Invisible Fortunes: Brief Thoughts on Wealth in America

Invisible Fortunes: Brief Thoughts on Wealth in America

Last week my wife and I saw an unremarkable movie, “Crazy Stupid Love.”  It was good for a few laughs and a highly suspect message on the essential nature of true love, but not much beyond that, unless you were willing to look at the movie in terms of the American ideology of affluence and wealth, of which it provided a very good example while, at the same time, inviting some insights about the way ideology in general works—through strategies of invisibility.

The theme of the movie was about true love, and how each of us has a single soul-mate, for whom we must fight.  If we are brave or inspired or “stupid” enough to listen to our hearts rather than reason, the story affirms, we will find our true love.  Nothing remarkable about this sort of drivel coming out of Hollywood.

The movie was certainly not about wealth, economics, or social class.  If it had brought in elements of class, for instance, this would have been a distraction.  The story was about the sort of true love that transcends time and place.  The universal qualities of love formed the basis of the film, not love for the rich, the poor, or some specific ethnic group with their unique struggles and charming quirks.

It therefore needed to choose as its subjects and its context—the people and place—a setting that would be race and class “neutral.”  I use the quotation marks because this neutrality is the very illusion we are calling into question.  It would be more accurate to describe the setting and the people as completely unremarkable in terms of their affluence.  Their wealth had to be invisible in the sense that it wouldn’t call attention to itself as unusual or extraordinary or suggest to the viewer that this movie is about the social conditions of love and romance.  This would have distracted the viewer from the message of crazy, stupid, universal true love.

What is remarkable, then, is the sort of setting that passes as unremarkable in today’s popular culture.  It would be a mistake to see this as arbitrary or accidental—movies like this have too much detailed effort in their making to allow anything like setting or back-stories to be arbitrary.  The producers and writers, I would suggest, gave some thought to what sort of context would seem thoroughly and unremarkably average.

I am not familiar with home prices outside of Milwaukee, but from what I could tell, the  house owned by the main characters would probably be in the half-million to million dollar range around here.  It is the sort of house that can be afforded, for example, with double-income middle to upper management jobs in corporate America—which in fact describes the main couple’s jobs well.  Like their house, their jobs had to be relatively unremarkable, a neutral backdrop.  These were ordinary people with ordinary jobs, so don’t dwell on that, the movie was saying in its invisible, silent language of ideology.

My wife and I live in a very nice older suburb directly adjacent to Milwaukee.  Our neighbors are professors, young lawyers, architects, middle-management, some physicians a few blocks over, an occasional writer.  By Shorewood standards, our house is modest and smaller than average.  But if looked at according to cross-cultural or trans-historical standards, we live in embarrassing splendor.  Even compared to the average house in Milwaukee or the United States, we are well above average in terms of the house and, especially, the tidy, quiet, well-kept nature of the neighborhood.  But Hollywood, as well as our government and most of all the multi-billion dollar marketing industry, has no interest in encouraging us to make such comparisons.

If a mainstream Hollywood movie chose our house as its setting, I believe, the movie would immediately mark itself as a member of a specific genre—what might referred to as a hard-scrabble struggle movie (our friends might suggest it would be about a nice couple who don’t have time to do the dishes or finish those landscaping projects).   In such movies, regardless of their ultimate ideology (which is not entirely uniform) the subject of the movie is the place or the economic status of its subjects—often having to do with their attempt to rise above their place.  This isn’t to say that Shorewood would provide a good back-drop for that sort of movie; only that a decent house in a place like Shorewood does bear the marks of a house that is noteworthy, by Hollywood standards, as conspicuously modest.  The same could be said of my 11 year old pickup truck and my Wife’s 12 year old Subaru—both of them miracles of technology, comfort, and power if looked at with any perspective (which I can assure you our neighbors do not!)  My point, simply, is the remarkably elevated economic status and lavish luxury that passes to day as unremarkable or neutral.

Why is this important to a Post-Carbon politics?  It is no secret that the greatest predictor of one’s carbon footprint is one’s economic status, whether intra- or inter-nationally compared.  The sort of lifestyle that passes as base-line normal depends of course on an even more invisible and lavish supply of fossil fuels.  But I also think that in an age of decline, issues of wealth, prosperity, and abundance will become more significant and a greater point of conflict.  The result may be class-warfare, which may or may not be productive.  More significant may be how those who are rich attempt to hold on to their riches and, from the standpoint of ideology, attempt to maintain the normative qualities of a high-income, high-carbon lifestyle.

I would like to finish with a question we should all be asking of ourselves.  When I referred to “the rich” in my previous sentence, did your mind immediately to go an image of others, of people with more?  Or did it focus on your own life?  This may, for many of us, be something worth pondering.