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Jeffrey Goldberg and Jack Shafer

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from: Jack Shafer

Taking a Power Grinder to Our Values

Posted Tuesday, Feb. 6, 2001, at 3:30 PM ET

Brother Goldberg,

The suburban ranch-home preservationists who would make McLean, Va., a McMansion-free zone have a lot of gall. As if their unsightly and pathetic 1,500-square-foot ramblers and split-levels and Cape Cods constitute the highest expression of residential architecture! Instead of insisting that any new construction complement "neighborhood scale, characteristic and materials," these people should thank the McMansion crowd for blocking their cramped little caves from public view.

Goldberg! We must drink deep from the well of life or not at all! (Where did that come from?) My three-bedroom house, which you mention in your last note, fits me--a single guy--like a McMansion does a family of four. I gotta tell you that it's a treat to prowl my environs, soak up all the space. Why, just the other day while looking for my glasses, I discovered a bedroom I didn't even know that I had! So how can I begrudge these wonderful people their barns? Actually, my favorite neighborhoods are the kind where enormous houses that make McMansions look like Levitt tracts are packed asshole-to-bellybutton along a broad boulevard. I'm thinking Monument Avenue down in Richmond and parts of Massachusetts Avenue N.W. here in D.C.

The paranoia behind the Virginia McMansion story serves as a fine bookend to another Washington Post story from last month. Fairfax County wanted to pass a law making it illegal to sleep anywhere but one's bedroom. The object of the law wasn't to prevent people from falling asleep during dinner but to keep immigrant families from doubling or tripling up in suburban homes and using basements and dining rooms as bedrooms. (The bill tanked.) Maybe the elegant solution to the McMansion/immigrant problem is a government program to build McMansions for Salvadorans in McLean. The suburban ranch-home preservationists would finally be shamed into silence, and, if the trend continued, McLean might someday be as hospitable as Monument Avenue.

To return to our press criticism theme, the story we've been talking about from today's Washington Post, "The Quandary Next Door," will surely be followed by another trend piece in a few months, "Making It Small, Making It Real," about people fleeing their airplane hangers for cozy condos in the District. "Said one newcomer to the District, 'I'm thinking of selling my two bedroom condo and inviting my brother and his family to move into an efficiency with me and my four kids. It's not really a family unless you're bumping into one another all the time.' "

Now, on to Charles Murray's column on today's Wall Street Journal op-ed page, "Prole Models." "We are witnessing the proletarianization of the dominant minority," Murray writes, echoing the findings of Gertrude Himmelfarb and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who believe our culture has gone to the hot shit-pit of hell.

I'll give Murray the point about our coarsening culture (I sorta did in my last sentence, didn't I?), but when exactly was the Golden Age of Manners and Propriety that he longs so nostalgically for? The disco bunny cokehead '70s? The acid-drenched '60s? The zip-gun juvenile delinquent '50s? The zoot suit jazz junkie '40s? Methinks that Mr. Murray doesn't get out much. If he spent much time with the strawmen and women he sets up--the rappers, trash-talkers, single mothers, and Simpsons viewers who have taken a power grinder to our values--he'd find how conservative they really are. Practically every rebel I know eventually cleans up his act, spawns, turns as conservative as Goldberg to defend his tender little flowers, marries a dentist, and moves. Where? To boring-as-hell McMansions!

Finally, guess who Murray sticks the blame to for the "collapse of the code of the elites"? I quote:

Bill Clinton's presidency, in both its conduct and in the reactions to that conduct, was a paradigmatic example of elites that have been infected by "the sickness of proletarianization." The survival of our culture requires that we somehow contrive to get well.



The Journal editorial page almost never lets you down. The only oversight here is that they don't pitch the bound volumes of the Whitewater coverage at the end of Murray's column.

Hey, if you're serious about farming out the little Goldies from the duck shed you call home, let's do it. But be forewarned: I don't keep kosher. Do you? I seem to recall that you're a pork-eating Jew (my favorite variety).

Love,
Jack

the breakfast table
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from: Jack Shafer

Taking a Power Grinder to Our Values

Posted Tuesday, Feb. 6, 2001, at 3:30 PM ET
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Jack Shafer is deputy editor of Slate. Jeffrey Goldberg is a staff writer at The New Yorker. His book on the Middle East, Prisoners, will be published next year by Knopf.
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[Notes from the Fray Editor: There was a spirit of friendly enquiry in the Fray: "Do you guys like each other?" asked Beth. "What is a CVS?" came from Dea--and do you need to be rich to find out? (Fletch tells us it's a drugstore.) And Mark wanted to know "What's wrong with a little Masada?"

Posters who weren't asking questions were trying to draw blood. "Breakfast Table" Fray regulars are a nest of trouble-makers. Neill Hamilton demonstrates this here and here, and so does Joseph Britt, whose comment below provoked a thread well worth reading, including a debate on whether basketball is prominent in American culture.]


In response to last week's "Breakfast Table", I and several other Fray posters made the suggestion that this feature would be more interesting if it involved writers who actually disagreed with each other about something.

By "something," I was referring to American politics or something especially prominent in American culture.

Disagreements about whom Israelis should vote for do not count. This is because Israel is a foreign country. Now, I wish Israel well; I like most of the Israelis I have met in my life; I even think how the American government should respond to whatever Israeli government emerges from this week's election is a topic worthy of exploration.

But who would I vote for? Stupid question

--Joseph Britt

(To reply, click here.)

(2/6)

Washington Post
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OPINIONS
What's Fair Game?
Anne E. Kornblut | What questions would Hillary Clinton have to answer if she were in Sarah Palin's shoes?
Editorial: Disappointment '08
PLUS » Stumped: More Nonsense From McCain