Our Gatsby Middleclass Shame

There is lots of middle class shame to go around these days. There are people who cant pay their mortgages, are on food stamps, Medicaid, assistance programs at schools. Middle class people don't talk about these things and this goes back to our Purtian work ethic that says failure is nothing less than losing God. Rich people are people who have served HIM and poor people need not apply. The gospel of the United States is one of shaming people who don't have jobs or who cant find jobs or who are homeless. We just don't really believe people can fail through no fault of their own.

But there is another kind of middle class shame. Almost a Gatsby shame evident in Fitzgerald's novel of course, The Great Gatsby. In the novel Gatsby refers to his home as something of a prize, saying it only took him a month to earn the money to buy the mansion. But at the end after his death we meet his father who said Gatsby used to chastise him because he "ate like a hog" and his father bragged about how Jimmy had pulled himself up and left the dirt poor farming existence of his childhood.

And like Gatsby there is a group of people who are ashamed of where they came from because during the boom they bought mansions. These are middle class people who do not believe they deserve their homes but are now stuck in them. Many are just hanging on in a sort of golden handcuffs perpetual state of illusion. The dream they saw when times were good and middle class people believed they could  be like rich people is now a nightmare where they cant get rid of the costume.

And like Gatsby, who at the end reverted to his roots, unable finally to pull it off for the Daisy Buchanan's of the world, these people are no longer able to pull it off for their neighbors, their friends, and ultimately, themselves.

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Rocket Man...one word...one word...plastics.

Buying Eggs

I needed eggs the other morning and so I jumped in the car and started driving for a local farm where they sell eggs off the back porch for a buck seventy five. I had scratched up the money from my pants pockets (times being what they are) and set off on my Sunday morning drive back into the rural America. The far west suburb of Chicago I live in is ground zero for where the boom died. On my drive toward the farmer I saw old stone entrance posts and gates of STONEHAVEN  or CREST FARMS with bright red flags advertising luxury homes. On the other side was only corn fields.

And I drove feeling more anxious. Hadn't these morons learned yet? That Americans could no longer afford luxury homes and that the market nay the culture for these type of homes had passed. In these high weeded lots sat several desultory McMansions that someone had taken a flyer on and like the pioneers of old found themselves isolated in a country they knew not. Like a wave retreating these fields will return to the Prairie grass. 

But I felt anxious. Something seemed terribly wrong. America seemed to have bet on all the wrong things. The thought that a million dollar home could make you feel better about yourself seems so delusional now after four years of super recession. And yet the red flags are new and the sign is freshly painted. COME PICK OUT YOUR DREAM HOME. I slowed down to look and then I stopped and just stared at the lonely landscape of American capitalism gone bad. I saw no American dreams here.

And so I finally reached the old farm house with the swinging sign EGGS and pulled up to the back porch. I crunched across the drive and swung open the door to the nineteenth century home. The cooler whirred and the box for money sat there open. I threw in my dollar seventy five and fished out a dozen eggs. No one was up in the house and I shut the door quietly and walked back to my car. Then I drove back toward home with my eggs and I felt strangely peaceful.

Funny that just a simple task like buying eggs off a farmers back porch should give me such serenity. But maybe I had just touched a time when all the choices were simple. A man produced eggs and sold them to his neighbors and expected the money to be left behind. Simply amazing.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/