That was a great piece in The New English Review. I read the whole thing and mostly agree.

If I have one argument, though, it’s that the middle class of 2008 and the middle class of 1978 are not equatable. Things are, despite what the article implies, not financially better for the middle class of 2008. I could make a very strong argument that many of my peers are not as well-off as their parents. My son and I are both in need of glasses, but the cost of the doctor visits and the glasses are more than we can afford. This would not have even been a question for my parents. My wife talked yesterday with a friend who put her kids in parochial school and the family now requires two incomes to do so. Again, not the case in 1978, when nearly all the kids who lived in my neighborhood went to parochial school and had their moms at home.

The article is also accurate in its depiction of the “value adders” who toss in a couple bucks service charges here and there in order to get their cut of whatever good or service is being sold. Include about four of five of these carcass pickers in the loop and suddenly your $1 widget costs $10. This is one reason why I have not been to see a concert by a popular music act in decades. Who can afford $100 tickets to see some geezer rock band whose ticket price is being marked up a hundred different ways from Sunday by “convenience charges,” the Teamsters, the promoters, the venue, etc? Just getting to the bottom of why a plane ticket’s price is 30-50% higher from all these tacked on taxes and surcharges is maddening. No one knows where those surcharges go! Not the airport or the airline. That’s ludicrous.

The social capital analysis is dead on, though. We now live disconnected lives surrounded by the self-sufficient fortresses we’ve erected. We believe that we need no one to help us. Too bad for us. That same neighborhood in 1978 where I grew up was a marvel at interconnectedness. But as the trappings of the new tech penetrated our homes, they became fortresses in time, too. The neighborhood’s vitality ebbed and now no one knows the people on either end of the street.

Thanks for clueing me in on that article. I’m chastened by the fact the author is Japanese, English is his 4th language, and I still needed a dictionary to follow some of his vocabulary! So much for my pretense that I, as a native writer, can resist others outsourcing the writing of the English language! I guess there’s always working as a garbageman, gigolo, or manicurist—or all three, as the case may be.

I don’t like letting people know where I live, but this was unavoidable.

We had our mailbox vandalized recently. It was the only box vandalized on the entire road. I’m sure that’s not a coincidence.

We had Wal-Mart in the Bay Area and they perfectly reflected the demise of Sam Walton. You used to be able to eat off the floors at your typical Wal-Mart, but when Sam died, everything slid into K-Mart territory. The Wal-Marts in the Bay Area were dingy affairs whose shelves looked like a bomb went off on them. I couldn’t believe how badly things had slipped in just the few years after Walton’s death. The race to the bottom proceeded unabated.