Nicholas Lemann and Judith Shulevitz
Dear Judith,
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StumbleUponSpeaking of job dissatisfaction, today's Washington Post has a story by Ellen Nakashima and Dana Milbank called "Bush Cabinet Takes Back Seat in Driving Policy," which already this morning has garnered a mention elsewhere in Slate. This is one of the hardiest perennial trend stories in Washington--the trend being that the White House staff has become more powerful than the Cabinet. The authors provide many good examples, but they have to acknowledge, somewhat sheepishly, that the shift in power from the Cabinet to the White House has been going on "for more than half a century." This time it's news, though, because Bush "set out to restore some clout to the Cabinet."
Don't I remember just about every president promising he'd do this, though? Out of the mists of my youth comes a picture of Richard Nixon standing on a stage in December 1968, introducing his powerhouse Cabinet of corporate CEOs and the like, and promising to institute "Cabinet government." I also think I remember Jimmy Carter making the same promise. Like the principle of running government like a business, Cabinet government never works, but what really struck me was the poignancy of the Cabinet members--powerful, accomplished people in the full bloom of late middle age--uprooting themselves to move to Washington, only to find that they're nobodies. Poor things! And actually their situation is even worse than it appears to be, because if they had been truly satisfied in their previous lives as governors, corporate big shots, etc., they would not have campaigned as hard as they did for the jobs in Washington that now turn out to suck. The obverse of the proposition that the people with really awful jobs, like prison guards, have to suffer doubly because they are also paid so poorly, is that the people with really fun jobs, of the kind where you get to boss people around and be chauffeured places, get truckloads of money to do them. We can console ourselves over the unfairness of this with the knowledge that their double good fortune only seems to make them miserable--they always seem to feel that their coveted jobs actually have horrible disadvantages that people can't see from the outside, and furthermore that some other coveted jobs, just over the next hill, will lack those disadvantages. And then the cycle repeats. You might as well just be a prison guard.
Maybe the death of the social novel is about as real as the rebirth of Cabinet government, but if it's in such good shape, has it depicted the peculiar self-pity of the rich and powerful, which I think of as one of the distinctive and fascinatingly strange features of American society?
Love,
Nick
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Reader Comments From The Fray
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[Notes from the Fray Editor: Don't like restaurants? Then let's discuss home cooking, and get some ideas for tonight's dinner, in this thread here. One of the cooks, Will Allen, has this to say elsewhere (context not really important, but he had been accused of pre-judging people): "I nearly always allow someone to clearly display their banal, wooden-headed, nature before denouncing it." There was an interesting thread on prison officers, the word 'perversely', and insults, starting here. Everyone was in cheerful mood in the Fray: Ex-Fed was able to start joke threads here and here (warning: this one was considered tasteless by another poster.) Ex-Fed also proposed marriage to one of the Breakfast Tablers, here: we're being a little circumspect because this involved being rude about the other BT-er. And there was a fan letter from Zeitguy to Judith Shulevitz here.]
If there's anything "unique" about American society, it's the amazing extent of our ability to think that we're somehow different from every other civilization in history. Maybe it's because our particular culture has only been around for a few hundred years, in a land where we are cut off almost completely from the ancient civilizations that have been around significantly longer. I don't know. But bored, whiny rich people? That's nothing new
--Mangar
(To reply, click here.)
It's not the self-pity that bothers me so much, though it's bad enough, but the truculence and righteous indignation and desire to grind the faces of the poor it seems to lead to.
To put it another way--what, exactly, are the rich and powerful so pissed off about? What is it that they want that they're not getting? 100% of the wealth instead of a mere 90%?
--Kassandra
(To reply, click here.)
(9/5)