for the rollback of banking regulation, or for union busting. They did it through culture war, through a massive wave of outrage against permissiveness, flag burning, “countercultural McGoverniks,” limousine liberals, and so on. More importantly, the culture war has always had a curious class angle to it: Think of Nixon and his Silent Majority, or Agnew berating the Eastern establishment, or Reagan speaking up for the good, honest, hard-working citizens. The common people were mad as hell at an arrogant elite, but by definition the business community–the entrepreneurs and managers and owners–weren’t members of that elite. The target of the great backlash was liberals, who were often identified one-to-one with the hated counterculture. Nice, square business people were supposed to be hard-working regular citizens, just like the hard-hats who were beating up demonstrators.
But what happens when it’s business people who flaunt their countercultural tastes? What happens when the guy who outsources your job to Arkansas wears a nose ring and doesn’t give a damn about flag and country? Or when the person denouncing big government from the heights of Davos is a Deadhead? Or when the latest management theory tract seeks to reconcile you to “change” by referring to aura or the chakras?
What becomes of the “Reagan Democrats,” who mainly voted Republican on cultural issues, when boho and billionaire are one and the same? Will the inherent absurdity of Bobo capitalism–the millionaires consuming peasant food, the management consultants chattering about the soulful corporation–ever bring some sort of breakdown? And, perhaps most importantly, what of the family values crowd? Will the Bobos scream if Tom DeLay revs up the culture war for another sortie? Or will Bush and Co. keep Lynne Cheney busy baking cookies this time around?
Does this seem like a good beginning? If not, feel free to try another one. And from now on, I vow to keep it short, ephemeral, and amusing.
