We went to church this morning. It was packed, as always, with all the Irish and Italians in our town. Jonah scampered off to church school, and we kept Ian silent in the pew with a bowl of dry cheerios.
The sermon today was about social justice. A man from the Knights of Columbus came forward to talk about caring for the less fortunate in the community and virtue of volunteer work. Yeah, those religious types are so conservative.
After that, we headed to the mall to catch up on chores. Steve needed new Rockport shoes for work. I exchanged an unfortunate skirt at the Gap for a shorter one at H&M. Pull-ups were purchased at Target. The kids road some quarter-eating purple cars and played computer games in the back of the Apple Store. And we ate pasta at the Macaroni Grill with a $3.99 kiddie menu.
The Palisades Mall is as huge as it is ugly. A monumental concrete slab that immediately sunk eight inches into the ground just after it was built. It’s over the border of New Jersey in Rockland County, NY. Though Rockland has a mix of people, it has enough working class stiffs to make it a draw for the Fox crowd. Last time I was there, Sean Hannity was giving a rousing speech for the crowd in the food court.
Our last stop before we went home was Barnes and Noble. Jonah got a book on ancient Rome
Fifty pages into the book, I’m having a love-hate relationship with it. There’s some interesting theories about class in America. However, Frank writes with journalistic flair full of opinion and florid adjectives, which is fun, but sometimes grates against my formal, academic training. He also isn’t shy about displaying his aversion to suburban, middle class America. Sometimes I’m guilty of those same snobberies, but I at least fight them.
I’ll probably give a more thorough review of the book after I finish it. But here’s a quote:
Cupcake Land is a metropolis built entirely according to the developer’s plan, without the interference of angry proles or ethnic pols as in nearby Kansas City. Cupcake Land encourages no culture but that which increases property values; supports no learning but that which burnishes the brand; hears no opinions but those that will further fatten the cupcake elite; tolerates no rebellion but that expressed in haircuts and piercings and alternative rock. You know what it’s like even though you haven’t been there. Smooth jazz. Hallmark cards. Applebees. Corporate Woods. Its greatest civic holiday is the turning-on of the Christmas lights at a nearby shopping center — an event so inspirational to the cupcake mind that the mall thus illuminated has been rendered in paint by none other than Thomas Kinkade.
Apt. 11d 
Okay, I refuse to read the book based on that excerpt alone. What a supercilious git — and I speak as a licensed bed-wetting liberal with plenty of animus against suburbuan dystopia.
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I understand that Thomas Frank spent some time in Kansas “researching” that book, but when I read a passage like that I wonder if he even bothered to get out of his car.
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I think the phrase “working class stiffs” and then associating them with the FOx TV crowd is quite offensive. As someone who is from the working class and had a chance later in life to attend the university I found just as many if not more reactionary and backward types coming from the middle and upper classes than from the neighborhood I grew up in (Paterson NJ).
In fact, I knew hardly any republicans in my city or union. Almost all the republicans I have met in life were suburban folks or managers.
You also feed into the bullshit that the republicans somehow connect to the “everyday working man” which isn’t true. Last I checked the blue states and the city areas of the red states voted overwhelmingly democrat, these are also the areas with a concentration of “working class stiffs.”
I think there is still this stereotype of the working class (thanks to Archie Bunker and paranoia by the liberal elite)that we are just a bunch of idiots. But it is just a stereotype. I would bet my life there are far more republicans in the middle-upper middle class town you live in (w/ other professors and professionals) than the working class neighborhood of Jersey City where I live.
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Mathias — Most of my family would be described as working class stiffs. Before going to college, my dad was the fourth generation to work in the steel mills in Chicago. My cousins are typewriter repairmen and foremen in a plastic bag company. One cousin works at a carnevale. I don’t think that it is even considered working class stiff.
The point of Frank’s book is that working class stiffs are voting against their material interest and voting for Republicans. I havent’ finished the book yet, so I’ll have to write more on this later.
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I’ll be interested to read what you have to say about Frank, Laura; I’ve been wrestling with his claims and perspective for a while now. In so many ways I think he’s right: he’s making a populist argument in favor of the sort of economy and society that considers foremost the interests and the empowerment of the working class, particularly those in rural areas. But what he’s up against is the fact that America’s contemporary “working class,” thanks to cheap and readily available goods, information and entertainment delivered by powerful corporations (Disney, Wal-Mart, etc.), no longer thinks primarily about their economic bottom-line, as Frank (not entirely accurately) insists they once did. So his conclusion is that they’ve been bought off by, or caught up in, the faux moral obsessions of the suburban, petite bourgeoisie, freaking out about abortion and the evils of cable tv while their jobs get shipped off to Mexico by oligarchs who distract them with the “culture war” card. In the end, he can’t help but be condescending towards the beliefs and values of the very people whom his populism is supposedly directed towards. I think, ultimately, what Frank needs is an appreciation of the centrality of cultural concerns to the sort of socio-economic environments that he favors; he doesn’t want to believe that today’s culture war reflects any real continuum from the egalitarian, union-supported, morally close-knit (and homogenous) cities of his idealized Kansas past, but there is: the path which many white working-class and rural voters have taken towards the Republican party over the last 30 years surely hasn’t been the best of all possible paths, least of all economically, but it has been a legitimate and an at least partly reasoned one nonetheless. Frank’s book gets close to the heart of the current dilemma, I think, but can’t grasp it, because he just can’t accept that “heartland values” might have to be a real component of the populist politics he desires after all.
That was way too long for a single comment. Sorry.
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Frank’s thesis seems all the more clumsy and prejudiced when I turn it on its head and apply it to my own neighborhood here in D.C.
From my prepsterously small apartment, I can see rows of enormous three- and four-story homes that now sell for around $1.5 million each. The occupants are wealthy, Ivy League-educated families and their children attend expensive, all-white private schools. (There’s even an elite pre-school down the block. Tuition? $15,000 per annum.) I’ve often thought, “You know, it would be in the financial interest of my neighbors to vote Republican”–yet my neighborhood sent millions to Howard Dean and voted overwhelmingly–nearly 80%–for the Kerry-Edwards ticket.
Back home in my native New Jersey, there are entire towns that probably would vote Republican were it not for the residents’ labor-union membership. Along those same lines, I’ve known people who would vote Republican if the religious right didn’t make them so uncomfortable, but I’ve also known people who would vote Democratic if one issue–abortion, for example, or the military–didn’t overshadow their other concerns.
And so on, and so on, and so on. My point is that Thomas Frank appears to be so amazed that Kansans don’t vote the way he expects them to that he assumes they must have been duped. That’s nonsense. If Frank wants to be some sort of neo-populist, he’s going to have to trust that people know their own interests better than outsiders do. I can be baffled by my wealthy neighbors’ Democratic voting habits and rant about how they’ve been misled by The New Yorker and The Nation, or I can draw the more sensible conclusion: that just because people don’t always vote their economic interests doesn’t mean they aren’t voting on the issues that concern them the most.
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Applebees he lost me there. I live in a “white bread” community like he is describing, except … of course, my one daughter’s best friend is black and the other daughter’s best friend is Indian (sub-continent).
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Give me a chance, guys, to finish the book. I want to give Frank a fair shake before I really get into his main thesis.
That paragraph of Frank’s was really nasty business. I mean I had a fairly red state sort of day. Church. Mall. Chain restaurant with a kiddie menu. But that’s how life is with kids these days. When Jonah was a baby we took him to the balcony of the Met on a Friday evening when we drank wine amidst the Ming vases, but that lifestyle was hard to maintain.
And you shouldn’t judge people on their tastes on art or food anyway. I mean I would rather chew off my right arm than hang a Kinkade painting on my wall, but that doesn’t mean that those who like that stuff are stupid or selfish or evil.
What I don’t get, and maybe Frank will get to it, is why people don’t seem to vote based on their economic interests. Both the rich and poor seem to be equally guilty. Maybe both parties are offering up the same entree, so it’s only the appetizers to fight over.
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I loved What’s the Matter With Kansas. It’s much more entertaining than Frank’s essay in the NYRB, which recaps some of his key arguments.
Frank doesn’t hate suburbia or red staters. The full Cupcake Land anecdote is a bitter personal rant about exurban gentrification. Frank grew up in that neighborhood. His father is still living there, struggling to pay the property taxes on his small post-WW2 bungalow, now surrounded by McMansions and all but worthless except for the property it sits on.
When Frank was a kid, union workers and middle managers populated the neighborhood.
Today, executives from the multi-national firms that have relocated to Kansas have bought up the land and replaced the modest homes with McMansions. These executives and their allies in the state and federal government have busted the unions and driven wages so low that working people can’t afford to own homes.
Of course, when they find an even cheaper place to do business, they’ll pull out and leave Cupcake Land to become another post industrial ghost town.
What’s the Matter With Kansas makes an important point about the vicious cycle of Movement Conservatism. Working class conservatives aren’t actually voting in their “values” interests either. Senators like Brownback campaign to clean up the filthy media and stop abortion, but once they get elected, they govern like plain old robber barons. Abortion is still illegal. The Republicans are taking money hand over fist from the same media conglomerates that create all that “smut” that conservative Christians hate. All this time, they’re pushing through tax cuts for the rich and social service cuts for people who actually need them. Life gets harder, people get angrier, they vote for even more radical Christian Republicans who promise to reform on the social issues that people care about. But they don’t deliver. They don’t want to. Their allegiance is to the corporate wing of the Republican party, and they know perfectly well (from 20-odd years of electoral experience, as Frank notes) that people won’t punish Brownback and his colleagues for failing to outlaw abortion or reform popular culture or do anything that their constituents actually care about.
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BOOK REVIEW IN PROGRESS.
Laura at 11-D is doing a review-in–progress of Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas?
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Lindsay, I think, but I may be wrong, that “Cupcake Land” is different from his dad’s neighborhood, which has become upper middle-class. His dad’s town was an older suburb and Cupcake Land are the new development towns. And the upper middle class don’t go to Applebees or buy Kinkade paintings.
I think it is fine to make fun of Kinkade paintings, but when you make fun of people who buy them, then it crosses a line for me. I actually almost stopped reading the book at that point.
But your other point about the bait and switch that the Republican leadership is pulling is most interesting. Let me finish the book first. A bigger review will happen soon.
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Laura, I’ll look forward to your review.
Frank grew up in Mission Hills, which at the time was an was an upper middle class/wealthy suburb. Today, it’s a nearly exclusive preserve of the super-rich.
Mission Hills is part of Cupcake Land (aka Johnson County). (Map) Although, the boomtown developments that earned Johnson County its nickname didn’t exist until the 90’s.
My point is that Cupcake Land is a very, very tony community. Frank is making fun of nouveau riche sprawl, not the middle class.
Yes, there are Applebee’s there, but there are also Dean and DeLucas and malls with three-star restaurants. I can only guess how much a Thomas Kincaid mural would cost. His mass-produced paintings start around $760, unframed. Even a TK-licensed mural would beggar your average suburban shopping mall.
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Thanks, Lindsay. I’ll post something on Monday, when everybody’s fresh. I look forward to your input, since you’ve clearly done your homework. Who knew that a Kinkade painting went for that much? Just horrified.
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